I did not know why Strickland had suddenly offered to show them to me. I welcomed the opportunity.A man's work reveals him.In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, and you can only gain a true knowledge of him by inferences from little actions, of which he is unconscious, and from fleeting expressions, which cross his face unknown to him.Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.But in his book or his picture the real man delivers himself defenceless.His pretentiousness will only expose his vacuity.The lath painted to look like iron is seen to be but a lath.No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.To the acute observer no one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul.
As I walked up the endless stairs of the house in which Strickland lived, I confess that I was a little excited. It seemed to me that I was on the threshold of a surprising adventure.I looked about the room with curiosity.It was even smaller and more bare than I remembered it.I wondered what those friends of mine would say who demanded vast studios, and vowed they could not work unless all the conditions were to their liking.
“You'd better stand there,”he said, pointing to a spot from which, presumably, he fancied I could see to best advantage what he had to show me.
“You don't want me to talk, I suppose,”I said.
“No, blast you;I want you to hold your tongue.”
He placed a picture on the easel, and let me look at it for a minute or two;then took it down and put another in its place. I think he showed me about thirty canvases.It was the result of the six years during which he had been painting.He had never sold a picture.The canvases were of different sizes.The smaller were pictures of still-life and the largest were landscapes.There were about half a dozen portraits.
“That is the lot,”he said at last.
I wish I could say that I recognized at once their beauty and their great originality. Now that I have seen many of them again and the rest are familiar to me in reproductions, I am astonished that at frst sight I was bitterly disappointed.I felt nothing of the peculiar thrill which it is the property of art to give.The impression that Strickland's pictures gave me was disconcerting;and the fact remains, always to reproach me, that I never even thought of buying any.I missed a wonderful chance.Most of them have found their way into museums, and the rest are the treasured possessions of wealthy amateurs.I try to fnd excuses for myself.I think that my taste is good, but I am conscious that it has no originality.I know very little about painting, and I wander along trails that others have blazed for me.At that time I had the greatest admiration for the Impressionists.I longed to possess a Sisley and a Degas, and I worshipped Manet.His Olympia seemed to me the greatest picture of modern times, and Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe moved me profoundly.These works seemed to me the last word in painting.
I will not describe the pictures that Strickland showed me. Descriptions of pictures are always dull, and these, besides, are familiar to all who take an interest in such things.Now that his infuence has so enormously affected modern painting, now that others have charted the country which he was among the frst to explore, Strickland's pictures, seen for the frst time, would fnd the mind more prepared for them;but it must be remembered that I had never seen anything of the sort.First of all I was taken aback by what seemed to me the clumsiness of his technique.Accustomed to the drawing of the old masters, and convinced that Ingres was the greatest draughtsman of recent times, I thought that Strickland drew very badly.I knew nothing of the simplifcation at which he aimed.I remembered a still-life of oranges on a plate, and I was bothered because the plate was not round and the oranges were lop-sided.The portraits were a little larger than life-size, and this gave them an ungainly look.To my eyes the faces looked like caricatures.They were painted in a way that was entirely new to me.The landscapes puzzled me even more.There were two or three pictures of the forest at Fontainebleau and several of streets in Paris:my first feeling was that they might have been painted by a drunken cab-driver.I was perfectly bewildered.The colour seemed to me extraordinarily crude.It passed through my mind that the whole thing was a stupendous, incomprehensible farce.Now that I look back I am more than ever impressed by Stroeve's acuteness.He saw from the frst that here was a revolution in art, and he recognized in its beginnings the genius which now all the world allows.
But if I was puzzled and disconcerted, I was not unimpressed. Even I, in my colossal ignorance, could not but feel that here, trying to express itself, was real power.I was excited and interested.I felt that these pictures had something to say to me that was very important for me to know, but I could not tell what it was.They seemed to me ugly, but they suggested without disclosing a secret of momentous signifcance.They were strangely tantalizing.They gave me an emotion that I could not analyse.They said something that words were powerless to utter.I fancy that Strickland saw vaguely some spiritual meaning in material things that was so strange that he could only suggest it with halting symbols.It was as though he found in the chaos of the universe a new pattern, and were attempting clumsily, with anguish of soul, to set it down.I saw a tormented spirit striving for the release of expression.
I turned to him.
“I wonder if you haven't mistaken your medium,”I said.
“What the hell do you mean?”
“I think you're trying to say something, I don't quite know what it is, but I'm not sure that the best way of saying it is by means of painting.”
When I imagined that on seeing his pictures I should get a clue to the understanding of his strange character I was mistaken. They merely increased the astonishment with which he flled me.I was more at sea than ever.The only thing that seemed clear to me-and perhaps even this was fanciful-was that he was passionately striving for liberation from some power that held him.But what the power was and what line the liberation would take remained obscure.Each one of us is alone in the world.He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain.We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them.We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual.Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house.
The final impression I received was of a prodigious effort to express some state of the soul, and in this effort, I fancied, must be sought the explanation of what so utterly perplexed me. It was evident that colours and forms had a significance for Strickland that was peculiar to himself.He was under an intolerable necessity to convey something that he felt, and he created them with that intention alone.He did not hesitate to simplify or to distort if he could get nearer to that unknown thing he sought.Facts were nothing to him, for beneath the mass of irrelevant incidents he looked for something significant to himself.It was as though he had become aware of the soul of the universe and were compelled to express it.Though these pictures confused and puzzled me, I could not be unmoved by the emotion that was patent in them;and, I knew not why, I felt in myself a feeling that with regard to Strickland was the last I had ever expected to experience.I felt an overwhelming compassion.
“I think I know now why you surrendered to your feeling for Blanche Stroeve,”I said to him.
“Why?”
“I think your courage failed. The weakness of your body communicated itself to your soul.I do not know what infnite yearning possesses you, so that you are driven to a perilous, lonely search for some goal where you expect to find a final release from the spirit that torments you.I see you as the eternal pilgrim to some shrine that perhaps does not exist.I do not know at what inscrutable Nirvana you aim.Do you know yourself?Perhaps it is Truth and Freedom that you seek, and for a moment you thought that you might fnd release in Love.I think your tired soul sought rest in a woman's arms, and when you found no rest there you hated her.You had no pity for her, because you have no pity for yourself.And you killed her out of fear, because you trembled still at the danger you had barely escaped.”
He smiled dryly and pulled his beard.
“You are a dreadful sentimentalist, my poor friend.”
A week later I heard by chance that Strickland had gone to Marseilles. I never saw him again.
我不知道為什么斯特里克蘭會(huì)突然提出要讓我看看他的畫作,但我對(duì)有這樣的機(jī)會(huì)還是歡迎的,從一個(gè)人的作品中可以洞察這個(gè)人本身。在社會(huì)交往中,他留給你的印象是他希望世人可以接受的表象,你要真正了解他,只能通過他的一舉一動(dòng)來推斷,只能通過他無意識(shí)的表現(xiàn),和他臉上露出的,連自己都沒察覺到稍縱即逝的表情來判斷。有時(shí)人們把一副假面具戴得爐火純青,時(shí)間一久,連他們也覺得自己成了所扮演的人。但是,在他的書里或畫里,一個(gè)真實(shí)的人會(huì)毫無防范地交出自己的全部,他的矯飾只會(huì)暴露他的空虛。上了漆的木板條看上去像鐵條,但終歸是木板條。矯飾出來的個(gè)性無法掩蓋思想的平庸。對(duì)于敏銳的觀察者而言,一個(gè)人創(chuàng)作出的,哪怕是最漫不經(jīng)心的作品,也會(huì)泄露他靈魂最深處的秘密。
當(dāng)我沿著斯特里克蘭住的房子那似乎沒有盡頭的樓梯向上爬的時(shí)候,我得承認(rèn)我的心情還是有些激動(dòng)的。我好像正踏在通往令人吃驚的冒險(xiǎn)之旅的門檻上,我好奇地四下打量著這個(gè)房間,它比我記憶中的還要狹小窘迫,可以說是家徒四壁。真不知道我那些號(hào)稱需要寬敞工作室的朋友們會(huì)怎么想,他們發(fā)誓說,除非滿足他們喜歡的所有條件,否則無法進(jìn)行創(chuàng)作。
“你最好站在那兒?!彼f,并指向一個(gè)地點(diǎn),也許他認(rèn)為在那兒,我能有一個(gè)最佳的視角,更好地欣賞他給我展示的畫作。
“我猜,你不想讓我開口吧。”我說道。
“不想,你真該死,我想讓你管住自己的舌頭。”
他把一幅畫放在畫架上,讓我看上一兩分鐘,然后把它拿下來,換上另外一幅畫。我覺得他大約讓我看了三十幅畫作,這些畫作是他在六年間一直創(chuàng)作的成果。他沒有賣掉一幅畫,這些畫的尺寸大小不一,最小的是些靜物畫,最大是些風(fēng)景畫,還有六七張肖像畫。
“就是這些了?!彼詈笳f道。
我希望能夠說,我立刻就認(rèn)識(shí)到了這些畫的美妙和非凡的原創(chuàng)性。如今我又再次看過其中很多畫作,其余的通過仿制品我也不陌生了,可讓我吃驚的是,當(dāng)我第一眼看到它們的時(shí)候,居然感到十分失望。我當(dāng)時(shí)根本沒有感受到真正的藝術(shù)品會(huì)帶給人的特殊的激動(dòng),斯特里克蘭的畫作帶給我的印象就是讓我困惑不安。而實(shí)際上,我當(dāng)時(shí)根本沒想到要買上幾幅,這是至今都讓我自責(zé)的事,我錯(cuò)過了千載難逢的機(jī)會(huì)。這些畫的大部分現(xiàn)在都已經(jīng)經(jīng)過各種途徑進(jìn)入博物館了,剩下的畫被一些富有的業(yè)余收藏者如獲至寶地收藏。我試圖為自己開脫,我認(rèn)為自己的品位還是不錯(cuò)的,但是也意識(shí)到了缺乏創(chuàng)新性。我對(duì)繪畫知之甚少,我只是沿著別人已開拓出的道路信步走下去。在當(dāng)時(shí),我對(duì)印象派大師的作品佩服得五體投地,期盼能擁有一幅西斯萊[70]和德加[71]的作品,我對(duì)馬奈也崇拜有加,他的《奧林匹亞》在我看來似乎是現(xiàn)代最偉大的畫作了,而《草地上的早餐》也深深地打動(dòng)了我,這些作品在我眼中似乎是空前絕后了。
我不想描述那些斯特里克蘭給我展示的畫了,因?yàn)閷?duì)畫的描述總是很乏味,更何況,這些畫現(xiàn)在對(duì)于所有喜歡藝術(shù)的人來說,都已經(jīng)不再陌生了。如今他的影響如此巨大,已經(jīng)對(duì)現(xiàn)代繪畫藝術(shù)產(chǎn)生了不可忽視的作用,他屬于第一批探索那種畫風(fēng)的一代巨匠,現(xiàn)在很多人對(duì)這種畫風(fēng)已經(jīng)做了分析,所以大家都熟悉了。斯特里克蘭的畫,如果是第一次見著,確實(shí)要做好心理準(zhǔn)備。大家別忘了,我以前從沒見過這種畫風(fēng)。首先,我似乎對(duì)他技巧的笨拙吃驚不小,習(xí)慣了老一輩大師的畫風(fēng),堅(jiān)信安格爾[72]才是近代最偉大的畫家,我那時(shí)認(rèn)為斯特里克蘭畫得太差了,我對(duì)他所崇尚的簡(jiǎn)潔一無所知。我還記得他畫了一個(gè)靜物畫,在盤子上的幾個(gè)橘子,我看到時(shí)很錯(cuò)愕,因?yàn)楸P子畫得不圓,橘子也不對(duì)稱。他的肖像畫也比真人的尺寸稍大,這種技巧讓人覺得肖像看上去很別扭。在我的眼中,這些肖像的面孔就像是卡通人物的臉,這種畫風(fēng)對(duì)我來說是全新的。風(fēng)景畫就更讓我覺得困惑不解了,有兩三幅畫畫的是楓丹白露的樹林和巴黎的幾條街道,我的第一感覺就是這些畫可能是一位喝醉了的馬車夫畫的。我徹底被搞糊涂了,在我看來,畫的色彩也格外的粗糙。我頭腦中的想法是,整幅畫就是一出驚人的、莫名其妙的鬧劇?,F(xiàn)在回想起來,我對(duì)斯特里克蘭的敏銳印象更為深刻了,他從一開始就看出了在藝術(shù)上會(huì)有一場(chǎng)革命,他在一開始就認(rèn)識(shí)到的天才般的繪畫技法,現(xiàn)在已得到全世界的公認(rèn)。
然而,雖說我感到困惑和不安,但我不能不說,對(duì)他的畫我還是印象深刻的。即使我對(duì)這種畫風(fēng)懵懂無知,但也強(qiáng)烈感覺到,這些畫在努力表達(dá)自己,真的很有力量。我很激動(dòng),也很有興致。我覺得這些畫好像在向我傾訴什么東西,某種很重要的東西,我需要知道,但是我又說不出它是什么。在我看來,它們好像很丑,卻又暗示著一個(gè)重大的秘密,而不是直接明示。它們很奇怪地撩撥人的心弦,給了我一種我分析不出來的感情;它們所表達(dá)的東西是任何言辭也無力說出口的。我想象斯特里克蘭一定是在物質(zhì)層面的東西里,隱隱約約看到了某種精神的含義,這種精神上的含義如此奇異,以至于他只能用晦澀的象征來暗示和表達(dá),好像他在宇宙的混沌中發(fā)現(xiàn)了一種新的圖案,在笨拙地試圖描繪出來,因?yàn)榱Σ粡男?,心靈上充滿了痛苦,我看見一個(gè)飽受折磨的精神正奮力尋求表達(dá)上的釋放。我轉(zhuǎn)向他說道:
“我不知道你的媒介手段是否搞錯(cuò)了?”我說道。
“你到底什么意思?”
“我認(rèn)為你正在試圖表達(dá)什么,我不是很清楚那是什么,但是我懷疑,用繪畫的方式來表達(dá),是不是最佳的方法?!?/p>
我原以為當(dāng)我看到他的畫,會(huì)找到線索去理解他怪異的性格,結(jié)果我想錯(cuò)了。這些畫只增加了原來就填滿我心中的震驚,我比以前更加困惑了。只有一件事似乎我搞清楚了——也許這甚至也是想象——那就是他正激情滿滿地堅(jiān)持獲得自由,從束縛他的力量中掙脫出來。但是這種力量是什么,自由的底線又在哪里,依然模糊不清。我們生活在世界上,每個(gè)人都是單槍匹馬地戰(zhàn)斗。他被囚禁在一個(gè)銅塔里,只能通過一些符號(hào)和他的同胞交流,這些符號(hào)沒有共同的價(jià)值,所以它們的意義是模糊不定的。我們可憐巴巴地想把自己心中的財(cái)富傳達(dá)給別人,但是別人沒有力量來接收它們,所以我們只能孤獨(dú)地前行。雖然并著肩,但心卻沒有在一起,無法了解我們的同胞,也不能被我們的同胞所了解。我們就像生活在某個(gè)國家的人,但是對(duì)該國的語言不太會(huì)說,盡管有美麗景色和深刻思想要交流,可只能按照會(huì)話手冊(cè)上的句型只言片語地交流,造成交流的平常乏味。他們腦子里充滿著各種想法,可只能告訴你“園丁的姑姑有把雨傘在屋子里”[73]一類的話。
我對(duì)這些畫的最后的印象是,為了表達(dá)心里的某種狀態(tài),畫家付出了巨大的努力,我覺得要想尋得解釋,就必須在那些最為困惑我的東西上下功夫。顯然易見,色彩和形式對(duì)于斯特里克蘭來說有一種意義,而且對(duì)他自身來說是非同尋常的,他處于無法忍受的狀態(tài)下,一定要把他感受到了的東西傳達(dá)出去。他只帶著這種目的去創(chuàng)作。如果能夠更接近他所尋求的、未知的那種東西,他會(huì)毫不猶豫地簡(jiǎn)化和扭曲色彩與線條。事實(shí)對(duì)他來說毫無意義,因?yàn)樵诖罅坎幌嚓P(guān)事件的表象下,他要尋找某種對(duì)他來說更加有意義的東西。好像他已經(jīng)明晰了宇宙的靈魂,受到驅(qū)使要表達(dá)出來。雖然這些畫讓我困惑和感到混亂,但我不能不被畫中顯然流露出來的感情所感動(dòng)。而且,不知道為什么,我覺得自己的感情也發(fā)生了變化,對(duì)斯特里克蘭的感情產(chǎn)生了我從未料到會(huì)經(jīng)歷的情況——對(duì)他充滿了憐惜與同情。
“我認(rèn)為我現(xiàn)在知道了,對(duì)于布蘭奇·斯特羅伊夫,你為什么會(huì)屈從你的感情了?!蔽覍?duì)他說道。
“為什么?”
“我認(rèn)為你的勇氣喪失了,你身體的軟弱和你的靈魂進(jìn)行了交流。我不知道什么樣的無限渴求控制了你,使得你被迫走上危險(xiǎn)而孤獨(dú)的求索之路,你指望的目的是能夠最終從折磨你的精神中得到解脫。我看見你好像是永恒的朝圣者,走向某個(gè)也許根本不存在的圣地。我不知道你的目的地是怎樣神秘莫測(cè)的極樂世界,你自己知道嗎?也許它就是你尋找的真理和自由,一瞬間,你覺得你能夠在愛情中找到解脫。我認(rèn)為你疲憊的靈魂尋求在一個(gè)女人的懷抱中得到安息,而當(dāng)你發(fā)現(xiàn)根本得不到安息時(shí),你就開始恨她,你對(duì)她沒有憐憫之情,因?yàn)槟銓?duì)自己都沒有憐憫之心。你把她殺死只是出于恐懼,因?yàn)槟氵€在為你剛剛死里逃生的危險(xiǎn)而顫抖呢?!?/p>
他干笑了一下,又用手捋了捋胡須。
“你真是一個(gè)可怕的感傷主義者,我可憐的朋友?!?/p>
一個(gè)星期以后,我偶然聽說,斯特里克蘭已經(jīng)去了馬賽。以后我再也沒見到他。
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