Moon and Sixpence, by Somerset Maugham

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The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

There was in my soul a perfectly genuine horror of Strickland,
and side by side with it a cold curiosity to discover his motives.
I was puzzled by him, and I was eager to see how he
regarded the tragedy he had caused in the lives of people who
had used him with so much kindness. I applied the scalpel
boldly.

"Stroeve told me that picture you painted of his wife was the
best thing you've ever done."

Strickland took his pipe out of his mouth, and a smile lit up
his eyes.

"It was great fun to do."

"Why did you give it him?"

"I'd finished it. It wasn't any good to me."

"Do you know that Stroeve nearly destroyed it?"

"It wasn't altogether satisfactory."

He was quiet for a moment or two, then he took his pipe out of
his mouth again, and chuckled.

"Do you know that the little man came to see me?"

"Weren't you rather touched by what he had to say?"

"No; I thought it damned silly and sentimental."

"I suppose it escaped your memory that you'd ruined his life?"
I remarked.

He rubbed his bearded chin reflectively.

"He's a very bad painter."

"But a very good man."

"And an excellent cook," Strickland added derisively.

His callousness was inhuman, and in my indignation I was not
inclined to mince my words.

"As a mere matter of curiosity I wish you'd tell me, have you
felt the smallest twinge of remorse for Blanche Stroeve's death?"

I watched his face for some change of expression, but it
remained impassive.

"Why should I?" he asked.

"Let me put the facts before you. You were dying, and Dirk
Stroeve took you into his own house. He nursed you like a mother.
He sacrificed his time and his comfort and his money for you.
He snatched you from the jaws of death."

Strickland shrugged his shoulders.

"The absurd little man enjoys doing things for other people.
That's his life."

"Granting that you owed him no gratitude, were you obliged to
go out of your way to take his wife from him? Until you came
on the scene they were happy. Why couldn't you leave them alone?"

"What makes you think they were happy?"

"It was evident."

"You are a discerning fellow. Do you think she could ever
have forgiven him for what he did for her?"

"What do you mean by that?"

"Don't you know why he married her?"

I shook my head.

"She was a governess in the family of some Roman prince, and
the son of the house seduced her. She thought he was going to
marry her. They turned her out into the street neck and crop.
She was going to have a baby, and she tried to commit suicide.
Stroeve found her and married her."

"It was just like him. I never knew anyone with so
compassionate a heart."

I had often wondered why that ill-assorted pair had married,
but just that explanation had never occurred to me. That was
perhaps the cause of the peculiar quality of Dirk's love for
his wife. I had noticed in it something more than passion.
I remembered also how I had always fancied that her reserve
concealed I knew not what; but now I saw in it more than the
desire to hide a shameful secret. Her tranquillity was like
the sullen calm that broods over an island which has been
swept by a hurricane. Her cheerfulness was the cheerfulness
of despair. Strickland interrupted my reflections with an
observation the profound cynicism of which startled me.

"A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her," he said,
"but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on
her account."

"It must be reassuring to you to know that you certainly run
no risk of incurring the resentment of the women you come in
contact with," I retorted.

A slight smile broke on his lips.

"You are always prepared to sacrifice your principles for a
repartee," he answered.

"What happened to the child?"

"Oh, it was still-born, three or four months after they were married."

Then I came to the question which had seemed to me most puzzling.

"Will you tell me why you bothered about Blanche Stroeve at all?"

He did not answer for so long that I nearly repeated it.

"How do I know?" he said at last. "She couldn't bear the
sight of me. It amused me."

"I see."

He gave a sudden flash of anger.

"Damn it all, I wanted her."

But he recovered his temper immediately, and looked at me with
a smile.

"At first she was horrified."

"Did you tell her?"

"There wasn't any need. She knew. I never said a word.
She was frightened. At last I took her."

I do not know what there was in the way he told me this that
extraordinarily suggested the violence of his desire. It was
disconcerting and rather horrible. His life was strangely
divorced from material things, and it was as though his body
at times wreaked a fearful revenge on his spirit. The satyr
in him suddenly took possession, and he was powerless in the
grip of an instinct which had all the strength of the
primitive forces of nature. It was an obsession so complete
that there was no room in his soul for prudence or gratitude.

"But why did you want to take her away with you?" I asked.

"I didn't," he answered, frowning. "When she said she was
coming I was nearly as surprised as Stroeve. I told her that
when I'd had enough of her she'd have to go, and she said
she'd risk that." He paused a little. "She had a wonderful
body, and I wanted to paint a nude. When I'd finished my
picture I took no more interest in her."

"And she loved you with all her heart."

He sprang to his feet and walked up and down the small room.

"I don't want love. I haven't time for it. It's weakness.
I am a man, and sometimes I want a woman. When I've satisfied
my passion I'm ready for other things. I can't overcome my
desire, but I hate it; it imprisons my spirit; I look forward
to the time when I shall be free from all desire and can give
myself without hindrance to my work. Because women can do
nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance.
They want to persuade us that it's the whole of life. It's an
insignificant part. I know lust. That's normal and healthy.
Love is a disease. Women are the instruments of my pleasure;
I have no patience with their claim to be helpmates, partners,
companions."

I had never heard Strickland speak so much at one time.
He spoke with a passion of indignation. But neither here nor
elsewhere do I pretend to give his exact words; his vocabulary
was small, and he had no gift for framing sentences, so that
one had to piece his meaning together out of interjections,
the expression of his face, gestures and hackneyed phrases.

"You should have lived at a time when women were chattels and
men the masters of slaves," I said.

"It just happens that I am a completely normal man."

I could not help laughing at this remark, made in all seriousness;
but he went on, walking up and down the room like
a caged beast, intent on expressing what he felt, but found
such difficulty in putting coherently.

"When a woman loves you she's not satisfied until she
possesses your soul. Because she's weak, she has a rage for
domination, and nothing less will satisfy her. She has a
small mind, and she resents the abstract which she is unable
to grasp. She is occupied with material things, and she is
jealous of the ideal. The soul of man wanders through the
uttermost regions of the universe, and she seeks to imprison
it in the circle of her account-book. Do you remember my wife?
I saw Blanche little by little trying all her tricks.
With infinite patience she prepared to snare me and bind me.
She wanted to bring me down to her level; she cared nothing
for me, she only wanted me to be hers. She was willing to do
everything in the world for me except the one thing I wanted:
to leave me alone."

I was silent for a while.

"What did you expect her to do when you left her?"

"She could have gone back to Stroeve," he said irritably.
"He was ready to take her."

"You're inhuman," I answered. "It's as useless to talk to you
about these things as to describe colours to a man who was
born blind."

He stopped in front of my chair, and stood looking down at me
with an expression in which I read a contemptuous amazement.

"Do you really care a twopenny damn if Blanche Stroeve is
alive or dead?"

I thought over his question, for I wanted to answer it
truthfully, at all events to my soul.

"It may be a lack of sympathy in myself if it does not make
any great difference to me that she is dead. Life had a great
deal to offer her. I think it's terrible that she should have
been deprived of it in that cruel way, and I am ashamed
because I do not really care."

"You have not the courage of your convictions. Life has no
value. Blanche Stroeve didn't commit suicide because I left
her, but because she was a foolish and unbalanced woman.
But we've talked about her quite enough; she was an entirely
unimportant person. Come, and I'll show you my pictures."

He spoke as though I were a child that needed to be
distracted. I was sore, but not with him so much as with myself.
I thought of the happy life that pair had led in the
cosy studio in Montmartre, Stroeve and his wife, their
simplicity, kindness, and hospitality; it seemed to me cruel
that it should have been broken to pieces by a ruthless
chance; but the cruellest thing of all was that in fact it
made no great difference. The world went on, and no one was a
penny the worse for all that wretchedness. I had an idea that
Dirk, a man of greater emotional reactions than depth of
feeling, would soon forget; and Blanche's life, begun with who
knows what bright hopes and what dreams, might just as well
have never been lived. It all seemed useless and inane.

Strickland had found his hat, and stood looking at me.

"Are you coming?"

"Why do you seek my acquaintance?" I asked him. "You know
that I hate and despise you."

He chuckled good-humouredly.

"Your only quarrel with me really is that I don't care a
twopenny damn what you think about me."

I felt my cheeks grow red with sudden anger. It was
impossible to make him understand that one might be outraged
by his callous selfishness. I longed to pierce his armour of
complete indifference. I knew also that in the end there was
truth in what he said. Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure
the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion
of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such
influence. I suppose it is the bitterest wound to human
pride. But I would not let him see that I was put out.

"Is it possible for any man to disregard others entirely?"
I said, though more to myself than to him. "You're dependent on
others for everything in existence. It's a preposterous
attempt to try to live only for yourself and by yourself.
Sooner or later you'll be ill and tired and old, and then
you'll crawl back into the herd. Won't you be ashamed when
you feel in your heart the desire for comfort and sympathy?
You're trying an impossible thing. Sooner or later the human
being in you will yearn for the common bonds of humanity."

"Come and look at my pictures."

"Have you ever thought of death?"

"Why should I? It doesn't matter."

I stared at him. He stood before me, motionless, with a
mocking smile in his eyes; but for all that, for a moment I
had an inkling of a fiery, tortured spirit, aiming at
something greater than could be conceived by anything that was
bound up with the flesh. I had a fleeting glimpse of a
pursuit of the ineffable. I looked at the man before me in
his shabby clothes, with his great nose and shining eyes, his
red beard and untidy hair; and I had a strange sensation that
it was only an envelope, and I was in the presence of a
disembodied spirit.

"Let us go and look at your pictures," I said.

Chapter XLII

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 lathe
painted to look like iron is seen to be but a lathe.
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 recognised 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 first 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 find 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 seemed to me the greatest picture of modern times,
and 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 influence has so enormously affected modern painting,
now that others have charted the country which he was among
the first to explore, Strickland's pictures, seen for the
first time, would find 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 simplification at which he aimed.
I remember 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 cabdriver.
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 first that here was a
revolution in art, and he recognised 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
significance. They were strangely tantalising. 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 filled 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 infinite
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 to 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 find 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.

Chapter XLIII

Looking back, I realise that what I have written about Charles
Strickland must seem very unsatisfactory. I have given
incidents that came to my knowledge, but they remain obscure
because I do not know the reasons that led to them.
The strangest, Strickland's determination to become a painter,
seems to be arbitrary; and though it must have had causes in
the circumstances of his life, I am ignorant of them.
From his own conversation I was able to glean nothing. If I were
writing a novel, rather than narrating such facts as I know of
a curious personality, I should have invented much to account
for this change of heart. I think I should have shown a
strong vocation in boyhood, crushed by the will of his father
or sacrificed to the necessity of earning a living; I should
have pictured him impatient of the restraints of life; and in
the struggle between his passion for art and the duties of his
station I could have aroused sympathy for him. I should so
have made him a more imposing figure. Perhaps it would have
been possible to see in him a new Prometheus. There was here,
maybe, the opportunity for a modern version of the hero who for
the good of mankind exposes himself to the agonies of the damned.
It is always a moving subject.

On the other hand, I might have found his motives in the
influence of the married relation. There are a dozen ways in
which this might be managed. A latent gift might reveal
itself on acquaintance with the painters and writers whose
society his wife sought; or domestic incompatability might turn
him upon himself; a love affair might fan into bright flame
a fire which I could have shown smouldering dimly in his heart.
I think then I should have drawn Mrs. Strickland quite
differently. I should have abandoned the facts and made her a
nagging, tiresome woman, or else a bigoted one with no
sympathy for the claims of the spirit. I should have made
Strickland's marriage a long torment from which escape was the
only possible issue. I think I should have emphasised his
patience with the unsuitable mate, and the compassion which
made him unwilling to throw off the yoke that oppressed him.
I should certainly have eliminated the children.

An effective story might also have been made by bringing him
into contact with some old painter whom the pressure of want
or the desire for commercial success had made false to the
genius of his youth, and who, seeing in Strickland the
possibilities which himself had wasted, influenced him to
forsake all and follow the divine tyranny of art. I think
there would have been something ironic in the picture of the
successful old man, rich and honoured, living in another the
life which he, though knowing it was the better part, had not
had the strength to pursue.

The facts are much duller. Strickland, a boy fresh from school,
went into a broker's office without any feeling of distaste.
Until he married he led the ordinary life of his fellows,
gambling mildly on the Exchange, interested to the extent
of a sovereign or two on the result of the Derby or the
Oxford and Cambridge Race. I think he boxed a little in his
spare time. On his chimney-piece he had photographs of Mrs.
Langtry and Mary Anderson. He read and the Sporting Times>. He went to dances in Hampstead.

It matters less that for so long I should have lost sight of him.
The years during which he was struggling to acquire
proficiency in a difficult art were monotonous, and I do not
know that there was anything significant in the shifts to
which he was put to earn enough money to keep him. An account
of them would be an account of the things he had seen happen
to other people. I do not think they had any effect on his
own character. He must have acquired experiences which would
form abundant material for a picaresque novel of modern Paris,
but he remained aloof, and judging from his conversation there
was nothing in those years that had made a particular
impression on him. Perhaps when he went to Paris he was too
old to fall a victim to the glamour of his environment.
Strange as it may seem, he always appeared to me not only
practical, but immensely matter-of-fact. I suppose his life
during this period was romantic, but he certainly saw no
romance in it. It may be that in order to realise the romance
of life you must have something of the actor in you; and,
capable of standing outside yourself, you must be able to
watch your actions with an interest at once detached and
absorbed. But no one was more single-minded than Strickland.
I never knew anyone who was less self-conscious. But it is
unfortunate that I can give no description of the arduous
steps by which he reached such mastery over his art as he ever
acquired; for if I could show him undaunted by failure, by an
unceasing effort of courage holding despair at bay, doggedly
persistent in the face of self-doubt, which is the artist's
bitterest enemy, I might excite some sympathy for a
personality which, I am all too conscious, must appear
singularly devoid of charm. But I have nothing to go on.
I never once saw Strickland at work, nor do I know that anyone
else did. He kept the secret of his struggles to himself.
If in the loneliness of his studio he wrestled desperately with
the Angel of the Lord he never allowed a soul to divine his
anguish.

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