Inarticulations

The Moon and Sixpence — By W. S. Maugham

Had Mr. Maugham confessed to his hero Charles Strickland, a painter of genius, his great desire to present him, to explain him to the public, with all his eccentricities, violences and odious ways included, we imagine the genius would have retorted in his sardonic way: ‘Go to hell. Let them look at my pictures or not look at them—damn them. My painting is all there is to me.’ This discouraging reply is not without a large grain of truth. Strickland cut himself off from the body of life, clumsily, obstinately, savagely—hacking away, regardless of torn flesh and quivering nerves, like some old Maori warrior separating himself from a shattered limb with a piece of sharp shell. What proof have we that he suffered? No proof at all. On the contrary, each fresh ugly blow wrung a grin or chuckle from him, but never the slightest sign that he would have had it otherwise if he could.

If we had his pictures before us, or the memory of them in our mind's eye, this his state of mind might be extremely illuminating, but without them, with nothing to reinforce our knowledge of him but a description of two or three which might apply equally well to a very large number of modern works, we are left strangely unsatisfied. The more so in that Mr. Maugham takes extraordinary pains in explaining to us that Strickland is no imaginary character. His paintings are known everywhere, everywhere acclaimed. Books have been written about him in English and French and German. He even goes so far as to give us the author's and the publishers' names—well-known live publishers who would surely never allow their names to be taken in vain. So it comes to this. If page 18 Strickland is a real man and this book a sort of guide to his works, it has its value; but if Mr. Maugham is merely pulling our critical leg it will not do. Then, we are not told enough. We must be shown something of the workings of his mind; we must have some comment of his upon what he feels, fuller and more exhaustive than his perpetual: ‘Go to hell.’ It is simply essential that there should be some quality in him revealed to us that we may love, something that will stop us for ever from crying: ‘If you have to be so odious before you can paint bananas—pray leave them unpainted.’

Here are the facts. Charles Strickland, a middle-aged stockbroker, the husband of a charming cultured woman and the father of two typically nice English children, suddenly, on a day, without a hint of warning, leaves his home and business and goes off to Paris to paint. The reason is unthinkable. A sturdy, ruddy middle-aged man cannot so utterly change his nature. He can; he does. Living in poverty, great untidiness and discomfort, he renounces his old life and seemingly never gives it another thought. For the moment he sheds that respectable envelope and is away, it is no longer part of his new self. He is grown out of its roundness and firmness and is become a lean pale creature with a great red beard, a hooked nose and thick sensual lips, possessed with one passion, ravaged by one desire—to paint great pictures. Paris he accepts as though he had always known it. He lives the life of its disreputable quarters as though he had been brought up in them and adopts its ugly ways with a kind of fiendish glee. Then he is discovered, half dead of a fever, by a stupid kind-hearted little Dutchman who takes him into his flat and nurses him. The adored gentle wife of the Dutchman falls under Strickland's spell and ruins her life for him. When he is sick of her (for his contempt for women is fathomless) she takes poison and dies. And Strickland, his sexual appetite satisfied, ‘smiles dryly and pulls his beard.’

Finally, he leaves Paris and makes his home in Tahiti. page 19 Here he goes native, living in a remote hut with a black woman and her relatives, and painting masterpieces until his body takes its great and final revenge upon his spirit and he becomes a leper. He lives for years, painting the walls of his house. When he is dying he makes his black wife promise to burn the house down so that the pictures may be destroyed. ‘His life was complete. He had made a world and saw that it was good. Then, in pride and contempt, he destroyed it.’

This strange story is related by a friend of Mrs. Strickland's, a young, rather priggish author, who is sent over to Paris after the first tragedy to discover with whom Strickland has eloped and whether he can be induced to return.

‘You won't go back to your wife?’ I said at last.

‘Never.’

‘… She'll never make you a single reproach.’

‘She can go to hell.’

‘You don't care if people think you an utter black-guard? You don't care if she and her children have to beg their bread?’

‘Not a damn.’

That is very typical of their conversations together. Indeed, the young man confesses that if Strickland is a great deal more articulate than that, he has put the words into his mouth—divined them from his gestures. ‘From his own conversation I was able to glean nothing.’ And ‘his real life consisted of dreams and of tremendously hard work.’ But where are the dreams? Strickland gives no hint of them; the young man makes no attempt to divine them. ‘He asked nothing from his fellows except that they should leave him alone. He was single-hearted in his aim, and to pursue it he was willing to sacrifice not only himself—many can do that—but others….’ But what does the sacrifice matter if you do not care a rap whether the creature on the altar is a little horned ram or your only beloved son?

page 20

The one outstanding quality in Strickland's nature seems to have been his contempt for life and the ways of life. But contempt for life is not to be confused with liberty, nor can the man whose weapon it is fight a tragic battle or die a tragic death. If to be a great artist were to push over everything that comes in one's way, topple over the table, lunge out right and left like a drunken man in a café and send the pots flying, then Strickland was a great artist. But great artists are not drunken men; they are men who are divinely sober. They know that the moon can never be bought for sixpence, and that liberty is only a profound realization of the greatness of the dangers in their midst.