When I come to his connection with Blanche Stroeve I am exasperated by the fragmentariness of the facts at my disposal.To give my story coherence I should describe the progress of their tragic union, but I know nothing of the three months during which they lived together.I do not know how they got on or what they talked about.After all, there are twenty-four hours in the day, and the summits of emotion can only be reached at rare intervals.I can only imagine how they passed the rest of the time.While the light lasted and so long as Blanche's strength endured, I suppose that Strickland painted, and it must have irritated her when she saw him absorbed in his work.As a mistress she did not then exist for him, but only as a model; and then there were long hours in which they lived side by side in silence.It must have frightened her.When Strickland suggested that in her surrender to him there was a sense of triumph over Dirk Stroeve, because he had come to her help in her extremity, he opened the door to many a dark conjecture.I hope it was not true.It seems to me rather horrible.But who can fathom the subtleties of the human heart? Certainly not those who expect from it only decorous sentiments and normal emotions.When Blanche saw that, notwithstanding his moments of passion, Strickland remained aloof, she must have been filled with dismay, and even in those moments I surmise that she realised that to him she was not an individual, but an instrument of pleasure; he was a stranger still, and she tried to bind him to herself with pathetic arts. She strove to ensnare him with comfort and would notsee that comfort meant nothing to him.She was at pains to get him the things to eat that he liked, and would not see that he was indifferent to food.She was afraid to leave him alone.She pursued him with attentions, and when his passion was dormant sought to excite it, for then at least she had the illusion of holding him.Perhaps she knew with her intelligence that the chains she forged only aroused his instinct of destruction, as the plate-glass window makes your fingers itch for half a brick; but her heart, incapable of reason, made her continue on a course she knew was fatal.She must have been very unhappy.But the blindness of love led her to believe what she wanted to be true, and her love was so great that it seemed impossible to her that it should not in return awake an equal love.
But my study of Strickland's character suffers from a greater defect than my ignorance of many facts.Because they were obvious and striking, I have written of his relations to women; and yet they were but an insignificant part of his life.It is an irony that they should so tragically have affected others.His real life consisted of dreams and of tremendously hard work.
Here lies the unreality of fiction.For in men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes its place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life.There are few men to whom it is the most important thing in the world, and they are not very interesting ones; even women, with whom the subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for them.They are flattered and excited by them, but have an uneasy feeling that they are poor creatures.But even during the brief intervals in which they are in love, men do other things which distract their mind; the trades by which they earn their living engage their attention; they are absorbed in sport; they can interest themselves in art.For the most part, they keep their various activities in various compartments, and they can pursue one to the temporary exclusion of the other.They have a faculty of concentration on that which occupies them at the moment, and it irks them if one encroaches on the other.As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.
With Strickland the sexual appetite took a very small place.It was unimportant.It was irksome.His soul aimed elsewhither.He had violent passions, and on occasion desire seized his body so that he was driven to an orgy of lust, but he hated the instincts that robbed him of his self-possession.I think, even, he hated the inevitable partner in his debauchery.When he had regained command over himself, he shuddered at the sight of the woman he had enjoyed.His thoughts floated then serenely in the empyrean, and he felt towards her the horror that perhaps the painted butterfly, hovering about the flowers, feels to the filthy chrysalis from which it has triumphantly emerged.I suppose that art is a manifestation of the sexual instinct.It is the same emotion which is excited in the human heart by the sight of a lovely woman, the Bay of Naples under the yellow moon, and the <i Entombment> of Titian.It is possible that Strickland hated the normal release of sex because it seemed to him brutal by comparison with the satisfaction of artistic creation.It seems strange even to myself, when I have described a man who was cruel, selfish, brutal and sensual, to say that he was a great idealist.The fact remains.
He lived more poorly than an artisan.He worked harder.He cared nothing for those things which with most people make life gracious and beautiful.He was indifferent to money.He cared nothing about fame.You cannot praise him because he resisted the temptation to make any of those compromises with the world which most of us yield to.He had no such temptation.It never entered his head that compromise was possible.He lived in Paris more lonely than an anchorite in the deserts of Thebes.He asked nothing 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.He had a vision.
Strickland was an odious man, but I still think be was a great one.
