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204
THE MANSARD GALLERY
brush-stroke that does not serve his single
purpose ; he admits no adventitious dainties,
there is nothing to quote. Happy touches
are not in his way. Should he find some part
of his picture empty he will not fill it with
nicely balancing daisies, clouds, or bric-a-brac ;
he will begin it again. To him it will seem
either that he has failed to conceive his work
as a whole or that he has failed to realize his
conception. Similarly, you will not easily
discover a favourite passage ; for if he felt
that he had succeeded beyond expectation in
one passage, that some note was sharper and
truer than the rest, he would set himself to
key the rest to that note. In art, such a
process means incredible labour and agony ;
Gertler sweats blood and shows it. He labours
terribly, and his pictures are terribly laboured.
He is not artist enough to paint as a bird sings ;
he paints as a desperate soldier might dig
himself in.
What he has to is express not, it must be
because his
confessed, of the highest quality,
reactions are limited and rather undistinguished.
He has only two or three notes, and
they are neither rich nor rare. For an artist
he is unimaginative, and often in their blank
simplicity his conceptions are all but commonplace.
In actual expression, too, though a
first-rate craftsman who paints admirably, he