The Dark Labyrinth by Lawrence Durrell Read Free Book Online Page A

the importance of the work each had to do. It was during this time that Baird had chanced upon a book by Hogarth and had been struck by a passage in it upon the sensibility of the artist. Alice thought it was rubbish.
    â€œArt is a dangerous thing to play with, since it demands self-examination and self-knowledge, and many people do not really wish for either. Its true function, after all, is to insist on the existence in us of unused faculties for experience which custom has staled—or compromise to intellectual order of the society in which we find ourselves. The artist does not invent or discover; rather does he, by making himself unusually receptive, be discovered and re-created. We tend to measure artists by their powers of transmission, but even bad artists suffer of the sense of displacement and anxiety which we see recorded in the lives of the great. Benjamin Haydon and Van Gogh are equals in suffering if in nothing else. Each was lost in the labyrinth of his own spiritual discoveries.”
    Alice wrinkled her pretty nose as she closed the book and handed it back to him. No, she said, in response to his question, it was just another attempt by these psychologists to put the artist in the strait-jacket of a clinical definition; she did not want to admit that the individuality of the creative man was not by its very nature beyond definition. John must find some way round the problem or he would find his book on aesthetics a study of the artist in one set of terms. This, of course, was precisely what John wanted to do, but his respect for Alice made him defer judgment until he had read through the whole of Ruskin once more. Several summers and winters passed in this pleasant frivolity. John wrote the best part of his New Aesthetics in dear workmanlike prose, but found that the book had turned out rather a frost. Several friends criticized it in typescript, and it became obvious that it was simply another of those productions by young University men which earn them, at the best, a column in a weekly journal. There was no harm in publishing, but John Baird was determined to publish something first-class or remain silent. Alice thought this very wise. She in the meantime was busy painting and reading books about painting. Less critical and far less self-conscious than her husband, she allowed her work to be shown on more than one occasion, and was known to derive comfort from criticisms written about her in the Burlington Magazine . At this time there was almost no sacrifice too great to make on behalf of her art—so strongly was she under the influence of Vincent (as she called him). She even thought that they might have a baby. “I do not feel fully awakened,” she told an astonished Baird one evening in May, “and I notice I’m painting nothing but Madonnas with infants-in-arms. My subconscious must be getting interested in pregnancy.” It was the High Renaissance of Art in England at that time—a Renaissance that was to come to an end in Sloper and Frampton—and people were in the habit of talking like that. Baird was rather taken aback by her sense of proportion, which, it seemed to him, did little credit to a married woman of several years’ standing, but he said nothing. Indeed there was nothing to say. There was no reason why they should not have a child. They were comfortably off. “You could have one by February,” he said after a brief calculation on his finger-ends. But then it was discovered that this would interfere with their yearly trip across the Channel, and the idea was temporarily shelved. Alice had been promised an introduction to Picasso (she still imagined the artists bore more than a superficial resemblance to their work) and would not trade that for a subconscious gratification.
    Their life was a happy one simply because no obstacles presented themselves; but it could not last for ever. After several years John became troubled by a sense of failure,