All for Art

A THING OF BEAUTY (440 pp.)--A. J. Cronin--Little, Brown ($4).

With this novel, Dr. A. J. Cronin proves himself the greatest living practitioner of the Victorian novel. The hero is that Mauve Decade martyr, the unconventional artist struggling hopelessly for recognition from a conventional world. Its "bohemian" artists and its fusty gentry are furnished forth with stock-company props and costumes dragged from literature's dustiest attic, and Physician Cronin uses every cliche of this oft-told tale with the almost touching innocence of new discovery, right down to the mustiest of them all--the notion that a man cannot possibly be a genuine genius unless he starves in a garret.

Stephen Desmonde, son of a well-off Anglican clergyman, has all the cherished stigmata of the True Artist--a "slight figure and sensitive face, dark eyes and delicate pallor," and at every crisis he coughs blood. His father is appalled when Stephen insists he Wants To Paint. "To throw away your brilliant prospects, wreck your whole career, for a mere whim," he wails. Stephen is adamant: "The only thing that mattered was this creative instinct that burned within him." He Renounces All, including the love of the neighboring squire's daughter, a girl with an "air of quiet composure, a sense of inescapable good breeding," who appreciates "the essential fineness of Stephen's character." He rushes off to Paris, whose air exhilarates him. How? "Like wine."

Broken, Thank God. There he mingles with Struggling Artists dressed in moleskin trousers and given to statements like "I rejoice in the fact that in all my life I have never debased my art." He starves, paints, and falls for a firm-breasted circus girl. For several chapters Stephen hangs about her "like a wasp around a nectarine, but without once penetrating the soft flesh of the fruit." She jilts him, but "through his hurt and humiliation, he still wanted her, through his hatred he still had need of her."

Buzzing off from the nectarine, Stephen returns to England to suffer some more. His paintings for a war memorial shock the village elders because they depict Naked Men and Women. His most masterful masterpieces declared obscene by an ignorant magistrate, Stephen lurches off to London, coughing, and takes refuge in a London boarding house run by a little Cockney girl of his acquaintance. In Cronin's rendition, Jenny speaks Cockney as if she had learned it from a talking book, but Stephen finds "something in her, a simple quality of womanhood, of homely warmth," marries her and settles down to paint in slummy seclusion. "How happy he was with these simple people whom the members of his own class would doubtless have looked down upon as 'common.'" When his old girl beseeches him to return to his sorrowing father, Stephen declares ringingly: "I've broken too far away from the beliefs and--thank God--the prejudices of my class."

We're All Mad. Later, dealers beg him for pictures, but Stephen declaims: "Success, especially popular success, imprisons the spirit." He paints only "to satisfy himself," and soliloquizes: "We're all mad, or half mad . . . perpetually in conflict with society . . . All except the ones who compromise." He, of course, "has never done that . . ."

In the end, dying of tuberculosis, which he of course refuses to treat, he is sought out by the most distinguished art dealer in Paris and told that he is famous. The dealer, in passing, bestows the final accolade: "I should have known you anywhere as an artist. Those hands . . . your head . . ."

This book, well made, clearly printed, and fitting the hand easily, is written to join the several other Cronin novels (Hatter's Castle, The Citadel, Keys of the Kingdom) high up on the bestseller lists. In an accompanying blurb, Cronin declares that of all his novels "this book, more than any other, was written from the heart."

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