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Pettitt was a most sincere lover of nature, but that was all; he knew little or nothing of those necessities and conditions that make art a different thing from nature. The tendency of his teaching was, therefore, to lead me to nature instead of leading me to art, and this was a great misfortune for me, as my instincts were only too much in the same direction already.
They are disappointing people; without candour, without imagination. Yet what a look of personality hangs about them.... To-night ... Mr. Pettitt: "Sister!" "Yes, Mr. Pettitt." "Do you ever go to theatres? Do you like them?" At the risk of appearing unnatural, I said, "Not much." "Oh ... I thought.... H'm, that's a pity. Don't you like revues?" "Oh, yes...."
I could get nature in the country, and that in endless abundance; what I needed at that time was some guidance into the realm of art. Pettitt taught me to draw in a hard, clear, scientific manner. He himself knew a little geology, and one of his sons was a well-informed geologist. I copied studies of cliffs that were entirely conceived and executed in the scientific spirit.
I slid in the road as I turned down the drive; a sheet of ice was spread where the leaky pipe is, and the steps up to the house door were slippery. But oh, the honeysuckle and the rose-trees...! Bush, plant, leaf, stem, rimed from end to end. The garden was a Bond Street jeweller's! Perhaps the final chapter on Mr. Pettitt....
She had to walk from a hill-village down to the valley every day, nearly twenty miles going and returning; so Pettitt made her a present of his donkey, and she prayed for him most fervently. Another of my master's pedestrian rambles extended for fifteen hundred miles along the coast of Great Britain.
Pettitt had strengthened the positive and scientific tendency that there is in me, so that I was quite ardent in the pursuit of the rigid and measurable truths, neither knowing nor caring anything about those more subtle and less manifest truths that the cultivated artist loves.
She comes often, having heard of him through the padre, to see a Canadian whom she doesn't know and who doesn't want to see her. From two places away I heard her voice piping up: "Nurse, excuse my asking, but is your cap a regulation one, like all the others?" I looked up, and all the tea I was pouring poured over the edge. Mr. Pettitt and Captain Matthew, between us, looked down at their plates.
Presently they heard some feet enter the outer shop, and Mrs. Duncombe's voice asking for Mr. Pettitt; while his mother replied that he would wait on her immediately, but that he was just now engaged with the Honourable Mr. De Lancey. "Could she show them anything?" "Oh no, thank you, we'll wait! Don't let us keep you, Mrs. Pettitt, it is only on business."
There was nothing more difficult in those days than for a young gentleman to become an artist, because no human being would believe that he could be serious in such an intention. As I had a fine-looking horse in the stable at the hotel, Pettitt of course took me for an amateur, and only attempted to communicate the superficial dexterity that amateurs usually desire.
Ruskin, saw in working from nature the only hope for the regeneration of art, and my practical master, Mr. Pettitt, considered it the height of artistic virtue to sit down before nature and work on the details of a large picture for eight or ten weeks together. I was eagerly anxious to do what was considered most right, and quite willing to undergo any degree of inconvenience.
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