: Kloka Maja och andra berättelser by Hedberg Frans - Swedish fiction

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GENERAL BRAMBLE

PORTRAITS

"As to what the picture represents, that depends upon who looks at it."--Whistler.

The French Mission in its profound wisdom had sent as liaison officer to the Scottish Division a captain of Dragoons whose name was Beltara.

"Are you any relation to the painter, sir?" Aurelle, the interpreter, asked him.

And he related how he had visited the French War Office after he had been wounded, and how an old colonel had made friends with him and had tried to find him a congenial job.

"I am a painter, sir."

"A painter?" the colonel exclaimed, dumbfounded. "A painter? Why, damn it all!"

Captain Beltara and Aurelle soon became inseparable companions. They had the same tastes and different professions, which is the ideal recipe for friendship. Aurelle admired the sketches in which the painter recorded the flexible lines of the Flemish landscape; Beltara was a kindly critic of the young man's rather feeble verses.

"You would perhaps be a poet," he said to him, "if you were not burdened with a certain degree of culture. An artist must be an idiot. The only perfect ones are the sculptors; then come the landscape painters; then painters in general; after them the writers. The critics are not at all stupid; and the really intelligent men never do anything."

"Why shouldn't intelligence have an art of its own, as sensibility has?"

"No, my friend, no. Art is a game; intelligence is a profession. Look at me, for instance; now that I no longer touch my brushes, I sometimes actually catch myself thinking; it's quite alarming."

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