What's Bred in the Bone

by Robertson Davies

  “I don’t know anything about alchemy, and there are things in that picture I don’t pretend to explain. I just painted what demanded to be painted.”

  “You may not have a scholar’s understanding of alchemy, but plainly you have lived alchemy; transformation of base elements and some sort of union of important elements has worked alchemically in your life. But you do know painting as a great technical skill, and such skills arouse splendid things in their possessors. What you do not understand in the picture will probably explain itself to you, now that you have dredged it up from the depths of your soul. You still believe in the soul, don’t you?”

  “I’ve tried not to, but I can’t escape it. A Catholic soul in Protestant chains, but I suppose it’s better than emptiness.”

  “I assure you that it is.”

  “Meister—I shall always call you Meister, though you say I’ve graduated from alunno to amico di Saraceni—you have been very good to me, and you have not spared the rod.”

  “He that spareth his rod, hateth his son. I am proud to be your father in art. So do something for me: I ask it as a father. Watch Ross.”

  Nothing more could be said, because of a commotion that broke out on the great staircase behind them. Professor Baudoin had misjudged his step, fallen on the marble, and broken his hip.

  THAT WAS SARACENI’S EVIL EYE, I suppose, said the Lesser Zadkiel.

  —Nobody becomes as great a man as Saraceni without extraordinary spiritual energy, and it isn’t all benevolent, said the Daimon Maimas. The Masters and Sibyls turn up in lucky people’s lives, and I am glad I could put such good ones in Francis’s path.

  —Lucky people? I suppose so. Not everybody finds Masters and Sibyls.

  —No, and at the present time—I mean Francis’s time, of course, because you and I have no truck with Time ourselves, brother—many people who are lucky enough to come into the path of a Master or a Sibyl want to argue and have their trivial say, and prattle as if all knowledge were relative and open to argument. Those who find a Master should yield to the Master until they have outgrown him.

  —If Francis has really made up his soul, as Saraceni said, what lies ahead of him? Hasn’t he achieved the great end of life?

  —You are testing me, brother, but you won’t catch me that way. Having got his soul under his eye, so to speak, Francis must now begin to understand it and be worthy of it, and that task will keep him busy for a while yet. Making up the soul isn’t an end; it’s the new beginning in the middle of life.

  —Yes, it will take some time.

  —You are fond of that foolish word time. Time in his outward life will run much faster for him now, but in the inward life it will slow down. So we can get on much faster with this record, or film, or tape, or whatever fashionable word Francis’s contemporaries would apply to it, because his external life occupies less of his attention. Onward, brother!

  WHAT WAS FRANCIS NOW in the world of MI5? Not one of the great ones, who inspire novelists to write about danger and violence and unexplained deaths. His work with the Allied Commission on Art continued when the conferees in Europe were completed, because the decisions of the conferees created all sorts of problems that had to be settled diplomatically, with much bargaining, much soothing of ruffled national pride, and a few arbitrary judgements in which he played a significant if not a leading role. He had a liaison association with the British Council. But only Uncle Jack knew that he was expected to keep a watchful eye on some people who were important in the world of art but who had other loyalties that did not jibe with those of the Allied cause.

  It was this secret aspect of his work that gave him the air of Civil Servant, a conventional man, a clubman who might turn up anywhere in the art world, the country-house world, the fashionable world, and sometimes even close to the Court. Anywhere, in fact, where there were clever people who did not think him clever, or quite one of themselves—not a Cambridge man—and who therefore sometimes talked less discreetly when he was present than they would otherwise have done. He was thought to be rather a dull dog who somehow managed to have a finger in the art pie. But he was also a useful man who could arrange things.

  For instance, he arranged that Aylwin Ross should receive favours that might not otherwise come his way and Ross, being what he was, showed gratitude but not for long, because he thought the favours the natural outcome of his own brilliant abilities. It was through Francis that Ross gained a good appointment in the Courtauld Institute, and began his rapid climb toward influence as a critic and creator of taste.

  Saraceni had warned Francis to watch Ross, so watch him he did, and saw nothing but a brilliant, attractive young man whose career it was a pleasure to advance. He would have watched Ross at closer range if Ross had not been so busy with his concerns and a little inclined to patronize Francis.

  “I really think you misjudge Ross,” he said to Saraceni on one of his yearly visits to the crammed, cluttered flat in Rome. “He is coming on like a house on fire; soon he will be a very big figure in the critical world. But you hint as though he were somehow dishonest.”

  “No, no; not dishonest,” said the Meister. “Probably he is all you say. But my dear Corniche, I mean that he is not an artist, not a creator; he is a politician of art. He turns with the wind, and you stand like a rock against the wind—except when it is Ross’s wind. You are a little too fond of Ross, and you don’t understand how.”

  “If you suggest that I am in love with him, you are totally mistaken.”

  “You don’t want to snuggle up with Ross and whisper secrets on the pillow—or I don’t suppose you do. That might not be so dangerous, because lovers are egotists and may quarrel. No: I think you see in Ross the golden youth you never were, the free spirit you never were, the lucky man you think you never were. There is some grey in your hair. Youth has flown for you. Do not try to be young again through Ross. Do not fall for the charm of that sort of youth. People who are young in the way Ross is young never grow old, and never to grow old is a very, very evil fate, though the twaddle of our time says otherwise. Remember what that angel, or whatever it was, says in the great painting you have made: Thou has kept the good wine until now. Do not pour out the good wine on the altar of Aylwin Ross.”

  ROSS MET FRANCIS on an autumn day, walking along Pall Mall.

  “ ‘Thou look’st like Antichrist in that lewd hat,’ ” said he, in greeting.

  “Jonson, I suppose. What’s wrong with my hat?”

  “It is the epitome of what you have become, my dear Frank. It is an Anthony Eden hat. Sedate, gloomy, and out of fashion. Come with me to Locke’s and we’ll get you a decent hat. A hat that speaks to the world of the Inner Cornish, the picture-restorer—but of the highest repute.”

  “I haven’t restored a picture for years.”

  “But I have! I most certainly and indubitably have! I’m restoring it to its proper place in the world of Art. And it’s a picture you know, so why don’t you take me to Scott’s for lunch, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  Over the sole Mornay at Scott’s Ross told his news with exuberance extraordinary even for him.

  “You remember that picture we saw at Munich? The Marriage at Cana? You remember what happened to it?”

  “It went back to Schloss Düsterstein, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, but not to oblivion. No indeed. I was tremendously taken with that picture—that triptych, I should say. And don’t you remember that I spoke about a link between it and the Drollig Hansel we had seen earlier? The picture that was clearly marked as having belonged to the Fuggers of Augsburg? I’ve proved the link.”

  “Proved it?”

  “The way we prove things in our game, Frank. By the most careful examination of brushwork, quality of paint, colours, and of course a great deal of flair backed up with expertise. The full Berenson bit. Short of all that really rather inconclusive scientific stuff, I’ve proved it.”

  “Aha. A nice footnote.”

  “If I weren’t
eating your lunch, I’d kill you. Footnote! It makes clearer the whole affair of that unknown painter Saraceni called The Alchemical Master. Now look: this is obviously a man who loves to deal in puzzles and hints to the observant. That device in the corner of Drollig Hansel could have been the Fuggers’ family trademark, or it could have been a gallows. A hangman, you see? A dwarf hangman. And who turns up in The Marriage at Cana but the same dwarf hangman, and this time he is holding his rope! And he is glorious in his dress armour!

  “That bothered me for years, until at last I was able to get a grant—never do anything without a grant, Frank—to go to Düsterstein and persuade the old Countess to let me see The Marriage. She’s tremendously chuffed with it now, you know. It hangs in the best gallery. I stayed for three days—she was very hospitable (lonely I suppose, poor old duck)—and I’ve cracked the code.”

  “Cracked what code?”

  “What The Marriage is really about, of course. The Alchemical Master cloaked it all in alchemical mystery, and for a very good reason, but it’s not really an alchemical picture. It’s political.”

  “You astonish me. Go on.”

  “What do you know about The Interim of Augsburg?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “It’s not on everybody’s tongue, but it was important when that picture was painted. It was a scheme to reconcile the Catholics and the Protestants in 1548. It was a compromise that led up to the Council of Trent. The Catholics made certain concessions to the Protestants, the biggest one being communion in both kinds, if you know what that means.”

  “Don’t insult me, you prairie Protestant. It means the laity receive both the bread and the wine at Communion.”

  “Good boy. So—the Marriage at Cana, where Christ certainly gave everybody the wine, the best they’d ever had. But look who’s the principal figure in the picture: Mother Church, personified as the Virgin Mary, offering the Cup. So that’s one-up for the Catholics because they are graciously yielding something very precious to the Protestants. The married couple are the Catholic and Protestant factions united in amity.”

  “There’s a hole in your explanation. Mary may be yielding the Cup to the Protestants, but she certainly isn’t giving it to the Catholics, and they haven’t got it yet.”

  “I thought of that, but I don’t think it really matters. The ostensible point of the picture is not to shout its message to every chance visitor to the Düsterstein Chapel, but to offer an altar-piece representing the Marriage at Cana.”

  “Well—what about the other figures?”

  “Some can be identified. The old man with the writing-tablet is obviously Johann Agricola, one of the framers of the Interim of Augsburg. Who is holding his spare writing materials? Who but Drollig Hansel, the hangman with his rope, but he is in parade armour and thus dressed for a celebration, which he assists by holding the pens. Symbolic of the cessation of persecution, do you see? The Knight and the Lady in the right-hand wing of the triptych are surely Graf Meinhard and his wife—the donors of the picture, just where you would expect to find them. Even Paracelsus is there—that shrewd little chap with the scalpel.”

  “And what about all the others?”

  “I don’t see that they really matter. The significant thing is that the picture celebrates the Interim of Augsburg, by linking it with the Marriage at Cana. The message of the angel, about the good wine, obviously refers to the Protestant-Catholic reconciliation. Those women quarrelling over Christ—Protestant preaching versus Catholic faith, obviously. And The Alchemical Master has laid out the whole squabble so that the picture, if necessary, could be explained in a number of different ways.”

  “What did the Gräfin say to all this?”

  “Just smiled, and said I astonished her.”

  “Yes, I see. But Aylwin, I really do think you ought to be careful. It’s ingenious, but a historian could probably blow it full of holes. For instance, why would the Ingelheims want such a thing? They were never Protestants, surely?”

  “Perhaps not avowedly so. But they were—or Graf Meinhard was—alchemists, and they chose a painter with this obvious alchemical squint. Graf Meinhard probably had something up his sleeve, but that’s not my affair. I shall simply write about the picture.”

  “Write about it?”

  “I’m doing a large-scale article for Apollo. Don’t miss it.”

  FRANCIS CERTAINLY DID NOT miss it. He worried for many weeks before the article appeared. Obviously he should tell Aylwin the history of The Marriage at Cana. But why “obviously”? Because conscience required it? Yes, but if conscience were given a foremost place in the matter, it would be Ross’s duty, as a matter of conscience, to denounce Francis as a faker, who had sat in silence while The Marriage was praised by the Munich experts. Conscience would involve the Gräfin, who, if she were really as innocent as she seemed about The Marriage, was certainly not innocent in the matter of Drollig Hansel. And if the Gräfin were involved, what about all those other pictures that had been so stealthily prepared by Saraceni and palmed off on the collectors for the Führermuseum? This was not a time to expose impostures practised on the Third Reich by Anglo-Franco-American entrepreneurs, which had involved the loss to Germany of genuine and splendid pictures; Germany, as the loser, was in the wrong, and must be firmly kept in the wrong for a time, to satisfy public indignation. Francis’s dilemma had a bewildering array of horns.

  And there was the matter of Ross himself. He counted on his article about The Marriage to provide a fine step upward in his career. Was Francis to hold him back by a confession which, if it were to be made at all, should have been made years earlier?

  Finally, Francis had to admit, there was sheer pride in having brought off a splendid hoax. Had not Ruth Nibsmith warned him about the strong Mercurial element in his nature? Mercury, who added so much that was uplifting and delightful in the world, was also the god of thieves and crooks and hoaxers. The division between art and deviousness and—yes, it had to be admitted—crime was sometimes as thin as a cigarette paper. Beset by conscience on the one hand, he enjoyed a deep, chuckling satisfaction on the other. He was no Letztpfennig, to be brought down to ruin by a monkey: his picture, though anonymously, was to be given wide exposure and an interesting ambience by a rising young expert in the Mercurial world of connoisseurship. Francis decided to keep mum.

  The article, when it did appear, was everything he could have wished. It was soberly, indeed elegantly written, without any of the gee-whiz enthusiasm Ross had shown when he told Francis what he was about to do. It was modest in tone: this very fine picture, hitherto unknown, had at last come to light, and except for Drollig Hansel it was the only example from the brush of The Alchemical Master, whoever he might be. He must have been known to the Fuggers, and to Graf Meinhard, and these facts and the quality of the painting put it with the best of the Augsburg group, of whom Holbein had been the finest master. Was The Alchemical Master a pupil or associate of Holbein? It was more than likely, for Holbein had delighted in pictures that offered concealed messages to those who had the historical knowledge and the flair to read them. Fuller explication of the iconographic intricacies of the masterpiece Ross was happy to leave to scholars of greater insight than himself.

  It was a fine article, and it caused a sensation among those who cared about such things, which meant several hundred thousand professional critics, connoisseurs, and that large body of people who could never hope to own a great picture, but who cared deeply for great pictures. Perhaps best of all, it offered a fine colour reproduction of the triptych as a whole, and a detailed picture of each of its three parts. The Marriage at Cana, now dated and explicated, became art history, and Francis (the Mercurial Francis, not the possessor of the tormented Catholic-Protestant conscience) was overjoyed.

  The Countess refused all subsequent requests to examine the picture. She was, she said, too old and too busy with her great farm to oblige the curious. Did she smell a rat? Nobody ever knew. Thou shalt perish ere I perish.
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  THE ARTICLE DESTROYED Francis forever as a painter. Clearly he could not go on in the style which he had, with so much pain and under the whip of Saraceni, made his own. The danger was too great. But with the perversity of his Mercurial aspect, he now found himself eager to paint again. He had done nothing since the end of the war except amuse himself with a few drawings in the Old Master manner and executed with his Old Master technique. After Ross’s article appeared he enlarged his portfolio of sketches in this style that had been preliminary studies for The Marriage at Cana; created them, so to speak, after the fact. They had to be kept locked up. Now he wanted to paint. The obvious thing—he had grown fond of Ross’s word “obvious”—was to learn to paint in a contemporary style. He bought new, ready-made paints and canvases prepared by an artist’s supplier, and remembering his early enthusiasm for Picasso he set to work to find a style related to that of the greatest of modern painters, but which would be the true style of Francis Cornish.

  That could never have been easy but it became wholly impossible after Picasso made a statement to Giovanni Papini, which was included in an interview that appeared in Libro Nero in 1952. The Master said:

  In art the mass of people no longer seeks consolation and exaltation, but those who are refined, rich, unoccupied, who are distillers of quintessences, seek what is new, strange, original, extravagant, scandalous. I myself, since Cubism and before, have satisfied these masters and critics with all the changing oddities which passed through my head, and the less they understood me, the more they admired me. By amusing myself with all these games, with all these absurdities, puzzles, rebuses, arabesques, I became famous and that very quickly. And fame for a painter means sales, gains, fortune, riches. And today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt were great painters. I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere.