Sir William

by David Stacton

  “You could make a little one of box,” said Sir William.

  “Box grows slowly. By the time the box is up, we’ll be down to his grandson, at the earliest. He wants it now. It’s one of his pranks; to confuse the courtiers, he says. I’ll not please his pranks, for he’s no king to me.”

  Sir William had one of his happier solutions.

  “Lay it out as a knot garden, tell him it will grow, and once he’s forgotten it, you can dig it up again and turf it over,” he said.

  *

  Notions are one thing. Any woman can have notions, but it is harder to be visited by an idea. Nonetheless, Emma had just received one.

  She was sitting in Sir William’s gallery of statues, surrounded by Castor, Pollux, a dubious Vespasian, a Mourning Woman, a Crouching Venus (it was a pair), a Hellenistic Prince in gilt bronze, and two Senators, one of them lacking a head. She felt rebellious. What did he see in them anyway? And he moved her about as though she were an art object. Very well then. She would be an art object.

  Getting up, she rang for a shawl and a full-length mirror. Then she arranged herself, a Crouching Venus first, then the Mourning Woman. She was reminded of George. What with George and the Opera and a dash of mythology besides, she found that Grief, Joy, Surprise, Awakened Conscience, Noble Resignation, An Orphan’s Curse, Herself Surprised, they came quite easily; they were easy to do, so long as you watched the mirror. A portrait was all very well, but a mirror was better.

  For Cornelia, however, she would need two children. It was Sir William’s birthday. This was to be her surprise.

  *

  Sir William galloped home from Caserta, past the poorhouse. It was a very long poorhouse, for Naples was a very large town, and though the King was generous, he could not be generous every day, so the rest of the time there was precious little to do but spend money and corrupt the taxgatherer.

  As sometimes happened in the evening, Sir William did not feel so immortal as was his wont. No doubt on their birthdays the Gods occasionally feel the same way, conscious perhaps of Christianity in the future, waiting patiently, with an undertaker’s air.

  A great many things could be counted in Sir William’s head at any given moment, for though he was not restless, his thoughts were often so. Ideas to him were like fruit: one does not grow them oneself; one merely touches them to see if they are ripe, before plucking them. Did a horse ever take all of its feet off the ground at one time? Would there be a war, and if so, with whom? At any rate it would not affect them: they were too far south. What about the English garden? It would have to be finished; it was a matter of national prestige. If Oliver Cromwell could have his portrait behind a door in the Pitti Palace, surely His Britannic Majesty might be allowed to plant a garden here. What was to be done about Greville? It seemed he could succeed at nothing unless it hung on Sir William’s affairs. At what age did a healthy man have his first heart attack? No doubt she was sometimes shrill, but she was a grateful creature, and at least she was always there when one came back. Since she never asked for anything, it was a pleasure to give her gifts. She had natural breeding and referred to him by his first name only when taken unaware.

  *

  At dinner she seemed nervous. Afterward she excused herself. He kept his birthday privately, but even so, that was unlike her. He took coffee in the large salon, where the sculpture was. It was bitter coffee. He let it stand. When he heard a rustle, he paid no mind to it, for it was only the evening shadows closing in.

  “Who’s there?” he asked, catching another sound. It was a footman, squeaking across the parquet with a candelabrum, to open the gold-and-white doors leading to a farther room.

  In the darkness beyond the doors the candelabrum caught a weaving figure in long Roman garments, gathering flowers in a meadow. The walls were blue. Space was blue. In the Elysian Fields one sees a good deal of blue. The flowers were yellow. So was the dress. The figure looked this way and that, now stooping, now plucking, and in the candlelight, space seemed infinite. It was like that scene in Swift, at Glubbdubdrib, where the past is shown, too real to be touched.

  “William, is it not that fresco we saw underground at Herculaneum, to the life?”

  Sir William dropped his coffee cup. He had been dreaming.

  “Don’t be cross. Perhaps I have not got it quite right yet, but there are more.”

  There were more. It was the beginning of what were to be called her Attitudes. He was entranced. It was not so much that she moved, as that she was so moving. She could make the past move.

  “No, not quite that way,” he said, dismissing the footman, and from then on it was he who held the candelabrum up.

  *

  “My dear, Herr Goethe is coming. He is a great man. And though I know that concept to be repugnant to the female temperament, yet to men such do exist, so entertain him. We will do the Attitudes.”

  The Attitudes had become famous.

  *

  He was a great man. He was almost as good as Kotzebue, and had written a novel sufficiently illusory to make women cry. There was the added advantage that when he traveled he left his native language, that is most of it, at home, and spoke French. He was not alone. Some people, in moments of self-doubt, produce a mirror; Goethe produced Tischbein, a young artist brought along to sketch the Master when told to. Goethe, so they said, had a universal mind, and if he found that restricting, did not show it. He was no more frightening than any other young man of good family.

  Though without affectation, he was not without mannerisms and had a tendency to sit about in rooms as modestly as a public statue patiently waiting to be unveiled, and when he spoke, spoke as a priest does through the mouth of the oracle. Sir William could not help but notice that his chair was an exact two inches in front of Tischbein’s chair, no matter where they might find themselves.

  Sir William was amused. Like all well-bred people, he demanded of others only that they play their role. If they asked you backstage, he did not like it. He clouded up at once. But since Goethe could be seen only from out front, he found him, though German and hence irrelevant, congenial.

  Emma was up to her star turn.

  So this is hate, she realized, with some surprise (it was a Medea). It is certainly a most sustaining emotion, I had forgotten it; but, afraid to linger, hurried on to a Psyche Abandoned (after Thorwaldsen). It was marvelous really. The emotions could be not only shown but felt, merely with the aid of two shawls, a chair, a candle and an urn. It was possible to express them all; Sir William had shown her how. For Joy, however, one needed a tambourine (with fitments from Pompeii. Joy was authentic, though the wood hoop itself was new).

  “Schöne,” said Goethe.

  “Schöne,” said Tischbein, though he did not altogether approve, for in Winckelmann he had read that Expression is an unfortunate necessity which arises from the fact that human beings are always in some emotional state, and Tischbein, who was a learned painter, had found this to be true from his own experience, and not only true, but deplorable.

  “Wunderschöne,” said Goethe sharply.

  “Wunderschöne,” repeated Tischbein.

  As the two men said it, they seemed to bend over invisible oars, while behind them the minor members of the Neapolitan German colony followed them (the oars were locked) in expressing admiration with the same most audible hiss, in unison. Vogue la galère.

  There are geese in the Forum, thought Sir William. They will rouse the guard. And so Rome cannot be taken, after all; the relevant anecdote may be found, with some labor, in Livy.

  Emma was up to Lucretia now, in the opulent manner of Giulio Romano, also to be found in Livy, with a bare bodkin. Goethe admired, though what he remembered was a large portfolio he had seen recently in which the physiognomy of the horse, by means of the eyes mostly, was utilized to show the entire range of the emotions, from Startled Joy to Woe. Ox-eyed Juno is one thing, but the English are noted for their addiction to and emulation of the horse.

  “Ti
schbein, is it not so?”

  “Ja,” said Tischbein, without listening. He was a paid companion. It was always so, though later he hoped to have disciples of his own.

  Emma was beginning to tire, but Vivacity came next, so she was not worried. She was enjoying herself. There was so much to feel—whole continents of emotion of whose existence she had been ignorant. She beckoned to the footman. It was time to bring the children in, for she planned to conclude with a Cornelia and Her Jewels, to be followed by a Hope, a 19th century emotion perhaps, but then, artists are always a generation ahead of their time.

  “Standing, kneeling, seated, reclining, grave, sad, sportive, teasing, abandoned, penitent, alluring, threatening, agonized … one manifestation follows another, and indeed grows out of it,” said Goethe. For that is the way life is: one thing leads to another. We need merely follow, being careful only that of any two roads, we take the right one, lest we be left. “Her elderly knight holds the torch for her performance and is absorbed in his mind’s desire,” he added.

  Perhaps he was, at that. For Sir William had never been given to the passions; he was cerebral. At any rate, he would not have mentioned them, for English is the language of the affections, not of the passions. Anything else fortunately remains a lexicographical impossibility.

  Nonetheless, it was true; it was his mind’s desire.

  After the performance, he took Goethe down to the cellars. The lantern made little holes of light in the surrounding darkness. Bronzes, bustos, and sarcophagi cast muddled silhouettes against the ceiling and the walls. Standing in the middle of the floor was a chest with a gold rim, upended.

  “She stood there once,” said Sir William, “in a Pompeiian dress. The effect was striking.”

  Goethe stared at the chest. It looked very like Pandora’s box, without the lid. Hope, no doubt, was fluttering about upstairs, or else waiting quietly in her bed, her wings invisible, a hope realized.

  Had Sir William been a fellow German, Goethe would have said, “You are to be congratulated, sir.”

  Had he been English, and therefore truly clubbable, Sir William might perhaps have permitted him to say so.

  As it was, with a last look at the chest, which was a shrine of some kind, the two men went back upstairs, sobered by the thought that under different circumstances they might each have found somebody they could talk to, at last.

  *

  Emma’s letters were too long, so Greville did not read them. In order to have our letters read, we must insert in them something the lector wishes to know, and there was no longer anything about Emma that Greville wished to know. But he answered them because in that way he could bring things to Sir William’s attention indirectly. She should be a go-between. He had found her proper use.

  He was concerned with the improvement of Milford Haven. Instead of taking money out, Sir William should put money in.

  I dare say [wrote Sir William] all you propose, such as an Act of Parliament and buildings and exchanges, would be greatly to the advantage of the Estate in process of time, but it is by no means convenient to me to run myself into debt and difficulties for a prospect of future advantages to be enjoy’d—by whom?

  The man is ungrateful. I am only acting in his best interest, thought Greville, had the Act of Parliament passed anyway (it would allow him to pour money into Milford Haven Harbor), and drew a draft upon his uncle’s bankers, which he cashed with some pleasure.

  *

  At an official reception to which all the world and his wife came, Emma could not appear. Like a child, she was to be allowed downstairs only in the presence of the more indulgent members of the family. And since she was a child, she did not relish that.

  The King and Queen were to make a call, much as they would have gone to the bank, for such was the political situation that England seemed their one security.

  Since formal calls can scarcely be made impromptu, Emma had already seen the carpet rolled out to the street, and was well aware of an anticipatory bustle among the chambermaids and footmen. So when, at her singing lesson (she had put back the regular hour), she heard coach horns in the street and the clatter of a stage carriage, a natural curiosity impelled her—forgetful that she was not to be seen—to the landing at the top of the main hall, to see who it could be. The clustered columns of the landing made her indiscretion discreet without in any way concealing her.

  Below her Sir William was receiving first the King, then the Queen.

  “Caro cavaliere!” yelled the King. Since he refused to speak anything but Italian, and the Queen—except for an occasional guttural curse—restricted herself to French, the conversation had a worldly air.

  “There are disturbances,” said the Queen, “in France.” To entertain royalty is not easy, for their attention tends to wander. Maria Carolina’s wandered.

  Looking down, Emma saw a massy woman of about forty, with a long face, lovely arms, and a poached look about the eyes. In one hand she held a long white glove negligently, as Pharaoh would hold a gold-and-lapis flail, the symbol of his office, though to use it, you flick the power itself, not its embodiment.

  Looking up, the Queen saw a mobile creature who had the look of someone worth knowing, were she but knowable.

  Sir William followed her glance. Emma ducked out of sight. The Queen and Sir William progressed to the salon, where they talked of France, to an obbligato from Ferdinand, who never talked of anything but hunting. He did not mean to be discordant, but having no other subject, he played always the same tune.

  They stayed an hour.

  “So that is Miss Hart,” said the Queen, leaving. “I should like to talk to her. It is a pity I cannot.” She needed a new confidante, for a new favorite is cheaper than an old one, if only because accounts have not been struck yet, and besides, she has the unique merit no old favorite can have, of being new.

  Their carriage rolled sonorously away (because of the horns). Sir William went upstairs, where Emma was at her singing again.

  “My dear child,” he said, noticing she was flushed. “You must never look down on royalty. They are not designed to be seen from above. It is they who belong on the balcony, not you.”

  “Indeed I meant no harm,” said Emma carefully, but with a forgive-me look. It was a new attitude.

  “I’m sure you didn’t.” She was a little minx. She was a most amusing creature.

  *

  At dawn, when he could get away, Sir William went out to fish in the bay alone, in a longboat. That is, he had two boys row him out, sent them back in the dory, and told them to return when he should wave.

  Hot sun is good for old bones, and he was fifty-nine. However, since each good comes accompanied by its own evil, he had come prepared, and wore a large, floppy, disreputable hat.

  He got nary a nibble, but there is a truth locked up in every platitude—crisp as an almond none the worse for a frazzled shell—and one does not go fishing to catch fish.

  The hobby is praised in Theophrastus, who also informs us that love is the passion of an idle mind, as no doubt it is. But Sir William did not have an idle mind. At most, he allowed it to idle at times in order to let it rest. Theophrastus further quotes the tragic poet Charaemon to the effect that Eros is variable, like wine; that when he comes in moderation, he is gracious, but when he comes too intensely and puts men in utter confusion, he is hard to bear.

  Passion is ludicrous and vulgar (here there was a bite, but it turned out to be an orange grown drowsy with its own weight). To the English, vulgarity is an all-embracing concept that includes all living matter and most inanimate, with the exception only of themselves. Sir William did not except himself. He was quite willing to laugh at his own passions, given he might do so reminiscently (here he threw the orange at a pelican, who did not want it either).

  “It is usually agreeable, all the same, to have her here,” said Sir William, himself a downy old bird, as becomes a diplomat. “I shall do nothing, but if she does, I shall not interfere.” And he went
on fishing for no fish, contentedly.

  *

  North of Brescia, Goethe confronted the foothills with equanimity. They looked at him. He looked at them. Then, twisting in the saddle, he turned his face upward, for a last dose of the sun, and rode on with relief. It is necessary to make the Grand Tour, no doubt, but he was not sorry to be going home. He had gathered his impressions and made, on the whole, an excellent one on his late hosts. It was time to create.

  Nonetheless, when the shadows began to fall and he drew rein for the night at Como, he found to his annoyance that he was humming “Mein’ junges leben hat’ ein End’,” so he stopped. It was an old German pietistic parlor song from past time, written by the Norns.

  Kennst du das land….

  *

  “You are growing up, my child,” said Mrs. Cadogan, doing Emma’s hair, which gave her pleasure. It was such an occupation as Fafnir would have enjoyed. It was like carding red gold. “Pray why?”

  “It cannot be helped.”

  “Of course it can be helped. It is certainly no reason to ruin your appearance.”

  *

  “No,” said Sir William, still out at sea. “It cannot be helped. But all the same it is a great shame.”

  He was almost aware, these days, of the drawing about him of an invisible net. It was a silken net. Since he had tarried too long, he found himself being rowed to shore through the fishing fleet, which was putting to sea to cast out theirs.

  It was New Year’s Eve of 1789; and then, just as suddenly, of 1790.

  *

  In 1789, there was a gala at Ranelagh, to celebrate the recovery from madness of His Most Gracious Majesty George III. That was how he solved his problems. When he became bored, he went away. When his interest was aroused again, he came back, to find everything much the same, except for the increasing difficulty each time of getting back. The orchestra played “Rule Britannia” (by the author of “Sally in Our Alley”) and the national anthem. We can all recover from madness in time; here was proof. At Posilipo, Sir William gave a dinner to celebrate the same event.