What’s Bred in the Bone tct-2

by Robertson Davies

  “Your hatred is reserved for the moderns, as mine is for you?”

  “Not at all. I do not hate them. The best of them are doing what honest painters have always done, which is to paint the inner vision, or to bring the inner vision to some outer subject. But in an earlier day the inner vision presented itself in a coherent language of mythological or religious terms, and now both mythology and religion are powerless to move the modern mind. So—the search for the inner vision must be direct. The artist solicits and implores something from the realm of what the psychoanalysts, who are the great magicians of our day, call the Unconscious, though it is actually the Most Conscious. And what they fish up—what the Unconscious hangs on the end of the hook the artists drop into the great well in which art has its being—may be very fine, but they express it in a language more or less private. It is not the language of mythology or religion. And the great danger is that such private language is perilously easy to fake. Much easier to fake than the well-understood language of the past. I do not want to make you dizzy with flattery, but your picture of Drollig Hansel whispered something of that very deep, dark well.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “No, not at all. As I have told you. Our Blessed Lord wanted something quite different from that dark well, and drew from it like the Master He was.”

  “But the Moderns—surely one must paint in the manner of one’s day?”

  “I don’t admit any such necessity. If life is a dream, as some philosophers insist, surely the great picture is that which most potently symbolizes the unseizable reality that lies behind the dream. If I—or you—can best express that in terms of mythology or religion, why should we not do so?”

  “Because it’s a kind of fakery, or a deliberate throw-back, like those Pre-Raphaelites. Even if you are a believer, you cannot believe as the great men of the past believed.”

  “Very well. Live in the spirit of your time, and that spirit alone, if you must. But for some artists such abandonment to the contemporary leads to despair. Men today, men without religion or mythology, solicit the Unconscious, and usually they ask in vain. So they invent something and I don’t need to tell you the difference between invention and inspiration. Supply such inventions and you may come to depise those who admire you, and play games with them. Was that the spirit of Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt? Of course, you may become something rather like a photographer. But remember what Matisse said: ‘L’exactitude ce n’est pas la vérité.’ “

  “Isn’t exactitude what you are devilling and driving me to achieve with this bloody piece of handwriting?”

  “Only as a means of training you so that you will be able to set down, as well as lies in your power, what the Unconscious may choose to put on your hook, and offer it to those who have eyes to see.”

  “You are teaching me to paint reality so well that it might deceive—like that Roman painter who painted flowers, or a jar of honey, or something so truly that bees settled on his pictures. How do you equate that with the kind of reality you are talking about—the reality that rises from the dark well?”

  “Don’t despise things. Every thing has a soul that speaks to our soul, and may move it toward love. To understand that is the real materialism. People speak of our age as materialistic, but they are wrong. Men do not believe in matter today any more than they believe in God; scientists have taught them not to believe in anything. Men of the Middle Ages, and most of them in the Renaissance, believed in God and the things God had made, and they were happier and more complete than we. Listen, Corniche: modern man wants desperately to believe in something, to have some value that cannot be shaken. This country in which we live is giving fearful proof of what mankind will do in order to have something on which to fasten his yearning for belief, for certainty, for reality.”

  “I don’t like it, and neither do you. Nor does the Countess.”

  “But we cannot deny it, or change it. These Nazi fanatics are picturesque, so one can take some comfort from that.”

  Francis thought of the trains, whose journey to the concentration camp in the hills he was recording, and did not find it picturesque. But he said nothing.

  Saraceni went on, serenely. “The modern passion for the art of the past is part of this terrible yearning for certainty. The past is at least done with, and anything that we can recover from it is solid goods. Why do rich Americans pay monstrous prices for paintings by Old Masters which they may, or may not, understand and love, if it is not to import into their country the certainty I am talking about? Their public life is a circus, but in the National Gallery at Washington something of God, and something of the comfort of God’s splendour, may be entombed. It is a great cathedral, that gallery. And these Nazis are ready to swap splendid Italian masters for acres of German pictures, because they want to make manifest on the walls of their Führermuseum the past of their race, and so give substance to the present of their race, and provide some assurance of the future of their race. It is crazy, but in a crazy world what can you expect?”

  “What I can expect, it appears, is that some day I shall finish this idiotic job, or I shall go mad and kill you.”

  “No, no, Corniche. What you can expect is that when you have finished that idiotic job you will be able to write a splendid hand like the great Cardinal Bembo. And by so doing you will achieve at least something of the outlook upon the world of that great connoisseur, for the hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand. You will not kill me. You love me. I am your Meister. You dote upon me.”

  Francis threw an ink-bottle at Saraceni. It was an empty bottle, and he took care to miss his mark. Then they both laughed.

  So the weeks and the months passed and Francis had been at Düsterstein for almost three years, during which he had worked without a holiday as Saraceni’s slave, then colleague, then trusted friend. True, he had been back to England twice, for a week each time, meeting the Colonel and—for colour—visiting Williams-Owen. But these jaunts could not be called holidays. He was on easier terms with the Countess, though no one was ever fully at ease with the Countess. Amalie had found her tongue and lost her love for Francis, and he taught her some trigonometry (of which Ruth Nibsmith knew nothing) and the elements of drawing, and a great deal about gin rummy and bridge. Amalie was on the way to becoming a great beauty, and although nothing much was said, it was apparent that Miss Nibsmith’s reign must soon give way to a broader education, probably in France.

  “You don’t care, I suppose,” said Francis to Ruth, on one of their afternoon walks. “You’re not really a governess—not in the nineteenth-century Bronte sense—and surely you want to do something else.”

  “So I shall,” said Ruth, “but I shall stay here as long as there is work for me to do. Like you.”

  “Ah, well: I’m learning my craft, you see.”

  “And practising your other craft. Like me.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Come on, Frank. You’re in the profession, aren’t you?”

  “I’m a professional painter, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Go on with you! You’re a snoop, and so am I. The profession.”

  “You’ve left me behind.”

  “Frank, nobody at Düsterstein is thick. The Countess has rumbled you, and so has Saraceni, and I rumbled you the first night I noticed you looking out of your open window, counting the cars on the Bummelzug. I was on the ground below, doing the same thing, just for the fun of it. A fine snoop you are! Standing in a window with a light behind you!”

  “All right, officer. It’s a fair cop. I’ll come quietly. So you’re in the profession, too?”

  “Born to it. My father was in it until he died on the job. Killed, very likely, though nobody really knows.”

  “And what are you doing here?”

  “That’s not a question one pro asks another pro. I’m just looking about. Keeping an eye on what you and the Meister are doing, and what the Countess and Prince Max do with that.”

&nb
sp; “But you’ve never been in the shell-grotto.”

  “Don’t need to go. I write the Countess’s letters, and I know what happens, however much she pretends it’s something else.”

  “Doesn’t the Countess rumble you?”

  “I hope not. It would be awful to think there were two snoops in one’s house, wouldn’t it? And I’m not very high-powered, you know. Just write the occasional letter home to my mum, who is a pro’s widow, and knows how to read them and what to pass on to the big chaps.”

  “I know it’s nosy to ask, but do you get paid?”

  “Ha ha; the profession relies to what might be considered a dangerous degree on unpaid help. The old English notion that nobody who is anybody really works for money. No, I work for nothing, on the understanding that if I shape up well I will be in line for a paid job some day. Women don’t get on very fast in the profession, unless they are elegant love-goddesses, and then they don’t last long. But I don’t grumble. I’m acquiring a useful command of Bavarian rural dialect and a peerless knowledge of the borderland between the Reich and Austria.”

  “Not casting any horoscopes?”

  “Plenty, but chiefly of people long dead. Why?”

  “It was hinted to me that Prince Max would like to know what you think of his.”

  “Oh, I know that. But I won’t bite. Anyhow, it would be bad for his character. Max is going to be rather famous.”

  “How?”

  “Even if I were sure I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “Aha, I see in you the iconological figure of Prudence.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “The Meister has me hard at it studying all that sort of thing. So that I can read old pictures. All those symbolic women—Truth with her mirror, Charity suckling her child, Justice with her sword and balances, Temperance with her cup and ewer—scores of them; they are the sign language of a particular kind of art.”

  “Well, why not? Have you anything better to do?”

  “I have a block about that sort of thing. This Renaissance and pre-Renaissance stuff, where you make out the figures of Time, and his daughter Truth, and Luxury, and Fraud, and all those creatures, seems to me to pull a fine painting down to the level of moral teaching, if not actual anecdote. Could a great painter like Bronzino really have been so much of a moralist?”

  “I don’t see why not. It’s just romantic nonsense to suppose that painters have always been rowdies and wenchers. Most of them were daubing away like billy-o in order to get the means to live the bourgeois life.”

  “Oh well—it’s very dull learning iconology and I am beginning to wish something interesting would happen.”

  “It will, and soon. Just hang on a bit. Some day you will be really famous, Francis.”

  “Are you being psychic?”

  “Me? What put that into your head?”

  “Saraceni did. He says you are very much a psychic.”

  “Saraceni is a mischief-making old nuisance.”

  “Rather more than that. Sometimes when I listen to him going on about the picture exporting and importing business that he and the Countess are up to, I feel like Faust listening to Mephistopheles.”

  “Lucky you. Would anybody ever have heard of Faust if it hadn’t been for Mephistopheles?”

  “All right. But he has in a high degree the trick of making the worse seem the better cause. And he says it’s because conventional morality takes no heed of art.”

  “I thought he said art was the higher morality.”

  “Now you are beginning to sound like him. Listen, Ruth, aren’t we ever going to get together in bed again?”

  “Not a hope, unless the Countess goes away on one of her jaunts and takes Amalie with her. In the Countess’s house and under her eye I play by the Countess’s rules, and I can’t be having it off with you when I am supposed to be gently watching over the precious virginity of her granddaughter. Fair’s fair, and that’s a little too much in the line of eighteenth-century castle intrigue for my taste.”

  “Okay—I just thought I’d ask. ‘Hereafter, in a better world than this—’ “

  “ ‘I shall desire more love and knowledge of you.’ I’ll hold you to that.”

  “And I’ll hold you to that.”

  “Corniche! I want you to go to the Netherlands and kill a man.”

  “At your service, Meister. Shall I take my dagger or rely on the poisoned chalice?”

  “You will rely on the poisoned word. Only that will do the job.”

  “Then I suppose I’d better know his name.”

  “His name, unfortunately for him, is Jean-Paul Letztpfennig. I am a great believer in the influence of names on destiny, and Letztpfennig is not a lucky name. Nor is he a lucky man. He wanted a career as a painter, but his stuff was dull and derivative. A failure, indeed, but just at the moment he is attracting a lot of attention.”

  “Not from me. Never heard of him.”

  “His notoriety is not mentioned in the German papers, but he is of great interest to Germany. The glassy eye of Reichsmarschall Göring is on him. He wants to sell the Reichsmarschall a ridiculous fake painting.”

  “If it’s ridiculous how did the Reichsmarschall ever cast his glassy eye on it?”

  “Because Letztpfennig, who is probably the most left-handed schlemiel in the art world at present, is hawking his fake around, and if it were real it would be the great find of the century. Nothing less than a major work by Hubertus van Eyck.”

  “Not Jan van Eyck?”

  “No; Hubertus, Jan’s brother who died in 1426, quite young. But Hubertus was a very great painter. It was he who designed and painted quite a bit of the magnificent Adoration of the Lamb, which is at Ghent. Jan finished it. There aren’t many pictures by Hubertus, and the appearance of one now is bound to create a sensation. But it is a fake.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know because I feel it in my bones. It is my ability to feel things in my bones that lifts me above the general run of art experts. We all have sensitive bones, of course. But I am a painter myself, and I know more about how the great painters of the past worked than even Berenson, because Berenson is not a painter, and his bones keep changing their mind; he has attributed some very remarkable pictures to as many as three painters over a period of twenty years, to the dismay of their owners. When I know a thing I know it forever. And Letztpfennig’s van Eyck is a fake.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “I don’t have to see it. If Letztpfennig vouches for it, it’s a fake. He has made a tiny reputation among gullible people, but I know him through and through. He is the worst kind of scoundrel—an unlucky, muddling scoundrel. And he must be destroyed.”

  “Meister—”

  “Yes?”

  “I have never mentioned this, because it seems tactless, but I have been told that you possess the Evil Eye. Why don’t you simply destroy Letztpfennig yourself?”

  “Oh, what a dreadful world we live in! How spitefully people talk! The Evil Eye! Of course, I know that stupid people say that, merely because one or two people to whom I have taken a dislike have had unfortunate accidents. Only a broken bone, or losing their sight, or something of that sort. Never anything fatal. I am still a Catholic, you know; I would recoil from killing a rival.”

  “But don’t you want me to kill Letztpfennig?”

  “I spoke in terms of melodramatic exaggeration, to get your full attention. I only want you to kill him professionally.”

  “Oh, I see. Nothing serious.”

  “If he dies of chagrin, that is because he is over-sensitive. Nobody’s fault but his own. Psychological suicide. Not uncommon.”

  “This is just a matter of professional rivalry, is it?”

  “Do you suppose I would elevate such an idiot as Letztpfennig to the status of a rival? A rival to me! You must think I hold my abilities in low esteem. No, he must go because he is dangerous.”

  “Dangerous to the trade of selling dubious pictures to the R
eich?”

  “How coarsely you judge these things! It is the Lutheran streak in you—a perverse, self-destroying concept of morality. You refuse to see things as they are. I, and several people of whom you know one or two, am carefully securing some Italian art from the German Reich in exchange for pictures they like better. And not one of those pictures has been a fake—only a picture that has been assisted to put its best face foremost. The chain of action is carefully calculated. Everything goes through people with unexceptionable credentials, and we never pitch the note too high—no Dürers, no Cranachs. And now this Flemish buffoon appears with a fake Hubertus van Eyck, and wants gigantic sums either in cash or in paintings the Reich thinks it can spare, and he has the effrontery to haggle, and bring in an American bidder for his picture, with the result that the Dutch government is intervening in the matter, and God alone knows what beans may be spilled.”

  “Could you give me some facts? I now know the range of your passion; I’d just like to know what Letztpfennig has done, and what you want me to do.”

  “There is a very nice strain of common sense in you, Corniche. Your family background is in banking, is it not? Not that my experience of bankers puts them above art dealers in matters of probity. But they manage to look and sound so trustworthy, even when they are not. Well—this all began about two years ago when Jean-Paul Letztpfenmg let it be known that during a jaunt to Belgium he had come upon a picture in an old country house that he bought because he wanted an old canvas. Idiot! Who wants an old canvas unless he means to fake something with it? Anyhow—he says he cleaned the picture and found it to be a painting of The Harrowing of Hell. You know the subject?”