Not that the Provost offered to these signs of the time an attitude of careless disregard. Senior common rooms are full of aged ostriches; their voices, muffled in the sand, can be heard muttering that such inconveniences and absurdities will quickly pass. Edward Pococke was too intelligent not to remain alert to them, and this alertness governed (I imagine) his approach to Tamburlaine. In my own time, his attitude to college theatricals had been courteously obstructive. Although he would turn out manfully even to productions en plein air, swathed in rugs and armed with insect repellants provided by his wife, and would move among the players in an interval, amiably recalling his own involvement in such activities when young, it would nevertheless have been only under pressure that he had sanctioned so profitless an activity in the first place. Nowadays, it was plain that he regarded the Dramatic Society as purveying a useful sort of bread and circuses. Young men absorbed in rehearsing scenes of rapine and lawless spoil, and young women competing for the part of the divine Zenocrate, were distracted from more grievous forms of nuisance. He invited Junkin to luncheon – an ordeal to which Junkin, as it happened, had been subjected on a previous diplomatic occasion connected with the fate of Ivo Mumford. And he remembered that Dr Seashore of the Ashmolean, having several times assisted the college by providing gratuitous expertises on some of our pictures, rated for similar polite attention at a more august level. (It was here that lay the fateful link between Junkin’s project and the graver fortunes of the college.)
The attitude of many of my colleagues to the forthcoming theatrical explosion was the more edgy, I believe, because of their anxieties about the tower. It was impossible for sensitive and cultivated men to pass daily beneath this magnificent assertion of the college’s consequence, and to reflect that at any time it might be tumbling about their ears, without uneasiness of a highly creditable sort. There were even those who judged the state of the tower’s fabric to render additionally inexpedient the dramatic jamboree looming ahead in the Great Quadrangle. Might not the mere din – including salvos and fanfares and heaven knew what –fatally upset some delicate balance of forces deep within the stonework? Again, it was rumoured that a wretched undergraduate, abjectly eager for fame, was to allow himself to be suspended in manacles high above the quad, and there indecently to simulate a hideous death agony. This would involve all sorts of scramblings on the very surface of the tower itself – and what greater madness could there be than to permit that? The Provost proved to have consulted unimpeachable authority. There was, it appeared, no rational ground for anxiety. The dangling body of the unfortunate Governor of Babylon would be as innocuous to the fabric of the tower as the depending therefrom of a spider by its thread.
VII
The luncheon for Dr Seashore took place in the senior common room dining-room. Mrs Pococke had established a rule that, at least in term-time, only undergraduates were to be invited to lunch in the Lodging: an ordinance making it possible to be fairly lavish with favourites while allowing everybody at least one glimpse of this particular aspect of academic high-life. It was also remarked, however, that the favourites were increasingly selected on other than common social criteria, since Mrs Pococke’s sense of purpose in the matter was much governed by what she judged to be the needs of odd and awkward young men. These she often entertained in batches, but with an old-fashioned regard to the propriety of laying on an answering bevy of young women from St Anne’s or St Hilda’s who were neither awkward nor odd in any way. Whether the regime achieved much therapeutic success, I don’t know. The attempt, at least, had to be admired. As for the male guests, they may or may not have conscientiously got up pastoral staves and flat ornament out of regard for what were traditionally understood to be the ruling passions of their hostess. Probably not – the laxity of the times scarcely conducing to laboriousness of that sort. This note on Mrs Pococke’s progress is by the by; it was quite a change from the time when Tony Mumford and I enjoyed the entree to the Lodging for no better reason than that we brushed our hair and could be lively without impudence. One result of her missionary zeal was that the Provost, when disposed to entertain senior male persons, was constrained to turn out of doors for the purpose.
On this occasion, in addition to Seashore and myself, the guests were Albert Talbert, our librarian Tommy Penwarden, and the elusive Dr Burnside – of whom I hadn’t had a glimpse since my bold call on him earlier in the term. In mere point of cognomen, Burnside and Seashore went felicitously together; I was reminded of the distant time when my friend Martin Fish enjoyed as his nearest neighbour on Surrey Four a pious man called Clive Kettle; it even occurred to me that mere gamesomeness here had dictated the Provost’s choice. But this last was a frivolous thought. The luncheon, which clearly wasn’t to be particularly oriented to the Dramatic Society’s affairs, seemed rather arranged with a certain sense of learned dustiness as its keynote. I had simply to hope that I could keep my end up.
Seashore wasn’t precisely dusty, his surfaces being too polished to make this suggestion apposite. He might have been said, rather, to have acquired a patina, or even to exist slightly obscured behind a varnish that had browned with age. As he was by profession the university’s Keeper of Paintings some symbiotic process may have been responsible; and he also owned the gentleness, the mild sadness that the severer forms of connoisseurship seem liable to induce. He was certainly not a bustling sort of person, and one wouldn’t have supposed him to be a promising wardrobe mistress to a pack of impatient undergraduates. (But Talbert’s judgement here proved not to be at fault; Seashore was to produce appropriate sketches with admirable expedition, and to possess a good sense of what was practicable within the customary scurrying conditions of the venture.)
When the Provost introduced me, Seashore was delivering a sustained if rather fatigued monologue to Talbert and Penwarden, and this he continued without the interruption of doing more than shake hands – although with an air of discerning at once that I was a man equipped instantly to pick up the thread of his discourse. It concerned Bernard Berenson and the enchantments of the Villa i Tatti. Most art historians, I reflected, possess a routine they can go into on this. They like to tell one of their own past possession of the entrie there, and Seashore wasn’t an exception.
‘Did you learn a great deal?’ I asked when the moment came for me to chip in respectfully.
‘I learnt an enormous amount. To have the run of the whole queer set-up was an artistic education in itself. And Mr Berenson, although tricky and mildly comical in so many ways, was extremely kind.’
I was impressed. ‘Mr Berenson’, I knew, represented the very mark and acme of propriety; mere pretenders to intimacy invariably referred to the eminent Kunstgeschichtler as B.B.
‘Berenson’s work,’ Talbert interposed, ‘was in a field which is unfamiliar to me. Yet analogies suggest themselves. When I was myself a young man, Seashore, just entering upon Elizabethan scholarship, there was a sanguine belief that much could be achieved through scientific methods in the task of attributing texts, or portions of texts, to specific authors. The comparative philogists were an example to us. They had achieved much by rigorous analysis.’ Talbert paused, evidently the better to marshal a good deal more that was to come. I wondered whether everybody would have to deliver himself similarly before we got anything to eat. Vocabulary tests,’ Talbert pursued, ‘metrical tests, rhyme tests, recurrent imagery: we believed that great things could be done with them.’
‘Most fascinating!’ Seashore said, in a tone balancing weariness or dejection with an intent courtesy. ‘Yes, I recall reading about that sort of thing.’
‘Unfortunately, it was largely eggs in moonshine.’ As he made use of this archaic figure Talbert’s mysteriously internalised laughter was faintly heard.
‘In fact,’ Penwarden said, a shade impatiently, ‘you neglected to consider that two men who have never passed the time of day may develop the same taste for rhyming hot with pot or ham with jam. Whether it be so with painting, I w
ouldn’t know.’
‘Extremely interesting!’ Seashore murmured. ‘There is a real analogy. Yes, indeed.’ He was inclining his head now towards Penwarden and now towards Talbert as if in doubt as to which were the more likely to place him agreeably under instruction. ‘It is true that one man may pick up from another man’s canvas the flick of a brush on a fingernail or on the lobe of an ear. However, it must be said for the Sage of Settignano that he refined upon the Morellian criteria in various ways. I don’t know that his method was strictly scientific. I wouldn’t presume to say. But he was an assiduous man, particularly when young.’
‘At least there were tangible rewards,’ Penwarden said. It didn’t seem to me that Penwarden was in a good temper. ‘The young Talbert didn’t build up a fortune by swearing that one piece of rubbish was by Robert Greene whereas the piece next to it was by Thomas Lodge.’
‘Young Talbert was wasting his time,’ Talbert said – and produced what was now an overt chuckle, so that I felt I had never before known him approach so near to levity. ‘But at least he did no harm. Nobody was the worse off in his pocket.’
‘No. No. Indeed, no. That is so.’ Seashore was relieved that at this moment the common-room butler announced luncheon as served. The monetary consideration upon which my colleagues had ventured, had distressed him, and he now edged away from them, so that he and I found ourselves walking across a corner of the Great Quadrangle towards the dining-room together. ‘Your Provost,’ he murmured to me, surprisingly, ‘always strikes me as a very stately man. Sometimes, indeed, when I attend your college chapel – itself so very beautiful a building – his processional appearance – if that be a proper term – transports me to the Cappella Brancacci itself.’
‘It’s a most august comparison,’ I said, doing my best, and wondering whether I should find myself still neighbouring this cultivated person at table.
‘Masaccio’s St Peter, my dear Dr Pattullo. Almost the first unchallengeably sublime thing in Italian painting. He has been a simple fisherman. But he will hold the Keys. He knows his place, almost as Piero’s Madonnas are to know their place. He walks through the little street at an unutterable remove. And the storpi are healed as his mere unregarding shadow falls on them.’
‘Yes,’ I said, startled to find my mildly-mannered companion capable of this impropriety. We didn’t ourselves much run to facetious remarks about the Provost, and it was wicked in a guest to do so. But, after all, is it facetious to compare a member of the Anglican higher clergy with St Peter – the top man, one might say, in the whole profession? I found myself rather taking to my deceptively masked companion, who might be genuinely sad but certainly wasn’t dull. When we did sit down, and I discovered myself on his right hand as he was on the Provost’s, I reflected that I was at least better off than I should have been with Penwarden in his present frame of mind.
‘Dr Pattullo and I,’ Seashore said, blandly, ‘have been talking, Provost, about aspects of ecclesiastical portraiture. May I venture to mention the pleasure which – in common, I am sure, with all your friends – I received from your notably successful portrait at the Royal Academy last year?’
‘My dear Seashore, you are very kind.’ The Provost made a graceful gesture which lightened the formality of this response. ‘The artist was a delightful fellow, and we had several absorbing talks. I don’t know that I have so enjoyed meeting a painter since I had the privilege of entertaining a great one in the person of Pattullo’s father. And that was rather a long time ago.’
‘How very pleasing,’ Seashore’s tone acknowledged the respect he felt for a man who seldom missed this sort of conversational trick. ‘Unhappily I never got to know your father well’—he had turned to me—’but I am sure those were right who judged him the best talker since Whistler. And he was certainly a much nicer man.’
‘We must not discuss in what aspect Duncan a little inherits from him,’ the Provost said. ‘Duncan is something of an unknown quantity with us as yet, old member though he undoubtedly be.’
Seeing no means of contributing to this jocosity, which didn’t perhaps represent the Provost at his best, I glanced round the company. Talbert was on my right, and devoting himself with a serious mien to such pleasures of the table as the occasion afforded him. Mrs Talbert, I imagine, was little given to fine cuisine; and her husband, although so dedicated to austere intellectual pursuits, was not inattentive to meat and wine when placed freely before him. This absorption – for it came to that – had for the moment left Penwarden and Burnside to entertain each other: something of which they seemed to be making heavy going. A college librarian and an archivist must in some measure patrol common ground, and I wondered whether these two a little bumped up against one another from time to time. But it was hard to believe that Burnside, who had the same gentleness of manner as Seashore but gave no sign of Seashore’s ability to bite, could get seriously across anybody, I remembered that I must ask him if he had yet explored the tower as a potential lumber- room.
‘It occurred to me the other day, Provost,’ Seashore was now saying, ‘that an interesting monograph in the field of academic iconography might be framed in terms of your praepositorial predecessors. If that is a correct expression. I fear I wouldn’t know.’
‘It has been used,’ Penwarden said from across the table.
‘Ah, thank you!’ Seashore allowed himself faint surprise at this interposition. I always try, when I can, to enter your college by way of Surrey. Because of the statue—perhaps “effigy” would be more correct—of that old Provost. I forget his name—’
‘John Harbage, 1647-1710,’ Penwarden said. ‘I believe it to be tolerably well-known that he designed Surrey Quadrangle. And that his, indeed, was the first conception of our New Library.’
‘How very forgetful of me, I do apologise. And then there is that earlier Provost in the niche over Howard gate. Blagden, would he have been called?’
‘Antony Pagden, 1509-1573. Educated at Westminster School. Matriculated 1524. Provost 1555-1561, and afterwards Bishop of Salisbury. He is best known by his Alpba-betum theologicum ex opusculis Roberfi Grosseteste collectum.’
‘Thank you, my dear sir. A most amusing statue in that delightfully chunky Tudor style. Is anything known about the sculptor? The statuary, as he would have been called.’
‘The carver, more probably,’ Penwarden said.
‘The carver, no doubt. I am sadly ignorant, I fear.’
‘I can find out nothing about him.’ Burnside spoke for the first time, and unwontedly briskly. He judged, no doubt, that our librarian had already been as informative as civility allowed. I myself felt rather on Penwarden’s side, there being something of affectation in Seashore’s air of being a mere man of taste among the learned. I had read his books, and knew him to be sufficiently erudite in his own line. So, probably, did Penwarden.
‘It would be nice to find out,’ Seashore said. ‘My own only thought would be Gerard Christmas – or Garrett Christmas, as I have sometimes found him called. But it is clear that your Provost Pagden was too early for him by several decades.’
‘It would appear that the college also owned a painting of Pagden at one time,’ Burnside said. ‘I came on the record of it only the other day, and have been eager to tell you about it, Seashore. That it may still be extant is a most exciting thought.’ Burnside was certainly excited; he had suddenly become boyish and absorbed.
‘Yes, indeed! Particularly if it is a Holbein. That would put the good Christmas in the shade.’ Seashore didn’t fail to enunciate this on his fatigued note, but his interest had been kindled. ‘And here the dates could be right.’
‘Unfortunately it can’t be so. The name of the painter – the limner, as the document has it – is recorded, and is what I want to ask you about. I have been quite unable to identify the man. But I am sure, Seashore, that it will afford you no difficulty.’
‘Here is an event!’ the Provost said, with pronounced enthusiasm. A conversation of the kind
developing appealed to him as very much the proper thing at his table. ‘What is the name, my dear Christian?’
‘Not only can I not identify it, Edward. I quite fail in the ability to pronounce it either. I must positively have recourse to pencil and paper. If people will bear with me so far, that is to say.’
The Madonna of the Astrolabe Page 11