The Rebel Angels

by Robertson Davies

  Luckily, Prof. the Rev. was far better than I could have hoped. “What do you expect from this seminar?” he asked, right away. “I’m not going to teach you a language; I suppose you all know classical Greek?” I did, but the four men looked unconfident, and admitted slowly that they had done a bit of it, or crammed some during summer courses. “If you know Greek, it may be assumed that you also know Latin,” said Prof. the Rev., and this was received in glum silence. But was he down-hearted? No!

  “Let’s find out how good you are,” he said. “I’m going to write a short passage on the blackboard, and in a few minutes I’ll ask you for a translation.” Widespread discomfort, and one of the long-haired ones murmured that he hadn’t brought a Latin dictionary with him. “You won’t need it,” said Darcourt; “this is easy.”

  He wrote: Conloqui et conridere et vicissim benevole obsequi, simul leger libros dulciloquos, simul nugari et simul honestari. Then he sat down and beamed at us over his half-glasses. “That’s the motto, the groundwork for what we shall do in this seminar during the year before us; that’s the spirit in which we shall work. Now, let’s have a rendering in English. Who’ll translate?”

  There followed that awful hush that falls on a room when several people are trying to make themselves invisible. “Talk together, laugh together, do good to each other—” murmured the spiky youth, and fell silent. The hairy pair looked as if they hated Darcourt already.

  “Ladies first,” said Darcourt, smiling at me. So in I plunged.

  “Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions,” said I.

  I could see he was pleased. “Admirable. Now somebody else tell me where it comes from. Come on, you’ve all read the book, even if only in translation. You ought to know it well; the author ought to be a close friend.”

  But nobody would speak and I suspect nobody knew. Shall I make myself hated, I thought. I might as well; I’ve been doing it in classes all my life.

  “It’s Saint Augustine’s Confessions,” I said. The two hairy ones looked at me with loathing, the spiky one with sick envy. The middle-aged one was making a careful note; he was going to conquer this stuff or die; he owed it to the wife and kids.

  “Thank you, Miss Theotoky. You gentlemen must learn not to be so shy,” he said with what seemed to be a hint of irony. “That’s what we’re going to attempt here; talk and jokes—I hope—rising out of the reading of the New Testament. Not that it’s a great book for jokes, though Christ once made a pun on Peter’s new name that he had given him: ‘Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church’. Of course Peter is petras, a stone, in Greek. If that were translated Thou art Rocky and upon this rock I will build my church, people would get the point, but it would hardly be worth it. Wouldn’t have church-goers rolling in the aisles two thousand years later. Of course I suppose Christ went on calling him Cephas, which is Stone in Aramaic, but the pun suggests that Our Lord knew some Greek—perhaps quite a lot of it. And so should you, if you want to serve Him.”

  It seemed to me that Darcourt was being mischievous; he saw that the hairy ones did not like the line he was taking, and he was getting at them.

  “This study can lead in all sorts of directions,” he said, “and of course deep into the Middle Ages when the sort of Greek we are going to study was hardly known in Europe, and wasn’t in the least encouraged by the Church. But there were some rum people who knew some of it—alchemists and detrimentals of that sort—and the tradition of it persisted in the Near East, where Greek was making its long journey toward the language we know as Modern Greek. Funny how languages break down and turn into something else. Latin was rubbed away until it degenerated into dreadful lingos like French and Spanish and Italian, and lo! people found out that quite new things could be said in these degenerate tongues—things nobody had ever thought of in Latin. English is breaking down now in the same way—becoming a world language that every Tom Dick and Harry must learn, and speak in a way that would give Doctor Johnson the jim-jams. Received Standard English has had it; even American English, that once seemed such an impertinent johnny-come-lately in literature, is fussy stuff compared with what you will hear in Africa, which is where the action is, in our day. But I am indulging myself—a bad professorial habit. You must check me when you see it coming on. To work, then. May I assume that you all know the Greek alphabet, and therefore can count to ten in Greek? Good. Then let’s begin with changes there.”

  I knew I was going to like Prof. the Rev. Darcourt. He seemed to think that learning could be amusing, and that heavy people needed stirring up. Like Rabelais, of whom even educated people like Parlabane had such a stupid opinion. Rabelais was gloriously learned because learning amused him, and so far as I am concerned that is learning’s best justification. Not the only one, but the best.

  It is not that I wanted to know a great deal, in order to acquire what is now called expertise, and which enables one to become an expert-tease to people who don’t know as much as you do about the tiny corner you have made your own. I hoped for a bigger fish; I wanted nothing less than Wisdom. In a modern university if you ask for knowledge they will provide it in almost any form—though if you ask for out-of-fashion things they may say, like the people in shops, ‘Sorry, there’s no call for it.’ But if you ask for Wisdom—God save us all! What a show of modesty, what disclaimers from the men and women from whose eyes intelligence shines forth like a lighthouse. Intelligence, yes, but of Wisdom not so much as the gleam of a single candle.

  That was what chained me to Hollier; I thought that in him I saw Wisdom. And as Paracelsus said—that Paracelsus with whom I had to be acquainted because he was part of my study of Rabelais: The striving for wisdom is the second paradise of the world.

  With Hollier I truly thought that I would have the second paradise, and the first as well.

  The New Aubrey

  2

  Is it ever a kindness to appoint someone an executor? It is evidence of trust, certainly, but it may become a tedious servitude. Hollier and I were swept more and more into concern with Cornish’s affairs, at cost of time and energy that we needed for our own work. There was a note in the will that when everything was dealt with each of the advisers or sub-executors might choose ‘some object that especially pleases him, provided it has not been designated as a bequest or portion of a bequest elsewhere’. But this made our work more vexatious, because we were continually coming upon things we would like to have and finding that they had been earmarked for somebody else. And young Cornish’s lawyers told us that we might not choose or remove anything until all bequests had been dealt with. We were like poor relatives at the Christmas Tree of rich children.

  Rich, and not as grateful as I thought they should be. The big recipients were glad enough to take what they liked, but made it clear that some things that were in their portion didn’t especially please them and weren’t welcome.

  The National Gallery was one of these. Cornish had left them dozens of canvases, but he had stipulated that the Canadian pictures were to be kept together and placed on permanent exhibition, as the Cornish Bequest. The Gallery people said, reasonably enough, that they liked to show their pictures in a historical context, and Cornish’s Krieghoffs and other early things ought to go with their exhibitions of Early Canadian Painting; they didn’t want primitives spotted about all over their galleries. They said also that they didn’t think some of the modern pictures first-rate, whatever Cornish may have thought, and simply couldn’t say they would put them on permanent show. If there was to be a Cornish Bequest, Cornish might have discussed it with them beforehand; or might have thought of leaving money to build a special gallery for it; even if he had done so, they had no land on which to build such a gallery. The correspondence was courteous, but only just, and there were frequent hints that donors could be peremptory and inconsiderate, and that anybody without a degree in Fine Arts was rat
her an amateur.

  Hollier didn’t like that. He is a man of strong feelings and loyalties, and he thought Cornish’s memory was being insulted. I, with my tedious capacity to see both sides of a question, wasn’t so sure. McVarish made Hollier even angrier by being frivolous, as if the will and Cornish’s wishes didn’t matter very much.

  “All donors and benefactors are crazy,” he said. “What they want is posthumous fame and posthumous gratitude. Every college and faculty on this campus could tell a bloody tale if you asked for it. What about the family that earmarked the income from a million to found a chair of internal medicine, and then craftily snatched it back when they didn’t like the politics of the third man appointed to it—years later? What about that old bastard who gave a historical library to the University Library, and frowned everybody down and demanded an honorary degree even when it was shown that the books weren’t really his, but the property of a foundation he directed? What about old Mahaffy, who gave a bundle for a Centre for Celtic Studies, on condition that Celtic Studies meant Irish Studies and the Scots and the Welsh and the Bretons could all go and bugger themselves? What about that miserable old hound who founded a lectureship, insisting that it be intitiated in his lifetime and that the University foot the bill till he died, and then told the President, years later, with a grin on his face, that he’d changed his mind, and didn’t like the lectures anyway? Benefaction means self-satisfaction, nine times out of ten. The guile and cunning that enable benefactors to get their hands on the dough make it almost impossible for them to relinquish it, at the hour of death. Even our dear friend Cornish—a very superior specimen, as we all know—can’t entirely relax his grip. But what does it matter, anyhow? If the National Gallery doesn’t want a picture, give it to the Provincial Gallery, who are getting lots of pictures anyhow. What does another daub or so matter, in the long run? You know what the will says: anything that’s left over after specific pictures have gone to the right places may be disposed of at the discretion of Cornish’s executors. And that means us. The nephew won’t know and won’t care. Our job is to cut up the melon and get these apartments emptied.”

  But Hollier wouldn’t hear of that. I had known him for years in a casual way, but I had never seen very deeply into him. He seemed to me to have more conscience than is good for any man. A powerful conscience and no sense of humour—a dangerous combination.

  McVarish, on the other hand, possessed rather too much humour. People tend to talk as if a sense of humour were a wonderful adjunct to a personality—almost a substitute for common sense, not to speak of wisdom. But in the case of McVarish it was a sense of irresponsibility, a sense of the unimportance of anybody else’s needs or wishes if they interfered with his convenience; it was a cheerful disguise for the contempt he felt for everybody but himself. In conversation and in the affairs of life he greatly valued what he called ‘the light touch’; nothing must ever be taken seriously, and the kind of seriousness Hollier displayed was, so McVarish hinted pretty broadly, ill-bred. I like a light touch myself, but in McVarish’s case it was too plainly another name for selfishness. He didn’t care about carrying out Cornish’s wishes as well as could be managed; he just liked the importance of being an executor to a very rich and special man, and of hobnobbing with people from the galleries who met his exacting standards. As has so often been my lot, I had to play peacemaker between these irreconcilables.

  My special problem was with archivists. The University Library, not content with the promise of a splendid haul of manuscripts and rare books, wanted all Cornish’s papers. The National Library in Ottawa, which had been left nothing, put in a courteous but determined request for Cornish’s letters, records, papers, everything that could be found relating to his career as a collector and patron. The two libraries squared off and began, politely but intensely, to fight it out. Cornish had never, I suppose, thought that his old letters and junk might be of any interest to anyone; he kept no records, his method of filing was to throw stuff into cardboard cartons in whatever order came to hand; his notebooks—preserved simply because he never threw anything away—were a muddle of scribbled reminders of appointments, notes of unspecified sums of money, addresses, and occasional words and phrases that had meant something to him at some time. I looked through them superficially and found an entry in a book which, as it was not filled, I presumed must have been his last: it said, ‘Lend McV. Rab. MS April 16’.

  There were treasures, too, and nobody knew about them except myself, because I would not permit the librarians to snoop. There were letters from painters who had subsequently become celebrated, but who wrote to Cornish when they were young and poor, letters of friendship and often of touching need. They illustrated their letters with sketches and scribbles that were funny and delightful, and sometimes of beauty. When I explained all of this to Arthur Cornish, he said: “I leave it up to you; Uncle Frank trusted you and that’s quite good enough for me.” Which was complimentary but unhelpful, because the librarians were tough.

  The National Library’s case was that Cornish had been a Great Canadian (how he would have laughed, for he had as little vanity as any man I ever knew) and everything about him that could be preserved should be given the archival treatment, catalogued, cross-indexed, and preserved in acid-free containers so that it would never perish. But the University Library saw Cornish as a great benefactor of the University who had shown his esteem for its Library by leaving it a splendid collection of fine books and manuscripts; his memory should repose, so far as possible, in their hands.

  Why? I asked. Were not the treasures themselves sufficient without all the rubbish, much of which seemed to me to be good for nothing but the incinerator? No, said the archivists, in controlled voices beneath which I could hear suppressed shrieks of rage and horror at my ignorance and obtuseness. Surely I was not forgetting Research, that giant scholarly industry? Students of art, students of history, students of God knows what else, would want to know everything about Cornish that could be recovered. How did I expect that the official biography of Cornish could be written if all his papers were not in responsible hands, forever?

  I was not impressed. I have read two or three official lives of people I have known well, and they never seemed to be about the person I knew. They were, upon the whole, cautiously favourable to their subjects, though they did not neglect what the writers loved to call Flaws. It is part of the received doctrine of modern biography that all characters are Flawed, and as a Christian priest I am quite ready to agree, but the Flaws the biographers exhibited usually meant that the person under discussion had not seen eye to eye with the biographer on matters of politics, or social betterment, or something impersonal. What I thought of as human flaws—Pride, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, and Sloth, the Deadly Seven, of which Cornish had scored pretty high on the latter four—rarely received any intelligent discussion. As for the Virtues—Faith, Hope, Charity, Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance, some of which Cornish had possessed in praiseworthy plenty—biographers never wanted to talk about them under their own names, or even under fashionable modern names. There had been no Love in the biographies of any people I had known personally, and perhaps it was impudent of me to wish that Cornish, if he were to be the subject of a Life, might have a proper measure of Love. Or Hate, or anything but the scholarly incomprehension of a professional biographer.

  So I havered and temporized between the two claimants, and lost sleep, and sometimes wished I had the courage to do what I had a right to do, and put the whole mess in a fire. But those wonderful letters from the artists made me stay my hand.

  What was all Cornish’s hoard of objects worth? Arthur Cornish had the easy job of dealing with the money, which could be reckoned up in terms tax-collectors and probate courts understood. The objects of art were quite another thing; the tax people wanted a sum to put here and there on pieces of paper which were important to them, if to nobody else. We could not appeal to insurance records; Cornish never insured an
ything. Why insure what is irreplaceable? I persuaded Hollier and McVarish, without difficulty, to let me call in the Toronto branch of Sotheby’s to make a valuation. But here again we ran into trouble. The valuers knew their stuff, and could tell us what the hoard might fetch, piece by piece, at auction if it were all catalogued and offered in the right markets. A probate value was something different, because Arthur Cornish was firm in his determination not to have estate duties reckoned on present inflated values for objects of art. The fact that so much of the stuff was left to the public, in one way or another, did not make as much difference as Arthur thought it should.

  It was weary work, and kept me from what I was paid by the university to do.

  (2)

  THE PRINCIPAL EXCUSE FOR MY LIFE, I suppose, is that I am a good teacher. But to teach my best I must have some peace of mind, because I do not simply dole out lectures I prepared long ago; I engage my classes, which are never large, in talk and discussion; every year the shape of the work is different, and the result is different, because as much depends on the quality of the students as depends on me. Cornish’s posthumous demands cost me too much in worry for me to teach at my best level.

  I was particularly anxious to do so, because for the first time in some years I had an exceptional student, none other than the Maria Magdalena Theotoky whose presence I had taken note of at Cornish’s funeral. I asked her if she knew him, and she said no, but that Professsor Hollier had said she might find herself greatly obliged to Cornish some day, and suggested that she attend. She seemed to be a special pet of Hollier’s, and that surprised me because he was not a man to have much to do with his students outside the classroom. I suppose that, like myself, he was drawn by her real scholarly appetite; she appeared to want knowledge for itself, and not because it could lead to a career. Theologically trained as I was, I wondered if she were one of the Scholarly Elect; I mean it as a joke, but only partly as a joke. As Calvin said that mankind was divided between the Elect, chosen to be saved, and the Reprobate Remainder of mankind, so it seemed to me to be with knowledge; there were those who were born to it, and those who struggled to acquire it. With the Scholarly Elect one seems not so much to be teaching them as reminding them of something they already know; that was how it was with Maria, and she fascinated me.