What's Bred in the Bone

by Robertson Davies

  “I don’t follow you, sir.”

  “Well—it is an aspect of my work I do not talk about very much. But if you work on a painting with all your skill, and sympathy, and love, even if you have to re-invent much of it—as would be the case here—something of what directed the first painter may come to your aid.”

  It was at this point that Francis, who had been listening attentively, felt as though he had been given a sharp, quickening tap on the brow with a tiny hammer.

  “Do I understand, Signor Saraceni, that the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelites might infuse you, from time to time, as you worked?”

  “Ah—ah—ah! This is why I do not usually speak of such things. People like you, Mr. Cornish, may interpret them poetically—may speak of something almost like possession. I have had too much experience to speak so boldly. But consider: these men who painted the pictures we are talking about were poets; better poets than painters, except for Burne-Jones, and as you probably know he wrote very well. What was their theme? The pictures illustrate The Quest for the Grail, and that is much more a theme for a poet than a painter. Surely one can evoke the Grail spirit better in words than in images? Am I a heretic to say that each art has its sphere of supremacy, and invades another’s at its deep peril? Painting that is illustrative of a legend is only that legend at second-best. Pictures that tell a story are useless because they are immobile—they have no movement, no nuance or possibility of change, which is the soul of narrative. I suppose it is not unduly fanciful to think that the poets who made asses of themselves with these old, dirty, obliterated pictures might have something to say to somebody who was a masterly painter, even though he might be no poet?”

  “You have known that to happen?”

  “Oh yes, Mr. Cornish, and there is nothing spooky about it when it happens, I assure you.”

  “So we might get these pictures back on our walls as Morris and Rossetti and Burne-Jones would have painted them if they had understood fresco-work?”

  “Nobody can say that. Certainly they would be much better pieces of craftsmanship. And such inspiration as the original painters possessed would still be there.”

  “Surely that answers all our questions,” said Francis.

  “Oh no. Pardon me, there is one question of the uttermost importance that we have not touched on,” said the cabinet-minister-in-embryo. “What would you judge the cost to be?”

  “I couldn’t tell you, for I have not thoroughly examined the walls under the pictures, or even measured the extent of wall that is covered,” said Saraceni. “But I am sure you know the story about the American millionaire who asked another American millionaire what it cost him to maintain his yacht? The second American millionaire said, If you have to ask that question, you can’t afford it.”

  “You mean it might run up to—say, a thousand?”

  “Many thousands. There would be no point in doing it any way but the best way, and the best way always runs into money. When I had done my work you would have some enthusiastic illustrations of the Grail Legend, if that is what you want.”

  That effectively concluded the conversation, though there were further courtesies and assurances of mutual esteem. The House Committee was by no means displeased. It had done something, something no previous committee had done in many years. It could make a report on what it had done. So far as the pictures were concerned it really did not care if they were restored or not. The Union was, after all, a great school for budding politicians and civil servants, and this was how politicians and civil servants worked: they consulted experts and ate lunches and worked up a happy sense of behaving with great practicality. But practicality was against spending much money on art.

  Francis, however, was in a high state of excitement, and with the full concurrence of the President—who was glad to have Saraceni taken off his hands, once the issue of the pictures had been settled—he invited the little man to dine with him that evening at the Randolph Hotel.

  “QUITE CLEARLY, Mr. Cornish, you were the only member of the committee who knew anything about pictures. You also showed keen interest when I spoke of the influence of the original painter on the restorer. Now I must tell you once again that I meant nothing at all mystical by that. I am no spiritualist; the dead do not guide my brush. But consider: in the world of music many composers, when they have completed an opera, rough out the plan of the overture and give it to some trusted, gifted assistant, who writes it so much in the style of the master that experts cannot tell one from t’other. How many passages in Wagner’s later work were written by Peter Cornelius? We know, pretty well, but not because the music reveals it.

  “It is the same in painting. Just as so many of the great masters entrusted large portions of their pictures to assistants, or apprentices, who painted draperies, or backgrounds, or even hands so well that we cannot tell where their work begins and leaves off, it is possible today for me—I don’t say for every restorer—to play the assistant to the dead master and paint convincingly in his style. Some of those assistants, you know, painted copies of masterworks for people who wanted them, but the master did not emphasize that when he presented his bill. And today it is very hard to tell some of those copies from originals. Who painted them? The master or an assistant? The experts quarrel about it all the time.

  “I am the heir, not to the masters—I am properly modest, you observe—but to those gifted assistants, some of whom went on to become masters themselves. You see, in the great days of what are now so reverently called the Old Masters, art was a trade as well. The great men kept ateliers which were in effect shops, where you could go and buy anything that pleased you. It was the Romanticism of the nineteenth century that raised the painter quite above trade and made him scorn the shop—he became a child of the Muses. A neglected child, very often, for the Muses are not maternal in the commonplace sense. And as the painter was raised above trade, he often felt himself raised above craftsmanship, like those poor wretches who painted the frescoes we were looking at earlier today. They were full up and slopping over with Art, but they hadn’t troubled to master Craft. Result: they couldn’t carry out their ideas to their own satisfaction, and their work has dwindled into some dirty walls. Sad, in a way.”

  “You don’t think much of the Pre-Raphaelites.”

  “The ones with the best ideas, like Rossetti, could hardly draw, let alone paint. Like D.H. Lawrence, in our own time. He had more ideas than any half-dozen admired modern painters, but he couldn’t draw and he couldn’t paint. Of course, there are fools who say it didn’t matter; the conception was everything. Rubbish! A painting isn’t a botched conception.”

  “Is that what’s wrong with modern art, then?”

  “What’s wrong with modern art? The best of it is very fine.”

  “But so much of it is so puzzling. And some of it’s plain messy.”

  “It is the logical outcome of the art of the Renaissance. During those three centuries, to measure roughly, that we call the Renaissance, the mind of civilized man underwent a radical change. A psychologist would say that it changed from extraversion to introversion. The exploration of the outer world was partnered by a new exploration of the inner world, the subjective world. And it was an exploration that could not depend on the old map of religion. It was the exploration that brought forth Hamlet, instead of Gorboduc. Man began to look inside himself for all that was great and also—if he was honest, which most people aren’t—for all that was ignoble, base, evil. If the artist was a man of scope and genius, he found God and all His works within himself, and painted them for the world to recognize and admire.”

  “But the moderns don’t paint God and all His works. Sometimes I can’t make out what they are painting.”

  “They are painting the inner vision, and working very hard at it when they are honest, which by no means all of them are. But they depend only on themselves, unaided by religion or myth, and of course what most of them find within themselves is revelation only to themselves. And these
lonely searches can quickly slide into fakery. Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision, Mr. Cornish. Look at those ruined frescoes we were examining this morning; the people who painted those—Rossetti, Morris, Burne-Jones—all had the inner vision linked with legend, and they chose to wrap it up in Grail pictures and sloe-eyed, sexy beauties who were half the Mother of God and half Rossetti’s overblown mistresses. But the moderns, having been hit on the head by a horrible world war, and having understood whatever they can of Sigmund Freud, are hell-bent for honesty. They are sick of what they suppose to be God, and they find something in the inner vision that is so personal that to most people it looks like chaos. But it isn’t simply chaos. It’s raw gobbets of the psyche displayed on canvas. Not very pretty and not very communicative, but they have to find their way through that to something that is communicative—though I wonder if it will be pretty.”

  “It’s hell for anybody who thinks of being an artist.”

  “As you do? Well—you must find your inner vision.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do. But it doesn’t come out in the modern manner.”

  “Yes, I understand that. I don’t get on very well with the modern manner, either. But I must warn you: don’t try to fake the modern manner if it isn’t right for you. Find your legend. Find your personal myth. What sort of thing do you do?”

  “Might I show you some of my stuff?”

  “Certainly, but not now. I must leave first thing in the morning. But I shall be back in Oxford before long. Exeter College wants to consult me about its chapel. I’ll let you know in plenty of time, and I shall keep some time for you. Where shall I send a note?”

  “My college is Corpus Christi. I pick up letters there. But before you go, won’t you have another cognac?”

  “Certainly not, Mr. Cornish. Some of the masters drank a great deal, but we assistants and apprentices, even three centuries afterward, must keep our hands steady. I won’t have another cognac, and unless you are certain that you are a master, you won’t have one either. We must be the austere ones, we second-class men.”

  It was said with the ironic grin, but for Francis, suckled at least in part on the harsh creed of Victoria Cameron, it was like an order.

  LATE IN THE AUTUMN, and not long after his meeting with Saraceni, Francis was surprised and not immediately pleased to receive the following letter:

  My dear grandson Francis:

  I have never written to you at Oxford before this, because I did not feel that I had anything to say to a young man who was deep in advanced studies. As you know, my own education was scant, for I had to make my way in the world very young. Education makes a greater gulf in families even than making a lot of money. What has the uneducated grandfather to say to the educated grandson? But there are one or two languages I hope we still speak in common.

  One is the language, which I cannot put a name to, that you and I shared when you were a lad, and used to come on afternoon jaunts with me, making the sun-pictures with my camera. It was a language of the eye, and also I think chiefly a language of light, and it gives me the greatest satisfaction to think that perhaps your turn for painting and your interest in pictures had a beginning, or at least some encouragement, there. You now speak that language as I never did. I am proud of your inclination toward art, and hope it will carry you through a happy life.

  Another language is something I won’t call religion, because all through my life I have been a firm Catholic, without truly accepting everything a Catholic ought to believe. So I cannot urge you sincerely to cling to the Faith. But don’t forget it, either. Don’t forget that language, and don’t be one of those handless fellows who believes nothing. There is a fine world unknown to us, and religion is an attempt to explain it. But, unhappily, to reach everybody religion has to be an organization, and a trade for a lot of its priests, and worst of all it has to be reduced to what the largest mass of people will accept and can be expected to understand. That’s heresy, of course. I remember how angry I was when your father demanded that you be raised a Protestant. But that was a while since, and in the meantime I have wondered if the Prots are really any bigger turnip-heads than the R.C.s. As you grow old, religion becomes a lonely business.

  The third language we speak in common is money, and it is because of that I am writing to you now. Money is a language I speak better than you do, but you must learn something of the grammar of money, or you cannot manage what your luck has brought you as my grandson. This is much on my mind now, because the doctors tell me that I have not a great way farther to go. Something to do with the heart.

  When my will is executed, you will find that I have left you a substantial sum, for your exclusive use, apart from what you will share with my other descendants. The reason I give in my will is that you do not seem to me to be suited by nature to the family business, which is the banking and trust business, and that therefore you must not look for employment or advancement there. This looks almost like cutting you out, but that is not so at all. And this is between us: the money will set you free, I hope, from many anxieties and from a kind of employment that I do not think you would like, but only if you master the grammar of money. Money illiteracy is as restrictive as any other illiteracy. Your brother Arthur promises well as a banker, and in that work he will have opportunities to make money that will not come your way. But you will have another kind of chance. I hope this will suit your purpose.

  Do not reply to this letter, for I may not be able to deal with my own letters for very long, and I do not want anyone else to read what you might say. Though if you chose to write a farewell, I should be glad of that.

  With affct. good wishes …

  James Ignatius McRory

  Francis wrote a farewell at once, and did his utmost with it, though he was no more a master of the pen than his grandfather; lacked, indeed, the old man’s self-taught simplicity. But a telegram told him that it came too late.

  Was there anything to be done? He wrote to Grand’mère and Aunt Mary-Ben, and he wrote to his mother. He considered going to Father Knollys at the Old Palace and asking for—and paying for—a requiem mass for his grandfather, but in the light of what the letter had said he thought that would be hypocritical and would make the old colonial laugh, if he knew.

  Was his feeling of grief hypocritical? It struggled in his heart with a sense of release, and new freedom, a feeling of joy that he could now do with his life what he liked. His grief for the old Scots woodsman quickly turned to elation and gratitude. Hamish was the only one of his family who had ever really looked at him, and considered what he was. The only one of the whole lot, perhaps, who had ever loved the artist in him.

  CHRISTMAS WAS DRAWING NEAR, and Francis decided that duty called him back to Canada. After one of those penitential mid-winter sea voyages across the Atlantic he was once again in the up-to-the-minute decor of his mother’s house, and little by little became aware of what his grandfather had meant to the Cornishes and the McRorys, and the O’Gormans. To the bankers a real regard for the old man was greatly tempered by the delightful business of administering his affairs. He seemed more splendid in death than he had ever been in life. Gerald Vincent O’Gorman in particular was loud in his praise for the way the old man had disposed of his estate. There was something for everybody. This was a Christmas indeed!

  Gerry O’Gorman was understandably better pleased than was Sir Francis Cornish, for Gerry now succeeded his father-in-law as Chairman of the Board, while Sir Francis remained in his honourable but less powerful place as President. But then Lady Cornish inherited substantially, which was very agreeable to Sir Francis, and took much of the salt out of the tears of his wife. Even Francis’s younger brother, Arthur, who was just twelve, seemed enlarged by Grand-père’s death, for his future in the Cornish Trust, always sure, was now clearer than it had been before, and Arthur, at school, was taking on the air of a young financier, stylish, handsome, well-dressed, and adroit in his dealing with contemporaries and elders
.

  The stricken ones, of course, were Grand’mère and Mary-Ben, but even they had their benefit from the Senator’s death; had not Reverend Mother Mary-Basil from Montreal, and His Grace the Rev. Michael McRory from his archdiocese in the West, come to Blairlogie for the funeral, and stayed on to visit the two old women, dispensing comfort and good counsel that was none the less sweet for the handsome remembrances the Senator had made of his brother and sister in the great will.

  The will! It seemed that they talked of nothing but the will, and the part that Francis played in it, singularized as he was by the largest of all the personal bequests (his mother and Mary-Tess were beneficiaries of a special trust), surprised and puzzled his family. It was Gerry O’Gorman who summed it up briefly and bluntly: you would think Frank could study art on less than the income from a cool million.

  Not that he was just to have the income; the old man had left it to him outright. Now, what would Frank know about handling money in that quantity? But Francis remembered what his grandfather had said about learning the grammar of money, and before he took the dismal voyage back to Oxford he had given directions as to what was to be done with his money when it became available, and even Gerry had to admit that he had handled it well.

  So Francis returned to Corpus Christi and Canterbury House, and the inner rooms of the Ashmolean, a rich man, in terms of what he was and what responsibilities he had. Rich, and with the prospect of being richer, for his grandfather had made him a participant in that family trust which at the moment carried Grand’mère, and Aunt, and his mother and Mary-Tess, and as these died off his portion would increase. You’re sitting pretty, boy, said Gerry, and Sir Francis, putting it with the dignity of a President, said that his future was assured.