What's Bred in the Bone

by Robertson Davies

  “Not odder than I would have thought. I chose you for my apprentice because you were odd, and you have revealed new depths of oddity ever since. That picture you painted while I was in Rome, for instance. It was a portrait, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I won’t pry. It had the unmistakable quality of a portrait, a feeling between subject and painter, which cannot be faked—not to my eye, that’s to say. Where are your preliminary drawings?”

  Francis produced them from a portfolio.

  “You are a thorough creature, aren’t you? Even your preliminaries on the right paper, in the right style. Not your Harry Furniss style. Nevertheless, I’ll wager that when you first drew that dwarf, it was in your Harry Furniss manner.”

  “It was. He was dead, and I did a few sketches while he was being prepared for burial.”

  “You see? Odd, as I said. How you profited from Harry Furniss’s book! Forget nothing; learn the trick of remembering through the hand. I shall be interested to hear what they think of it in London.”

  “Meister, who are ‘they’? Haven’t I a right to know what I’m mixed up in, working here with you? There must surely be some risk. Why am I kept in the dark?”

  “ ‘They’ are a few very distinguished dealers in art, who make all the business arrangements in this little game which, as you say, involves some risk.”

  “They’re swapping these worthless, or at least trivial, pictures for pictures of greatly superior quality?”

  “They are exchanging certain pictures for others, for complicated reasons.”

  “All right. But is it no more than what Prince Max said? An elaborate hoax on the German Reich?”

  “It would be a very bold man who would try to hoax the German Reich.”

  “Well, somebody seems to be doing it. Is this a government thing? Some sort of Secret Service lark?”

  “The British government knows about it, and very likely the American government knows—but only a very few people, who would deny all knowledge if there should be a discovery and a row.”

  “It’s for private gain, then?”

  “There is money involved. This work we are doing is not unrequited.”

  “ ‘Unrequited’! What a word for such a thing! You mean that you and the Countess and Prince Max are getting damn well paid!”

  “For services rendered. The Countess supplies the pictures on which we work. Where else but in such a place as this, where there are two pictures stacked in those innumerable service corridors for every one on the walls, would you find things of the right age, right character, and indeed authentic? I supply a quality of craftsmanship that makes those pictures look rather more desirable to the agents of the great Reichsmarschall than they did in their earlier, neglected state. Prince Max sees that the pictures arrive in England and reach the dealers, which involves substantial risk. Such services do not come cheap, but what we receive is not comparable to what the London dealers receive, because they get fine Italian art for mediocre German art, and they sell it at splendid prices.”

  “A huge international fraud, in fact.”

  “If there is fraud, it is not the kind you suggest. If the German experts consider our pictures so desirable that they will exchange Italian pictures of great value for them, are we to say that they do not know what they are doing? No money changes hands—not at that point. The Reich is not anxious that large sums of German money should leave the country even for works of German art; that is the reason for the exchange arrangement. The German experts have a task; it is to form the finest and most complete and most impressive collection of German art in the world. They need both quantity and quality. The work we do here does not aim at quality in the highest reaches—no Dürers, no Grünewalds, no Cranachs. To provide those we should have to resort to faking—from which, of course, I shrink in holy horror. We simply make old, undistinguished pictures into old pictures of some distinction.”

  “Except for Drollig Hansel. He’s a fake and he’s gone to England.”

  “My dear man, don’t allow yourself to become heated, or you may say things you will wish you had not said. Drollig Hansel is a student exercise, undertaken in the style of an earlier day, as a test of skill. The test has been splendidly passed. I am the judge, and I know what I am talking about. If an expert, seeing it among the others, cannot tell that it is modern, what greater proof can you have of my achievement? But you are blameless. You did not paint to deceive, you signed nobody else’s name to it, and you did not yourself send it to England.”

  “That’s casuistry.”

  “Much talk in the art world is casuistry.”

  CASUISTRY: the study of Ethics as it relates to questions of conscience. That was how the Church used the word. But in Francis’s mind it had a Protestant ring, and it meant quibbling—teetering on the tightrope above a dangerous abyss. His conscience twinged sorely after the Countess received a letter from Prince Max, relating how a newly uncovered picture was causing a small sensation among a score or so of art experts in London.

  Pictures of dwarfs are not uncommon, and some of the subjects can be identified. Van Dyck painted Queen Henrietta Maria with her dwarf, Sir Jeffrey Hudson; Bronzino painted the dwarf Morgante in the nude—a front view and a back one so that no detail should be missed; the Prado has the female dwarf Eugenia Martinez Vallego, clothed and nude. The dwarfs of Rizi and Velasquez, who seem to observe royal splendour from a remote, half-comprehending world of their own, are not known by name, but by the pain in their intent regard. Less squeamish ages were delighted by dwarfs, and some of them were used in much the manner that had driven F. X. Bouchard of Blairlogie to put his head in a noose.

  The Countess read her cousin’s letter to Saraceni and Francis with as much excitement as that reserved lady ever chose to show. The experts had given the painting a little cleaning, and what had they found? That what had looked like the Fuggers’ Firmenzeiden, their family mark, was perhaps something more; true, it looked like a pitchfork, or a three-branched candlestick with an O beside it, but it could also be a gallows with a noose hanging from it! The experts were delighted by their find, and the puzzle it suggested. Had the dwarf been a hangman, then? That it was indeed Drollig Hansel, known as an obscure figure in history but never before seen, they did not choose to doubt. This was really a find for the Führermuseum, a real whiff from an earlier, spiritually fearless Germany, which did not shrink from realities, even when they were also grotesqueries.

  Prince Max’s letter was carefully phrased. No inquiring secret police, peeping into the letters that a German aristocrat wrote to his high-born cousin, could have understood anything more than the facts that were stated. But there was rejoicing at Düsterstein.

  Francis did not rejoice. His intention to make some record, to offer some comment, on the fate of the dwarf he had known had been unveiled, and he had not expected that to happen. His picture had been a very private affair, an ex voto almost, a memorial to a man he had never spoken to, and had come to know only after his death. He could not contain his dismay and torment, and he had to say so to Saraceni.

  “Are you really surprised, my dear man? There are very few secrets in this world, as you are quite old enough to have found out. And art is a way of telling the truth.”

  “That’s what Browning said. My aunt was always quoting him.”

  “Well? Your aunt must have been a wise woman. And Browning a deep psychologist. But don’t you see? It is the quality of truth, of depth of feeling, in your picture that has made all these learned gentlemen take notice.”

  “But it’s a cheat!”

  “I have carefully explained to you that it is no cheat. It is a revelation of several things about its subject and about you, but it is not a cheat.”

  If Francis did not rejoice to have his private comment on the incalculability and frequent malignancy of fate acclaimed as a reminder of a long-dead dwarf, he could not help being warmed by the praise he was receiving as a painter, though unidentified
. He thought he was being subtle in the way he afforded chances for Saraceni to comment on Drollig Hansel, its quality of workmanship, its evocation of a past time, its colour and the sense it gave of being a big picture when it was, by actual measurement, a small one. His subtlety did not deceive the Italian, who laughed at him as fishing for compliments.

  “But I am happy to provide the compliments,” he said; “why are you not happy to ask for them like a real artist, instead of demurring and hemming like some little old maid who does a few water-colours of her garden?”

  “I don’t want to over-value the little thing.”

  “Oh, I see; you don’t want to fall into the sin of pride? Well, don’t shrink from pride only to fall into hypocrisy. You’ve had a dog’s life, Corniche, brought up half Catholic and half Protestant, in a wretched hole where you got the worst of both those systems of double-dealing.”

  “Easy, Meister! I have detected a good Catholic in you.”

  “Perhaps, but when I am working as an artist I banish all that. Catholicism has begotten much great art; Protestantism none at all—not a single painting. But Catholicism has fostered art in the very teeth of Christianity. The Kingdom of Christ, if it ever comes, will contain no art; Christ never showed the least concern with it. His church has inspired much but not because of anything the Master said. Who then was the inspirer? The much-maligned Devil, one supposes. It is he who understands and ministers to man’s carnal and intellectual self, and art is carnal and intellectual.”

  “You work under the wing of the Devil, do you?”

  “I must, if I am to work at all. Christ would have had no time for a man like me. Have you noticed how, in the Gospels, He keeps so resolutely clear of anybody who might be suspected of having any brains? Good-hearted simpletons and women who were little better than slaves, those were His followers. No wonder Catholicism had to take a resolute stand in order to include people of intellect and artists; Protestantism has tried to reverse the process. Do you know what I should like, Corniche?”

  “A new revelation?”

  “Yes, that might come of it. I should like a conference to which Christ would bring all His saints, and the Devil would bring all his scholars and artists, and let them have it out.”

  “Who would judge the result?”

  “That’s the sticker. Not God, certainly, as the father of both leaders.”

  Saraceni did praise Drollig Hansel, as both he and Francis now called the picture. He did more. Without declaring it to be so, he included Francis in a closer fellowship with himself, and as they worked he talked untiringly about what he believed to be the philosophy of art. It was a philosophy deformed by that disease so fatal to philosophers—personal experience.

  The Countess also became more genial toward Francis. Not that she had ever treated him with anything but courtesy, but now she talked freely about what he and Saraceni were doing, and there were more of those conferences in her private room when Amalie and Miss Nibsmith had retired. The Countess wanted to improve the product she was exporting. If an original like Drollig Hansel was so well received, could not Saraceni bring about a greater change in some of the old pictures on which he was working?

  “Surely you are not urging me toward fakery, Countess?”

  “Certainly not. Just a little more boldness, Meister.”

  In the course of these talks things leaked out that gave Francis a better idea of what was actually involved in what he could not help considering an elaborate fraud. The Countess and Saraceni were receiving, for the pictures they sent, a full quarter of whatever the dealers could get for the Italian pictures the German museums offered in exchange, and the prices made his eyes start in his head. Where was the money going? Not to Düsterstein; nothing so direct or so dangerous. To Swiss banks, and by no means all to one bank.

  “A quarter is not too much,” said the Countess. “After all, that is what Bernard Berenson gets for a mere letter of authentication when he writes it for Duveen. We provide the actual works of art and all the authentication they need is the approval of the great German experts who buy them—who must be assumed to know what they are doing.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if they don’t know more than they are telling,” said Saraceni.

  “They are working under the gleaming eye of the Reichsmarschall,” said the Countess, “and he expects them to deliver the goods. And some of the goods—the choicest pieces—are said to find their way into the Reichsmarschall’s personal collection, which is large and fine.”

  “The whole thing sounds crooked as a dog’s hind leg,” said Francis, falling into the idiom of Blairlogie.

  “If that is so, which I do not admit, we are not the leaders in the deception,” said the Countess.

  “You do not see it as dishonest?”

  “If it were a simple matter of business, I would think so,” said the Countess, “but it is far from simple. I see it as a matter of natural justice. My family lost everything—well, not quite everything, but a very great deal—in the War, and lost it willingly for Germany. Since 1932 my Germany has been whittled away until I no longer know it, and my task in rebuilding my family’s fortunes has been made unbelievably hard. And why? Because I am the wrong kind of aristocrat, which is something much nearer to a democrat than National Socialism can endure. Do you know what an aristocrat is, Mr. Cornish?”

  “I know the concept, certainly.”

  “I know the reality. An aristocrat, when my family rose to prominence, was someone who gained power and wealth through ability, and that meant daring and taking chances, not steering a careful course through a labyrinth of rules that had been made for their own benefit by people without either daring or ability. You know my family’s motto? You have seen it often enough.”

  “Du sollst sterben ehe ich sterbe,” said Francis.

  “Yes, and what does it mean? It is not one of your nineteenth-century, bourgeois mottoes—a mealy-mouthed assertion of a tradesman’s idea of splendour. It means: ‘Thou shalt perish ere I perish.’ And I do not mean to perish. That is why I am doing what I am doing.”

  “THE COUNTESS seems to have decided to march under the banner of the Devil,” said Francis to the Meister.

  “We all meet the Devil in different forms, and the Countess is sure that she has found him in the Führer.”

  “A dangerous conclusion for a German citizen.”

  “The Countess would be surprised if you defined her as a citizen. She told you what she was: an aristocrat, a daring survivor. Certainly not a drivelling eccentric, as P. G. Wodehouse would have it.”

  “But suppose Hitler is right? Suppose the Reich lasts for a thousand years?”

  “As an Italian I am sceptical of claims to last for a thousand years according to any plan; Italy has lasted far longer chiefly by muddle and indirection, and how gloriously she has done it. Of course, we have our own buffoon at present, but Italy has seen many buffoons come and go.”

  “I gather I am being invited to march under the Countess’s banner? The Devil’s banner.”

  “You can do that, Corniche, or you can go back to your frozen country, with its frozen art, and paint winter lakes and wind-blown pine trees, to which the Devil is understandably indifferent.”

  “You suggest that I shall have missed my chance?”

  “You will certainly have missed your chance to learn what I can teach you.”

  “Really? You forget that now I can mix paint, and prepare grounds on the best principles, and I have painted one picture which seems to have met with a good deal of approval.”

  Saraceni laid down his brush and applauded gently. “Now that is what I have been hoping to hear for quite a while. Some show of spirit. Some real artist’s self-esteem. Have you read and reread Vasari’s Lives of the Painters as I told you?”

  “You know I have.”

  “Yes, but attentively? If so, you must have been struck by the spirit of those men. Lions, all the best of them, even the gentle Raphael. They may have doubted thei
r own work at bad moments, but they did not allow anyone else to do so. If a patron doubted, they changed patrons, because they knew they had something wholly beyond anybody’s power to command—a strong individual talent. You have been hinting and manoeuvring to get me to say that Drollig Hansel is a fine painting. And I have. After all, you have been drawing and painting for—what—nineteen years? You have had good masters. Drollig Hansel will do, for the present. It’s a pretty good painting. It shows that you, nipped by the frosty weather of your homeland, and stifled by the ingenious logic-chopping of Oxford, have at last begun to know yourself and respect what you know. Well—there have been late bloomers before you. But if you think you have learned all I can teach you, think again. Technique—yes, you have a measure of that. The inner conviction—not yet. But now you are in a frame of mind where we can begin on that paramount necessity.”

  THIS SOUNDED PROMISING, but Francis had learned to mistrust Saraceni’s promises; the Italian not only reproduced faithfully the painting technique of an earlier day, but also the harsh, unappeasable spirit of a Renaissance master toward his apprentice. What new trial could he possibly devise?

  “What do you see here?” The Meister stood ten feet away from Francis and unrolled a piece of paper, obviously old.

  “It seems to be a careful pen drawing of the head of Christ on the Cross.”

  “Yes. Now come nearer. You see how it is done? It is calligraphy. A picture rendered in exquisite, tiny Gothic script in such a way that it depicts Christ’s agony, while writing out every word—and not one word more—of Christ’s Passion as it is recorded in the Gospel of St. John, chapters seventeen to nineteen. What do you think of it?”

  “An interesting curiosity.”

  “A work of art, of craft, of devotion. Done, I suppose, by some seventeenth-century chaplain, or tutor to the Ingelheim family. Take it, and study it closely. Then I want you to do something in the same manner, but your text shall be the Nativity of Our Lord, as recorded in Luke’s Gospel, chapter one, and chapter two up to verse thirty-two. I want a Nativity in calligraphy, and I make only one concession to your weakness: you may do it in Italic, rather than Gothic. So sharpen your quills, boil yourself some ink of soot and oak-galls, and go to work.”