What's Bred in the Bone

by Robertson Davies

  Well, here goes, thought Francis. Thank God I can be both decisive and honest.

  “I fear the picture cannot be accepted as genuine,” said he.

  “That is your opinion?” said Huygens.

  “More than simply an opinion, Edelachtbare,” said Francis; the occasion he thought deserved the fullest formality. “The picture may indeed be an old picture. The quality of the painting is superb, and it strongly suggests van Eyck. Any painter at any time might be proud to have painted it. But you cannot even attribute it to alunno di van Eyck or alunno di van Eyck; it is probably a century after van Eyck.”

  “You speak with great certainty,” said Professor Baudoin, with unconcealed gloating. “But you are—if you will allow me to speak of it—a very young man, and the certainty of youth is not always appropriate to such matters as this. You will give us reasons, of course.”

  Indeed I shall, thought Francis. You think Letztpfennig is virtually destroyed and now you want to destroy me because I am young. Well—bugger you, you bad-breathed old nuisance.

  “I am sure your colleague will be glad to give his reasons,” said Huygens, the peacemaker. “If they are truly convincing, we shall call back the experts from Britain, who will make scientific appraisals.”

  “I don’t think you will need to do that,” said Francis. “The picture has been put forward as a van Eyck, and it certainly is not by van Eyck, either Hubertus or Jan. Have any of you gentlemen visited the zoo lately?”

  What was this about the zoo? Was the young man trifling with them?

  “A detail of the painting tells us all we need to know,” Francis continued. “Observe the monkey who hangs by his tail from the bars of Hell, in the upper left-hand corner of the picture. What is he doing there?”

  “It is an iconographical detail that one might expect in such a picture,” said Letztpfennig somewhat patronizingly toward the young man, glad to defend the monkey. “The chained monkey is an old symbol of the fallen mankind that preceded the coming of Christ. Of souls in Hell, in fact. He belongs with the defeated devils.”

  “But he is hanging by his tail.”

  “Since when do monkeys not hang by their tails?”

  “They did not do so in Ghent in van Eyck’s day. That monkey is a Cebus capucinus, a New World monkey. The chained monkey of iconography is the Macacus rhesus, the Old World monkey. Such a monkey as that, a monkey with a prehensile tail, was unknown in Europe until the sixteenth century, and I need not remind you that Hubertus van Eyck died in 1426. The painter, whoever he is—or was—wanted to complete his composition with a figure, not too commanding, in that particular spot, so the chained monkey had to be hanging by his tail from the bars of Hell. There are several examples of both Cebus capucinus and Macacus rhesus informatively labelled in your very good local zoo. That is why I mentioned it.”

  In the melodrama of the nineteenth century there may frequently be found such stage directions as Sensation! Astonishment! Tableau! This was the gratifying effect produced by Francis’s judgement. None of the experts tried to suggest that they were well up in the lore of monkeys, but when they were shown the obvious they made haste to declare that it was indeed obvious. This is one of the things experts are frequently called on to do.

  As they chattered learnedly, assuring each other that they had had some uneasiness about the monkey, Letztpfennig was understandably undergoing great stress. The big guard brought him a chair, and he sat on it and drew his breath painfully. But he regained his self-possession, rose to his feet, clapped his hands authoritatively, like a professor calling a class to order.

  “Gentlemen,” said he, “you shall know that I painted this picture. Why did I do so? In part as a protest against the fanatical adoration that is accorded to our Dutch masters of an earlier day, that is so frequently linked with a depreciation of modern painters. It is a bad principle that nothing may be praised without dispraising something else. Nobody nowadays can paint like the Old Masters! That is untrue. I have done so, and I know there are many others who could do it as well as I. It is not done, of course, because it is a kind of artistic fancy-dress, an insincerity, an imitation of another man’s style. I fully agree that a painter should work in the mode—speaking very generally—of his own time. But that is not because it is a degenerate mode, adopted because he cannot paint as well as his great artistic predecessors.

  “Now listen to me patiently, if you please. You have all praised this painting for its skill in colour and design, and its power to lift the heart as only a great picture can do. At one time or another you have all spoken highly of it, and several of you have professed yourselves delighted with it. What delighted you? The magic of a great name? The magic of the past? Or was it the picture before your eyes? Even you, Mr. Thresher, before you found that under no circumstances could you buy this picture for your great client, spoke of it to me in terms that made my heart sing in my breast. The work of a very great master, you said, if not indubitably a van Eyck. Well—? I am the very great master. Do you take back everything you said?”

  Thresher said nothing, and none of the other experts were inclined to speak, except Baudoin, who was hissing in Belmann’s ear that he had never trusted the craquelure.

  It was the Judge who spoke, and he spoke like a judge. “We must bear in mind, Mynheer Letztpfennig, that you offered the picture for sale as a genuine van Eyck, and with it you offered a tale about its origins which we now know to be untrue. That cannot be explained away as part of a protest on behalf of the skill of modern painters.”

  “But how else was I to get attention for my picture? How else was I to make my point? If I had made it known that Jean-Paul Letztpfennig, professor of art, restorer of Old Masters, known as a painter condemned to mediocrity by those who profess to rank artists as if they were schoolboys, had painted a great painting in an old style, how many of you would have crossed your doorstep to see it? Not one! Not one! But as things are you have used words like masterpiece, and transporting beauty. At what were they directed? Toward what you saw, or merely toward what you thought you saw?”

  “The Judge is right,” said Addison Thresher. “You wanted the top dollar for your picture, not only for its beauty—which I don’t deny—but for the glamour of age and a great name. And we fell for it! It’s a fine painting, but where can you sell it? I guess it’s a draw. Certainly so far as I am concerned, it’s a draw.”

  OF COURSE, it wasn’t a draw, and the international press turned it into a sensation. How did they find out what had happened? When eleven men are in a room and something of unusual interest takes place, at least one of them is likely to let something drop which the press seizes on, and the hunt is up. The one who was supposed to have leaked the story was Sluyters, the guard, who was not nearly so impassive as he looked, and who would have been glad to tell what he knew for a consideration. But did nobody else say a word? Certainly Francis didn’t until he was back at Düsterstein, but who can answer for Addison Thresher? Did the Judge drop a word to his wife, who may have told an intimate friend in the uttermost confidence? The Germans certainly were not silent when they reported to their superiors, and through them to the Reichsmarschall, who was not known for being close-mouthed. The two Frenchmen and the Belgian would not be inclined toward silence; they had risked little and gained much, for they had been in on a great unmasking which gave the international art world something to talk about for many months.

  “Monkey Blows Hoax” was the headline in one form or another, and one paper carried a caricature of Francis instructing the experts, based on a famous painting of the Boy Christ Teaching in the Temple.

  “I see that the Letztpfennig file is now closed,” said Saraceni, raising his eyes from the Völkischer Beobachter he had been reading in the shell-grotto.

  “Are they dropping all charges?” said Francis.

  “No charges are effective now. He has killed himself.”

  “Oh God! The poor devil!”

  “Do not reproach yourself, Co
rniche. I told you to kill him, and you killed him. You destroyed him professionally on my instruction and now he has yielded up his life of his own volition. In a very interesting way, too. He lived in Amsterdam in one of those lovely old houses on a canal. You know how they have projecting mounts for cranes, hanging over the canal bank, so that in the old days those merchant houses could have goods hauled up to the top floor for storage? Picturesque old things. It seems Letztpfennig hanged himself on his crane, right out over the canal. When he was retrieved by the police they found a note pinned to his coat. Oddly enough, he had worn his overcoat and hat to die in. The note said: ‘Let them say what they will now; in the beginning they said it was a great picture.’—My dear man, are you unwell? Perhaps you had better take the day off. You have done quite enough for art, for the present.”

  THAT WAS THE MAKING OF FRANCIS, said the Daimon Maimas.

  —You are not gentle in your methods, brother, said the Lesser Zadkiel.

  —Not always, but I am often subtle. It was I, of course, who nudged Francis to visit the zoo, and I made sure he had a good look at the monkeys.

  —A bad moment for Letztpfennig.

  —Letztpfennig was not my care. And he was not too badly used. He wanted fame and he wanted to be recognized as a great painter. He had both his wishes—posthumously. His death gave a note of pathos to what was, considering all things, a remarkable career. It was the rest of mankind that felt the pathos, as it usually is in pathetic fates. When everything is added up, Letztpfennig did not do too badly. He is a footnote in the history of art. And Francis gained at a stroke a very nice little reputation.

  —And that was the fame that Ruth predicted? said the Lesser Zadkiel.

  —Oh, by no means. I can do better than that, said the Daimon Maimas.

  THE DOWNFALL OF LETZTPFENNIG was of interest to the world, as somebody’s downfall always is, but by the autumn of 1938, not long after Francis’s twenty-ninth birthday, the Munich Crisis took precedence over all other news, and the apparent triumph of Neville Chamberlain in concluding an agreement with the German Führer gladdened the hearts of millions of innocents who wanted peace and were ready to believe anything that seemed to promise peace. But not everyone trusted that pact; the Countess and Saraceni were two of these. There was uneasiness and change at Düsterstein. Amalie was sent off to a distinguished school in Switzerland, and though Ruth Nibsmith stayed on to help the Countess in secretarial work, she knew that her time in that capacity was short, and before Christmas she had taken affectionate farewells of everyone and returned to England. Saraceni likewise found that he had imperative business in Rome, and could not say how long it would be before he returned—though he assured the Countess that he would certainly return. And the Countess announced that pressing work in Munich, relating to her sales of farm produce, would keep her in that city for several weeks and perhaps for months.

  Saraceni and Francis had, between them, in the year past, completed a substantial amount of work, some of which was ambitious. Bigger and bigger pictures were making their way to the wine merchants’ cellars—pictures so large the canvases had to be dismounted from their stretchers, and packed around the insides of the big barrels, carefully wrapped to protect them from the wine. The stretchers and the old nails that belonged to the pictures travelled in two large bags of golf clubs, which Prince Max had added to his luggage. These were ambitious pictures of battle scenes, and a number of portraits of minor historical figures, all greatly improved by Saraceni and also by Francis, who was trusted with increasingly significant work. What was to become of Francis during the Meister’s long absence? The day before he left, Saraceni told him.

  “You have done well, Corniche, and you have done it much quicker than I thought you would. The explosion of Letztpfennig has given you a name—a modest name, but nevertheless a name. Still, before you are ready to appear before the world as amico di Saraceni instead of the lesser alunno di Saraceni there is an important test I want you to accept now. Quite simply it is this: can you paint as well as Letztpfennig? He was a master, you know, in this lesser realm of art. I can say it, now that you have disposed of him. I am not talking of course of faking, for that is contemptible, but I mean the ability to work truly in the technique and also in the spirit of the past. Unless you can satisfy me of that I shall not feel absolutely certain about you. Drollig Hansel was good. What you have done during the past year is good. But when you are not under my eye and subject to my advice and relentless criticism—I know I’m a bastard, but all great teachers must be so—can you really bring it off? So: while I am away I want you to paint an original picture on a large scale—not just big, but big in conception—and I want you to do it not in imitation of anyone, but as you would paint yourself if you were living in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Find your subject. Grind your colours. I have found a groundwork for you.

  “Look here; it is, as you see, a triptych, an altar-piece of fair size in three panels that hung in the chapel here before it was done over in the great Baroque style. It is a wreck, of course. It has been standing for at least two hundred years in one of the innumerable service corridors of this castle from which we have recovered so many discarded paintings, but it was never very good and now it is rubbish. Clean it, right down to the wood, and go to work. I am expecting something that will tell me just how good you are, when you work independently. You will have plenty of time. I shall return in the spring, or perhaps a little later. But I shall certainly return.”

  SO, SHORTLY BEFORE CHRISTMAS of 1938, Francis found himself the virtual master of Düsterstein. The family rooms, as well as the great rooms of state, were transformed by dust-sheets and muslin wraps for the chandeliers into the habitations of ghosts. One small room was left for his use, and there he sat and ate his meals when he was not busy in the shell-grotto. He took walks in the grounds, squelching over mossy paths under weeping trees. Another man might have found it melancholy, but Francis welcomed the solitude and the dimness, for he was turned in upon himself and wanted no distraction, no invitation to play. He was seeking his picture.

  The philosophy of Saraceni, as distinguished from the avarice and opportunism of Saraceni, was not something he had learned as Amalie learned her lessons. He had absorbed it, and ingested it, and had made it part of his own wholeness. What was so plainly unworthy in the Meister he regarded with amusement; he was not such a fool as to suppose that great men do not have their foibles, and that such flaws might not be great ones. He had consumed the wheat and discarded the chaff, and the wheat was now bone of his bone. It was his belief, not his lesson.

  What did he now believe, at the end of a toilsome and sometimes humiliating apprenticeship? That a great picture must have its foundation in a sustaining myth, which could only be expressed through painting by an artist with an intense vocation. He had learned to accept and cherish his vocation, which was none the less real because it had been reached by such a crooked path. He had worked in the shell-grotto as a man under orders, but now he was to work under no orders but his own, even though he must express himself in a bygone mode of painting. But what was his picture, the masterpiece which would conclude his apprenticeship, to be?

  Rooted in a myth, but what myth? In the tangle of mythology, the cosmic bedroom farce and vulgar family wrangles of the gods of Olympus or their diminished effigies as conceived by the Romans? Never! In the finer myth of the Christian world, as seen in a thousand forms in the Age of Faith? Catholicism he certainly possessed, but it was still the sweet Catholicism of Mary-Ben rather than that of the rigorous Church Fathers. In the myth of the greatness of Man, as the Renaissance had asserted, or the myth of Man Diminished and Enchained as it appeared to the Age of Reason? What about Romanticism, the myth of the Inner Man sharply declining to the myth of Egotism? There was even the nineteenth-century myth of Materialism, the exaltation of the World of Things, which had evoked so many great pictures from the Impressionists. But these must be rejected at once, even if they had strongl
y attracted him (which they did not), because his orders—and he was still under orders—were to paint a picture in the manner of the Old Masters, a picture that would contain some technical instruction even for the ingenious Letztpfennig.

  Alone, and only vaguely aware of the Europe that was boiling up toward a war of hitherto unexampled horror almost on his doorstep, Francis found his answer, and it was the only possible, the inescapable answer. He would paint the myth of Francis Cornish.

  But how? He was not free to work as a painter might who was not seeking to advance from alunno to amico in the fierce school of Saraceni. He could not descend, so far as his talent allowed, into the Realm of the Mothers and return with a picture that might evade the understanding of even the most intuitive and sympathetic of observers, but that would perhaps explain itself after twenty years as a prophecy, or a cry of despair. He must have a subject that could be identified as the subjects of the Old Masters are identified, however much these say that is not contained in the obvious subject.

  He made and destroyed innumerable sketches, but even as he rejected them he felt that he was moving nearer to his goal. At last a subject began to assert itself, and then to show that it was inescapable, a subject that might be invited to body forth the myth of Francis Cornish. It was at this point that he began to make the preparatory studies and drawings in the old manner, on prepared paper with a silver-point; studies which might, at some distant time, puzzle the experts. His theme, his subject, his myth, was to be contained in a triptych of The Marriage at Cana.

  It had not been one of the most popular themes of the masters who painted before the High Renaissance, the masters who painted in the mode that preceded the lush depictions of that wedding feast—so improbable in terms of the biblical story—which were, in fact, glorifications of the splendours and luxuries of this world. Francis must work in terms of the austere but not starveling manner of the sunset of the Gothic world. And as he made his drawings he found that this was a manner that would serve him very well; the myth of Francis Cornish was not a Renaissance myth, or a myth of Reason or of self-delighted egotism, or the myth of the World of Things. If he could not speak in the voice of his century he would speak in the final accents of the Gothic voice. And so he worked, not furiously but with concentration and devotion, and when at last his preliminary cartoons were done, and the ruinous old picture on the triptych was scoured and scraped off, and his colours were chosen and prepared down to the last grinding of the lapis lazuli that lay so readily at hand, he began to paint.