Adrian Glynde

by Martin Armstrong

  “You mean your narrowness comes from breadth.”

  The old man turned amazed speculation upon Adrian, but Adrian had not intended to astonish him and was not aware that he had done so.

  “Mr. Heller, my music-master, said that,” he added calmly. “He said he was a narrow and prejudiced old man and that he had a perfect right to be, because he had given all the composers a fair trial and had chosen his gods, but that I had no right to be narrow yet.”

  Oliver Glynde nodded his head approvingly. “He’s quite right,” he said. “And who are his gods?”

  “His gods are Beethoven and Bach, and William Byrd, and after them Handel, Haydn, and Mozart.”

  “Good. He and I belong to the same religion.”

  “And who are your gods, Grandfather? I mean, among poets.”

  “I have two heavens,” said the old man, “one for gods who are the gods of everyone who loves literature, gods who are high above our feeble ambitions and emulations: the other for the gods whom I regard as my masters and humbly try to imitate. In the first heaven are Shakespeare, and Dante, and I think … yes, I think, Wordsworth. In the second are a strangely assorted three: Racine, Landor, and John Donne, whose picture, there, you so often look at.”

  “And must I read all those if I want to know about poetry?”

  “No, old man, I wouldn’t try any of them except Shakespeare for a long time yet. But there are plenty of others you would enjoy, and several of them I ought to have put in the first heaven sitting on the steps of the great ones’ thrones. I will give you the poems of Keats. But when you read poetry you must not forget, if you want to enjoy it to the full, that it not only means what it says in words but also a great many things it doesn’t say. It has meanings as music has meanings. You would say, wouldn’t you, that a Sonata by Beethoven had a perfectly definite meaning of its own?”

  “Yes,” said Adrian, remembering Mr. Heller’s playing of the Appassionata and the Waldstein.

  “But it is a meaning that has no need of words—that cannot, in fact, be put into words. Well, the sound of poetry has a meaning of its own, and so has the rhythm, and these meanings reinforce the meaning of the words. As for the words, they also have many meanings besides the one particular meaning of which they tell.”

  “Yes,” said Adrian, “we talked about that, didn’t we, when you told me the story of the old Chinee?”

  Oliver nodded. “So you see that what a poet does when he writes poetry is to say something to you as fully as forcefully and as unforgettably as possible. He entices your mind, your heart, and all your senses into making you accept what he offers. If say ‘Pass the jam,’ I am saying a perfectly plain thing, I am simply shying a wellaimed brick at your mind. But when I write a poem I make an organised attack on you. I shy a dozen bricks all at once, each brick aimed carefully. One hits your head, another your heart, five hit your five senses, another your love of dancing, another your love of music, another your love of beautiful shapes and colours, another catches you on the soul. That’s what poetry does: it bombards every part of your defences at once.”

  Adrian appeared to be puzzled. “Then why … how does Aunt Clara … manage to hold out against the bombardment?”

  “A … h!” The old man burst into a laugh. “Trust your Aunt Clara to hold out,” he said. Then, serious once more, he explained: “Poetry conquers only those who wish to be conquered. If you don’t yield to it, it can’t touch you.”

  “Then Aunt Clara is one of those who don’t like being bombarded?”

  Oliver laughed again. Precisely,” he said. “Dear Clara never gives herself beyond a certain point.”

  That remark of his grandfather’s came as a revelation to Adrian. It illuminated what he had hitherto not consciously seen; it recalled and explained childish disappointments, the pained sense, once a great sorrow to him, that Aunt Clara did not love him as he loved her. No, Aunt Clara did not give herself, that was it. But it was this very fact, he next moment felt, though he could not have explained why, that made her say such delightfully amusing things.

  “You mustn’t tell your aunt I said that,” said his grandfather,” because there’s nothing that more annoys people who don’t give themselves than to be told so.”

  “Did Father give himself, then?” Adrian asked.”

  “Oh, completely,” replied the old man fondly. “He was as open and unfettered as the sky. Why, didn’t he end by giving his life?”

  XIII

  The holiday life at Abbot’s Randale and at Yarn seemed to Adrian, by its contrast with Charminster, much richer and freer and more delightful than it had seemed when he had come to it from Waldo. The quiet and restfulness after the everlasting turbulence, the long leisurely vacancy of the days after the weeks of cast-iron routine, the beauty of the rooms in his grandfather’s house and the civilisation of the meals filled him with delight. It was wonderful to be able to slink away after lunch to his grandfather’s study and play the little piano and stare at the death-mask of John Donne, instead of having to rush to the rowdy boot-room to change into chilly shorts and shirt for fives or football; to realise that in the evening there would be no prep., no prayers, nothing to do but to talk or read the volume of Keats which his grandfather had given him; and, best of all, to awake in the morning and suddenly to discover that no crashing bell was on the point of wrecking the early morning peace, that there was at least an hour in which to lie and dream of what he would do during the day, of the new tune he had begun to compose, or of Ronny, who, though away in unknown surroundings, was extraordinarily real, extraordinarily near to him as he lay thinking of him now and holding long imaginary conversations with him.

  The separation from Ronny was not nearly so unbearable as he had expected. The absence of the real Dakyn seemed merely to add a background of warm, luxurious melancholy to his holiday pursuits, for there was always present to him the comforting assurance that in a few weeks he would see him again. But suppose something happened to prevent Ronny from returning after the holidays. Once or twice that thought occurred to Adrian, and at once there yawned beneath him such a cavern of misery that he drove the thought from his mind. It would be impossible, it seemed to him, to go on at Charminster if Ronny were not there.

  That thought made him realise for the first time that life’s happiness hangs by a thread which an insignificant accident or the idle whim of an unknown person may snap irremediably. Yet, though his mind perceived that fearful truth, there burned in some deeper recess of his being a faith in the security of his happiness, a faith which was perhaps produced by nothing more than the happiness itself. The accident, of which the bare thought chilled and terrified him, would not, he felt sure, actually happen.

  In the afternoon he played over a new piece he had composed, fastidiously altering it here and there and critically trying over each new version, lingering enchanted over each phrase; and his glowing absorption in the music reinforced his faith in the security of his joy. He played the piece to his grandfather, who praised it and, bringing music-paper from a drawer, showed him how to write it down.

  “Have you shown your pieces to Mr. Heller?” the old man asked.

  “Oh, no!” said Adrian.

  “Why not?”

  “I daren’t. He’s so very particular.”

  “But so are your pieces,” said Oliver.

  “They’re particular?” said Adrian, knitting his brows.

  “Yes. You have polished them down, haven’t you, to their clearest and simplest. There’s nothing in them, is there, that doesn’t seem real and alive to you? That should be the foundation of every piece of music and of every poem, however elaborate. I believe that you should be able to play the essence of a symphony with one finger. All music and all art must have a structure. If you take away the flesh, with its warmth and colour, its wonderful curves and folds and creases, its beautiful decorations of hair, you should find the skeleton; and if you take away the bony limbs and curves and flourishes of the skeleton,
you should find the backbone, the spine on which all these are hung in perfect balance; and in the spine you should find the spinal cord which holds even the spine together and makes it supple. The first and last quality of music is in its spinal cord. Have you ever read The Book of Job? There is a wonderful saying there which is true not only of human beings but also of art: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither.” You cannot tell if a man has a perfect body until you see him naked. It is easy to make anyone look beautiful if you dress him up in gorgeous clothes, and it is easy to make music sound lovely at a first hearing if you dress it up in elaborate harmonies and rhythms and orchestration. But if the music is really good it must be able to endure the light of day upon its nakedness. Nowadays tricks of harmony-weaving and pattern-weaving and tone-weaving by means of masses of different instruments have become so elaborate and so ingenious that symphonies and tone-poems, like brocaded dresses stiff with whalebone, stand up of themselves even though there is no living body inside them. Be as subtle and intricate as you like, but always build your elaborations out of a simple, clear, and vital core. That is what I try to do. And not only that. Your elaborations must not be merely applied to that central simplicity: they must grow out of it. When I talked of dresses and nakedness, I gave you the wrong idea. I should have compared music to a seed from which springs a growth of roots and branches, leaves and flowers.”

  Adrian loved these private talks, and the general talk at meals. The talk at Abbot’s Randale was for him a continual feast. It fed something in him which had long been starved, and it provided him with cud which he ruminated at leisure. Things which were vague or incomprehensible when he first heard them became clear in the light of some chance saying of his grandfather’s on the following day.

  The subject of art arose again at dinner next evening. It began with the Burgundy. Dates were bandied about, and Adrian caught the sound of strange names: Romanee, Hospices de Beaune, Nuits Saint Georges; and then the bottle that was in question at the moment and reclined luxuriously in a wicker cradle, was carefully poured out by Oliver himself, who rose from his chair and circled the table to do so. When he had returned to his place and helped himself he raised his glass and inhaled its fragrance. His fine old beak of a nose seemed to grow finer, more fastidiously inquisitive, the nostrils more proudly arched, the full, well-shaped lips fuller and redder with anticipation. Then, before tasting, he raised his head and his eyes shone.

  “Exquisite!” he said. “A work of art; nothing less!”

  He took a careful sip and so did the other two. It was as if they were partaking of a sacrament.

  “Better!” said Clara with a sigh of satisfaction.

  The old man raised an eyebrow. “Better?”

  “Than a work of art,” said Clara. “It’s real. It’s an exquisite and delicate emotion, not merely the expression of one.”

  “Then we are not to express our emotions?” asked Oliver, with the gleam of a smile in his eyes and at the corners of his mouth.

  “Only in extreme moderation,” said Clara, “otherwise one tends to become … well, a mere Italian tenor. I always suspect the expression of emotion to be a substitute for the feeling of it.”

  “And in that, my dear,” said Oliver, “I believe you are largely right, if you mean physical and not artistic expression. But it was artistic expression that you referred to first.”

  “Well, I prefer unemotional art.”

  “There’s no such thing, my child. A mere contradiction in terms. Art is nothing else than the conservation of emotion. Your emotional people—your Italian tenors, Clara—are mere thunder-claps and lightning-flashes, whereas art …”

  “Is the municipal gas-works?” said Bob.

  “Precisely. Or shall we say, the electric supply?”

  “But my dear Father,” said Clara, “you’re not going to tell me that you like emotional art?”

  “But indeed I am, Clara, and I can only hope that the information won’t spoil your dinner.”

  “Is your icy Racine, then, as emotional as … whom shall I say? … Alfred de Musset or the early Swinburne with his ridiculous Dolores?”

  The old man braced his shoulders emphatically. “As emotional? Why he’s infinitely, immeasurably more so; just as Bach contains more emotion than all your Chopins and Wagners and Strausses and Scriabines rolled together. What is the matter with Dolores and, for example, that horrible melody in the middle of Chopin’s Funeral March is the thinness and shallowness of the emotion. They’re Italian tenors, if you like. It is simply the immense emotional power of Racine that makes him the great poet he is. Why, didn’t you yourself very wisely remark just now that emotionalism was usually a substitute for genuine feeling.”

  Clara sipped her Burgundy and for a moment did not speak. Her lips moved as she savoured the wine and set down the glass. “Well, Father,” she said at last, “I’m afraid I’ve allowed you to shoot me with my own bullet. I have no reply except one which you and Bob, mere logical men as you are, will at once label as typically feminine.”

  The old man’s eyes sparkled at her. “And that is?”

  “That whatever Racine may or may not be, I don’t like him.”

  “Yes,” said Oliver, “a woman’s reply and a perfectly just one, because strictly practical. Enjoyment of art is not in the end a matter of principles, but a matter of experience. One must not use principles to judge works of art. One submits oneself to artistic experience and draws principles from the experiences. But I suspect a weakness somewhere, Clara, for all that. You called Racine icy just now, and you also said that you preferred unemotional art. Now, if you find him icy, why don’t you like him?”

  Clara shook her head. “I haven’t a notion. Probably because I don’t really care for any poetry.”

  “Or possibly, do you think, because Racine isn’t really icy?”

  Clara raised her glass again. “My dear Father, if you hold me in a cleft stick, how can I enjoy my Burgundy?”

  Oliver laughed. “Then I’ll let you out, my dear. Besides, I’d rather you called Racine icy and disliked him than called him icy and liked him for it, for in the second case you would have made two mistakes instead of one.”

  They stayed ten days at Abbot’s Randale. When Christmas was over and the appointed five days of their visit were past, the old man could not let them go.

  “The poem will have to wait,” he said. “One makes virtuous resolutions, but, thank God, one has the strength of mind not to keep them.”

  Seeing that he really wished them to stay, they gladly postponed their departure till after New Year’s Day. Adrian asked nothing better.

  “If I were a real poet,” said Oliver at lunch, “I should, of course, bundle you back to Yarn at once, or rather I should never have invited you here at all, for the perfect artist, I suppose, sacrifices everything to his art.”

  “Which is all very well for the perfect artist,” said Clara, “but not very pleasant for the everything, which in this case would include Bob, Adrian, and myself. We should find ourselves in the position of a sort of threefold Isaac, and you, as the perfect artist, would of course ignore the timely interruption of the angel of the Lord.”

  “If I were the perfect artist, my dear, I should have gone on with my poetry instead of getting a couple of children and a grandchild, so that you and Adrian would not be here to be sacrificed and I might never have had a chance of getting my sacrificial knife even into Bob. No, the perfect artist is a hermit whose only happiness is the service of his god; or, as I sometimes suspect, he is a machine designed by Nature, Nature with a big N of course, solely for the production of poetry, music, or whatever his art may be. My weakness is that the larger half of me is a human being, and the human half protests sooner or later. It refuses to be enslaved by the tiresome trade of divine pattern-making and it goes on strike. Sooner or later,” he said, turning to Adrian, “you’ll discover that you’re not one person, but two, body and soul, the animal ma
n and the spiritual man, an incompatible couple who are always squabbling and pitching into each other. If you could give both enough work to do, it wouldn’t be so bad; but you can’t, because each demands a full-time job. So you have to favour one or the other, and, whichever you favour, the other grumbles and whines. I often wish I were a coal-heaver. A week of coal-heaving would keep the animal man quiet for a bit, but, after all, that would only end in the spiritual man’s getting out of hand.”

  “Are we to understand,” asked Bob,” that it is Oliver Glynde the animal who has pressed us to stay an extra five days?”

  “Certainly it is,” replied the old man. “Oliver the Spirit did all he could not to detain you, but the warm-blooded, gregarious, chattering, eating, and drinking Oliver shouted him down, and here you are.”

  “I should like,” said Clara, her narrow lips curling into a smile, “to put in a word for the mind, who seems to have been left out of the menage—or shall I say menagerie?”

  “Mind?” The old man snorted with humorous disgust. “Mind is a mere nuisance. He pretends to be the friend of both and is the friend of neither. Body and Soul are innocent, simple, honest, each is a thoroughbred; but Mind is a crafty, disingenuous, squint-eyed mongrel who enormously embitters the antagonism between the other two. Mind should be kept severely on collar and chain and used only as a pointer, a retriever, or a turn-spit—kept in a bag, like a ferret, let out to bolt rabbits, and, that done, caught and pushed back into the bag before he gets into mischief. Don’t speak to me of Mind: he’s a bad dog. Think of all the mongrel pups he’s presented us with.”

  “Pups?”

  “The philosophers.”

  Clara smiled reflectively. “I have always found him, when kindly treated, a very charming and useful pet.”

  “So people have declared who kept tiger-cubs,” said Oliver, “till the day when the cubs ceased to be cubs and gobbled them up.”