It was a job of measuring, scheming, and pernickety reckoning that might have brought despair to the heart of Sir Isaac Newton, but at last Francis had his plan, and set himself carefully to work. But what was there here to inspire inner conviction? This was drudgery, pedantry, and gimmickry. His concentration was not helped by an endless flow of reflection and comment from Saraceni, who was touching up a series of conventional seventeenth-century still-life paintings of impossibly opulent flowers, fish and vegetables on kitchen tables, bottles of wine, and dead hares with the glaucous bloom of death on their staring eyes.
“I sense your hatred of me, Corniche. Hate on. Hate greatly. It will help your work. It gives you a good charge of adrenalin. But reflect on this: I ask you to do nothing that I have not done in my day. That is how I have achieved mastery that has not its equal in the world. Mastery of what? Of the techniques of the great painters before 1700. I do not seek to be a painter myself. Nobody would want a painting done today in the manner of, let us say, Goveart Flink, the best pupil of Rembrandt. Yet that is how I truly feel. That is my only honest manner. I do not want to paint like the moderns.”
“Your hatred is reserved for the moderns, as mine is for you?”
“Not at all. I do not hate them. The best of them are doing what honest painters have always done, which is to paint the inner vision, or to bring the inner vision to some outer subject. But in an earlier day the inner vision presented itself in a coherent language of mythological or religious terms, and now both mythology and religion are powerless to move the modern mind. So—the search for the inner vision must be direct. The artist solicits and implores something from the realm of what the psychoanalysts, who are the great magicians of our day, call the Unconscious, though it is actually the Most Conscious. And what they fish up—what the Unconscious hangs on the end of the hook the artists drop into the great well in which art has its being—may be very fine, but they express it in a language more or less private. It is not the language of mythology or religion. And the great danger is that such private language is perilously easy to fake. Much easier to fake than the well-understood language of the past. I do not want to make you dizzy with flattery, but your picture of Drollig Hansel whispered something of that very deep, dark well.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“No, not at all. As I have told you. Our Blessed Lord wanted something quite different from that dark well, and drew from it like the Master He was.”
“But the Moderns—surely one must paint in the manner of one’s day?”
“I don’t admit any such necessity. If life is a dream, as some philosophers insist, surely the great picture is that which most potently symbolizes the unseizable reality that lies behind the dream. If I—or you—can best express that in terms of mythology or religion, why should we not do so?”
“Because it’s a kind of fakery, or a deliberate throw-back, like those Pre-Raphaelites. Even if you are a believer, you cannot believe as the great men of the past believed.”
“Very well. Live in the spirit of your time, and that spirit alone, if you must. But for some artists such abandonment to the contemporary leads to despair. Men today, men without religion or mythology, solicit the Unconscious, and usually they ask in vain. So they invent something and I don’t need to tell you the difference between invention and inspiration. Supply such inventions and you may come to depise those who admire you, and play games with them. Was that the spirit of Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt? Of course, you may become something rather like a photographer. But remember what Matisse said: ‘L’exactitude ce n’est pas la vérité.’ “
“Isn’t exactitude what you are devilling and driving me to achieve with this bloody piece of handwriting?”
“Only as a means of training you so that you will be able to set down, as well as lies in your power, what the Unconscious may choose to put on your hook, and offer it to those who have eyes to see.”
“You are teaching me to paint reality so well that it might deceive—like that Roman painter who painted flowers, or a jar of honey, or something so truly that bees settled on his pictures. How do you equate that with the kind of reality you are talking about—the reality that rises from the dark well?”
“Don’t despise things. Every thing has a soul that speaks to our soul, and may move it toward love. To understand that is the real materialism. People speak of our age as materialistic, but they are wrong. Men do not believe in matter today any more than they believe in God; scientists have taught them not to believe in anything. Men of the Middle Ages, and most of them in the Renaissance, believed in God and the things God had made, and they were happier and more complete than we. Listen, Corniche: modern man wants desperately to believe in something, to have some value that cannot be shaken. This country in which we live is giving fearful proof of what mankind will do in order to have something on which to fasten his yearning for belief, for certainty, for reality.”
“I don’t like it, and neither do you. Nor does the Countess.”
“But we cannot deny it, or change it. These Nazi fanatics are picturesque, so one can take some comfort from that.”
Francis thought of the trains, whose journey to the concentration camp in the hills he was recording, and did not find it picturesque. But he said nothing.
Saraceni went on, serenely. “The modern passion for the art of the past is part of this terrible yearning for certainty. The past is at least done with, and anything that we can recover from it is solid goods. Why do rich Americans pay monstrous prices for paintings by Old Masters which they may, or may not, understand and love, if it is not to import into their country the certainty I am talking about? Their public life is a circus, but in the National Gallery at Washington something of God, and something of the comfort of God’s splendour, may be entombed. It is a great cathedral, that gallery. And these Nazis are ready to swap splendid Italian masters for acres of German pictures, because they want to make manifest on the walls of their Führermuseum the past of their race, and so give substance to the present of their race, and provide some assurance of the future of their race. It is crazy, but in a crazy world what can you expect?”
“What I can expect, it appears, is that some day I shall finish this idiotic job, or I shall go mad and kill you.”
“No, no, Corniche. What you can expect is that when you have finished that idiotic job you will be able to write a splendid hand like the great Cardinal Bembo. And by so doing you will achieve at least something of the outlook upon the world of that great connoisseur, for the hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand. You will not kill me. You love me. I am your Meister. You dote upon me.”
Francis threw an ink-bottle at Saraceni. It was an empty bottle, and he took care to miss his mark. Then they both laughed.
So the weeks and the months passed and Francis had been at Düsterstein for almost three years, during which he had worked without a holiday as Saraceni’s slave, then colleague, then trusted friend. True, he had been back to England twice, for a week each time, meeting the Colonel and—for colour—visiting Williams-Owen. But these jaunts could not be called holidays. He was on easier terms with the Countess, though no one was ever fully at ease with the Countess. Amalie had found her tongue and lost her love for Francis, and he taught her some trigonometry (of which Ruth Nibsmith knew nothing) and the elements of drawing, and a great deal about gin rummy and bridge. Amalie was on the way to becoming a great beauty, and although nothing much was said, it was apparent that Miss Nibsmith’s reign must soon give way to a broader education, probably in France.