“When the butcher’s boy tells you in confidence, and with an eye to a
tip, that the grocer’s brother has a very fine piece of very old
sculpture which he is prepared to part with for a moderate
consideration, what do you suppose he means?” Walking slowly up-hill
among the olive trees, Mr. Cardan meditatively put the question.
“I suppose he means what he says,” said Miss Thriplow.
“No doubt,” said Mr. Cardan, halting for a moment to wipe his face,
which shone, even though the sun came only slantingly through the thin
foliage of the olive trees, with an excess of heat. Miss Thriplow in the
green uniform of the musical comedy schoolgirl looked wonderfully cool
and neat beside her unbuttoned companion. “But the point is this: what
exactly is it that he says? What is a butcher’s boy likely to mean when
he says that a piece of sculpture is very beautiful and very old?” They
resumed their climbing. Below them, through a gap in the trees, they
could see the roofs and the slender tower of the Cybo Malaspina palace,
and below these again the dolls’ village of Vezza, the map-like plain,
the sea.
“I should ask him, if you want to know.” Miss Thriplow spoke rather
tartly; it was not to talk of butchers’ boys that she had accepted Mr.
Cardan’s invitation to go for a walk with him. She wanted to hear Mr.
Cardan’s views on life, literature and herself. He knew a thing or two,
it seemed to her, about all these subjects. Too many things, and not
exactly the right ones at that, about the last. Too many—it was
precisely for that reason that Miss Thriplow liked to talk with him.
Horrors always exercise a fascination. And now, after the prolonged
silence, he was starting on butchers’ boys.
“I have asked him,” said Mr. Cardan. “But do you suppose there’s
anything intelligible to be got out of him? All I can gather is that the
sculpture represents a man—not a whole man, part of a man, and that it’s
made of marble. Beyond that I can discover nothing.”
“Why do you want to discover?” asked Miss Thriplow.
Mr. Cardan shook his head. “Alas,” he said, “for sordid reasons. You
remember what the poet wrote?
I have been in love, in debt and in drink
This many and many a year;
And these are three evils too great, one would think,
For one poor mortal to bear.
’Twas love that first drove me to drinking,
And drinking first drove me to debt,
And though I have struggled and struggled and strove,
I cannot get out of them yet.
There’s nothing but money can cure me
And ease me of all my pain;
’Twill pay all my debts and remove all my lets,
And my mistress who cannot endure me
Will turn to and love me again,
Will turn to and love me again.
There’s a summary of a lifetime for you. One has no regrets, of course.
But still, one does need cash—needs it the more, alas, the older one
grows, and has less of it. What other reason, do you think, would send
me sweating up this hill to talk with the village grocer about his
brother’s statuary?”
“You mean that you’d buy it if it were worth anything?”
“At the lowest possible price,” confirmed Mr. Cardan. “And sell it at
the highest. If I had ever adopted a profession,” he continued, “I think
it would have been art dealing. It has the charm of being more dishonest
than almost any other form of licensed brigandage in existence. And
dishonest, moreover, in a much more amusing way. Financiers, it is true,
can swindle on a larger scale; but their swindling is mostly impersonal.
You may ruin thousands of trusting investors; but you haven’t the
pleasure of knowing your victims. Whereas if you’re an art dealer, your
swindling, though less extensive, is most amusingly personal. You meet
your victims face to face and do them down. You take advantage of the
ignorance or urgent poverty of the vendor to get the work for nothing.
You then exploit the snobbery and the almost equally profound ignorance
of the rich buyer to make him take the stuff off your hands at some
fantastic price. What huge elation one must feel when one has succeeded
in bringing off some splendid _coup_! bought a blackened panel from some
decayed gentleman in need of a new suit, cleaned it up and sold it again
to a rich snob who thinks that a collection and the reputation of being
a patron of the ancient arts will give him a leg up in society—what vast
Rabelaisian mirth! No, decidedly, if I were not Diogenes and idle, I
would be Alexander, critic and dealer. A really gentlemanly profession.”
“Can you never be serious?” asked Miss Thriplow, who would have
preferred the conversation to turn on something more nearly related to
her own problems.
Mr. Cardan smiled at her. “Can anybody fail to be serious when it’s a
question of making money?”
“I give you up,” said Miss Thriplow.
“I’m sorry,” Mr. Cardan protested. “But perhaps it’s all for the best.
Meanwhile, what about that butcher’s boy? What _does_ he mean by a bit
of very old sculpture? Is it the head of some rich Etruscan
cheese-monger of Lunae that they’ve dug up? Some long-nosed primitive
oriental with a smile of imbecile rapture on his face? Or a fragment of
one of his Hellenised posterity, reclining on the lid of his sarcophagus
as though along his prandial couch and staring blankly out of a head
that might, if Praxiteles had carved it, have been Apollo’s, but which
the Etruscan mason has fattened into an all too human grossness? Or
perhaps it’s a Roman bust, so thoroughly real, life-like and up-to-date
that, but for the toga, we might almost take it for our old friend Sir
William Midrash, the eminent civil servant. Or perhaps—and I should like
that better—perhaps it dates from that strange, grey Christian dawn that
followed the savage night into which the empire went down. I can imagine
some fragment from Modena or Toscanella—some odd, unpredictable figure
bent by excess of faith into the most profoundly expressive and symbolic
of attitudes: a monster physically, a barbarism, a little mumbo-jumbo,
but glowing so passionately with inward life—it may be lovely, it may be
malignant—that it is impossible to look at it with indifference or
merely as a shape, ugly or beautiful. Yes. I should like the thing to be
a piece of Romanesque carving. I’d give the butcher’s boy an extra five
francs if it were. But if it turned out to be one of those suave Italian
Gothic saints elegantly draped and leaning a little sideways, like
saplings in the mystical breeze—and it might be, you never can tell—I’d
deduct five francs. Not but what it mightn’t fetch just as much in the
American market. But how they bore me, those accomplished Gothicisms,
how they bore me!”
They were at the top of the hill. Emerging from the sloping forest of
olive trees, the road now ran along a bare and almost level ridge. Some
little way off, where the ground began to rise once more towards further
heights, one could see a cluster of houses and a church tower. Mr.
Cardan pointed.
“There,” he said, “we shall find out what the butcher’s boy really did
mean. But in the meantime it’s amusing to go on speculating. For
example, suppose it were a chunk of a bas-relief designed by Giotto. Eh?
Something so grand, so spiritually and materially beautiful that you
could fall down and worship it. But I’d be very well pleased, I assure
you, with a bit of a sarcophagus from the earliest renaissance. Some
figure marvellously bright, ethereal and pure, like an angel, but an
angel, not of the kingdom of heaven; an angel of some splendid and,
alas, imaginary kingdom of earth. Ah,” pursued Mr. Cardan, shaking his
head, “that’s the kingdom one would like to live in—the kingdom of
ancient Greece, purged of every historical Greek that ever existed, and
colonised out of the imaginations of modern artists, scholars and
philosophers. In such a world one might live positively, so to
speak—live with the stream, in the direction of the main current—not
negatively, as one has to now, in reaction against the general trend of
existence.”
Positive and negative living. Miss Thriplow made a mental note of the
notions. It might be an idea to work up in an article. It might even
throw light on her own problems. Perhaps what one suffered from was the
sense of being negative and in reaction. More positiveness—that was what
one needed. The conversation, she thought, seemed to be growing more
serious. They walked on for a moment in silence. Mr. Cardan broke it at
last.
“Or can it possibly be,” he said, “that the grocer’s brother has lighted
on some fragmentary rough-hewing by Michelangelo, begun in a frenzy
while he was living among these mountains and abandoned when he left
them? Some tormented Slave, struggling to free himself more of his
inward than his outward chains; straining with more than human violence,
but at the same time pensively, with a passion concentrated upon itself
instead of explosively dissipated, as in the baroque, which all too
fatally and easily developed out of him? And after all our hopes and
speculations, that’s what my treasure will probably resolve itself
into—a bit of seventeenth-century baroque. I picture the torso of a
waltzing angel in the middle of a whirlwind of draperies turning up to
heaven the ecstatic eye of the clergyman in a Lyceum melodrama; or
perhaps a Bacchus, dancing by a miracle of virtuosity on one marble leg,
his mouth open in a tipsy laugh and the fingers of both hands splayed
out to their fullest extent, just to show what can be done by a sculptor
who knows his business; or the bust of a prince, prodigiously alive and
characteristic, wearing a collar of Brussels lace imitated in stone down
to the finest thread. The butcher’s boy kept on insisting that the thing
was very beautiful as well as very old. And it’s obvious, now I come to
think of it, that he’d really and sincerely like baroque and baroque
only, just because it would be so familiar to him, because it would be
just like everything he had been brought up to admire. For by some
strange and malignant fate the Italians, once arrived at baroque, seem
to have got stuck there. They are still up to the eyes in it. Consider
their literature, their modern painting and architecture, their
music—it’s all baroque. It gesticulates rhetorically, it struts across
stages, it sobs and bawls in its efforts to show you how passionate it
is. In the midst, like a huge great Jesuit church, stands d’Annunzio.”
“I should have thought,” said Miss Thriplow with barbed ingenuousness,
“that you’d have liked that sort of elaboration and virtuosity. It’s
‘amusing’—isn’t that the word?”
“True,” answered Mr. Cardan, “I like being amused. But I demand from
my art the added luxury of being moved. And, somehow, one can’t feel
emotion about anything so furiously and consciously emotional as these
baroque things. It’s not by making wild and passionate gestures that
an artist can awake emotion in the spectator. It isn’t done that way.
These seventeenth-century Italians tried to express passion by making
use of passionate gestures. They only succeeded in producing something
that either leaves us cold—though it may, as you say, amuse us—or
which actually makes us laugh. Art which is to move its contemplator
must itself be still; it is almost an aesthetic law. Passion must
never be allowed to dissipate itself in wild splashings and boilings
over. It must be shut up, so to speak, and compressed and moulded by
the intellect. Concentrated within a calm, untroubled form, its
strength will irresistibly move. Styles that protest too much are not
fit for serious, tragic use. They are by nature suited to comedy,
whose essence is exaggeration. That is why good romantic art is so
rare. Romanticism, of which the seventeenth-century baroque style is a
queer sub-species, makes violent gestures; it relies on violent
contrasts of light and shade, on stage effects; it is ambitious to
present you with emotion in the raw and palpitating form. That is to
say, the romantic style is in essence a comic style. And, except in
the hands of a few colossal geniuses, romantic art is, in point of
historical fact, almost always comic. Think of all the hair-raising
romances written during the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth
centuries; now that the novelty has worn off them, we perceive them
for what they are—the broadest comedies. Even writers of a great and
genuine talent were betrayed by the essentially comic nature of a
style into being farcical when they meant to be romantically tragical.
Balzac, for example, in a hundred serious passages; George Sand in all
her earlier novels; Beddoes, when he tries to make his _Death’s Jest
Book_ particularly blood-curdling; Byron in _Cain_; de Musset in
_Rolla_. And what prevents Herman Melville’s _Moby Dick_ from being a
really great book is precisely the pseudo-Shakespearean idiom in which
what are meant to be the most tragical passages are couched—an idiom
to whose essential suitability to comedy the exceptional tragic
successes of Shakespeare himself, of Marlowe and a few others has
unfortunately blinded all their imitators. Moreover, if the romantic
style is essentially fitted to comedy, it is also true, conversely,
that the greatest comic works have been written in a romantic style.
_Pantagruel_ and the _Contes Drolatiques_; the conversation of
Falstaff and Wilkins Micawber; Aristophanes’ _Frogs_; _Tristram
Shandy_. And who will deny that the finest passages in Milton’s
reverberating prose are precisely those where he is writing
satirically and comically? A comic writer is a very large and copious
man with a zest for all that is earthy, who unbuttons himself and lets
himself freely go, following wherever his indefatigably romping spirit
leads him. The unrestrained, exaggerated, wildly gesticulating manner
which is the romantic manner exactly fulfils his need.”
Miss Thriplow listened with growing attention. This was serious;
moreover, it seemed really to touch her own problems. In her new novel
she had done her best to throw off the light satiric vestments in which,
in the past, she had clothed her tendernesses; this time, she had
decided to give the public her naked heart. Mr. Cardan was making her
wonder whether she wasn’t exposing it in too palpitating a manner.
“When you come to pictorial art,” Mr. Cardan went on, “you find that
seriousness and romanticism are even less frequently combined than in
literature. The greatest triumphs of the nineteenth-century romantic
style are to be found precisely among the comedians and the makers of
grotesques. Daumier, for example, produced at once the most comic and
the most violently romantic pictures ever made. And Doré, when he ceased
from trying to paint serious pictures in the romantic style—with what
involuntarily ludicrous results I leave you to recall to mind—and
applied himself to illustrating _Don Quixote_ and the _Contes
Drolatiques_ in the same romantic terms, Doré produced masterpieces.
Indeed, the case of Doré quite clinches my argument. Here was a man who
did precisely the same romantic things in both his serious and his comic
works, and who succeeded in making what was meant to be sublime
ludicrous and what was meant to be ludicrous sublime in its rich,
extravagant, romantic grotesqueness.”
They had passed the outlying houses of the village and were walking
slowly up its single, steep street.
“That’s very true,” said Miss Thriplow pensively. She was wondering
whether she oughtn’t to tone down a little that description in her new
novel of the agonies of the young wife when she discovers that her
husband had been unfaithful to her. A dramatic moment, that. The young
wife has just had her first baby—with infinite suffering—and now, still
very frail, but infinitely happy, lies convalescent. The handsome young
husband, whom she adores and who, she supposes, adores her, comes in
with the afternoon post. He sits down by her bed, and putting the bunch
of letters on the counterpane begins opening his correspondence. She
opens hers too. Two boring notes. She tosses them aside. Without looking
at the address, she opens another envelope, unfolds the sheet within and
reads: “Doodlums darling, I shall be waiting for you to-morrow evening
in our love-nest....” She looks at the envelope; it is addressed to her
husband. Her feelings ... Miss Thriplow wondered; yes, perhaps, in the
light of what Mr. Cardan had been saying, the passage was a little too
palpitating. Particularly that bit where the baby is brought in to be
suckled. Miss Thriplow sighed; she’d read through the chapter critically
when she got home.
“Well,” said Mr. Cardan, interrupting the course of her thoughts, “here
we are. It only remains to find out where the grocer lives, and to find
out from the grocer where his brother lives, and to find out from the
brother what his treasure is and how much he wants for it, and then to
find some one to buy it for fifty thousand pounds—and we’ll live happily
ever after. What?”
He stopped a passing child and put his question. The child pointed up
the street. They walked on.
At the door of his little shop sat the grocer, unoccupied at the moment,
taking the sun and air and looking on at such stray drops from the flux
of life as trickled occasionally along the village street. He was a
stout man with a large fleshy face that looked as though it had been
squeezed perpendicularly, so broadly it bulged, so close to one another
the horizontal lines of eyes, nose and mouth. His cheeks and chin were
black with five days’ beard—for to-day was Thursday and shaving-time
only came round on Saturday evening. Small, sly, black eyes looked out
from between pouchy lids. He had thick lips, and his teeth when he
smiled were yellow. A long white apron, unexpectedly clean, was tied at
neck and waist and fell down over his knees. It was the apron that
struck Miss Thriplow’s imagination—the apron and the thought that this
man wore it, draped round him like an ephod, when he was cutting up ham
and sausages, when he was serving out sugar with a little shovel....
“How extraordinarily nice and jolly he looks!” she said enthusiastically,
as they approached.
“Does he?” asked Mr. Cardan in some surprise. To his eyes the man looked
like a hardly mitigated ruffian.
“So simple and happy and contented!” Miss Thriplow went on. “One envies
them their lives.” She could almost have wept over the little
shovel—momentarily the masonic emblem of prelapsarian ingenuousness. “We
make everything so unnecessarily complicated for ourselves, don’t we?”
“Do we?” said Mr. Cardan.
“These people have no doubts, or after-thoughts,” pursued Miss Thriplow,
“or—what’s worse than after-thoughts—simultaneous-thoughts. They know
what they want and what’s right; they feel just what they ought to feel
by nature—like the heroes in the _Iliad_—and act accordingly. And the
result is, I believe, that they’re much better than we are, much gooder,
we used to say when we were children; the word’s more expressive. Yes,
much gooder. Now you’re laughing at me!”
Mr. Cardan twinkled at her with benevolent irony. “I assure you I’m
not,” he declared.
“But I shouldn’t mind if you were,” said Miss Thriplow. “For after all,
in spite of all that you people may say or think, it’s the only thing
that matters—being good.”
“I entirely agree,” said Mr. Cardan.
“And it’s easier if you’re like that.” She nodded in the direction of
the white apron.
Mr. Cardan nodded, a little dubiously.
“Sometimes,” Miss Thriplow continued, with a gush of confidence that
made her words come more rapidly, “sometimes, when I get on a bus and
take my ticket from the conductor, I suddenly feel the tears come into
my eyes at the thought of this life, so simple and straightforward, so
easy to live well, even if it is a hard one—and perhaps, too, just
because it is a hard one. Ours is so difficult.” She shook her head.
By this time they were within a few yards of the shopkeeper, who, seeing
that they were proposing to enter his shop, rose from his seat at the
door and darted in to take up his stand, professionally, behind the
counter.
They followed him into the shop. It was dark within and filled with a
violent smell of goat’s milk cheese, pickled tunny, tomato preserve and
highly flavoured sausage.
“Whee-ew!” said Miss Thriplow, and pulling out a small handkerchief, she
took refuge with the ghost of Parma violets. It was a pity that these
simple lives in white aprons had to be passed amid such surroundings.
“Rather deafening, eh?” said Mr. Cardan, twinkling. “Puzza,” he added,
turning to the shopkeeper. “It stinks.”
The man looked at Miss Thriplow, who stood there, her nose in the oasis
of her handkerchief, and smiled indulgently. “I forestieri sono troppo
delicati. Troppo delicati,” he repeated.
“He’s quite right,” said Mr. Cardan. “We are. In the end, I believe, we
shall come to sacrifice everything to comfort and cleanliness.
Personally, I always have the greatest suspicion of your perfectly
hygienic and well-padded Utopias. As for this particular stink,” he
sniffed the air, positively with relish, “I don’t really know what you
have to object to it. It’s wholesome, it’s natural, it’s tremendously
historical. The shops of the Etruscan grocers, you may be sure, smelt
just as this does. No, on the whole, I entirely agree with our friend
here.”
“Still,” said Miss Thriplow, speaking in a muffled voice through the
folds of her handkerchief, “I shall stick to my violets. However
synthetic.”
Having ordered a couple of glasses of wine, one of which he offered to
the grocer, Mr. Cardan embarked on a diplomatic conversation about the
object of his visit. At the mention of his brother and the sculpture,
the grocer’s face took on an expression of altogether excessive
amiability. He bent his thick lips into smiles; deep folds in the shape
of arcs of circles appeared in his fat cheeks. He kept bowing again and
again. Every now and then he joyously laughed, emitting a blast of
garlicky breath that smelt so powerfully like acetylene that one was
tempted to put a match to his mouth in the hope that he would
immediately break out into a bright white flame. He confirmed all that
the butcher’s boy had said. It was all quite true; he had a brother; and
his brother had a piece of marble statuary that was beautiful and old,
old, old. Unfortunately, however, his brother had removed from this
village and had gone down to live in the plain, near the lake of
Massaciuccoli, and the sculpture had gone with him. Mr. Cardan tried to
find out from him what the work of art looked like; but he could gather
nothing beyond the fact that it was beautiful and old and represented a
man.
“It isn’t like this, I suppose?” asked Mr. Cardan, bending himself into
the attitude of a Romanesque demon and making a demoniac grimace.
The grocer thought not. Two peasant women who had come in for cheese and
oil looked on with a mild astonishment. These foreigners....
“Or like this?” He propped his elbow on the counter and, half reclining,
conjured up, by his attitude and his fixed smile of imbecile ecstasy,
visions of Etruscan revelry.
Again the grocer shook his head.
“Or like this?” He rolled his eyes toward heaven, like a baroque saint.
But the grocer seemed doubtful even of this.
Mr. Cardan wiped his forehead. “If I could make myself look like a Roman
bust,” he said to Miss Thriplow, “or a bas-relief of Giotto, or a
renaissance sarcophagus, or an unfinished group by Michelangelo, I
would. But it’s beyond my powers.” He shook his head. “For the moment I
give it up.”
He took out his pocketbook and asked for the brother’s address. The
grocer gave directions; Mr. Cardan carefully took them down. Smiling and
bowing, the grocer ushered them out into the street, Miss Thriplow
vailed her handkerchief and drew a breath of air—redolent, however, even
here, of organic chemistry.
“Patience,” said Mr. Cardan, “tenacity of purpose. One needs them here.”
They walked slowly down the street. They had only gone a few yards when
the noise of a violent altercation made them turn round. At the door of
the shop the grocer and his two customers were furiously disputing.
Voices were raised, the grocer’s deep and harsh, the women’s shrill;
hands moved in violent and menacing gestures, yet gracefully withal, as
was natural in the hands of those whose ancestors had taught the old
masters of painting all they ever knew of expressive and harmonious
movement.
“What is it?” asked Miss Thriplow. “It looks like the preliminaries of a
murder.”
Mr. Cardan smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “It’s nothing,” he said.
“They’re just calling him a robber; that’s all.” He listened for a
moment more to the shouting. “A little question of short weight, it
seems.” He smiled at Miss Thriplow. “Should we go on?”
They turned away; the sound of the dispute followed them down the
street. Miss Thriplow did not know whether to be grateful to Mr. Cardan
for saying nothing more about her friend in the white apron. These
simple folk ... the little shovel for the sugar ... so much better, so
much _gooder_ than we.... In the end she almost wished that he would say
something about it. Mr. Cardan’s silence seemed more ironic than any
words.
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