“Indeed it is.”
“Hulda is an artist. How good or how big, who can say? But an artist, certainly. Kater Murr is the enemy of all true art, religion, science—anything of any importance whatever. Kater Murr wants nothing but certainty, and whatever is great grows in the battleground between truth and error. ‘Raus mit Kater Murr! That is what Hulda says now. If I play with her a little—you understand me?—it is all for the defeat of Kater Murr.”
“All?”
“You are a sly one! No, not all. It is very agreeable to me, and to her as well.”
“I am not accusing you.”
“But you are being very clever. You have changed the conversation from what sins you would like to commit to what sins that silly, provincial woman accuses me of. Hulda will be all right. What is it she says? Okay. She will be okay.”
“A little better than just okay, I hope?”
“Oh, but you understand. She is very bad at language. She says terrible things. She says she must ‘maul over’ these sketches of Hoffmann’s. I look it up. She means ‘mull’. And she says she will ‘day-bew’ with this opera. She means ‘debut’ and she uses it all wrong anyhow. But she is not a fool or a vulgarian. She just has no regard for language. It has no mystery, no overtones, for her.”
“I know. Such people make you and me feel stuffy and pernickety.”
“But she cannot be an artist in music and a hooligan in speech. You are careful about language.”
“Yes.”
“I know from what you have done on the libretto. It is really good.”
“Thank you.”
“That silly woman does not help you?”
“Certainly not so far.”
“I suppose she thinks of me and it dries up the ink in her pen. And that beautiful fool Professor Hollier, who is too much a scholar to be even a very tiny poet. But what you give to Hulda is respectable poetry.”
“No, no; you are too flattering.”
“No I’m not. But what I want to know is—is it all yours?”
“What else could it be?”
“It could be pastiche. Which I am at last persuading Hulda not to call pistache. If so, it is first-class pastiche. But pastiche of what?”
“Now listen here, Dr. Dahl-Soot, you are being very pressing. You are accusing me of stealing something. What would you say if I accused you of stealing musical ideas?”
“I would deny it indignantly. But you are too clever to be deceived, and you know that many musicians borrow and adapt ideas, and usually they come out so that only a very subtle critic can see what has happened. Because what one borrows goes through one’s own creative stomach and comes out something quite different. You know the old story about Handel? Somebody accused him of stealing an idea from another composer and he shrugged and said, ‘Yes, but what did he do with it?’ What is theft and what is influence, or homage? When Hoffmann suggests Mozart, as he does in some of his compositions, it is homage, not theft. So, do you have an influence?”
“If I’m going to talk to you in this way, I must insist on calling you Nilla.”
“I shall be honoured. And I shall call you Simon.”
“Well, Nilla, it is insulting to suggest that I am not a poet, but that I am presenting unquestionable poetry.”
“Insulting, perhaps, but I think it is true.”
“It suggests that I am a crook.”
“All artists are children of Hermes, the Arch-Crook.”
“Let me answer your earlier question: what sins would I like to commit? Very well; I have just the tiniest inclination toward imposture. I think it would be delightful to slip something not absolutely sincere and gilt-edged into a world where any sort of imposture is held in holy horror. The world of art is such a world. The critics, who themselves originate nothing, are so unforgiving if they catch an impostor! Indeed, the man whose life I am writing, and whose money is the engine behind the Cornish Foundation, once exposed an impostor—a painter—and that was the end of the poor wretch whose crime was to pretend that his masterly painting had been done by somebody long dead. Not the worst of crimes, surely?”
“So you are a crook, Simon? It makes you very interesting. And you are safe with me. Here: we drink to secrecy.”
The Doctor took her wineglass in her hand and slipped her right arm through Darcourt’s left. They lifted their arms, and drank—drained their glasses.
“To secrecy,” said Darcourt.
“So—who are you robbing?”
“If you had to prepare this libretto, who would you rob? A poet, of course, but not a very well-known poet. And he would have to be a poet contemporaneous with Hoffmann, and a fellow-spirit, or the work would ring false. And amid the work of that poet you would have to interpose a lot of stuff in the same spirit, because nobody wrote a libretto about King Arthur that is lying around, waiting for such an occasion as this. And the result would be—”
“Pastiche!”
“Yes, and the craft of the thing would be sewing up the joins, so that nobody would notice and denounce the whole thing as—”
“Pistache! Oh, you are a clever one! Simon, I think you and I are going to be great friends!”
“Let’s drink to that, Nilla,” said Darcourt, and once again they linked arms and drank. Some people at a nearby table were staring, but the Doctor gave them a look of such Boreal hauteur that they hastily bent their heads over their plates.
“And now, Simon—who is it?”
“I won’t tell you, Nilla. Not because I think you would blab, but because it is very important to me to be the only one who knows, and if I lose that I may lose everything. Nor do I suppose the name would mean anything to you. Not at all a fashionable poet, at present.”
“But a good one. When Modred is plotting Arthur’s murder, you make him say:
I felt cold when I read that.”
“Good. And you saw how it fits Schnak’s musical fragment? So genuine Hoffmann is mated with my genuine poet, and with luck we may get something truly fine.”
“I wish very much I knew your poet.”
“Then look for him. He’s not totally obscure. Just a little off the beaten path.”
“Is he this Walter Scott, about whom Powell spoke?”
“Anything good you can pinch from Scott is well known, and nothing but his best is of any use.”
“Surely you will be found out when the opera is produced.”
“Not for a while. Perhaps not for a long time. How much of a libretto do you actually hear? It slips by, as an excuse for the music, and to indicate a plot.”
“You have changed the plot Powell told us about?”
“Not much. I’ve tightened it up. An opera has to have a good firm story.”
“And the music ought to carry the story and make it vivid.”
“Well—not in Hoffmann’s day. In Hoffmann’s operas and those he admired you get a chunk of plot, usually in pretty simple recitative, and then the action stops while the singers have a splendid rave-up about their feelings. It’s the rave-up that makes the opera; not the plot. Most of the plots, even after Wagner, have been disgustingly simple.”
“Simple—and few.”
“Astonishingly few, Nilla, however you dress them up.”
“Some critic said there were not more than nine plots in all literature.”
“He might as well have said, in all life. It’s amazing, and humbling, how we tread the old paths without recognizing them. Mankind is wonderfully egotistical.”
“Lucky for mankind, Simon. Don’t grudge us our little scrap of individuality. You talk like that woman Maria Cornish, with her wax-and-seal. What path is she treading, do you think?”
“How can I tell till her full story is told? At which time I shall probably not be around to have an opinion.”
“She interests me very much. Oh, not what you are thinking. I don’t want to break up her marriage, though she is a lovely creature. But somebody will.”