“Are you, sir? I hadn’t known.”
“Neither had I, till I met you today. But that’s what I am now. So you write to me as a godfather, which is a very good relationship, because it can mean nothing very much, or quite a lot. Just one thing, though; don’t mention that your father, or your godfather, has anything whatever to do with the profession.”
“I’m not really very sure what the profession is.”
“No, of course not. For the present, it’s just the profession of men who follow their noses and see whatever’s to be seen. I don’t think we want any blancmange, do you? Let’s take our mud coffee upstairs.”
Dear Uncle Jack:
Cornwall was really great, but I liked London better. I have never seen such pictures before. Our gallery in Toronto is small, and not very good, because we have no money to buy the really first-rate pictures. Not yet. Maybe it will come. I am trying now to find out about the new pictures, by the new men, and I went to as many private galleries in London as I could, and saw a lot of stuff that puzzled me. I might as well tell you, though, that the people who ran the galleries, or perhaps I should say the young men who showed off the pictures to possible buyers, were as interesting as the pictures themselves. They are so silky, and they talk so easily about tactile values and nouveau vague, and a lot of things that were away over my head. I hadn’t really understood what an ignoramus I am.
I’ve read a bit about the new stuff. Quite a lot, really. And I understand (or think I do) that a picture shouldn’t really be about anything. Not like those awful pictures that tell a story, or show upper-class kids feeding robins in the snow, or show you Hope, or the Soul’s Awakening or something that is intended to make you feel religious, or wistful. No, a picture is just patterns of line and colour arranged on a flat surface, because it’s no good kidding yourself that it isn’t flat, is it? I mean, perspective is all very fine if it’s mathematics, but if it tries to kid you that you are looking into depth it’s a cheat. Pictures are pure form and colour. Anyway, that’s what the new books say, and certainly that is what the silky chaps in the galleries say. Nix on emotion. Perhaps even nix on meaning anything except what is in front of one’s nose.
The trouble is that in some of the best of the new stuff emotion and meaning keep breaking in. Like this chap Picasso. I saw some of his stuff at one of the galleries, and if it’s just form and colour on a flat surface, I’m dreaming. It’s a statement of some sort. Not that I could tell you what the statement is, but I’m sure it’s there, and I’m sure that if I can stick with it long enough, I’ll find the meaning.
And Old Masters! Of course I’ve done my best with the new painting, but I admit I liked the Old Masters best. I think I know why. As you know, I was raised a Catholic—or perhaps not exactly raised one but a lot of Catholicism was bootlegged into my early days by a great-aunt, and unless I can drain every drop of it out of me—and I don’t seem to have much luck doing that—those Nativities and Adorations and Crucifixions and Transfigurations can never be simply clever arrangements of line, volume, and colour for me. They are statements, some strong, some not so strong, some fancy, some terribly plain. Were the old boys wrong? I try to think so, but it won’t work.
You are partly to blame, godfather. You say follow your nose, and if I do it takes me in some very unmodern and unfashionable directions. If I’m to see pictures the modern way, and no other way, I guess I’ll have to cut off my nose. And that would spite my face, wouldn’t it?
I don’t intend to spite my face, ever, or turn my back on old friends. Do you know of a caricaturist and illustrator called Harry Furniss? I owe a lot to him, or I should say to a book of his that was my Bible for a while. The other day, in a shop that sells drawings and pictures, I found an original sketch of an actor called Lewis Waller (never heard of him) by H.F. and I bought it, just for old sake’s sake, for ten pounds. Which is pretty steep for my pocket. But I couldn’t resist it. Just to have something H.F. had touched. How the silky boys would despise it, but it’s a wonder of artistic economy.
I have sore feet from trudging through the National Gallery, the Tate, the Wallace, the Victoria and Albert. All full of marvels. And what do you think? I have a favourite picture! I know I shouldn’t, and crushes on works of art are the worst kind of amateurism, but it absolutely stuns me. In the Nat. Gal. a big picture called An Allegory of Time by Bronzino; 1502-72 it says and otherwise I know nothing about him. But what a statement! And what is the statement and what is the allegory? I stare and stare and can’t figure it out.
Do you know it? What hits you first is the nude figure of a beautiful woman, superbly fleshly and naked as a jay-bird except for a coronet of jewels. I mean she isn’t just nude, which can be like a corpse on the embalmer’s table, but astonishingly naked. A youth who looks about fourteen stoops toward her from the left, kissing her, and it’s plain that her tongue is pushing between his lips—French kissing they call that, godfather—and if they are really mother and son it’s a pretty queer situation; furthermore his right hand is on her left breast, the nipple peeping between his index and second fingers, which it wouldn’t do unless the kiss meant more than just good-morning or something like that. His left hand is drawing her head toward him. On the right a stout baby, with a knowing smile, is winding up to throw some roses over them. So far, so good. But a vigorous, muscular old man, looking as though he wasn’t very pleased by the goings-on, is either drawing a blue curtain over this scene, or else he is revealing it. Can’t be sure. A woman is helping him, only her head visible, but beneath her and just behind Cupid’s out-thrust rump is another woman whose face is torn with pain—is it? or could it be jealousy? Behind the fat baby is a creature with a childlike but not an innocent face, and the body attaching to it ends in a serpent’s tail and the terrible feet of a lion. Two masks, one young and one old, lie on the ground.
What do you make of that fine thing? God only knows, at present, but I mean to make it my business to know, because it’s saying something, just as my great-aunt’s awful, skilful pictures of Cardinals joking and boozing say something. Those are saying that the Church is powerful and classy, but Bronzino says—something about a very different world, and a world I want to learn about. Nobody is going to tell me it’s just an arrangement of form and colour. It’s what my great-aunt calls A Good Lesson.
I am learning fast. I have already caught on that Bouguereau wasn’t really a great painter, though he was an astonishing technician. Bought another drawing yesterday, just some scratches of the Virgin and Child, with a scribble that might be one of the Magi. Cost me twenty-five pounds and I shall not be eating at the Café Royal tonight I assure you. But I’m sure it’s a Tiepolo. Maybe School Of.
Off on the boat-train in the morning. It was wonderful to see you. Shall write again soon.
Yr. affct. godson
Not bad for a lad of nineteen, thought Colonel John Copplestone, as he tucked the letter into a newly opened file.
By the time Francis had completed four years at the College of Saint John and the Holy Ghost (irreverently called Spook by all students and by faculty members when they were not obliged to be on their best behaviour) in the University of Toronto, the file in Colonel John Copplestone’s study was a fat one, and there was an additional file, not so fat, in which the Colonel’s old friend and an honoured member of the profession who simply signed himself J.B. reported now and then on things which Francis might not have told his godfather. J.B. was officially the Warden of the Students’ Union at the University of Toronto, but he was a great letter-writer, and although most of his letters were simply dutiful communications with his aged mother in Canterbury, quite a few of them went to Colonel Copplestone, and some of these went farther still, to the Chaps Who Knew. Even in a trusted, if not beloved, Dominion, things may happen about which inside information is welcome to the Secret Service of the mother country, and J.B. supplied a good deal of it.