“You mean it might run up to—say, a thousand?”
“Many thousands. There would be no point in doing it any way but the best way, and the best way always runs into money. When I had done my work you would have some enthusiastic illustrations of the Grail Legend, if that is what you want.”
That effectively concluded the conversation, though there were further courtesies and assurances of mutual esteem. The House Committee was by no means displeased. It had done something, something no previous committee had done in many years. It could make a report on what it had done. So far as the pictures were concerned it really did not care if they were restored or not. The Union was, after all, a great school for budding politicians and civil servants, and this was how politicians and civil servants worked: they consulted experts and ate lunches and worked up a happy sense of behaving with great practicality. But practicality was against spending much money on art.
Francis, however, was in a high state of excitement, and with the full concurrence of the President—who was glad to have Saraceni taken off his hands, once the issue of the pictures had been settled—he invited the little man to dine with him that evening at the Randolph Hotel.
“Quite clearly, Mr. Cornish, you were the only member of the committee who knew anything about pictures. You also showed keen interest when I spoke of the influence of the original painter on the restorer. Now I must tell you once again that I meant nothing at all mystical by that. I am no spiritualist; the dead do not guide my brush. But consider: in the world of music many composers, when they have completed an opera, rough out the plan of the overture and give it to some trusted, gifted assistant, who writes it so much in the style of the master that experts cannot tell one from t’other. How many passages in Wagner’s later work were written by Peter Cornelius? We know, pretty well, but not because the music reveals it.
“It is the same in painting. Just as so many of the great masters entrusted large portions of their pictures to assistants, or apprentices, who painted draperies, or backgrounds, or even hands so well that we cannot tell where their work begins and leaves off, it is possible today for me—I don’t say for every restorer—to play the assistant to the dead master and paint convincingly in his style. Some of those assistants, you know, painted copies of masterworks for people who wanted them, but the master did not emphasize that when he presented his bill. And today it is very hard to tell some of those copies from originals. Who painted them? The master or an assistant? The experts quarrel about it all the time.
“I am the heir, not to the masters—I am properly modest, you observe—but to those gifted assistants, some of whom went on to become masters themselves. You see, in the great days of what are now so reverently called the Old Masters, art was a trade as well. The great men kept ateliers which were in effect shops, where you could go and buy anything that pleased you. It was the Romanticism of the nineteenth century that raised the painter quite above trade and made him scorn the shop—he became a child of the Muses. A neglected child, very often, for the Muses are not maternal in the commonplace sense. And as the painter was raised above trade, he often felt himself raised above craftsmanship, like those poor wretches who painted the frescoes we were looking at earlier today. They were full up and slopping over with Art, but they hadn’t troubled to master Craft. Result: they couldn’t carry out their ideas to their own satisfaction, and their work has dwindled into some dirty walls. Sad, in a way.”
“You don’t think much of the Pre-Raphaelites.”
“The ones with the best ideas, like Rossetti, could hardly draw, let alone paint. Like D.H. Lawrence, in our own time. He had more ideas than any half-dozen admired modern painters, but he couldn’t draw and he couldn’t paint. Of course, there are fools who say it didn’t matter; the conception was everything. Rubbish! A painting isn’t a botched conception.”
“Is that what’s wrong with modern art, then?”
“What’s wrong with modern art? The best of it is very fine.”
“But so much of it is so puzzling. And some of it’s plain messy.”
“It is the logical outcome of the art of the Renaissance. During those three centuries, to measure roughly, that we call the Renaissance, the mind of civilized man underwent a radical change. A psychologist would say that it changed from extraversion to introversion. The exploration of the outer world was partnered by a new exploration of the inner world, the subjective world. And it was an exploration that could not depend on the old map of religion. It was the exploration that brought forth Hamlet, instead of Gorboduc. Man began to look inside himself for all that was great and also—if he was honest, which most people aren’t—for all that was ignoble, base, evil. If the artist was a man of scope and genius, he found God and all His works within himself, and painted them for the world to recognize and admire.”
“But the moderns don’t paint God and all His works. Sometimes I can’t make out what they are painting.”
“They are painting the inner vision, and working very hard at it when they are honest, which by no means all of them are. But they depend only on themselves, unaided by religion or myth, and of course what most of them find within themselves is revelation only to themselves. And these lonely searches can quickly slide into fakery. Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision, Mr. Cornish. Look at those ruined frescoes we were examining this morning; the people who painted those—Rossetti, Morris, Burne-Jones—all had the inner vision linked with legend, and they chose to wrap it up in Grail pictures and sloe-eyed, sexy beauties who were half the Mother of God and half Rossetti’s overblown mistresses. But the moderns, having been hit on the head by a horrible world war, and having understood whatever they can of Sigmund Freud, are hell-bent for honesty. They are sick of what they suppose to be God, and they find something in the inner vision that is so personal that to most people it looks like chaos. But it isn’t simply chaos. It’s raw gobbets of the psyche displayed on canvas. Not very pretty and not very communicative, but they have to find their way through that to something that is communicative—though I wonder if it will be pretty.”
“It’s hell for anybody who thinks of being an artist.”
“As you do? Well—you must find your inner vision.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do. But it doesn’t come out in the modern manner.”
“Yes, I understand that. I don’t get on very well with the modern manner, either. But I must warn you: don’t try to fake the modern manner if it isn’t right for you. Find your legend. Find your personal myth. What sort of thing do you do?”
“Might I show you some of my stuff?”
“Certainly, but not now. I must leave first thing in the morning. But I shall be back in Oxford before long. Exeter College wants to consult me about its chapel. I’ll let you know in plenty of time, and I shall keep some time for you. Where shall I send a note?”
“My college is Corpus Christi. I pick up letters there. But before you go, won’t you have another cognac?”
“Certainly not, Mr. Cornish. Some of the masters drank a great deal, but we assistants and apprentices, even three centuries afterward, must keep our hands steady. I won’t have another cognac, and unless you are certain that you are a master, you won’t have one either. We must be the austere ones, we second-class men.”
It was said with the ironic grin, but for Francis, suckled at least in part on the harsh creed of Victoria Cameron, it was like an order.
Late in the autumn, and not long after his meeting with Saraceni, Francis was surprised and not immediately pleased to receive the following letter: