“Maestro, I don’t really follow you.”
“I puzzle over it sometimes. So much talk since Dr. Freud about fathers who rouse erotic feeling in their daughters: never any talk about mothers who do the same with their sons. Does such one-sidedness seem really likely?”
“Where I grew up we had lots of incest. I knew one fellow, the son of a logger who was killed in the forest, and from twelve years of age onward he had to stand and deliver for his mother at least five times a week. When last I heard of him he had two brothers who were probably his sons. He never married; no necessity, I suppose. But that was in what the Renaissance would call very primitive conditions.”
“Don’t be too sure what the Renaissance would call it. But I speak of possibilities, not of completed acts. Possibilities—things that merely float in the air and are never brought to earth—can be extremely influential. It is the artist’s privilege to seize such possibilities and to make pictures of them, and such pictures are among the most powerful we have. What is a picture of the Madonna—and we have seen many of them this week—but a picture of a Mother and her Son.”
“A Holy Mother and the Son of God.”
“In the worlds of myth and art all mothers are holy because that is what we feel in the depths of our hearts. No, not the heart: that is where modern people think they feel. During the Renaissance they would have said, the liver. In the gut, in fact. Worship of the Mother, real or mythical, comes from the gut. Have you never wondered why in so many of those pictures Joseph, the earthly father, looks such a nincompoop? In the very best of them Joseph is not even permitted to enter. That is one of the unspoken foundation stones of our mighty Faith, Francis; the love affair between Mother and Son, and according to the Scriptures no other woman ever challenged her place of supremacy. But in these Madonnas there is nothing overtly erotic. There is in Bronzino; in that picture he cast off the Christian chains and showed truth as he saw it, of love despised and rejected.
“Have you really looked at the picture? You have looked at the artist’s achievement, but have you understood what he is saying? Venus holds an apple in one hand, and an arrow in the other. What does that say: I tempt you, and I have a wound for you. And look at all the secondary figures—the raving figure of Jealousy behind Cupid, speaking so clearly of despair, of love despised and rejected; the little figure of Pleasure who is about to pelt the toying lovers with rose leaves—see at his feet the thorns and those masks of the concealments and cheats of the world, marked with the bitterness of age; and who is that creature behind the laughing Pleasure—a wistful, appealing face, a rich gown that might almost blind us to her lion’s feet, her serpent’s sting, and her hands that offer both a honeycomb and something beastly—that must be the Cheat—Fraude, in Latin—who can so prettily turn love to madness. Who are the old man and the young woman at the top of the picture? They are plainly Time and Truth, who are drawing aside the mantle that shows the world what is involved in such love as this. Time—and his daughter Truth. A very moral picture, is it not?”
“Certainly as you interpret it, and as I have never heard anyone else explain it I cannot quarrel with you. But I’m horrified that Bronzino thought of love in that way.”
“So you might well be. But he didn’t, you know. The picture that has enthralled you in the National Gallery in London was half of a design that was meant to be two tapestries. One tapestry is completed and you can see it in Florence, in the Arazzi Gallery. It is called L’innocentia del Bronzino and it shows Innocence threatened by a dog (for Envy), a lion (for Fury), a wolf (for Greed), and a snake (for Treachery); Innocence is being powerfully protected by Justice, a female figure with a mighty sword, and there again you will see Time with his hourglass and his wings (because he flies, as every parrot knows) and he is taking the cloak from a naked girl, who of course is Truth, his daughter. So really the pictures ought to be called the Allegories of Truth and Luxury, and they are splendid Renaissance sermons. Together they tell us much about life and about love, as it appeared to a Christian mind refreshed by the newly found classicism.”
“Maestro, you remind me very much of my dear old Aunt Mary-Ben. She insisted that pictures were moral lessons, and told stories. But you should have seen the pictures she showed me to prove it.”
“I am quite sure I have seen many of them. Their morality is of their own time, and the stories they tell are sweet and pretty, suited to people who wanted a sweetly pretty, stunted art. But they are in a long tradition quite different from those innumerable landscapes and figure pictures, and abstracts painted by men who did not want to tell anybody anything except what their personal vision discovered in easily accessible things. The tradition that your aunt and I admire, in our different ways, is not to be brushed aside, nor should its works be discussed as though they belonged to the other, purely objective tradition. There is nothing in the least wrong with having something to say, and saying it as best you can, even if you are a painter. The best moderns often do it, you know. One thinks of Picasso. Think about him.”
It was impossible to think of Picasso, or of anything but immediate concerns, after Frank had read the letter which was sent on from Corpus and reached him two days before he was to return to England.
Dear Frank:
The news is that I am well and truly up the spout. Two months gone. I had meant to keep this jolly secret from the parents until you were back in England, but that hasn’t been possible. Not that I am all bagged out, and stumbling about in my bare feet like Tess of the D’Urbervilles, but some determined chucking up in the a.m. gave the show away. So there have been great family conferences, and after Daddy had had his prolonged and mournful say, and Mum had wept, the question was: what to do? My suggestion that I go to London and have the little intruder given what-for by a really competent doctor was shouted down. Daddy is a churchwarden and takes it greatly to heart. What they want is a wedding. Keep your hair on. They do not in the least regard you as an old black ram who has tupped their white ewe. (Shakes.) Indeed there were one or two nasty hints that they thought their white ewe might have been a not-unwilling collaborator. No, they think you a highly desirable parti, as they used to say in Mum’s day. When I said that I didn’t know if you would want to marry me they said that blood was thicker than water (messier, too) and we were cousins (which in other circs they might well have thought an objection), and there was a lot more to be said for it than just saving face. The Glassons, as you will have divined, have an awful lot of face and precious little else. So—what about it? Don’t waste time. Think hard and let me know. If my plan is to be taken, it must be done pretty soon.
Love, and all that that implies,
After a morning’s reflection Francis sent a telegram:
PROCEED WEDDING PLANS INSTANTER STOP WITH YOU IN A WEEK LOVE TO ALL
The eagerness in the telegram was not from the heart. Francis did not want to marry Ismay, or anybody; he discovered that what he really wanted was to be in love, but not tied down to marriage, of which his experience had not been particularly appetizing. Against abortion he had an insuperable Catholic objection, partnered by an equally insuperable Calvinist objection that sprang from his association with Victoria Cameron. How had it happened? Why had he not taken precautions? The answer to that was that he thought precautions unromantic, and with Ismay at Tintagel, everything must be romantic. A standing prick has no conscience; that was a piece of bleak wisdom he had acquired at Colborne College, and that would certainly be the way the Glassons would look at it. The fact that he had not meant it in that spirit at all simply could not be explained and was irrelevant to the situation. What was to be done? He couldn’t for a moment think of leaving Ismay in the lurch, quite apart from the fact that the Glassons and his own parents would probably hunt him down and kill him if he did such a dirty trick. His career, about which he had no firm plans but vast, unmoulded expectations, would be a ruin, for Ismay only fitted into that scene as The Ideal Beloved, not by any means as a wife and mother. He was to be the Grail Knight who ventured forth, returning to his lady only between adventures. But after all thoughts of this sort had been rehearsed again and again, the nagging feeling crept into his consciousness that he was really a very dim young man, considering that he was twenty-six and thought to be clever.