CHAPTER VII

 

IT was Press Day.  The critics had begun to arrive; Mr Albermarle circulated among them with a ducal amiability.  The young assistant hovered vaguely about, straining to hear what the great men had to say and trying to pretend that he wasn’t eavesdropping.  Lypiatt’s pictures hung on the walls, and Lypiatt’s catalogue, thick with its preface and its explanatory notes, was in all hands.

       ‘Very strong,’ Mr Albermarle kept repeating, ‘very strong indeed!’  It was his password for the day.

       Little Mr Clew, who represented the Daily Post, was inclined to be enthusiastic.  ‘How well he writes!’ he said to Mr Albermarle, looking up from the catalogue.  ‘And how well he paints!  What impasto!’

       Impasto, impasto – the young assistant sidled of unobtrusively to the desk and made a note of it.  He would look the word up in Grubb’s Dictionary of Art and Artists later on.  He made his way back, and as though by accident, into Mr Clew’s neighbourhood.

       Mr Clew was one of those rare people who have a real passion for art.  He loved painting, all painting, indiscriminately.  In a picture-gallery he was like a Turk in a harem; he adored them all.  He loved Memling as much as Raphael, he loved Grünewald and Michelangelo, Holman Hunt and Manet, Romney and Tintoretto; how happy he could be with all of them!  Sometimes, it is true, he hated; but that was only when familiarity had not yet bred love.  At the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition, for example, in 1911, he had taken a very firm stand.  ‘This is an obscene farce,’ he had written then.  Now, however, there was no more passionate admirer of Matisse’s genius.  As a connoisseur and Kuntsforscher, Mr Clew was much esteemed.  People would bring him dirty old pictures to look at, and he would exclaim at once: Why, it’s an El Greco, a Piazzetta, or some other suitable name.  Asked how he knew, he would shrug his shoulders and say: But it’s signed all over.  His certainty and his enthusiasm were infectious.  Since the coming of El Greco into fashion, he had discovered dozens of early works by that great artist.  For Lord Petersfield’s collection alone he had found four early El Grecos, all by pupils of Bassano.  Lord Petersfield’s confidence in Mr Clew was unbounded; not even that affair of the Primitives had shaken it.  It was a sad affair: Lord Petersfield’s Duccio had shown signs of cracking; the estate carpenter was sent for to take a look at the panel; he had looked.  ‘A worse-seasoned piece of Illinois hickory,’ he said, ‘I’ve never seen.’  After that he looked at the Simone Martini; for that, on the contrary, he was full of praise.  Smooth-grained, well-seasoned – it wouldn’t crack, no, not in a hundred years.  ‘A nicer slice of board never came out of America.’  He had a hyperbolical way of speaking.  Lord Petersfield was extremely angry; he dismissed the estate carpenter on the spot.  After that he told Mr Clew that he wanted a Giorgione, and Mr Clew went out and found him one which was signed all over.

       ‘I like this very much,’ said Mr Clew, pointing to one of the thoughts with which Lypiatt had prefaced his catalogue.  ‘“Genius,”’ he adjusted his spectacles and began to read aloud, ‘“is life.  Genius is a force of nature.  In art, nothing else counts.  The modern impotents, who are afraid of genius and who are envious of it, have invented in self-defence the notion of the Artist.  The Artist with his sense of form, his style, his devotion to pure beauty, et cetera, et cetera.  But Genius includes the Artist; every Genius has, among very many others, the qualities attributed by the impotents to the Artist.  The Artist without genius is a carver of fountains through which no water flows.”  Very true,’ said Mr Clew, ‘very true indeed.’  He marked the passage with his pencil.

       Mr Albermarle produced the password.  ‘Very strongly put,’ he said.

       ‘I have always felt that myself,’ said Mr Clew.  ‘El Greco, for example …’

       ‘Good morning.  What about El Greco?’ said a voice, all in one breath.  The thin, long, skin-covered skeleton of Mr Mallard hung over them like a guilty conscience.  Mr Mallard wrote every week in the Hebdomadal Digest.  He had an immense knowledge of art, and a sincere dislike of all that was beautiful.  The only modern painter whom he really admired was Hodler.  All others were treated by him with a merciless savagery; he tore them to pieces in his weekly articles with all the holy gusto of a Calvinist iconoclast smashing images of the Virgin.

       ‘What about El Greco?’ he repeated.  He had a peculiarly passionate loathing of El Greco.

       Mr Clew smiled up at him propitiatingly; he was afraid of Mr Mallard.  His enthusiasms were no match for Mr Mallard’s erudite and logical disgusts.  ‘I was merely quoting him as an example,’ he said.

       ‘An example, I hope, of incompetent drawing, baroque composition, disgusting forms, garish colouring and hysterical subject-matter.’  Mr Mallard showed his old ivory teeth in a menacing smile.  ‘Those are the only things which El Greco’s work exemplifies.’

       Mr Clew gave a nervous little laugh.  ‘What do you think of these?’ he asked, pointing to Lypiatt’s canvasses.

       ‘They look to me very ordinarily bad,’ answered Mr Mallard.

       The young assistant listened appalled.  In a business like this, how was it possible to make good?

       ‘All the same,’ said Mr Clew courageously, ‘I like that bowl of roses in the window with the landscape behind.  Number twenty-nine.’  He looked in the catalogue.  ‘And there’s a really charming little verse about it:

 

                                                     “O beauty of the rose,

                                                                   Goodness as well as perfume exhaling!

                                                                   Who gazes on these flowers,

                                                                   On this blue hill and ripening field – he knows

                                                                   Where duty leads and that the nameless Powers

                                                                   In a rose can speak their will.”

 

Really charming!’  Mr Clew made another mark with his pencil.

       ‘But commonplace, commonplace.’  Mr Mallard shook his head.  ‘And in any case a verse can’t justify a bad picture.  What an unsubtle harmony of colour!  And how uninteresting the composition is!  That receding diagonal – it’s been worked to death.’  He too made a mark in his catalogue – a cross and a little circle, arranged like the skull and cross-bones on a pirate’s flag.  Mr Mallard’s catalogues were always covered with these little marks: they were his symbols of condemnation.

       Mr Albemarle, meanwhile, had moved away to greet the new arrivals.  To the critic of the Daily Cinema he had to explain that there were no portraits of celebrities.  The reporter from the Evening Planet had to be told which were the best pictures.

       ‘Mr Lypiatt,’ he dictated, ‘is a poet and philosopher as well as a painter.  His catalogue is a – h’m – declaration of faith.’

       The reporter took it down in shorthand.  ‘And very nice too,’ he said.  ‘I’m most grateful to you, sir, most grateful.’  And he hurried away, to get to the Cattle Show before the King should arrive.  Mr Albemarle affably addressed himself to the critic of the Morning Globe.

       ‘I always regard this gallery,’ said a loud and cheerful voice, full of bulls and canaries in chorus, ‘as positively a mauvais lieu.  Such exhibitions!’  And Mr Mercaptan shrugged his shoulders expressively.  He halted to wait for his companion.

       Mrs Viveash had lagged behind, reading the catalogue as she slowly walked along.  ‘It’s a complete book,’ she said, ‘full of poems and essays and short stories even, so far as I can see.’

       ‘Oh, the usual cracker mottoes,’ Mr Mercaptan laughed.  ‘I know the sort of thing.  “Look after the past and the future will look after itself.”  “God squared minus man squared equals Art-plus-life times Art-minus-Life.”  “The Higher the Art the fewer the morals” – only that’s too nearly good sense to have been invented by Lypiatt.  But I know the sort of thing.  I could go on life that for ever.’  Mr Mercaptan was delighted with himself.

       ‘I’ll read you one of them,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘“A picture is a chemical combination of plastic form and spiritual significance.”’

       ‘Crikey!’ said Mr Mercaptan.

       ‘“Those who think that a picture is a matter of nothing but plastic form are like those who imagine that water is made of nothing but hydrogen.”’

       Mr Mercaptan made a grimace.  ‘What writing!’ he exclaimed; ‘le style c’est l’homme.  Lypiatt hasn’t got a style.  Argal – inexorable conclusion – Lypiatt doesn’t exist.  My word, though.  Look at those horrible great nudes there.  Like Caraccis with cubical muscles.’

       ‘Samson and Delilah,’ said Mrs Viveash.  ‘Would you like me to read about them?’

       ‘Certainly not.’

       Mrs Viveash did not press the matter.  Casimir, she thought, must have been thinking of her when he wrote this little poem about Poets and Women, crossed genius, torments, the sweating of masterpieces.  She sighed.  ‘Those leopards are rather nice,’ she said, and looked at the catalogue again. ‘“An animal is a symbol and its form is significant.  In the long process of adaptation, evolution has refined and simplified and shaped, till every part of the animal expresses one desire, a single idea.  Man, who has become what he is, not by specialization, but by generalization, symbolizes with his body no one thing.  He is a symbol of everything from the most hideous and ferocious bestiality to godhead.”’

       ‘Dear me,’ said Mr Mercaptan.

       A canvas of mountains and enormous clouds like nascent sculptures presented itself.

       ‘“Aerial Alps”’ Mrs Viveash began to read.

      

                                                                  ‘“Aerial Alps of amber and snow,

                                                                    Junonian flesh, and bosomy alabaster

                                                                    Carved by the wind’s uncertain hands …”’

 

       Mr Mercaptan stopped his ears.  ‘Please, please,’ he begged.

       ‘Number seventeen,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘is called “Woman on a Cosmic Background.”’  A female figure stood leaning against a pillar on a hilltop, and beyond was a blue night with stars.  ‘Underneath is written: “For one at least, she is more than the starry universe.”’  Mrs Viveash remembered that Lypiatt had once said very much that sort of thing to her.  ‘So many of Casimir’s things remind me,’ she said, ‘of those Italian vermouth advertisements.  You know – Cinzano, Bonomelli and all those.  I wish they didn’t.  This woman in white with her head in the Great Bear….’ She shook her head.  ‘Poor Casimir.’

       Mr Mercaptan roared and squealed with laughter.  ‘Bonomelli,’ he said; ‘that’s precisely it.  What a critic, Myra!  I take off my hat.’  They moved on.  ‘And what’s this grand transformation scene?’ he asked.

       Mrs Viveash looked at the catalogue.  ‘It’s called “The Sermon on the Mount’,’ she said.  ‘And really, do you know, I rather like it.  All that crowd of figures slanting up the hill and the single figure on the top – it seems to me very dramatic.’

       ‘Mr dear,’ protested Mr Mercaptan.

       ‘And in spite of everything,’ said Mrs Viveash, feeling suddenly and uncomfortably that she had somehow been betraying the man, ‘he’s really very nice, you know.  Very nice indeed.’  Her expiring voice sounded very decidedly.

       ‘Ah, ces femmes,’ exclaimed Mr Mercaptan, ‘ces femmes! They’re all Pasiphaes and Ledas.  They all in their hearts prefer beasts to men, savages to civilized beings.  Even you, Myra, I really believe.’  He shook his head.

       Mrs Viveash ignored the outburst.  ‘Very nice,’ she repeated thoughtfully.  ‘Only rather a bore …’ Her voice expired altogether.

       They continued their round of the gallery.