CHAPTER THREE
Later that
afternoon Lord Handon, desiring as much to show off his house as to entertain
his guests in a relatively educative manner, took those of them who hadn't set
foot in it before on a brief tour of inspection, starting with the ground floor
and working up to the bedrooms in which each of them had been allocated a bed
for the night. Sarah Field expressed her
delight in and amazement at what the host had in store for them, whereas
Timothy Byrne, though intrigued by the scale of everything, remained somewhat
cooler and more objectively detached than the others, as though in an effort
not to be too impressed by anything, least of all by its scale or amount.
It was in the library, for instance, that he
acquired his first real glimpse of an aristocratic norm where books were
concerned - a glimpse, alas, which did little but confirm him in his low
opinion of aristocratic libraries generally!
Stretching some thirty yards along the length of an entire wall and
reaching to a height of about ten feet from the floor, the shelves of this
particular library were crammed full of rather cumbersome-looking
leather-backed tomes of ancient lineage, which had doubtless been handed down
from generation to generation of the Handon family line. There must have been upwards of 20,000 books
there, most of which had probably never been read, at least not by the present
owner, the 4th Viscount Handon. They had
probably just stood there for centuries, gathering dust. Only a tiny fraction of them, at best, would
have had their pages turned and perused in a thoroughly curious manner....
Though quite a number may well have served a brief reference purpose which the
owner felt it incumbent upon himself to engage in from time to time. Indeed, many of them were so large, so
weighty and lengthy, that it was inconceivable they could possibly serve any
other purpose than one of reference, since, even with all the time in the
world, such tomes would have taken months, if not years, to peruse
individually. For the most part, they
were simply decorative possessions which the viscount had considered it
expedient to hold-on to for family honour and to satisfy the scholarly
traditions of his class - extremely expensive possessions which would fetch a
tidy sum from any prospective buyer, if ever he or any of his descendants
decided to sell.
Oh, yes!
And as Timothy scanned the tightly packed shelves of cumbersome tomes,
he realized that their purchase could run into hundreds-of-thousands of
pounds. But that wasn't something by
which he intended to be unduly impressed.
On the contrary, he needed to keep his customary attitude to the
existence of such collections in mind - an attitude which, rather than being
impressed by them, tended towards their condemnation on grounds of excessive
materialism. As the Biblical proverb had
it: 'Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man
to enter the
No, it was perfectly obvious that they were
not the ears for his mouth, to paraphrase Nietzsche, but, given their stately
circumstances, would either be offended by what he said, as in the case of Lady
Pamela, or somewhat perplexed by it, as in the case of the more benign Lord
Handon, who nevertheless endeavoured, in his capacity of host, to remain as
receptive as possible. Still, one could
understand the human aspirations in the face of nature which had led to the
building of large country houses like Rothermore. Rather than risk being dwarfed by the
surrounding countryside, the aristocracy had sought to tame and dominate it as
best they could, and the erection of the largest possible houses had gone some
way towards satisfying that end. After
all, even the ancient aristocracy were human beings, not animals, and
consequently they reflected human aspirations towards the Divine Omega, no
matter how crudely or materialistically.
Even the viscount's great-great-great-grandfather would have had a
spirit of sorts and found it desirable to cultivate that spirit to at least
some extent, even if only to the rather limited extent of collecting thousands
of cumbersome books and filling his house with Greek or Roman statuary. For, as the library amply demonstrated, there
was no shortage of classical sculpture on display, though most of it was
undoubtedly derivative. In fact, it was
difficult not to stumble against various of the statues, statuettes, and busts,
as one gingerly wound one's way between the tables and chairs liberally
scattered along the length of Lord Handon's library, as though in anticipation
of a whole tribe of avid readers.
Doubtless a certain horror vacui had possessed the original
furnisher of this room, which duly resulted in its becoming virtually crammed
with possessions, both aesthetic and utilitarian. And the current owner had not rebelled
against the fashion of his ancestors but, if the comparative newness of one or
two of the chairs and tables was any indication, had succumbed to it with a few
materialistic additions of his own!
Well, judging by the amount of furniture already in the room, it was
pretty obvious that Lord Handon wouldn't be able to add much else to it in
future, not unless he either sold off most of what was already there or set
about filling up the interior space of certain other rooms - assuming, of
course, that they still had any such space left to fill. As yet, Timothy had only seen a couple of the
downstairs rooms, so he wasn't really in a position to judge. But what he had seen was more than enough to
make him pessimistic about the rest of the house, bathrooms and toilets not
excepted!
Yet, by an ironic paradox, it could also be
claimed that this urge to collect and fill one's rooms with expensive
possessions was a further indication of aristocratic man's desire not to be
dwarfed or smothered by nature, but to extend civilization to the extent he
could. The regrettable thing, however,
was that he could only extend it, for the most part, in materialistic terms,
not in terms, significant of the spiritual, which stood at the furthest remove
from sensuous nature. With him, it was
more a case of endeavouring to protect oneself against a greater evil with the
aid of a lesser good. Whereas it was
increasingly becoming the tendency of modern man to protect himself against a
lesser good with the aid of a greater good, which is to say, to bring forward
the direct cultivation of the spirit through meditation at the expense of its
indirect cultivation through culture. No
small distinction! But aristocratic man,
reflected Timothy, hadn't really been in a position to do any such thing, and
so the indirect cultivation of the spirit through culture was, as a rule, the
best that could be done.
And not generally the most elevated culture
either, if Lord Handon's library was anything by which to judge! One searched in vain, among the numerous
sculptures on display, for anything with a direct bearing on Christianity. Not a single statue, statuette, or bust of a
senior Church dignitary, not even of a pope or an archbishop, and no
reproductions of saints or evangelists either.
Except for some busts dedicated to the memory of various members of the
Handon line, the entire collection revolved around classical antiquity, with
reproductions of Roman emperors, Graeco-Roman deities, and one or two Greek
heroes, like Hercules and
Yet neither, it appeared, would the writings
of the great Christian mystics have appealed to this family. For the bookshelves were mainly dedicated to
the pagan authors of classical antiquity, especially the Romans, who figured
prominently on the lower shelves.
Possibly everything ever written and preserved for posterity by Sulla,
Cicero, Tetullian, Caesar, Scipio, Horace, Senneca, Juvenal, Catullus, Virgil,
Terence, and Pliny was to be found there, both in the original Latin and in
subsequent English, French, and German translations, reminiscent of the sort of
library favoured by that great sixteenth-century humanist, Michel de
Montaigne. By craning one's neck up to
the top two shelves at the far end of the library, it was just possible to
discern a few large depressing-looking bibles, again in various tongues, but
the eye soon encountered the beginnings of a series of books written not by the
Church Fathers, as one might vaguely have expected, but by medieval scholastics
of a classical turn-of-mind, whose interest in contemporary scientific
endeavour extended to a commentary on the Greek philosophers, and whose works
now sedately reposed beside the major philosophical achievements of Plato and
Aristotle. Farther along that same shelf
the subject of Greek philosophy was superseded by a series of large tomes on
alchemy, among them a number by Paracelsus, and beneath these the eye discerned
the complete plays of Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille, and Molière in rather old
but evidently valuable editions - probably the first or very nearly. Apart from a number of important literary
figures such as Chaucer, Dante, Montaigne, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Petrach, Cevantes,
Milton, Byron, and Goethe, the greater part of the remaining shelves was
taken-up with histories, memoirs, biographies, letters, philosophies, and books
on painting, architecture, graphics, landscape gardening, and sculpture. In fact, apart from a little modern history,
the only contribution the twentieth century seemed to make to Lord Handon's
library was in the realm of aesthetics, notably through art books dealing with
classical antiquity and the Renaissance.
Judging by the nature of the house itself, one might have thought the
Baroque would figure prominently. But,
try as he might, Timothy could discern no more than three works dedicated to
that stage of aesthetic evolution, and they were decidedly pre-war, suggesting
acquisition by the viscount's father or grandfather rather than by the current
owner himself. Thus apart from the
aforementioned histories and studies in classical and renaissance aesthetics,
the crisp spines and bright titles of which betrayed comparatively recent
purchase, the great majority of the books on display appeared to have been
inherited and retained in aristocratic tradition. Unless by some chance Lord Handon had a
second library elsewhere, it looked as though this collection was broadly
representative of his intellectual tastes - tastes which completely excluded
the modern! For even the newer books in
it had been written in the twentieth century about
pre-twentieth century activity, like the studies in classical art. As regards modern art, a complete blank. And as regards modern literature, the nearest
one came to it appeared to be half-a-dozen novels by Disraeli and a couple by
Lytton! Really, Timothy could hardly
believe his eyes, as he frantically scanned the shelves in search of
twentieth-century life. Not even a
Proust or a Gide or a Mann. Nothing! So far as this library went, the twentieth
century didn't exist. Evidently, Lord
Handon had little use for it. Or would
it be nearer the mark to say that it had little use for him?
It wasn't exactly a question one could ask
there and then, not, anyway, while the man in question was so fervently engaged
in explaining to both Sarah Field and Nigel Townley how his great-grandfather
had acquired the Venus statuette in imitation of Phidias by an unknown Roman
sculptor whilst serving as English ambassador to Italy at the time of its
discovery. A quite shapely statuette it
was too, but terribly nude and pagan! It
would have been of more interest to Timothy, just then, had someone inquired
how the family had come by the worn edition of the Marquis de Sade's 120 Jours
de Sodom, which reposed, beside a number of the master's other novels, on a
shelf just to the left of where he was now standing, slightly apart from the
small group of admiring statuette-gazers.
At least de Sade, for all his moral faults, had the virtue of seeing the
criminality in nature at close range, so to speak, and in not pretending that
it was really something else. There was
even a dash of the saint about him, albeit in a paradoxically negative kind of
way. For rather than turning towards God
and the spiritual with love, like a genuine saint, de Sade had elected to turn
against nature and the sensual with contempt, and thereby set about denigrating
it in the manner best known to posterity.
Hardly surprising, therefore, that he was condemned as a criminal and
regarded as an eccentric in an age of Rousseauesque fervour for
nature and Wordsworthian complacency in nature. His hatred of nature, and the rather extreme
manifestation it was increasingly to take, could hardly be described, under the
prevailing circumstances, as trendy. Yet
it served as an example of sorts to such negatively inclined 'saints', or
anti-saints, as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Huysmans, who were to bring the
anti-natural tradition of decadent writings to a much more refined pass later
in the century. But de Sade, it
appeared, was the only anti-saint Lord Handon's library contained, whether or
not its current owner appreciated the fact.
In all probability, thought Timothy, as he followed his fellow-guests
past the Venus statuette and on towards the exit, the novels by that notorious
French nobleman had mouldered on their shelf since virtually the time of their
purchase. The current viscount had
probably not even opened them. Or, if
perchance he had, he probably shut them again pretty quickly, fearing
contamination!
They passed out of the library and were, in
due course, introduced to most of the other rooms, including a large billiards
room in which a couple of lush green felt-topped tables, one full-size and the
other small, stood naked but for a cue resting on each. Apparently billiards and snooker were among
the host's favourite pastimes, which he sometimes played with himself, but more
often with friends of the family who came-in from nearby country houses to do noble
battle with him.
Neither of the two male guests accompanying
him on this particular tour of inspection, however, could admit to being
regular practitioners of either game, though Townley confessed to having played
a great deal of snooker in his youth - a confession which appeared to endow him
with a certain temporary distinction over the others in Lord Handon's eyes.
Yet, for Timothy, the most interesting
aspect of the billiards room was the arrangement of Ionic pilasters which
stretched the length of the walls at wide though regular intervals, endowing
the setting with a restrained classical elegance. Being fluted, they took on a symbolically
feminine character that sharply contrasted with the masculinity of the bare,
white Doric columns which stood at salient points in the room, more suggestive
of the interior of a Greek temple than of anything recreational. In fact, there was even space here for a few
statues of Greek athletes, and the wall nearest the full-size table had two
curved niches in it, at a distance of some four yards apart, each of which
contained a brightly-painted Greek vase of the type which Timothy must have
seen hundreds of photos of, during his pictorial investigations in the local
library, but had only once before beheld in the flesh, so to speak, and then in
the British Museum. Was this spectacle
any better or worse, he wondered?
Curiously, he thought worse. For
he had grown so accustomed to photographic reproductions of works of art ...
that he had come to value the reproduction above the original production. Lord Handon was perfectly entitled to his
vases, as to his sculptures, but he, Timothy Byrne, wouldn't have wanted them,
not even if they were offered to him free-of-charge. He preferred the spiritualization of the material
object to the material object itself, and was therefore more at home with
photos. These Greek vases were of course
beautiful, but they were even more beautiful, to Timothy's way of thinking, as
colour reproductions in some choice book on the subject. The actual object was somehow disappointing,
all too palpably there. He preferred his culture
at a Platonic remove, as it were, from real culture, raised above materialism
through spiritual sublimation. All these
sculptures and ceramics which Lord Handon possessed and evidently had need of,
to fill his immense house, would have been raised to a higher level, it seemed
to him, in photographic reproduction.
Rather than floundering about amidst bodies, as one did here, one would
be contemplating their abstracted spirit, at a safe remove from their physical
presence. And one would be experiencing
a higher level of culture - a level made possible thanks to the existence of
photography.
Yes, how logical evolution was! The further one evolved, the more spiritual
one became. Eventually one would even
dispense with photographic reproductions.
But not for a while yet, least of all within the foreseeable future. The twenty-first century would doubtless
continue to amass reproductions of the materialistic culture appertaining to an
earlier stage of civilized evolution, thereby indirectly furthering the cause
of its own spiritual culture. And
Timothy would continue to derive more pleasure from the latter than from the former
- of that he assured himself. In fact,
so much so that his facial expression, as he stood no more than a few feet from
the nearest Greek vase, must have communicated something of the disdain he was
feeling for the object to its owner, who casually remarked, by way of apology,
that it was a rather second-rate, first-century item purchased for a modest sum
by his grandfather, some decades ago.
Slightly taken aback by the host's unexpected intervention, and a little
ashamed of himself for having unwittingly betrayed his feelings on the matter,
Timothy blushed faintly and then burst into a forgiving smile. He could hardly reveal to the viscount what
had really been on his mind!
And so, following their brief but passably
educative tour of Rothermore House, the three first-time guests were led back
to the large drawing-room, where the rest of the gathering was still assembled,
and thereupon encouraged to have another drink, with the aged butler duly
officiating. Dinner, they were informed,
would commence at seven-thirty sharp, whether or not the remaining two invitees
had arrived. In the meantime, they were
to relax and simply get to know one another better. Which is what now proceeded to happen ... in
spite of their differences. Even the
drawing-room had certain lessons to teach, and Timothy, not least, was avid to
learn what he could from it!
