The roads around it were certainly bad, but they had always been bad so long as they had been roads, and the people who used them accepted them as facts of their existence. If the greater world wished to approach Blairlogie, it could very well do so by the train which made the sixty-mile journey from Ottawa over a rough line, much of it cut through the hardest granite of the Laurentian Shield, a land mass of mythic antiquity. Blairlogie saw no reason to be easily accessible.
The best of the town’s money and business was firmly in the hands of the Scots, as was right and proper. Below the Scots, in a ranking that was decreed by money, came a larger population of Canadians of French descent, some of whom were substantial merchants. At the bottom of the financial and social heap were the Poles, a body of labourers and small farmers from which the upper ranks drew their domestic servants. Altogether the town numbered about five thousand carefully differentiated souls.
The Scots were Presbyterian, and as this was Canada at the turn of the century their religious belief and their political loyalty were the important conditioning factors in their lives. These Presbycerians might have had some trouble in formulating the doctrine of predestination or foreordination which lay deep in their belief, but they had no practical difficulty in knowing who was of the elect, and who belonged to a creation with a less certain future in Eternity.
The French and the Poles were Roman Catholics, and they too knew precisely where they stood in relation to God, and were by no means displeased with their situation. There were a few Irish, also Catholics, and some odds and ends of other racial strains-mongrels of one sort and another-who had mean churches suited to their eccentricities, dwindling toward a vacantstore temple that changed hands from one rampaging evangelist to another, in whose windows hung gaudy banners displaying the Beasts of the Apocalypse, in horrendous detail. There were no Jews, blacks, or other incalculable elements.
The town could have been represented as a wedding-cake, with the Poles as the large foundation layer, bearing the heaviest weight; the French, the middle layer, were smaller but central; the Scots were the topmost, smallest, most richly ornamented layer of all.
And
“I don’t want to over-value the litcle thing.”
‘Oh, I see: you don’t want to fall into the sin of pride? Well, don't shrink from pride only to fall into hypocrisy. You’ve had a dog’s lite, Corniche, brought up half Catholic and half Protestant, in a wretched hole where you got the worst of both those systems of double-dealing.”
“Easy, Meister! I have detected a good Catholic in you.”
“Perhaps, but when I am working as an artist I banish all char. Catholicism has begotten much great art; Protestantism none at all-not a single painting. But Catholicism has fostered art in the very teeth of Christianity. The Kingdom of Christ, if it ever comes, will contain no art; Christ never showed the least concern with it. His church has inspired much but not because of anything the Master said. Who then was the inspirer? The much-maligned Devil, one supposes. It is he who understands and ministers to man’s carnal and intellectual self, and art is carnal and intellectual.”
“You work under the wing of the Devil, do you?”
“I must, if I am to work at all. Christ would have had no time for a man like me. Have you noticed how, in the Gospels, He keeps so resolutely clear of anybody who might be suspected of having any brains? Good-hearted simpletons and women who were little better than slaves, those were His followers. No wonder Catholicism had to take a resolute stand in order to include people of intellect and artists; Protestantism has tried to reverse the process. Do you know what I should like, Corniche?”
“A new revelation?”
“Yes, that might come of it. I should like a conference to which Christ would bring all His saints, and the Devil would bring all his scholars and artists, and let them have it out.”
“Who would judge the result?” “That’s the sticker. Not God, certainly, as the father of both leaders.”
&
“I am sure your colleague will be glad to give his reasons,” said Huygens, the peacemaker. “If they are truly convincing, we shall call back the experts from Britain, who will make scientific appraisals.”
“} don’t think you will need to do that,” said Francis. “The picture has been put forward as a van Eyck, and s¢ cercainly is nor by van Eyck, either Hubertus of Jan. Flave any of you gen « visited the zoo lately?”
What was this about the z00? Was the young man erfling a them?
“A detail of the painting tells us all we need to know,” Francis continued. “Observe the monkey who hangs by his tail from the bars of Hell, in the upper left-hand corner of the piccure. What is he doing there?”
“It is an iconographical detail that one might expect in such a picture,” said Letztpfennig somewhat patronizingly toward the young man, glad to defend the monkey. “The chained monkey is an old symbol of the fallen mankind that preceded the coming of Christ. Of souls in Hell, in fact. He belongs with the defeated devils.”
“But he is hanging by his tail.”
“Since when do monkeys not hang by their tails?”
“They did not do so in Ghent in van Eyck’s day. That monkey is a Cebus capucinus, a New World monkey. The chained monkey of iconography is the Macacus rhesus, the Old World monkey. Such a monkey as that, a monkey with a prehensile tail, was unknown in Europe until the sixteenth century, and I need not temind you that Hubertus van Eyck died in 1426. The painter, whoever he is-or was-wanted to complete his composition with a figure, not too commanding, in that particular spot, so the chained monkey had to be hanging by his tail from the bars of Hell. There are several examples of both Cebus capucinus and Macacus rhesus informatively labelled in your very good local zoo. That is why J mentioned it.”
&
“You seem to want to create a new Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,” said one of the best, a large man of Ukrainian antecedents named George Bogdanovich. ‘You can’t get away with it, y'know, Buy some pictures. Sure, we're glad to sell pictures. But don’t try to be a big influence. Just leave us alone. We know what we're doing.”
What they were doing was respectable enough, but it did not appeal to Francis. They were utterly in love with the Canadian landscape, and tried to come to terms with it in a variety of ways, some of which, Francis knew, were admirable, and a handful splendid. “But no people ever appear in your pictures,” he said, again and again. “Don’t want ’em,” said Bogdanovich, answering for all. “The people stink. Most of ’em, anyway. We paint the country, and maybe after a while the people will learn about the country from the pictures, and stink a little less. Got to begin with the country.
That’s consolation and exaltation. We have to do it our own way.”
There could be no quarrelling with that. There were painters, of course, who followed the newest, fashionable trends. Without being pressed, they would explain that they dipped deep into their own Unconscious-a word that was new to Francis in this context-and drew up conceptions that were expressed in pictures that might be gaudy and rather messy rearrangements of what they saw, or felt; some were carefully wrought arrangements of colours, usually dingy. These messages from the Unconscious were deemed to be infinitely precious, evoking in sensitive viewers some hint of an Unconscious deeper than any they could explore unaided. But Francis was not impressed. What had Ruth said? “You can’t talk to the Mothers by getting them on the phone. They have an unlisted number.” These delvers clearly did not have the number. It was such fakers of a chthonic inner vision whom Francis grew to detest above all others.
So Francis had to content himself with buying pictures that he thought good, but did not much like. Without being quite sure how it happened he found that he was taking pictures from painters who lived in inaccessible places, and keeping them in his
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