What’s Bred in the Bone

That was the making of Francis, said the Daimon Maimas.

–You are not gentle in your methods, brother, said the Lesser Zadkiel.

–Not always, but I am often subtle. It was I, of course, who nudged Francis to visit the zoo, and I made sure he had a good look at the monkeys.

–A bad moment for Letztpfe

–Letztpfe

–And that was the fame that Ruth predicted? said the Lesser Zadkiel.

–Oh, by no means. I can do better than that, said the Daimon Maimas.

The downfall of Letztpfe

Saraceni and Francis had, between them, in the year past, completed a substantial amount of work, some of which was ambitious. Bigger and bigger pictures were making their way to the wine merchants’ cellars—pictures so large the canvases had to be dismounted from their stretchers, and packed around the insides of the big barrels, carefully wrapped to protect them from the wine. The stretchers and the old nails that belonged to the pictures travelled in two large bags of golf clubs, which Prince Max had added to his luggage. These were ambitious pictures of battle scenes, and a number of portraits of minor historical figures, all greatly improved by Saraceni and also by Francis, who was trusted with increasingly significant work. What was to become of Francis during the Meister’s long absence? The day before he left, Saraceni told him.

“You have done well, Corniche, and you have done it much quicker than I thought you would. The explosion of Letztpfe

“Look here; it is, as you see, a triptych, an altar-piece of fair size in three panels that hung in the chapel here before it was done over in the great Baroque style. It is a wreck, of course. It has been standing for at least two hundred years in one of the i

So, shortly before Christmas of 1938, Francis found himself the virtual master of Düsterstein. The family rooms, as well as the great rooms of state, were transformed by dust-sheets and muslin wraps for the chandeliers into the habitations of ghosts. One small room was left for his use, and there he sat and ate his meals when he was not busy in the shell-grotto. He took walks in the grounds, squelching over mossy paths under weeping trees. Another man might have found it melancholy, but Francis welcomed the solitude and the dimness, for he was turned in upon himself and wanted no distraction, no invitation to play. He was seeking his picture.

The philosophy of Saraceni, as distinguished from the avarice and opportunism of Saraceni, was not something he had learned as Amalie learned her lessons. He had absorbed it, and ingested it, and had made it part of his own wholeness. What was so plainly unworthy in the Meister he regarded with amusement; he was not such a fool as to suppose that great men do not have their foibles, and that such flaws might not be great ones. He had consumed the wheat and discarded the chaff, and the wheat was now bone of his bone. It was his belief, not his lesson.

What did he now believe, at the end of a toilsome and sometimes humiliating apprenticeship? That a great picture must have its foundation in a sustaining myth, which could only be expressed through painting by an artist with an intense vocation. He had learned to accept and cherish his vocation, which was none the less real because it had been reached by such a crooked path. He had worked in the shell-grotto as a man under orders, but now he was to work under no orders but his own, even though he must express himself in a bygone mode of painting. But what was his picture, the masterpiece which would conclude his apprenticeship, to be?

Rooted in a myth, but what myth? In the tangle of mythology, the cosmic bedroom farce and vulgar family wrangles of the gods of Olympus or their diminished effigies as conceived by the Romans? Never! In the finer myth of the Christian world, as seen in a thousand forms in the Age of Faith? Catholicism he certainly possessed, but it was still the sweet Catholicism of Mary-Ben rather than that of the rigorous Church Fathers. In the myth of the greatness of Man, as the Renaissance had asserted, or the myth of Man Diminished and Enchained as it appeared to the Age of Reason? What about Romanticism, the myth of the I