The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [112]
In his death my father’s privacy was still respected and no one had laid dust-sheets in the studio. “Too Big?” stood as he had left it on the easel. More than half was finished. My father made copious and elaborate studies for his pictures and worked quickly when he came to their final stage, painting over a monochrome sketch, methodically, in fine detail, left to right across the canvas as though he were lifting the backing of a child’s “transfer.” “Do your thinking first,” he used to tell the Academy students. “Don’t muddle it out on the canvas. Have the whole composition clear in your head before you start,” and if anyone objected that this was seldom the method of the greatest masters, he would say, “You’re here to become Royal Academicians, not great masters. This was the way Ford Madox Brown worked, and it will be a great day for English art when one of you is half as good as he was. If you want to write books on Art, trot round Europe studying the Rubenses. If you want to learn to paint, watch me.” The four or five square feet of finished painting were a monument of my father’s art. There had been a time when I had scant respect for it. Lately I had come to see that it was more than a mere matter of dexterity and resolution. He had a historic position for he completed a period of English painting that through other circumstances had never, until him, come to maturity. Phrases, as though for an obituary article, came to my mind—“. . . fulfilling the broken promise of the young Millais . . . Winterhalter suffused with the spirit of Dickens . . . English painting as it might have been, had there not been any Aesthetic Movement . . . the age of the Prince Consort in contrast to the age of Victoria . . .” and with the phrases my esteem for my father took form and my sense of loss became tangible and permanent.
No good comes of this dependence on verbal forms. It saves nothing in the end. Suffering is none the less acute and much more lasting when it is put into words. In the house my memories had been all of myself—of the countless homecomings and departures of thirty-three years, of adolescence like a stained tablecloth—but in the studio my thoughts were of my father and grief, nearly a week delayed, overtook and overwhelmed me. It had been delayed somewhat by the strangeness of my surroundings and the business of travel, but most by this literary habit; it had lacked words. Now the words came; I began, in my mind, to lament my father with prose cadences and classical allusions, addressing, as it were, a funeral oration to my own literary memories, and sorrow, dammed and canalized, flowed fast.
For the civilized man there are none of those swift transitions of joy and pain which possess the savage; words form slowly like pus about his hurts; there are no clean wounds for him; first a numbness, then a long festering, then a scar ever ready to reopen. Not until they have assumed the livery of the defence can his emotions pass through the lines; sometimes they come massed in a wooden horse, sometimes as single spies, but there is always a Fifth Column among the garrison ready to receive them. Sabotage behind the lines, a blind raised and lowered at a lighted window, a wire cut, a bolt loosened, a file disordered—that is how the civilized man is undone.
I returned to the house and darkened the rooms once more, relaid the dust-sheets I had lifted and left everything as it had been.
V
The manuscript of Murder at Mountrichard Castle lay on the chest of drawers in my club bedroom, reproaching me morning, evening and night. It was promised for publication in June, and I had never before disappointed my publishers. This year, however, I should have to ask grace for a postponement. I made two attempts on it, bearing the pile of foolscap to an upper room of the club which was known as the library and used by the elder members for sleeping between luncheon and tea.