Nor devils, nor sins. And none of our aspiring spiritualities, and, of course, none of our horrible, nauseating disgusts—because they’re the complement of being spiritual, they’re the tails to its heads. You couldn’t have had Homer writing “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame”. Though, of course, with Shakespeare, it may have been physiological; the passion violent and brief, and then the most terrible reaction. It’s the sort of thing that colours a whole life, a whole work. Only of course one’s never allowed to say so.
All that one isn’t allowed to say!’ He laughed. Pamela also laughed. ‘But physiology or no physiology,’ Fanning went on, ‘he couldn’t have written like that if he’d lived before the great split—the great split that broke life into spirit and matter, heroics and diabolics, virtue and sin and all the other accursed antitheses. Homer lived before the split; life hadn’t been broken when he wrote. They’re complete, his men and women, complete and real; for he leaves nothing out, he shirks no issue, even though there is no tragedy. He knows all about it—all.’ He laid his hand again on the statue. ‘And this God’s his portrait. He’s Homer, but with the Etruscan smile. Homer smiling at the sad, mysterious, beautiful absurdity of the world. The Greeks didn’t see that divine absurdity as clearly as the Etruscans.
Not even in Homer’s day; and by the time you get to any sculptor who was anything like as accomplished as the man who made this, you’ll find that they’ve lost it altogether. True, the earliest Greeks’ God used to smile all right—or rather grin; for subtlety wasn’t their strong point. But by the end of the sixth century they were already becoming a bit too heroic; they were developing those athlete’s muscles and those tiresomely noble poses and damned superior faces. But our God here refused to be a prize-fighter or an actor-manager. There’s no terribilità about him, no priggishness, no sentimentality. And yet without being in the least pretentious, he’s beautiful, he’s grand, he’s authentically divine. The Greeks took the road that led to Michelangelo and Bernini and Thorwaldsen and Rodin. A rake’s progress. These Etruscans were on a better track.
If only people had had the sense to follow it! Or at least get back to it. But nobody has, except perhaps old Maillol. They’ve all allowed themselves to be lured away. Plato was the arch-seducer. It was he who first sent us whoring after spirituality and heroics, whoring after the complementary demons of disgust and sin. We needs must love—well, not the highest, except sometimes by accident—but always the most extravagant and exciting. Tragedy was much more exciting than Homer’s luminous pessimism, than this God’s smiling awareness of the divine absurdity. Being alternately a hero and a sinner is much more sensational than being an integrated man.
So as men seem to have the Yellow Press in the blood, like syphilis, they went back on Homer and Apollo; they followed Plato and Euripides. And Plato and Euripides handed them over to the Stoics and the Neo-Platonists. And these in turn handed humanity over to the Christians. And the Christians have handed us over to Henry Ford and the machines. So here we are.’
Pamela nodded intelligently. But what she was chiefly conscious of was the ache in her feet. If only she could sit down!
But, ‘How poetical and appropriate,’ Fanning began again, ‘that the God should have risen from the grave exactly when he did, in 1916! Rising up in the midst of the insanity, like a beautiful, smiling reproach from another world. It was dramatic. At least I felt it so, when I saw him for the first time just after the War. The resurrection of Apollo, the Etruscan Apollo. I’ve been his worshipper and self-appointed priest ever since. Or at any rate I’ve tried to be.
But it’s difficult.’ He shook his head. ‘Perhaps it’s even impossible for us to recapture . . .’ He left the sentence unfinished and, taking her arm, led her out into the great courtyard of the Villa. Under the arcades was a bench. Thank goodness, said Pamela inwardly. They sat down.
‘You see,’ he went on, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped, ‘you can’t get away from the things that the God protests against. Because they’ve become a part of you. Tradition and education have driven them into your very bones. It’s a case of what I was speaking about just now—of the things that have nothing to do with you coming by force of habit to have everything to do with you. Which is why I’d like you to get Apollo and his Etruscans into your system while you’re still young. It may save you trouble. Or on the other hand,’ he added with a rueful little laugh, ‘it may not. Because I really don’t know if he’s everybody’s God.
He may do for me—and do, only because I’ve got Plato and Jesus in my bones. But does he do for you? Chi lo sa? The older one grows, the more often one asks that question. Until, of course, one’s arteries begin to harden, and then one’s opinions begin to harden too, harden till they fossilize into certainty. But meanwhile, chi lo sa? chi lo sa? And after all it’s quite agreeable, not knowing. And knowing, and at the same time knowing that it’s no practical use knowing—that’s not disagreeable either. Knowing, for example, that it would be good to live according to this God’s commandments, but knowing at the same time that one couldn’t do it even if one tried, because one’s very guts and skeleton are already pledged to other Gods.’
‘I should have thought that was awful,’ said Pamela.
‘For you, perhaps. But I happen to have a certain natural affection for the accomplished fact. I like and respect it, even when it is a bit depressing. Thus, it’s a fact that I’d like to think and live in the unsplit, Apollonian way. But it’s also a fact—and the fact as such is lovable—that I can’t help indulging in aspirations and disgusts; I can’t help thinking in terms of heroics and diabolics. Because the division, the splitness, has been worked right into my bones. So has the microbe of sensationalism; I can’t help wallowing in the excitements of mysticism and the tragic sense. Can’t help it.’ He shook his head. ‘Though perhaps I’ve wallowed in them rather more than I was justified in wallowing—justified by my upbringing, I mean. There was a time when I was really quite perversely preoccupied with mystical experiences and ecstasies and private universes.’
‘Private universes?’ she questioned.
‘Yes, private, not shared. You create one, you live in it, each time you’re in love, for example.’ (Brightly serious, Pamela nodded her understanding and agreement; yes, yes, she knew all about that.) ‘Each time you’re spiritually exalted,’ he went on, ‘each time you’re drunk, even. Everybody has his own favourite short cuts to the other world. Mine, in those days, was opium.’
‘Opium?’ She opened her eyes very wide. ‘Do you mean to say you smoked opium?’ She was thrilled. Opium was a vice of the first order.
‘It’s as good a way of becoming supernatural,’ he answered, ‘as looking at one’s nose or one’s navel, or not eating, or repeating a word over and over again, till it loses its sense and you forget how to think. All roads lead to Rome. The only bother about opium is that it’s rather an unwholesome road. I had to go to a nursing home in Cannes to get disintoxicated.’
‘All the same,’ said Pamela, doing her best to imitate the quiet casualness of his manner, ‘it must be rather delicious, isn’t it? Awfully exciting, I mean,’ she added, forgetting not to be thrilled.
‘Too exciting.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s the trouble. We needs must love the excitingest when we see it. The supernatural is exciting. But I don’t want to love the supernatural, I want to love the natural. Not that a little supernaturalness isn’t, of course, perfectly natural and necessary. But you can overdo it. I overdid it then. I was all the time in t’other world, never here. I stopped smoking because I was ill. But even if I hadn’t been, I’d have stopped sooner or later for aesthetic reasons. The supernatural world is so terribly baroque—altogether too Counter-Reformation and Bernini. At its best it can be Greco. But you can have too much even of Greco. A big dose of him makes you begin to pine for Vulca and his Apollo.’
‘But doesn’t it work the other way too?’ she asked. ‘I mean, don’t you sometimes long to start smoking again?’ She was secretly hoping that he’d let her try a pipe or two.
Fanning shook his head. ‘One doesn’t get tired of very good bread,’ he answered. ‘Apollo’s like that. I don’t pine for supernatural excitements. Which doesn’t mean,’ he added, ‘that I don’t in practice run after them. You can’t disintoxicate yourself of your culture. That sticks deeper than a mere taste for opium. I’d like to be able to think and live in the spirit of the God. But the fact remains that I can’t.’
‘Can’t you?’ said Pamela with a polite sympathy. She was more interested in the opium.
‘No, no, you can’t entirely disintoxicate yourself of mysticism and the tragic sense. You can’t take a Turvey treatment for spirituality and disgust. You can’t. Not nowadays. Acceptance is impossible in a split world like
