‘The bottom shelf,’ he was saying, ‘is taken up by an Encyclopaedia in fourteen volumes. Useful, but a little dull, as is also Caprimulge’s Dictionary of the Finnish Language. The Biographical Dictionary looks much more promising. Biography of Men who were Born Great, Biography of Men who Achieved Greatness, Biography of Men who had Greatness Thrust upon Them, and Biography of Men who were Never Great at All. Then there are ten volumes of Thom’s Works and Wanderings, while the Wild Goose Chase, a Novel, by an anonymous author, fills no less than six. But what’s this, what’s this?’ Mr Scogan stood on tiptoe and peered up. ‘Seven volumes of the Tales of Knockespotch. The Tales of Knockespotch,’ he repeated. ‘Ah, my dear Henry,’ he said, turning round, ‘these are your best books. I would willingly give all the rest of your library for them.’
The happy possessor of a multitude of first editions, Mr Wimbush could afford to smile indulgently.
‘Is it possible,’ Mr Scogan went on, ‘that they possess nothing more than a back and a title?’ He opened the cupboard door and peeped inside, as though he hoped to find the rest of the books behind it. ‘Phooh!’ he said, and shut the door again. ‘It smells of dust and mildew. How symbolical! One comes to the great masterpieces of the past, expecting some miraculous illumination, and one finds, on opening them, only darkness and dust and a faint smell of decay. After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one’s mind; one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking. Still – the Tales of Knockespotch . . .’
He paused, and thoughtfully drummed with his fingers on the backs of the non-existent, unattainable books.
‘But I disagree with you about reading,’ said Mary. ‘About serious reading, I mean.’
‘Quite right, Mary, quite right,’ Mr Scogan answered. ‘I had forgotten there were any serious people in the room.’
‘I like the idea of the Biographies,’ said Denis. ‘There’s room for us all within the scheme; it’s comprehensive.’
‘Yes, the Biographies are good, the Biographies are excellent,’ Mr Scogan agreed. ‘I imagine them written in a very elegant Regency style – Brighton Pavilion in words – perhaps by the great Dr Lemprière himself. You know his classical dictionary? Ah!’ Mr Scogan raised his hand and let it limply fall again in a gesture which implied that words failed him. ‘Read his biography of Helen; read how Jupiter, disguised as a swan, was “enabled to avail himself of his situation” vis-à-vis to Leda. And to think that he may have, must have written these biographies of the Great! What a work, Henry! And, owing to the idiotic arrangement of your library, it can’t be read.’
‘I prefer the Wild Goose Chase,’ said Anne. ‘A novel in six volumes – it must be restful.’
‘Restful,’ Mr Scogan repeated. ‘You’ve hit on the right word. A Wild Goose Chase is sound, but a bit old-fashioned – pictures of clerical life in the fifties, you know; specimens of the landed gentry; peasants for pathos and comedy; and in the background, always the picturesque beauties of nature soberly described. All very good and solid, but, like certain puddings, just a little dull. Personally, I like much better the notion of Thom’s Works and Wanderings. The eccentric Mr Thom of Thom’s Hill. Old Tom Thom, as his intimates used to call him. He spent ten years in Tibet organizing the clarified butter industry on modern European lines, and was able to retire at thirty-six with a handsome fortune. The rest of his life he devoted to travel and ratiocination; here is the result.’ Mr Scogan tapped the dummy books. ‘And now we come to the Tales of Knockespotch. What a masterpiece and what a great man! Knockespotch knew how to write fiction. Ah, Denis, if you could only read Knockespotch you wouldn’t be writing a novel about the wearisome development of a young man’s character, you wouldn’t be describing in endless, fastidious detail, cultured life in Chelsea and Bloomsbury and Hampstead. You would be trying to write a readable book. But then, alas! owing to the peculiar arrangement of our host’s library, you never will read Knockespotch.’
‘Nobody could regret the fact more than I do,’ said Denis.
‘It was Knockespotch,’ Mr Scogan continued, ‘the great Knockespotch, who delivered us from the dreary tyranny of the realistic novel. My life, Knockespotch said, is not so long that I can afford to spend precious hours writing or reading descriptions of middle-class interiors. He said again, “I am tired of seeing the human mind bogged in a social plenum; I prefer to paint it in a vacuum, freely and sportively bombinating.”’
‘I say,’ said Gombauld, ‘Knockespotch was a little obscure sometimes, wasn’t he?’
‘He was,’ Mr Scogan replied, ‘and with intention. It made him seem even profounder than he actually was. But it was only in his aphorisms that he was so dark and oracular. In his Tales he was always luminous. Oh, those Tales – those Tales! How shall I describe them? Fabulous characters shoot across his pages like gaily dressed performers on the trapeze. There are extraordinary adventures and still more extraordinary speculations. Intelligences and emotions, relieved of all the imbecile preoccupations of civilized life, move in intricate and subtle dances, crossing and recrossing, advancing, retreating, impinging. An immense erudition and an immense fancy go hand in hand. All the ideas of the present and of the past, on every possible subject, bob up among the Tales, smile gravely or grimace a caricature of themselves, then disappear to make place for something new. The verbal surface of his writing is rich and fantastically diversified. The wit is incessant. The . . .’
‘But couldn’t you give us a specimen,’ Denis broke in – ‘a concrete example?’
‘Alas!’ Mr Scogan replied, ‘Knockespotch’s great book is like the sword Excalibur. It remains stuck fast in this door, awaiting the coming of a writer with genius enough to draw it forth. I am not even a writer, I am not so much as qualified to attempt the task. The extraction of Knockespotch from his wooden prison I leave, my dear Denis, to you.’
‘Thank you,’ said Denis.
CHAPTER XV
‘IN THE TIME of the amiable Brantôme,’ Mr Scogan was saying, ‘every debutante at the French Court was invited to dine at the King’s table, where she was served with wine in a handsome silver cup of Italian workmanship. It was no ordinary cup, this goblet of the debutantes; for, inside, it had been most curiously and ingeniously engraved with a series of very lively amorous scenes. With each draught that the young lady swallowed these engravings became increasingly visible, and the Court looked on with interest, every time she put her nose in the cup, to see whether she blushed at what the ebbing wine revealed. If the debutante blushed, they laughed at her for her innocence; if she did not, she was laughed at for being too knowing.’
‘Do you propose,’ asked Anne, ‘that the custom should be revived at Buckingham Palace?’
‘I do not,’ said Mr Scogan. ‘I merely quoted the anecdote as an illustration of the customs, so genially frank, of the sixteenth century. I might have quoted other anecdotes to show that the customs of the seventeenth and eighteenth, of the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries, and indeed of every other century, from the time of Hammurabi onward, were equally genial and equally frank. The only century in which customs were not characterized by the same cheerful openness was the nineteenth, of blessed memory. It was the astonishing exception. And yet, with what one must suppose was a deliberate disregard of history, it looked upon its horribly pregnant silences as normal and natural and right; the frankness of the previous fifteen or twenty thousand years was considered abnormal and perverse. It was a curious phenomenon.’
‘I entirely agree.’ Mary panted with excitement in her effort to bring out what she had to say. ‘Havelock Ellis says . . .’
Mr Scogan, like a policeman arresting the flow of traffic, held up his hand. ‘He does; I know. And that brings me to my next point: the nature of the reaction.’
‘Havelock Ellis . . .’
‘The reaction, when it came – and we may say roughly that it set in a little before the beginning of this century – the reaction was to openness, but not to the same openness as had reigned in the earlier ages. It was to a scientific openness, not to the jovial frankness of the past, that we returned. The whole question of Amour became a terribly serious one. Earnest young men wrote in the public prints that from this time forth it would be impossible ever again to make a joke of any sexual matter. Professors wrote thick books in which sex was sterilized and dissected. It has become customary for serious young women, like Mary, to discuss, with philosophic calm, matters of which the merest hint would have sufficed to throw the youth of the sixties into a delirium of amorous excitement. It is all very estimable, no doubt. But still’ – Mr Scogan sighed –
