Art – A Fable.

Once upon a time there was a well-dressed and intellectually cultivated civil servant named M. Mortimer. He lived a comfortable life, and was well provided with every luxury the modern world affords to people disinclined to question the ethicality of aristocracy. He was remarkable for two things; which were, his unremarkable life, and the astonishing circumstances of his death.

You see, it is a peculiarity of the uppermost echelons of society that they flatten a man’s personality in equal measure as they round his physique; and M. Mortimer was indeed very round, so it stands to reason that he was also very flat. He delighted to let his tongue run away with him at elegant soirées, and would discourse upon every subject under the sun in such a way that everyone quickly came to recon him eminent and distinguished, and no one remembered a word he had said. His loquacity was unbounded; and still I regret to inform you that I cannot remember so much as the topic or tone of a single one of his declamations – always excepting one unforgettable incident which I shall return to soon. But I can speculate. I imagine he talked about the comparative merits of nuclear energy and wind turbines. I imagine he talked about finances and fiscal integrity. I imagine he talked about liberalism and conservatism, and the president of the United States, and about wars in the Middle East, and the evident evils of socialism, and the evident merits of capitalism, and the unhappiness of our own capitalist society. On any one of these topics, he would have expressed a thousand pretty sentiments and perfect distinctions that you have heard so many times that they would go straight over your head for sheer predictability. I assume these must have been the kinds of things he talked about; because it was a similarly stale topic that he was talking about the one time his conversation rose from mere cold perfection to true memorability. It was in the crystalline living room of Madame N., a faux-French marchioness who claimed to have come over as a refugée from the Revolution – the chronology of her story is confessedly muddled; it is after all the 21st century – though she had somehow risen to the pinnacle of material splendour since. She lived in a palace of a house in H–––shire: everything in it was exquisitely expensive. The door knocker was made of solid gold – frequently stolen and frequently replaced – the door of ebony, the windows were stained with subtle patterns and blendings, the window ledges were made of marble. Her coffee table must have been two hundred years old, golden, enameled, dazzling: her floor was a dizzying tangle of Mozarabic lacework: the ceiling rose in fathomless arches and vaulted above the heads of the guests in a most dizzying manner. The very tea seemed to glitter; and altogether it was the seventh heaven of human achievement. To this palatial abode Madame N. had invited everyone of note in England, including government ministers and millionaires and distinguished foreigners of all kinds. She had even invited the king, though he had declined to attend. And there in the midst stood M. Mortimer, surrounded by a ring of guests under an indescribable chandelier that hung over his head as India hangs over the empty oceans; and I need not tell you what he was doing. “Art!” he cried – though even on this instance, his words were not entirely memorable: I merely approximate – “Art!” (He swung his majestic jowl across the room, glancing passionately at the phials and astrolabes and fretwork and finery that surrounded him on every side) “Art! What is it? Since the dawn of time men have been asking this question. Since first our simian ancestors swung low from their arboreal mounts to grace the earth we hold so dear, this postulation has been posed, and this query has been questioned. For art is something mysterious; it is something ineffable; it is something inexpressible; it is something supreme and sublime. For what is art, after all, but a spark of divinity lighted upon a humble speck of dust, blossoming into beauty? What is art, I say, but the breath of an archangel wafting unexpectedly through the minds of mortals? What is art, but-” Here he was distracted by a oily looking Romanian guest, who cut in quietly, with a thick accent, “Eh, bot what this, this ‘ard’?” At once M. Mortimer’s face lit up and his mouth gaped with promise – for a moment; then it faltered, and the glow in his cheeks dissipated, and his eloquence was gone. “Why, it’s just a word for – why, everyone knows what ‘art’ means; I was just explaining what it’s like. For to what shall I compare it? Shall I –” But if he had hoped to resume his ecstatic expostulations, he was disappointed, for as it so happened, there were six Romanian guests, huddled over what appeared to be the remnants of an antique toaster – they were perhaps the oddest element of this otherwise high-brow assemblage; and the remaining five, taking courage from their companion, chorused implacably, “No, what this mean, what ‘art’ mean?” And M. Mortimer, with a sinking feeling, saw that five hundred pairs of eyes were glued on him, big with expectation and determined to see how he would answer his Romanian antagonists. There was no getting around it. “Well,” he began, beads of sweat already forming on his ample brow as in his mind he threw up clouds of words in search of a simple answer to the question – “art is of course the act of creating something…”

Here one of the Romanians cried out with gleeful relief, “Oh, that me, I make toaster! I make lots toaster for everyone!” and, to everyone’s surprise, began pulling greasy toasters of all sizes and states of completion out of his voluminous travelling cloak, lining them up on the golden coffee table and even holding them up for the admiration of the other guests. No one had expected this: they would surely have been offended had they not been so thrown by it.

 “…creatively!” boomed M. Mortimer, who sensed that he was beginning to lose the attention of his audience. “It must be done with originality; and it must be done for no other purpose than pleasure and delight,” but the audience had begun to sense the humour of his position, and one pert young lady cut in, “Ah, so I suppose this simple table here is not art; it was made to keep our cups off the floor.”

Everyone laughed. M. Mortimer went a shade redder. “W-well no, it’s not that simple; there is an aesthetic dimension to the table too; and anyhow, it is art because it is beautiful, anything beautiful is art – beauty is art” (he was trying to regain conviction with these lapidic apothegms.) But in came another impertinent interloper with his hand swinging out the window into the cool night air, “Say, but is that cloud out there art?” With considerable difficulty, M. Mortimer lumbered through the crowd to the window and stuck his head out. There was a pause, and then a muffled voice of cold precision came back over his shoulder – “It’s… a cloud.”

“Well I think it’s exquisite.”

“I think it’s fair to say that it is a distinctly unremarkable cloud.”

“You think so? Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

“This is silly. If you want. If you think it’s beautiful call it art.”

“Then I say, in my eyes those toasters are -“

“NOT ART!” boomed M. Mortimer, wrestling valiantly with the marbled window frame before extracting himself with an almighty sound of cracking marble and a cataclysm of fragmented glass.

 “Well why not?”

“BECAUSE THEY’RE BLUMIN’ TOASTERS!”

“And why should that matter?”

“BECAUSE…. BECAUSE…” His face was now as red as a Bolshevik flag, and no less menacing. He seemed to rise into the air in a rage, and unclear clarificatory words began to spill from his mouth like foam from the jaws of a rabid dog. The guests surged back from around him, as though he were about to explode. He seemed to swell and rise high into the air, until – the bubble burst, and he collapsed with an terrifying howl of, “Holy saint Isidore, pray for meeeeee!”

At once he melted into a puddle of flesh on the floor, his cry trailing off into a wail, until it broke upon a sob. For the first time that stupendous soul had stumbled upon a topic that no one really understands, and had been argued out of countenance. It had ruined him utterly.

How that soirée ended I do quite remember. Everyone was somewhat dazed; we must have slowly filtered out. For the next few days we heard nothing about M. Mortimer. We did not know even whether he was dead or alive. We got on with our business, and tried not to think when the next big event might be. The soirée was on Saturday. On Thursday a rumour flew through the market places and halls that M. Mortimer, that most respectable and worldly of bulks, had become a monk. A grosser absurdity could not be imagined: no one believed it, of course, but everyone repeated it. The most surprising thing, however, was that two days later, the news was actually confirmed, by an utterly indubitable witness. It was no joke; the man really was fasting and praying in a little stone cell over in the next village. The word reached every ear in town in no time, and people who had no business in the market began to appear without a word of explanation. By mid-afternoon everyone in the town was in the public square, murmuring to each other in whispers, with the kind of gloomy expressions and sombre silence that precede or follow an important funeral. We set out, en masse, at about four o’clock – no one needed to ask where we were going. At about seven, after three hours of walking, we found the monastery, and were let in, all two hundred, by the shell-shocked abbot. We walked tersely through the stone corridors until we found the right door. Those of us who were lucky enough to squeeze our heads into it saw what can only be described as the wreckage of a colossus. A cold, stone room, with nothing but a stone bed and an unglazed window for furbishings; and him in the midst. This was high society itself, abject and in horsehair. Seven days had done much to alter him. He who was the veriest bullfrog of a gentleman was now as lean as a rake; his cloths hung limp from his emaciated clavicles and cascaded from his too distinct spine. His cheeks were so sunken you could see down to purgatory through them, and his famous jowl was now nothing more than a cavity above the angular line of his jawbone. All about him were strewn open books, of all shapes and sizes, all colours and descriptions. They were dictionaries. And every one of them was opened to the same page: somewhere towards the end of the letter ‘A’; and every one of them was covered in red crosses and strikethroughs and interminable footnotes. M. Mortimer did not seem to notice us as we entered. He was kneeling in an awkward stoop with his eyes closed praying; and  his lips moving faintly and painfully, as though he had not drunk water for many days. His breathing was rough, and his skin of his face was deathly pale and grievously contorted. So little life was left in him a solemnity seemed to sanctify the whole room; and for a while it completely escaped my mind that two hundred people were crowded behind me. We stood there and watched, and God knows what each man felt in his own heart. The sun set and no one saw it. Still he struggled through his silent prayer. Some time later his lips stopped moving altogether; and though he did not slump or jerk, we all knew that the soul had left this penitent son of the world for good. Many hours later we quietly dispersed.

In our village we tell this story seldom, and to very few. But whenever we tell it we always confess, as thought it were an article of faith, that that last harrowed breath that left those lips carried with it on silent wings to the winds one single, deafening monosyllable – Art.