Sophie and the Sibyl (20 page)

‘
Sind Herr und Frau Lewes zu Hause
? Get along there then and announce us!’ He snatched Max’s card, slapped it down on the first maiden’s hand, and sent her scuttling off into the interior, her clogs scuffing the tiles. The other two lingered for a moment, wide-eyed, transfixed by Max’s curls as he removed his hat.

‘Real find, this place. They rented the cottage through the hotel. You know, Zum wilden Mann on the Marktplatz. Marian tells me that it reminds her of Goethe’s Gartenhaus in Weimar. That’s built in a little park, all vines and hedgerows. There’s a back door here, leading out into the fields and woods. And believe me, they go out walking, whatever the weather.’

But at that moment George Lewes interrupted the grand monologue, bounding towards them, arms flung wide, his universal bonhomie filling the hall. He ripped off their coats and gathered them in to Polly and the blazing fireside.

Max raised his eyes to greet the Sibyl. And now he saw her, as if for the first time. She rose, entwining her thin hands, slender and hesitant, nervous as a girl unused to company. The lace at the throat of her black, high-bodiced velvet dress matched the little lace cap perched on her opulent, grey-streaked hair. She gazed at Max, beseeching, her deeply lined face and massive features transfigured into beauty by the pleasure with which she clasped his hand. Max indicated the package.

‘Your great work, gnädige Frau, translated.’

She lowered her head in gratitude, and bowed. Max felt obscurely comforted, and understood. He laid the treasure on her table.

But there in those warm, low-ceilinged rooms, with the sound of church bells and children crying in the distance, Max once more found himself rocked, not by intellectual pretentiousness, comfortable waters he negotiated fearlessly, but by unfettered speculation on the nature of things, which left all known ports astern. Lewes and Carus had heard the Gospel according to Charles Darwin, seen the miracle of evolutionary theory in all its majesty, recognised this great and mighty wonder, and become not just passionate believers, but evangelists. Carus’s new translation of the
Origin of Species
formed the centre of the discussion. Surprisingly, Lewes defended the elderly Bronn, and forgave his shameless additions to the volume.

‘Bronn drew out the implications of Darwin’s theory. He saw what a ferocious blow the book had delivered to conventional religions and bigoted orthodoxies. What arrogance motivates the bishops to argue that we are descended from demigods and set just a little lower than the angels? We are animals. We behave like animals and we think like animals. All wars begin as fights over mates, territory and resources.’

‘Agreed,’ thundered Carus, ‘but he had no right to insert his own views into the book and attribute them to Darwin.’

Lewes appeared to view translation as something of a two-sided debate between the author and the translator. The Sibyl deliberately shifted the direction of the argument.

‘Darwin’s Doctrine of Development,’ she asserted, ‘created an epoch. There is no doubt of that, but to me, the Development Theory, and indeed all the other processes by which things come into being, still produces a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies beneath those processes.’

Max dipped a toe into the torrent.

‘But surely if we can reflect upon our origins, maybe even account for them, we are not subject to the inexorable laws of development and progression. We can choose not to be.’

‘And that,’ declared Carus, ‘is what distinguishes the civilised races from savages.’

‘Indeed,’ cried Lewes, digging in the pile of books scattered across the table. ‘And I have actually marked the passage in
The Descent of Man
, for he uses your words, Polly, your very words. Listen.

‘With savages the weak in body and mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone until the last moment . . . Thus the weak members of civilised society propagate their kind . . . the aid we feel impelled to give to the helpless is . . . the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but was subsequently rendered more tender and more widely diffused.’

Lewes closed the book and gazed at the Sibyl with unguarded affection.

‘I thought of you, Polly.
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused
.’

Carus, however, was not inclined to bow down before the Doctrine of Sympathy.

‘But sympathy may then signal the undoing of our race since it ensures the continuation of weakness. Perhaps the white races will sink while others rise.’

Here the arrival of teacups and cake intervened. The company sank into afternoon reflections. The maid bearing hot water stopped dead before Max as if her feet had taken root. Lewes gently relieved her of the kettle. The Sibyl watched this little drama, mightily amused, and then renewed the discussion.

‘Darwin feels, as I do, that sympathy represents the noblest part of our nature. Even as the unclouded light of truth streams in upon us, we are called not to neglect that higher moral life which impels us to strive towards the Perfect Right. We seek the True, the Just, the Good. That is our highest and most sacred calling, and we find our way towards this, our true destiny, through serving others.’

The old woman glowed with her own inner radiance. Her declaration affected the three men in different ways. Max sat incredulous and dumbfounded. Carus toned himself down and stroked his beard. Lewes pressed her hand gently. No one spoke for a moment. Max suspected that the Sibyl had a limited acquaintance with real vice, or else she would not disown the menace of damnation quite so cheerfully. Her hopeful assessment of human nature and the greatness of which we are capable, forever loving, tender and saturated in forgiveness, failed to take account of a more savage reality, which he sensed and feared. Max heard the brutal drumbeat beneath his otherwise civilised skin.

Then the Sibyl began to prophesy, her voice low, solemn and compelling.

‘That we should claim kinship with the beasts is not in question. And we know that the substance and object of all religion is altogether human. Divine wisdom is human wisdom. But to reject the despotism of religious systems is not to deny the holy power of all our most intimate and sacred bonds. That source of true living emotion, the heart of man itself, is sucked away from its rightful object, and given to the God who wants for nothing. But in our earnest search to discover what is Right, we need no incitement or support from above. He, to whom the Perfect Right is not holy for its own sake, will never be made to feel it sacred by religion.’

‘But, Madame, you argue on behalf of a natural morality that informs all social relations –’ rumbled Carus.

Max intervened.

‘No, you talk as if all men were brothers and had only to realise the necessity of loving one another to do it! That just doesn’t happen.’

He addressed Lewes and Carus directly, astounded at his own daring in contradicting the Sibyl.

‘And while it is quite clear that you all regard original sin as outmoded nonsense, simply declaring that it doesn’t exist never prevented slaughter on the streets. Surely, when you abandon the Christian faith you pull the right to insist on Christian morality out from under your own feet?’

‘I do not underestimate the difficulty of the human lot,’ replied the Sibyl, her Olympian calm floating above Max’s passionate objections, ‘but in whatever I have written I have tried to widen the English vision a little, and to rouse the imaginations of men to an understanding of those human claims that are the just demands of their fellow men. No matter how different or repulsive they may seem.’

And into the midst of this portentous statement scurried the smallest of the three bobbing maids, clutching a message. She curtsied to each member of the company in turn, and then handed the folded slip of paper to Lewes. He leaped up, delighted.

‘Polly, my love, we are all invited to the opera tomorrow night. And that includes you, Max. Herr Klesmer is in town, baying with desire to see his favourite author. Isn’t that marvellous!’

Max therefore had twenty-four hours in which to fester with confused indignation. He was mildly aware of the Darwin debate. He had even sat smoking beside Wolfgang, while the publisher corrected the proofs of various tracts, for and against, listening to his brother’s fulminations, without ever absorbing the arguments. For it is perfectly possible to saunter through life, especially if you are wealthy, young and in good health, taking the view that the intellectual controversies of the age are there for you to enjoy, dip into from time to time and ignore at your pleasure. He had peacefully nodded at Miss Gibbons’s breathless enthusiasm for the Development Theory as they careered round the ballroom in Homburg, accepting her torrent of evolutionary certainties as something peculiar, which occasionally poured forth from English spinsters. Above all, this rigorous discussion happened elsewhere, and did not affect him personally. Now it had. And without his consent.

Max simmered with unspoken disagreements. The Fall of the Roman Empire, in so far as he understood the causes of its slow demise, led him to believe that steam engines, gas lighting, new markets, numerous wars, and a general improvement in education and living standards, were no guarantee of national survival. Progress, far from being inevitable, remained a precarious business. The littleness of humankind, the meanness of our understanding, and the viciousness of our habits, both in modern Berlin and in Southern Gaul, during Lucian’s peaceful withdrawal into retirement, impressed him with their similarities. Lucian and the Sibyl, noble giants on fire with their misguided faith, walked the world, confident that Reason and Truth would triumph for all eternity. Max saw no grounds whatsoever for this benevolent optimism. The evidence supporting that ancient, unfashionable doctrine of innate evil, against which our better natures struggle if they can, galloped towards him, transformed into a host of grinning demons, waving banners. He passed an uncomfortable rainy morning in his hotel rooms, drinking coffee, smoking and staring at tiny patterns in the wallpaper.

Herr Klesmer and the sun arrived in the early afternoon. The musician stormed in, barely announced, his white mane shaking, and his head thrown back, like an orator reaching a climax. The peculiar manner of his entrance arrested Max in mid-stride. He had begun to pace from the fireplace to the furthest windows, from which he could see nothing but gabled roofs and yellowing trees. Max had last seen Klesmer plunging through the streets of Berlin, followed by a Bacchic train of admirers. Now the musician appeared once more, as if he had walked the world since then, gathering garlands of praise and prodigious roars of eulogy.

Klesmer froze in a dramatic attitude, his ferocious glare fixed upon Max, as if he was taking part in a game of charades, and had achieved the perfect pose for the tableau.

‘Good day to you, sir!’ He suddenly bowed, as an afterthought, then, holding his hat at a theatrical angle, he delivered his request.

‘I wish you to be on your guard tonight, sir. I am counting on your support, for there may well be trouble. I do not court controversy. But when a stand must be taken, I am fearless. I tell you, sir, fearless!’

Max bowed, hoping that the musician’s courage was thus sufficiently acknowledged.

‘Tonight you will witness Wagner’s sublime tale of passion and damnation,
The Flying Dutchman
! I am creating the performance tonight as the composer intended. There will be no interval. You will hear the music of the future –
das Kunstwerk der Zukunft
– uncensored, unfettered – the true musical drama of which Liszt and I have dreamed. An opera should not be a mere mosaic of melodies stuck together with no other method than that which is supplied by accidental contrast, no trite succession of ill-prepared crises, but an organic whole, which grows up and spreads, like a palm.’

At this point, casting his hat aside, Herr Klesmer flung his arms apart, indicating the huge spreading fractals of the Phoenix.

‘And the germ must be there from the first seething notes in the strings through to the triumphant catastrophe.’

He paused, hesitated, then declared:

‘But I have heard rumours that there will be opposition present. Of Carus I am quite certain. He will be bold in my defence if necessary. But Madame Lewes is fragile, sensitive. She is easily overwhelmed. I look to you, sir, to take care of this great lady, and to anticipate her anxieties, to remove her from the theatre should the public become unrestrained, chaotic, abandoned.’

Max, intensely surprised by this fervent intrusion, stood leaning against his desk.

‘But Herr Lewes will be present, if, as you fear –’

‘Ha! Lewes! He understands nothing. He comes only to jeer. Wagner demands submission, dedication; the whole soul of his audience must be laid at his feet. To hear truly is to believe. And you are the younger man. You must stand strong, sir, and take his place at her right hand. I shall hold you to account. And now I bid you farewell.’

He whirled out of the rooms with a flourish, leaving Max in a dense cloud of his own cigarette smoke. Had he hallucinated the entire interview? And how had Wagner escaped the clutches of Weimar? Wagnerismus seemed even more controversial in Bismarck’s Germany than the arguments smouldering around Mr. Charles Darwin, the gist of which had long been accepted by German scientists and intellectuals. Indeed, Wagner’s operas, consigned in many places to the Index Expurgatorius of theatre managers, had so dramatically failed to please the general public that Max had never heard one. Now the composer’s supporters, organised, militant, began to move outwards from Weimar into other towns and theatres, seeking converts and champions. Klesmer and Liszt, linked like hounds fixed upon a scent, roved the salons and concert halls hunting down their audience and bullying them, until they surrendered.