19 JUNE 1936, Page 12

QUERKES, FARMONGER, AND DUSP

By SIEGFRIED SASSOON

" yES, I've known some fairly complete failures in my day," remarked Aunt Eudora, " but the three most ambitious men I ever knew never succeeded in becoming known at all, except to a small circle of friends who only half believed in them and gradually lost all confidence in their unfinished masterpieces. So one can't even say that they are forgotten, because they never emerged from obscurity. Yet any one of the trio would have told you that it was only a matter of time before all three of their names would be immortal."

" What were their names ? " I enquired.

" Raphael Qucrkes, James Farmonger, and Henry Dusp—a painter, a composer, and a poet. They were all in their middle fifties when I first knew them, and they all vaguely regarded themselves as reincarnations. Far- monger was Beethoven, Dusp was Goethe, and Querkes was Tintoretto. From this you may imagine that although they failed, they did it :In a big scale. I myself can only remember two lines from Dusp's Epic, The Everlasting Vision. They aren't very good lines, but they epitomised what those three men felt :

"Fame is the dazzling zenith of our plans, And Wisdom wings us with refulgent hope."

Querkes adopted that as the motto for an enormous picture (also called The Everlasting Vision) on which he worked for twenty years."

" What did the picture represent ? "

" Well, dear, the trouble was that he tried to make it represent almost everything. As far as I remember it was a sort of mixture of the Sistine Chapel and the drop- curtain at the Coliseum. All the celebrated characters in history were visible, including the Holy Trinity. Poor old Querkes used to stand in front of it and say, ' When I've finished pulling it together and putting in the detail, I'm going to broaden it out and balance the elemental masses of the composition.' But he never did. It remained a gigantic muddle. The last time I saw him he was working on Homer's beard."

" Did you see much of Querkes ? "

" Oh yes ; I used to sit to him. He put me in as Joan of Arc, and then put me in again, with a different nose, as one of the Muses—Melpomene, I think it was. Hours and hours I spent in that huge studio of his. I remember it all quite clearly whenever I smell turpentine."

" What do you see now, when you remember it ? "

" I see Querkes, on the top of a high step-ladder with his thumb through a very large palette, seldom uttering a word, and working very slowly, as though Time didn't exist and Eternity was all that mattered. And then Farmonger comes in and tells us that he's just been to the Albert Hall to hear Wagner conduct ; and I remember him saying that we could take his word for it that we shouldn't hear much more of Wagner's music. ' The man's a mere self-advertiser. I regard his operas as a parcel of unmitigated clap-trap.' That was Farmonger's verdict. He said that sublimity was what the world wanted. Nothing else would be any good in the long run. ' Think of the first subject of my Symphony—Da- Da—dee—Da ; Tum, Tum : if that isn't great, I'll eat my hat ! ' He used to call it ' The Eternal Affirmation' motif—Humanity affirming its faith in the Future ; but for the life of me I can't remember a note of it now. Yet I've heard it often enough.

" Every Sunday evening the three of them used to meet in Querkes' studio and talk about how they were going to take posterity by storm. Dusp would read a Canto or two of his Epic with tremendous conviction—` the longest and most profound poem ever penned ' he called it ; while Raphael Querkes gazed absent-mindedly at the largest and most overcrowded picture ever painted. Poor old Raphael was rather a modest sort of man ; he didn't brag about his immortality, but he meant getting it ; and he once confided in me that he felt fairly sure that The Everlasting Vision would rank with Tintoretto's Last Judgment. He felt that it had the same grandeur of conception. . . .

" When Dusp had read himself to a standstill, it was Farmonger's turn to show what he was made of. At one end of the studio there was a large organ with a hydraulic apparatus for blowing. Querkes was a rich man, and he'd installed the instrument for Farmonger's special benefit. He usually began with his ' Mont Blanc Fantasia,' a work which started as though butter wouldn't melt in its mouth, slowly infuriated itself into a symphonic thunderstorm, and concluded seraphically with the voix-celeste stop affirming angelic sublimities. When it was all over, Guinevere Pomfret, with tears trickling down her face, invariably told him that he was a divine genius of the first water."

" Who was she ? "

" There now ! To think that you've never heard of Guinevere Pomfret I At the time I'm speaking of— nearly sixty years ago—many people considered her the finest gloomy actress on the London stage.

" She made quite a success as Lady Macbeth—no one had ever spoken the lines so slowly before and doom was in every syllable, so to speak. But after that she went on being Lady Macbeth in every part she played and the public became impatient. Poor Guinevere, her ' first entries ' were really rather magnificent, but she couldn't keep it up, and when the big moments' came she overdid them. But Querkes' Sunday evenings suited her down to the ground. No one ever made a joke, and everything was large and dimly lit and intense.

"She felt that she was the tragic Muse of these three great geniuses, and they felt it too. Gazing solemnly at The Everlasting Vision (Querkes had put her in as the Spirit of Destiny, with a pair of enormous blue and gold wings) she used to murmur—' How strange to think that we four are sitting here together—all four of us here in the same room ! ' And then she would turn to me and remark, in vibrant tones, ' When you are an old, old woman you will probably be the only person left in the world who can tell people about us.' And Farmonger would blow a cloud of cigar smoke and say Yes, I suppose we shall be a sort of legend in sixty years' time.' " " My goodness, Aunt Eudora, it's a bit pathetic, isn't it ? You telling me about them, and me never having heard of them before ! I'm almost afraid to ask you what became of them and their grandiose delusions 1 " " Well, dear, I'm thankful to say that they never allowed themselves to realise the truth. I think Guinevere began to lose faith after about ten years. of Sunday evenings, but they kept it up wonderfully, talking about art being long and life slow, and so on. And her own career had become a matter of waiting for the great play which someone would someday write for her, with the big part which would really give her full scope for her power of conveying a sense of doom. And then she died of heart failure while watching the 1887 Jubilee."

" What happened to the others ? "

" They were all drowned on the same day. It was in the fine summer of 1893 ; Querkes had bought one of the Scilly Isles, and he had a small sailing yacht. They all went out one day and never returned. The newspapers described it as a fatality,' but it seemed to me provi- dential. Three elderly men of eccentric habits'—that was their epitaph in the Press ! "

" What happened to their works ? "

" I always understood that they intended to bequeath them to the nation. But they all of them died intestate, and there were no relations, so I suppose nothing was done about it. The canvas of The Everlasting Vision is probably rolled up somewhere ; what happened to Dusp's Epic and Farmonger's Symphony heaven only knows ! "

" I suppose they have become part of The Everlasting Vision, Aunt Eudora. After all, their creators did believe in what they were trying to do, and I suppose that counts for something.

"All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist; Not its semblance, but itself;"

as Browning said."

" Well, dear, let us hope that Browning was right. But I'm sorry for the Recording Angel if he has to listen to Dusp's Epic, and I don't want the music of the spheres to sound like Farmonger's Symphony. As for Querkes' Everlasting Vision, it was altogether two exclusive. It contained nothing but celebrities."

Aunt Eudora chuckled, closed her eyes, and relapsed into a well-earned doz,-.