The completion of Darcourt’s poopnoddy scheme took almost three years from the fall of the final curtain on Arthur of Britain. Government bodies, great galleries, connoisseurs of art, publishers of books, and great sums of money all move with the uttermost deliberation, and to persuade them all to fit into a coherent plan calls for the extreme of diplomacy and tact. But Darcourt did it, and did it furthermore without ulcers or heart palpitations or too many private bouts of hysteria. He did it, he told himself, by pursuing the path of the Fool, marching merrily on his way, trusting to his intelligent nose and the little dog of intuition nipping at his rump to show him the path, overgrown and tortuous as it was.

So, on a December afternoon, in the presence of a distinguished assembly, the Francis Cornish Memorial Gallery was officially opened by the Governor General, and was agreed by everyone—or almost everyone—to be a notable addition to the National Gallery of Canada, to reflect the greatest credit on everyone concerned, and especially upon Arthur and Maria Cornish, whose names, as the prime movers in the plan, were never allowed to escape the notice of the public. If the contribution of the Cornishes to the opera production had been under-prized, and if their understandably hurt feelings had not been adequately salved, they were thanked to the point of embarrassment in the establishment of the Francis Cornish Memorial Gallery.

Of course they protested; of course their modesty was outraged, and they were entirely sincere in their protests and their sense of outrage. Nevertheless, it is very sweet to be recognized as public benefactors, and to be compelled to protest and feel outrage. Sweeter by far than to feel overlooked, under-prized, and intrusive when one is sincerely trying to do something for the furtherance of culture—for the hateful word, so much licked and pawed by Kater Murr, cannot conveniently be avoided. Arthur and Maria were modest, and were not displeased that the world should see that they were modest.

Darcourt, too, was modest, and for the first time in his life he had something of substantial public interest to be modest about. His book, the long-projected life of the late Francis Cornish, had been published a year earlier, and had received attention not only in Canada but throughout the English-speaking world, and indeed everywhere that books about extraordinary painters are read. Not all of the attention was flattering, but his publishers assured him that the attacks and the disparagement also had their value. Critics do not lash themselves into a high aesthetic tizzy about things that are insignificant. Nor were these critics all concerned with painting; many of them were critics of culture in a more general sense, and several of these were tarred with the recently fashionable Jungian brush, and had even read some of the writings of jung. What delighted these, and enraged many of the art critics, was the Introduction to the book that had been contributed by Clement Hollier, whose reputation in such matters where art, time, and the enduring and many-layered human psyche kissed and commingled, was very great indeed. Clem, so hopelessly out of his depth in the creation of an opera libretto, was a very big gun in the world where Darcourt’s biography took its place. Paleo-psychology and the history of human culture was what the knowing ones called it, and it was not everybody who could follow Clem in its overgrown paths. Thus Darcourt found himself a significant explainer in a number of important worlds, and invitations to lecture—which were in some cases demands that he appear to defend himself—were piling up on his desk.

Such invitations had to wait until the Francis Cornish Memorial Gallery had been shaped, and assembled, and formally opened to the world. After that, his Old Ontario folk wisdom told him, it would be time enough to cut a dead dog in two.

The work was not easy. First of all. Prince Max and the Princess Amalie had to be persuaded to sell The Marriage at Cana to the National Gallery. There had to be assurance that they would not, under any circumstances, be accused of having harboured a fake, and shown it to the world as a genuine painting dating from the sixteenth century. They had never offered the picture for sale under false pretences; but on the other hand they had never denied the interesting explanation of the picture that had been contained in that persuasive article by Aylwin Ross, and which was there to be consulted in the authoritative pages of Apollo. It was in the light of this splendid piece of art detection that they had allowed it to be exhibited in a great American gallery, which had for a time considered buying it. They must not seem guileful, only reserved, and it must be apparent to everybody that their hands were clean. This could be managed, and it was managed, by the brilliant critic Addison Thresher, who washed their hands and laundered the picture—though the hateful word “laundered” was never, never used—and set the price the Cornish Foundation paid for it. If a percentage of that awesome sum later passed into the hands of Addison Thresher, surely it was to be expected that he would be recompensed for his work, and his great reputation which set at rest all, or nearly all, doubts.

This involved delicate negotiation, but it was as nothing to the work of persuading the National Gallery of Canada that it should accept a picture of such curious provenance, and show it with pride in a room specially devoted to it, even if it did not cost the Gallery a cent.

People who control important galleries are very far from being stupid, but they are not accustomed to thinking of pictures psychologically. If the picture, whose beauty they readily acknowledged, were the work of a Canadian who had painted it less than fifty years ago, why had he painted it in a sixteenth-century style, on an authentic old triptych, with paints that defied any of the tests that had been used? Yes, yes; the picture was a masterpiece, in the old sense of being a work undertaken by a painter who wished to prove himself a master. But what kind of a master? Francis had been a pupil, certainly the best pupil, of Tancred Saraceni, who was himself a supreme master of picture restoration, and so much a master that it was suspected that he had revised, or even recreated, some old pictures into forms that were vastly superior to what they had originally been. People whose lives and reputations are devoted to pictures have fits at any suggestion of faking. Faking is the syphilis of art, and the horrid truth is that syphilis has sometimes lain at the root of very fine art. But connoisseurs and great galleries shrink from saying to the world: Here’s a fine, poxy piece of painting, beautiful, uplifting, sincerely describable as great—though of course, because of its ambiguity, not precisely the sort of thing you can safely recommend to Kater Murr. For him and his kind, everything must be Simon Pure—or, if you prefer the term, kosher. Kater Murr is very active among the connoisseurs and the galleries.

It was here that the testimony of Clement Hollier was invaluable. If a man wants to paint a picture that is intended primarily as an exercise in a special area of expertise, he will do so in a style with which he is most familiar. If he wants to paint a picture which has a particular relevance to his own life-experience, which explores the myth of his life as he understands it, and which, in the old phrase, “makes up his soul”, he is compelled to do it in a mode that permits such allegorical revelation. Painters after the Renaissance, and certainly after the Protestant Reformation, have not painted such pictures with the frankness that was natural to pre-Renaissance artists. The vocabulary of faith, and of myth, has been taken from them by the passing of time. But Francis Cornish, when he wanted to make up his soul, turned to the style of painting and the concept of visual art which came most naturally to him. He did not feel himself bound to be “contemporary”. Indeed, he had many times laughed at the notion of contemporaneity in conversation with both Hollier and Darcourt, mocking it as a foolish chain on a painter’s inspiration and intention.