The Saint and Artist by Peter J. Conradi

Author:Peter J. Conradi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

This is very much the voice of The Sovereignty of Good, and a voice heard at some point in most of the novels. What Rupert is criticised for is not the philosophy but his consistently clumsy inability to live by it. He is persistently shown to us as shy and wooden in a recognisably English way, and despite warm intentions, he bungles his encounters.

It is not only Julius who repeatedly points this out. Axel teases Rupert when he maliciously says he is most impatient to see his book: ‘I expect to be told how to live, my dear fellow. I shall take it as my guide to good behaviour and follow it slavishly’ (46). Peter asks whether his father intends to read aloud from his book at the dinner table; Julius satirically pretends to hope that the cast will all have to make ‘philosophical speeches just like in the Symposium, I should enjoy that’ (221). When Rupert says to Morgan, ‘Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues,’ she innocently replies, ‘That’s pretty. Do you say that in your book?’ (94). And such satire has, as it were, a purgative function: wisdom in this book, as in Plato’s Phaedrus and Seventh Letter, is ultra-verbal, and simulacra or copies may degenerate in the client’s mind once committed to print. Rupert’s philosophy is in fact a doctrine of love, as he comes to ponder when under extreme pressure from Julius’s manipulations and his own frailty:

The top of the moral structure was no dream, and he had proved this by exercises in loving attention: loving people, loving art, loving work, loving paving stones and leaves on trees. This had been his happiness…He had written about it in a formal half disguised way, as if it were a secret, in his philosophy book. (359)

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