The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (Valancourt eClassics) Read Free Page A

disappointed woman and a corrupt Socialist agitator. The conspiracy between them, with blackmail based on a knowledge of Hadrian’s early life as its main object, is frustrated; and the baffled Comrade, in a fit of rage, shoots the Pope as he is returning to the Vatican. ‘How bright the sunlight was, on the warm grey stones, on the ripe Roman skins, on vermilion and lavender and blue and ermine and green and gold, on the indecent grotesque blackness of two blotches, on Apostolic whiteness and the rose of blood.’ The final words are worthy of their author: ‘Pray for the repose of his soul. He was so tired.’
     
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    The style in which Hadrian the Seventh is written is hardly less remarkable than the story it tells. Fr. Rolfe shares his hero’s liking for compound words; and his pages are studded with such inventions or adaptations as ‘tolutiloquence’, ‘contortuplicate’, ‘incoronation’, ‘noncurant’, ‘occession’, and ‘digladiator’. In constructing his sentences he sets his adverbs as far before both parts of the verb as he can; and though he often lapses into learning and Latin, the most homely expressions are not disdained in his elaborate paragraphs. But these peculiarities do not rob him of a real eloquence; as, for instance, when describing Hadrian’s private visit to St Peter’s:
     
    They passed through innumerable passages and descended stairs, emerging in a chapel where lights burned about a tabernacle of gilded bronze and lapis lazuli. Here He paused while His escort unlocked the gates of the screen. Once through that, He sent-back the guard to his station; but He Himself went on into the vast obscurity of the basilica. He walked very slowly: it was as though His eyes were wrapped in clear black velvet, so intense and so immense was the darkness. Then, very far away to the right, He saw as it were a coronal of dim stars glimmering – on the floor they seemed to be. He was in the mighty nave; and the stars were the ever-burning lamps surrounding the Confession. He slowly approached them. As He passed within them, He took one from its golden branch, and descended the marble steps. Here, He spread the cloak on the floor; placed the lamp beside it; and fell to prayer. Outside, in the City and the World, men played, or worked, or sinned, or slept. Inside, at the very tomb of the Apostle, the Apostle prayed.
     
    And Fr. Rolfe also has the secret of a staccato brilliance, of phrases that tell as much as the paragraphs of others; of such expressions as ‘that cold white candent voice which was more caustic than silver nitrate and more thrilling than a scream’; ‘miscellaneous multitudes paved the spaces with tumultuous eyes’; ‘they mean well; but their whole aim and object seems to be to serve God by conciliating Mammon.’
    Perhaps above all the astonishments of Hadrian the Seventh I ought to put its revelation of a temperament. Hadrian, as he is presented by his creator, is a superman in whom we are compelled to believe. The felinity of his retort, his ready command over words, the breadth of his vision, the noble unworldliness of his beliefs and bearing, his mixture of pride and humility, of gentle charity and ruthless reproof for error, his sensitiveness to form and hatred of ugliness, his steadfast and touching confidence in God and in himself; all these things unite to create a character as difficult to match as the story of his exploits.
     
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    Those who are susceptible to literary influence will have no difficulty in imagining the effect of Hadrian the Seventh upon my imagination and my interest. Other occupations seemed colourless by contrast with the necessity of learning more about Fr. Rolfe. Was he alive or dead? What else had he written? How was it that I had never heard of a man who had it in his power to write such a book as Hadrian the Seventh? Many years before (though I was, of course, unaware of the circumstance) a similar enthusiasm overcame Robert Hugh