The Dark Clue by James Wilson Page B

Almost everything else, however, took me by surprise. Here was a magnificent sea piece, showing distant ships heeling in a stiff breeze, which (save for the waves, which gathered menacingly in the bottom right-hand corner and threatened to spill over the frame and wet your feet) might have been by a Dutch master; there a gorgeous classical landscape saturated with honey light, or a sublime mountain darkened by angry clouds. Most striking of all were those wild swirls of paint – like those which had so captivated Walter – in which the pure colour seemed to strive for freedom, detaching itself from form like the soul leaving the body, so that you could not clearly discern a subject at all.
    I think most people, confronted by such splendid profusion, would find it hard to believe that it could all have sprung from one hand. Certainly, as I embarked on my tour, that was the uppermost thought in my mind. It was only after I had examined three or four of the pictures more closely that I recognized – with that sudden dawning that comes when you at last become conscious of some insistent sound, like a dog barking in the distance – that there was, indeed, a family relationship, suggested not by obvious similarities of style, but by certain recurrent quirks and oddities. What they mean, or whether they mean anything at all, I still do not know; but they have left me with the nagging idea that they are a kind of message in code, and that I need but the right key in order to decipher it.
    The first painting I looked at (for no other reason than that it was the closest) was a luminous, gold-tinged historical scene which, at a casual glance, I should have taken to be by Claude. I failed, in my eagerness, to note the exact title, but the subject was the decline of Carthage. You are standing, as it were, in the bottom left-hand corner of the picture – in the entrance, perhaps, of a great palace, for the foreground is in shadow. Immediately before you, like flotsam on the shore, lies a clutter of objects: a pile of fruit; a standard bearing a shield and a wreath of withered flowers; discarded cloaks and weapons; and a strange, bulbous brown blob with a protuberance at the top, which might be a buoy with a chain but which also – you realize after a few seconds – has a fleshly quality about it, like a giant squid, or the internal organ of a beast. Beyond that is a narrow quay, and thena dazzling strip of water, fringed in the distance by lines of hazy masts, which stretches to the horizon. Above it – almost in the centre of the canvas, but a little to the left – hangs a burning sun, filling the sky with an incandescence so bright that it stings your eyes to look at it.
    On either side of the harbour, like the jaws of a vice, are clusters of classical buildings, their steps crowded with little doll-like figures. Those on the left are floridly baroque, and covered with ornate carvings, but those on the right – to which, because of the diagonal perspective, your gaze is naturally drawn – are more restrained: passing an odd little tower that looks like a dwarf lighthouse, you enter them by a narrow flight of steps (so narrow, indeed, you feel the walls will squeeze the breath from your body), and then ascend gradually until, at length, you reach a temple of Parthenon-like simplicity on the summit of a distant hill.
    I could remember little about the fall of Carthage, save that she had been reduced to surrendering her arms and children to Rome, but the import of the picture seemed clear enough. It was, in effect, a moral tale, told (unlike a written narrative) from top right to bottom left: once, the Carthaginians had had the vigour and discipline to climb the straight and narrow path; but, as their wealth and power grew, they had abandoned the austere and lofty heights of greatness, neglecting their industry and defences, and descending into the flyblown city on the left, where they had