Love of sin
memorable character is not the hero but the amoral villain Harry Lime. Lime it is who looks down at Vienna from the great ferris wheel and remarks that Renaissance Italian depravity led to great art while the civically virtuous Swiss managed only the cuckoo clock.
More recently Walter White in Breaking Bad is a boring, downtrodden teacher reborn as a fascinating, dynamic drugs entrepreneur. In Killing Eve the anti-heroine Villanelle is a contract killer you can’t take your eyes off. And how about this from Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street: ‘‘Greed is good . . . Greed works. Greed clarifies. Greed in all its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge in mankind.’’ Can anyone deny there’s some truth in that? Give us sin then? Henry IV Part Two would be a tedious pageant without Falstaff. As he himself says, ‘‘banish plump Jack and banish all the world’’. But this is what my long-dead teacher might have reminded me: when Falstaff goes to Gloucestershire seeking to press men into the king’s army, making jokes about their names and physiques, he is sending them to their deaths. And he does not care.
In the National Gallery look at the Bronzino carefully. It took me a dozen visits to notice that the child with the ecstatic smile and the rose petals has trodden on a thorn that has gone right through his foot. Somehow he hasn’t noticed that he’s injured. Look at the marginal figure of the young woman with a lovely face. But she has the body of a serpent and though in one hand she holds some sweet honeycomb, in the other she holds a scorpion’s stinger. And how about the figure on the left, howling in despair, displaying some of the physical symptoms of syphilis? The same disease is a recurring theme in William Hogarth’s series of six paintings Marriage A-la-Mode. Brought together by a smooth-talking lawyer called Silvertongue, the young alienated couple become separately debauched and have a lot of dark fun. Which ends when the wife is discovered in flagrante with Silvertongue, who kills the husband in a fight. He is hanged at Tyburn, she takes poison and, dying, is embraced by her child who bears the marks of syphilis. One moral of this series, wrote the novelist William Thackeray, was ‘‘don’t listen to evil silvertongued counsellors’’. Columns can be allegories as well as paintings. If a Boy Scout should be Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Courteous, Brave etc why do we settle so easily for so much less from those we elect to high office? Why these days, at home and abroad, is it all Falstaffs? We’re living through a time when those who don’t lie or mislead are described as ‘‘unlikeable’’ while the rogues are forgiven almost anything. Entranced, we forget the thorns in our feet and the cankers on our cheeks.