A Mixture of Frailties by Robertson Davies

"The terrible truth is that feeling really does have to be learned. It comes spontaneously when one is in love, or when somebody important dies; but people like you and me--interpretive artists--have to learn also to recapture those feelings, and transform them into something we can offer the world in our performances. You know what Heine says--and if you don't I won't scold you: 'Out of my great sorrows I make little songs.' Well--we all do that. And what we make out of the feelings life brings us is something a little different, something not quite so shattering but very much more polished and perhaps also more poignant, than the feelings themselves. Your jealousy--it hurts now, but if you are as good an artist as I begin to think you are, you'll never have to guess at what jealousy means again, when you meet it with music."

A Mixture of Frailties is the third book in Davies' Salterton trilogy, and it's so tenuously connected to those others, it sort of seems like a cheat: it begins with the death of the mother of Solly Bridgetower--who's the protagonist of Leaven of Malice, if not also the ensemble novel Tempest-Tost--who leaves Solly and his wife Veronica a substantial trust which they cannot use until Veronica bears a son. The "dead hand" of Solly's mother decrees that, until that happens, all the money will be used to finance the artistic education of a local girl in Europe. The trustees scramble to find the right beneficiary, settling with some hurry and trepidation on a girl named Monica Gall, who is a singer in a local evangelical choir. Monica is sent to Europe to become a polished singer--but mostly to satisfy the cumbersome demands of the trust--and A Mixture of Frailties is the story of her growth as an artist and a person while in London.

A Mixture of Frailties has all those qualities which make a Davies novel seem so antiquated, but in a good way, like intellectual comfort food. Every character is an artistic genius, and everyone seems to have a readymade speech about the importance of art or music or high culture, and they never flub the quotations. Part of what makes A Mixture of Frailties so anachronistic in particular is that it really does believe in the value of high culture, of opera and classical music and all that. Monica's musical guide, the composer Benedict Domdaniel, sends her not just to voice lessons but to French lessons, Spanish lessons, musical culture and history lessons, and through this process of refinement Monica learns to connect with her own moral sense, and extricate it from the earnest but simple evangelicalism of her Canadian mother and father. (This is one of those Canadian books where the cultural gap between Britain and the "Dominions" is very important.) Music, as articulated by Domdaniel and others, offers a way of meeting and understanding one's feelings and transforming them into moral judgment. It's through music that Monica must meet her feelings of inadequacy and her raging love for her cultural teacher, Giles Revelstoke.

Giles is the chaotic element in the novel, Davies' version of a dissolute musical genius. (Who is the archetype I'm trying to think of here? There must be a musical equivalent, but what Giles reminds me of most is the brilliant, selfish, womanizing Percy Shelley.) Monica falls in love with him, even though he treats her like dirt, and justifies it to herself by acknowledging with a newly developed clarity that he's treating her like dirt. She filches from the trust to fund his groundbreaking opera, The Golden Asse. The golden ass, of course is not Giles, who is an ass, but Monica, who undergoes her own transformation over the course of the novel. The problem is, of course, that when you change and succeed other people want to take credit, and Giles lashes out cruelly at Monica as his own creation. Though a brilliant composer, Giles is wrong: music, as Domdaniel supposes, has only given Monica the ability to be herself.

Funnily, A Mixture of Frailties doesn't quite have the same balance between the serious and comic that the other two novels in the trilogy do. It seems more of a piece, honestly, with the Deptford novels, which are also about Canadians exploring Europe, developing their own sensibility for high culture and religious mystery. But like all Davies' novels, it's a highly satisfying book, sensible enough to offer a story of spiritual and moral growth but also a climax of gothic, plotty proportions, like the showstopping number at the end of an opera.