Europe Revised

by Irvin S. Cobb

"She came hurrying back and for ten minutes they stood there drinking in that picture. Every second they discovered new and subtle beauties in it. I could hardly induce them to go on for the rest of the tour, and the next day they came back for another soul-feast in front of it."

Later along, that guide confided to me that in his opinion I had a keen appreciation of art, much keener than the average lay tourist. The compliment went straight to my head. It was seeking the point of least resistance, I suppose. I branched out and undertook to discuss art matters with him on a more familiar basis. It was a mistake; but before I realized that it was a mistake I was out in the undertow sixty yards from shore, going down for the third time, with a low gurgling cry. He did not put out to save me, either; he left me to sink in the heaving and abysmal sea of my own fathomless ignorance. He just stood there and let me drown. It was a cruel thing, for which I can never forgive him.

In my own defense let me say, however, that this fatal indiscretion was committed before I had completed my art education. It was after we had gone from France to Germany, and to Austria, and to Italy, that I learned the great lesson about art—which is that whenever and wherever you meet a picture that seems to you reasonably lifelike it is nine times in ten of no consequence whatsoever; and, unless you are willing to be regarded as a mere ignoramus, you should straightway leave it and go and find some ancient picture of a group of overdressed clothing dummies masquerading as angels or martyrs, and stand before that one and carry on regardless.

When in doubt, look up a picture of Saint Sebastian. You never experience any difficulty in finding him—he is always represented as wearing very few clothes, being shot full of arrows to such an extent that clothes would not fit him anyway. Or else seek out Saint Laurence, who is invariably featured in connection with a gridiron; or Saint Bartholomew, who, you remember, achieved canonization through a process of flaying, and is therefore shown with his skin folded neatly and carried over his arm like a spring overcoat.

Following this routine you make no mistakes. Everybody is bound to accept you as one possessing a deep knowledge of art, and not mere surface art either, but the innermost meanings and conceptions of art. Only sometimes I did get to wishing that the Old Masters had left a little more to the imagination. They never withheld any of the painful particulars. It seemed to me they cheapened the glorious end of those immortal fathers of the faith by including the details of the martyrdom in every picture. Still, I would not have that admission get out and obtain general circulation. It might be used against me as an argument that my artistic education was grounded on a false foundation.

It was in Rome, while we were doing the Vatican, that our guide furnished us with a sight that, considered as a human experience, was worth more to me than a year of Old Masters and Young Messers. We had pushed our poor blistered feet—a dozen or more of us—past miles of paintings and sculptures and relics and art objects, and we were tired—oh, so tired! Our eyes ached and our shoes hurt us; and the calves of our legs quivered as we trailed along from gallery to corridor, and from corridor back to gallery.

We had visited the Sistine Chapel; and, such was our weariness, we had even declined to become excited over Michelangelo's great picture of the Last Judgment. I was disappointed, too, that he had omitted to include in his collection of damned souls a number of persons I had confidently and happily expected would be present. I saw no one there even remotely resembling my conception of the person who first originated and promulgated the doctrine that all small children should be told at the earliest possible moment that there is no Santa Claus. That was a very severe blow to me, because I had always believed that the descent to eternal perdition would be incomplete unless he had a front seat. And the man who first hit on the plan of employing child labor on night shifts in cotton factories—he was unaccountably absent too. And likewise the original inventor of the toy pistol; in fact the absentees were entirely too numerous to suit me. There was one thing, though, to be said in praise of Michelangelo's Last Judgment; it was too large and too complicated to be reproduced successfully on a souvenir postal card; and I think we should all be very grateful for that mercy anyway.

As I was saying, we had left the Sistine Chapel a mile or so behind us and had dragged our exhausted frames as far as an arched upper portico in a wing of the great palace, overlooking a paved courtyard inclosed at its farther end by a side wall of Saint Peter's. We saw, in another portico similar to the one where we had halted and running parallel to it, long rows of peasants, all kneeling and all with their faces turned in the same direction.

"Wait here a minute," said our guide. "I think you will see something not included in the regular itinerary of the day."

So we waited. In a minute or two the long lines of kneeling peasants raised a hymn; the sound of it came to us in quavering snatches. Through the aisle formed by their bodies a procession passed the length of the long portico and back to the starting point. First came Swiss Guards in their gay piebald uniforms, carrying strange-looking pikes and halberds; and behind them were churchly dignitaries, all bared of head; and last of all came a very old and very feeble man, dressed in white, with a wide-brimmed white hat—and he had white hair and a white face, which seemed drawn and worn, but very gentle and kindly and beneficent.