Then there is that little matter of Leonardo’s St. John in the Louvre. Michelet saw the whole Renaissance in it, and Pater alludes to it as “one of the few naked figures Leonardo painted,” and builds upon it a complex theory of Leonardo’s symbolic suggestive method, and is not surprised at the saint’s “strange likeness to the Bacchus which hangs near it, which set Théophile Gautier thinking of Heine’s notion of decayed gods, who, to maintain themselves after the fall of Paganism, took employment in the new religion.” And now the St. John turns out to have been a pupil’s or an imitator’s, and probably not even a St. John.
The culture-pilgrims of to-day, armed with sacred text-books, verbally infallible, and canonical lists of authentic attributions, enjoy a suspicious superiority in æsthetic judgment over the greatest creative artists. For Goethe and Byron and Shelley did at least create, and Pater’s interpretation of Mona Lisa is finer than the picture itself; whereas the pursuit of culture in the average pilgrim is a confession of sterility either in himself or in his own nation, which is not sufficiently vitalised to absorb his interests. “If the Romans had had to learn Latin,” said Heine, “they would never have conquered the world.” And were England free in thought and nobly artistic, there would be no need of this fervour for the preservation of Greek. Even Goethe, it is amazing to discover from his “Italiänische Reise,” never saw the sea till he went to Italy. And his first glimpse of it was, of all places in the world, at the Lido in Venice! He with the German Ocean to draw from him, as it drew from Heine, the cry of “Thalassa!”; he who might have seen how
“Die weissen Meerkinder
Hoch aufspringen und jauchzen
Uebermut-berauscht,”
must fare forth to another land and behold a lazy, almost tideless lagoon lapping in shallow muddiness on the tamest and dullest shore in the world. Surely we have here an ironic image of the culture-pilgrim who sets out to see Art abroad before he has seen Nature at home.
When the Goths besieged Rome, Belisarius hurled down upon them the statues of the Mausoleum of St. Angelo, and the tomb was turned to a citadel. But against the siege of Rome by the Goethes there is no known defence. A rain of statues would merely aggravate their zeal, and the more hopelessly the statues smashed, the more would their admiration solidify. So to-day the Goethes and the Huns alike are invited up to see the statues—for a fee—and every citadel of reality is turned to a mausoleum-museum. St. Angelo, that has stood the storms of eighteen centuries, is the perquisite of a facetious warder who gabbles automatically of Beatrice Cenci, “la più bella ragazza d’ Italia,” as he points out her pitiful, if dubious, dungeon. In the stone cell of the Florentine monastery, on whose cold flags Savonarola wore his knees in fasting and prayer, a guide holds up a reflector to concentrate the light on the frescoes with which Fra Angelico glorified the rude walls. Where St. Catherine walked—in the footsteps of the Bridegroom—leaving the marks of her miraculous feet, a buxom native of Siena expects her obolus. Outside the pyramid-shadowed cemetery where Keats lies under his heart-broken epitaph, a Roman urchin turns supplicatory somersaults. Italia Bella, a paper published at Milan, adjured Arona to wake up and celebrate the tercentenary of the canonisation of its Saint Carlo, “if only because it pays.” History, with its blood and tears, becomes æsthetics for the tourist and economics for the native. Of a truth quaint links concatenate Cæsar and the showman, the saint with the apple-woman who finds a profitable pitch for her stall at his church-corner. While we are fuming and strutting we are but providing popcorn for posterity. Buskined heroes of history, who walk the earth in tragic splendour, perchance your truest service to humanity has been done in affording occupation for the poor devil who expatiates upon the traces of your passing. This, at least, ye may be sure is good service; the rest of your work, who shall sever the good and evil strands of it? So much pother of prophets and politicians—and, lo! how poor a planet we still wander in.
The culture-pilgrim, too, apart from this scattering of popcorn, is a futile being. Culture as a mere excursion from a solid home-reality may be vitalising, but whoso thinks to batten on alien arts and letters is filling his belly with the sirocco. There is no reality in the travel-world, be it the world of Art or the world of Nature, for we have no true volitional relations with it. ’Twas Schopenhauer who discovered this for Art—though his World has only the two dimensions of Will and Idea. But he did not, if I remember, point out that everything seen with aloofness from action partakes of this art-quality. The landscape from the observation-car is a mere picture to us, however real to the peasants working in the fields.
The only “real” traveller is the commercial. We others, wandering through streets that our ancestors did not build, or sitting in alien apartments and gazing upon unhomely hills, are still spectators, not actors. We are not rooted in this soil, nor feel the deep intimacies that are the truest truth about it. I may partake in the annual festa of an Italian mountain village, hear the Mass, bear banner and taper in the procession, salute the saintly image, dance upon the plateau-piazza with a snooded peasant-girl, but how shall I feel the holiness and joy of this day of days?—I whose infant breath was not drawn amid these precipitous fastnesses, who have not lived in these human caves cut in the rock, who have not played in these steep stone streets, who know nothing of the dear narrowness, the vivid intensity that is born of cramped consciousness! There is in the very attitude of spectator something that stands between one and the object in its truth. This it is that makes the appreciations of cities by the school of Pater such hollow phantasy, such bastards of an accident by a temperament. This it was that begot Pierre Loti’s monumental misreading of Japan as a Lilliput of the pretty-pretty. To lose the artistic Ego in the inner life of the phenomenon—how rare the critic who is capable of that! Listening to these parasites upon alien autocosms,
“Moving about in worlds not realised,”