De: ITALIAN FANTASIES
A truth, then, may be formulated, but it is not true till it is felt and acted on, and ceases to be true when it ceases to be felt and acted on. Nor does this canon apply only to inner truths. Without an element of feeling and volition, however shadowy, even the simple realities of the outer world have never been perceived, and the omission of these elements invalidates the total reality. If so many readers skip scenery in novels, ’tis because the scene is described as though it existed in itself. The dead chunk of landscape bores and depresses. The reader subconsciously feels that so impersonal a vision is untrue to the actualities of perception. Nobody has ever seen a landscape without some emotion, if only the traveller’s desire to be at the other end of it. A dozen persons—even omitting the colour-blind—would see it in as many different ways, each with different accompaniments of feeling, thought, and volition, potential or actual, just as every person in _The Ring and the Book_ sees Pompilia differently. Let the novelist describe the scene, not for itself, but for its relation to the emotions and purposes of his personages, and it leaps into life. Similar is the case of Science, whose facts in divesting themselves of all emotion and individual error divest themselves likewise of reality. The dry scientific coldness with which the universe must be envisaged is an artificial method of vision. True, the scientist himself may be impelled by the most tingling curiosity. But the passion and thrill of his chase for truth does not appear in the quarry: that is a mere carcase. His report on his speciality is always carefully divested of emotion. But our emotional and volitional relations to the spectacle of existence are as much a part of the total truth of things as colour is of the visible world. The world is not complete without
“The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet’s dream.”
When Lear cries to the heavens that they too are old, or Lamartine calls on the lake to remember his happiness, Ruskin would tell us that this suffusion of Nature with our own emotions is the pathetic fallacy. On the contrary, its absence is the scientific fallacy. Science registers the world as the phonograph registers sound or the camera space—without any emotion of its own. As the former with equal phlegm records a song or a curse, or the latter a wedding or a funeral, so does Science register its impassive observations. For once admit such a shifting subjective factor as emotion, and what becomes of the glorious objectivity of Science? Away, therefore, with all but the frigid intellectual view of things! Since the other elements of Truth elude our grasp, let us boldly declare them irrelevant. The bankruptcy of Science, you see, comes not at the end of its operations. Science starts bankrupt. It has not sufficient capital to begin trading. Its methods and apparatus are entirely inadequate for the attainment of truth. A cat may look at a king—but its observation will not be very profound. And Science is as little equipped for observing the universe as the cat for observing the king. All it can perceive or establish is chains of causation, or rather recurring sequences of phenomena, in an unconscious _continuum_. It is a _post-mortem_ investigation to ascertain, not the cause of death, but the cause of life.
But the universe is not a quaint collection of dead things in a vacuum, not a museum of stuffed birds or transfixed butterflies, but a breathing, flying, singing, striving, and suffering process—an unfinished infinitude. This kinetic process cannot be expressed in terms of statics. “What is Truth?” says the jesting cosmos, and does not _stay_ for an answer. But by an artificial abstraction parts of it can be expressed for the intellect in static ’ologies and ’onomies, on the understanding that the intellect never forgets to put back its results into the palpitating flux to which they belong and in which alone they have true significance. This understanding the intellect too frequently violates or forgets, and therefore for Truth we must go, not to the man of science, but to the poet, who registers his universe synthetically with soul as well as with brain. Tragedy, comedy, heroic drama, sombre suffering, majestic mystery, all these are in the flux—more surely than ether waves and dancing atoms—and the poet in painting the fulness of life with the fulness of his own emotion is giving us a fuller truth than any that Science can attain to. “We cannot really know the truth unless we love the truth,” said Fénelon. “They who love well will know well.” This is not mysticism but common sense, and Goethe repeated it when he said that “No one can write about anything unless he writes about it with love.” “To see things in their beauty,” said Matthew Arnold, “is to see them in their truth.” It may be that the knowledge of things through pure intellect is pure delusion, that to pigeon-hole the universe is to make it into a cemetery. Instead of that “love is blind,” the truth may be that only love sees. There is a sense in which every mother’s babe _is_ the most beautiful in the world.
Knowledge, then, as a mere function of the intellect, is only the dead knowledge that appears in school-books. But who shall say that knowledge was meant to be only a function of the intellect, that we do not know with our heart and soul as well as with our brains? Nay, as if to mock at mere intellect, the universe absolutely refuses to yield up its secret to the intellect. Hence the antinomies of Kant or Mansel or Plato’s “Parmenides.” Follow up mere thought, however apparently clear, and it lands us in nonsense. Perhaps wisdom does not lie that way at all. Perhaps the fear of the Lord is really the beginning of wisdom.
For if Science is Truth in one dimension and Art Truth in two dimensions, it is only when we complete emotional vision by volition that we arrive at Truth’s full-orbed reality. Even love cannot bring wisdom unless the love translates itself into action. In short, the meaning of Truth must be changed from a dead fact of the intellect into a live fact of the whole being. The Truth is also the Way and the Life.
Aristotle in his “Metaphysics” tells us that Cratylus carried the scepticism of Heraclitus to such a degree that he at last was of opinion one ought to speak of nothing, but merely moved his finger. Aristotle does not see that in this moving of his finger Cratylus was asserting at least the volitional element of Truth and perhaps its most important. For the universe is not a museum, placarded “Look, but please do not touch.” It says, “Touch, and then you will really see. Live, work, love, fight, and then you will really know what the nature of your universe is.”
The world of the physical sciences is only the stage-setting for the spiritual drama. Though there is a truth of dead things called Science, the real truth is of live things—a triple truth in which intellect, will, and emotion are one. Our sense of this truth—obtained as it is during emotional volition—is individual, irreducible to the simpler planes of Science and Art, and thus incommunicable. And the measure of our attainment of it will be the measure of our sympathetic insight and of the depth to which we have penetrated by action into the heart of the phenomena. Then what seemed a mass of dull facts may break into music like a Beethoven score under the baton of a master.
The scientist who should say that a Beethoven symphony consisted of the atoms of the paper and ink which constitute the score, or even who expressed it mathematically as a sequence of complex air-vibrations made by strings and holes, would be talking truth; but as incomplete and irrelevant truth as the ignoramus who should say it was curious black strokes and dots on ruled paper, or the statistician who should count the semi-breves or fortissimo passages. The true truth of the symphony comes into being only when it is interpreted by the finest performers to souls whose life it enlarges.
And so with the universe, which is not a dead, complete thing outside of us, but a palpitating spiritual potentiality, for the fullest truth about which the co-operation of our own souls is needed, our souls that create a part of the truth they perceive or aspire to. The universe, in short, is a magic storehouse from which we may draw—or into which put—what we will to the extent of our faith, our emotion, our sense of beauty our righteousness. “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”
OF FACTS WITH ALIEN AUTOCOSMS: OR THE FUTILITY OF CULTURE
When I betake me to a zoological garden, equipped with a pennyworth of popcorn, a food strangely popular even among the carnivora, I am touched by a prescience of all the pleasure and dumb gratitude to be evoked by those humble grains. And in truth how many eager caged creatures are destined to have a joyous thrill of sniffing suspense, followed by the due titillation of the palate! My proffering fingers shall meet the gentle nose of the deer, the sensitive arching trunk of the elephant, the kindly peck of parrots, the mischievous hands of monkeys, the soft snouts of strange beasts. Not otherwise is it when, faring forth to Italy, I provision myself with a bag of coin. Into what innumerable itching tentacles these gilded or cuprous grains are to drop: white-cuffed hands of waiters, horny digits of _vetturini_ and _facchini_, gnarled fins of gondoliers and hookers, grimy paws of beggars, shrivelled stumps of cripples, dexterous toes of armless ancients, spluttering mouths of divers, rosy fingers of flower-throwing children, persuasive plates of serenading musicians, deceptive ticket-holes of dishonest railway clerks, plethoric pockets of hotel-keepers, greedy tills of bargaining shopkeepers, pious palms of monks and sacristans, charity-boxes of cathedrals, long-handled fishing-nets of little churches, musty laps of squatting, mumbling crones, greasy caps of guides, official pyxes of curators and janitors, clutching claws of unbidden cicerones. All these—and how many more!—photographers and painters and copyists and forgers, modellers and restorers and lecturers on ruins, landlords and cooks and critics—live by Italy’s ancient art. Great Cæsar dead—and turned to Show.
The beauty of Italy is elemental fodder for the autochthones; yet how strange the existence of the Neapolitan swimmer whose _métier_ is to dive for coppers when the steamer sails for the witching cliffs of Sorrento, and to cry in enticing gurgles, “Money in the water!” the spluttering syllables flowing into one another as in the soft _patois_ of Venice! Precisely when the Bay of Naples is a violet dancing flame, and Vesuvius, majestically couchant, sends her white incense to the blue, and you are tranced with beauty and sunshine, comes this monetary merman to drag you down to the depths.
“Nutritive chains” the biologists name the inter-related organisms whose existence depends on one another, and another link of this chain you shall count the boatmen waiting to show you the blue grotto of Capri. Their skiffs dart upon you like creatures whose prey comes only at a fixed hour; like creatures, moreover, shaped in the struggle for existence to the only function by which they can survive, for they are fittest to pass under the low arch of the cerulean grotto (the occupant consenting to crouch like an antenna drawn in). That ardent water in the Capri cave—that lovely flame of light blue in a bluer burning spirit—sustains likewise the naked diver who stands poised on a rock, ready to show its chromatic effects upon flesh; the culminating moment of whose day—the feeding-time, as it were—comes when the tourists glide in.
Apt symbol indeed of the tourist, that shallow skiff skimming over beauty with which the native is in deep elemental contact, from which, indeed, he wrests his living.
Since Goethe with his gospel of culture spent those famous _Wanderjahre_ in Italy, a swollen stream of pious art-pilgrims has been pouring over the land. And coming into Florence from Lucca and a sheaf of quiet cities on an afternoon of this spring, I had a horrid impression of modern bustling streets and motors and trams and a great press of people, and ten thousand parasites battening on the art and beauty of the city, and it was not till I had won my way to my beloved Ponte Vecchio, with its mediæval stalls, that the city of the lily seemed to possess her soul again. Then as I saw her compose herself under her deep blue sky into a noble harmony, with her heights and her palaces and her river and her arches and arcades, and group herself round a tower, and brood in Venetian glamour over her water with her ancient rusty houses, and rise behind into a fantasy of quaint roofs and brick domes and steeples and belfries, all floating in a golden glory; and as I reflected on all she was and held within her narrow compass, how the names of great men and great days were written on every stone, and how every sort of art had been poured over her as prodigally as every sort of earth-beauty; and as I thought of the enchanting villages around and above her, where the cypress and the olive, the ilex and the pine slumbered in the sunshine, amid great rocks that shadowed cool glooming pools, and white roads went winding odorous with may and sweet with the song of thrush and blackbird, framing and arabesquing the faery city below in magic tangles of leafy boughs; and as I remembered that here to-day in this same city was not only spring, but Botticelli’s _Spring_—then it seemed to me that her flowers and her palaces, her frescoes and the curves of her hills were pushed up from the same deep elemental core of beauty, and that she lay like some great princess of Brobdingnag on whose body a colony of all the culture-snobs of the world had dumped its masses of raw building, run up its hundreds of hotels and _pensions_, piled its pyramids of handbooks, biographies, _Dantes_, histories, essays, landed its hordes of guides and interpreters, encamped its army of lecturers and art critics, installed its cohort of copyists, dragged up its heavy battery of professional photographers, supplemented by an amateur corps of Kodak snapshooters; but that, breathing lightly beneath all this mountainous cumber, unasphyxiated even by the works on the Renaissance, she could still rise radiant in her immortal strength and beauty, shaking off the Lilliputian creatures and their spawn of print, ungalled by that ceaseless fire of snapshots, imperturbable amid the lecturing, unimpaired even by all that immemorial admiration.
The pioneers of this culture-colony blundered sometimes, as pioneers will, and even Goethe, one notes with malicious glee, spent himself upon the wrong pictures, gloating over Guercino, wrestling with Caracci, Guido and Domenichino, and passing Botticelli by, nay taking all Florence as an afternoon excursion. And Pater himself, the pontifical Pater, though he has the merit of a Botticelli pioneer, yet thought it necessary to apologise for criticising “a second-rate painter”: which is as though one should apologise for discussing Keats.
Nor were Byron and Shelley more felicitous in their admirations. The _Kunstforscher_, that Being usually made in Germany, has been busy since their day. Amid the great movement of life, while men have been sowing and reaping, writing and painting, voyaging and making love, this spectacled creature has been peering at pictures and statues, scientifically analysing away their authenticity and often their charm. There is the Venus de’ Medici, which generations have raved over, which innumerable processions of tourists have journeyed to admire and found admirable. The connoisseurs have now pronounced her “spurious and meretricious,” and to-day nobody who respects himself would allow himself a thrill at the sight of her. Yet Childe Harold cried:
“We gaze and turn away, and know not where, Dazzled and drunk with beauty, till the heart Reels with its fulness.”
I must admit that after the Venus of Milo the beauty of the Medici Venus does appear a trivial prettiness. But even the Venus of Milo—though we are still permitted to admire her—is “late and eclectic.”
The unhappy Byron also wrote to somebody: “The Venus is more for admiration than for love. What struck me most was the mistress of the Raphael portrait.” Alas! nobody believes now that the picture has anything to do with La Fornarina.
As for Shelley, when in 1819 he saw at Florence the _Medusa_ attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, he broke into lyric raptures,
“Its horror and its beauty are divine, Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie Loveliness like a shadow, &c. &c. * * * “’Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror; For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare, Kindled by that inextricable error! . . .”
Kindled indeed by that inextricable error! For the _Medusa_ is now given up by every connoisseur. It is a mere inartistic futility and to-day every lover of the arts must grow stony at the sight of it. That immortal line “the tempestuous loveliness of terror” is the only thing to its credit, though some might count, too, the passage in which Pater gloats over its beauty of conception.
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,”
one would imagine that a civilisation or a city existed, that its remote founders had fevered and its burghers toiled and its architects built, to the mere end that centuries after they were dust some exquisite vibrations should be registered on a sensitive soul.
Only less arrogant is it to place one’s soul in patronising “appreciation” before some great historic structure—a cathedral, a mosque, a palace, a library. These works of man so immensely transcend any man’s works that he fits into them almost as ludicrously as a mouse. A cathedral that represents the genius and labours and sacrifices of generations towers so immensely out of proportion to any individual that he can only recover a reasonable relation to it by fusing himself into the life and stature of the race. To be solely concerned with its impingement upon his own soul is an impertinence, to pass his life in contriving such impingements is to live by robbery, and to enjoy these secular products of human solidarity on the Paterian pretext that the only reality is the fleeting and isolated Ego, is peculiarly paradoxical.
Pater himself would even go so far as to study men, _e.g._ Pico di Mirandola, for their æsthetic flavours. This is, indeed, to live resolutely _Im Schönen_ if not _Im Ganzen_, and it is, therefore, the more curious, that in citing Goethe’s maxim in his “Winckelmann” Pater should, like Carlyle, have unconsciously substituted _Im Wahren_ for _Im Schönen_. The æsthetic appreciation of Pico—as of most things—is a mere by-product. I do not deny that by-products are sometimes delightful. But let us not mistake them for central verities. And these churches, these pictures, these statues, these palaces, these monasteries which we see to-day in two dimensions, had once their third dimension of reality, nay often have it still to those who know them in their truth. How quaint that juxtaposition of Bibles and Baedekers in Italian churches! The image which, seen through tears, is soothing a worshipper’s pain, is at the same moment finding exact appreciation at the eyes of a connoisseur. Who can read without emotion of how in thirteenth-century Florence Cimabue’s _Madonna_, “the first Madonna the people could love,” was borne in triumph from the painter’s studio to its church by the whole population of the quarter, which henceforwards took the name of the Allegro Borgo! To-day the art-critic analyses its types and its composition, and it takes its place coldly in the history of painting as the link between the Byzantine and the Tuscan. But the citizens of the Joyous Quarter had the true flavour of the thing.
Despite the doctrine of Art for Art’s sake it remains questionable if any maker of Art has ever escaped a desire to act—massively or diffusively—upon the life of his age. In vain he hides himself in the past, or flies to No-man’s-land, he vibrates throughout to the present, touches living interests with their myriad indirect relations to action, to the third dimension. Every art-product holds, however subtly, something of that topical quality which makes the portrait of a contemporary celebrity, wet from the painter’s brush, very different from the peaceful remoteness of an Old Master.
No half-deciphered face of dim sweetness, charming us from the magic casement of some fading fresco by some forgotten artist, as with the very image of Art aloof and absolute, but was once wrought for a specific market and born into a specific atmosphere. The forlorn stumps and torsos that litter the moss-grown courts of museums were hailed, as they fell from the craftsman’s hand, by a definite clientèle, rejoicing in their beauty, stimulated by their freshness. Nothing, alas! is so old, so corroded with time, but it was once brand new, the pleasant novelty of the day to beings looking back upon an immemorial antiquity, and now long since mouldered to dust. Every blurred inscription, every crumbling pillar and shattered fragment had once its life, its meaning, its public.
The hand of time in eliminating the topical element and reducing a picture to pure Art—the inactive beauty that is its own end—removes from our perception the full reality of the art phenomenon as it fell from the artist’s hand into time and space.
Some parts of this original plenitude were indeed better forgotten, for the Old Masters who were young once, young and impecunious, turned Renaissance art into a fancy dress ball of their patrons, the Magnificent Ones figuring as saints and patriarchs, Bethlehem shepherds and Magian kings, whom oblivious time has done well to mellow into a quasi-anonymity. But if the loss of such intellectual elements is a gain, I am less certain as to the evaporation of the emotional auras of works of art.
Andrea Orcagna worked ten years at the marble Gothic Tabernacle that stands in the fuscous Or San Michele of Florence, and men of other races and faiths gaze perfunctorily upon its decorative jewelled marvels, its pictorial reliefs, wrought after the plague of 1348 from the pious legacies of the dead or the thank-offerings of the survivors. The marble gleams in the immortal inactive beauty that is its own end—but where are the hope and the faith, the mourning and the anguish that made the atmosphere in which its beauty had birth? Ebbed to the eternal silence, like that great wave of popular rejoicing on which Cimabue’s _Madonna_ was carried to S. Maria Novella, or a picture of Duccio’s to its due church in Siena. Can it be that Art, launched thus upon a sea of emotion, is only its true self when stranded high and dry upon the beach?
Is perhaps its most precious aspect precisely that by which it is related to life? And its least precious part that which remains over for the connoisseur of beauty? Oh but this is heresy, almost the philistinism of a Tolstoy or a Savonarola.