When I was a schoolboy and was to have a new knife, I could not make up
my mind as to which was the prettiest in the showcase, and I did not
think any of them were particularly pretty; and so I chose with a heavy
heart. But when I looked at my purchase, at home, where no glittering
blades came into composition with it, I was astonished to see how
handsome it was. To this day my new hats look better out of the shop
than they did in it, with other new hats. It begins to dawn upon me now,
that possibly, what I have been taking for uniform ugliness in the
galleries may be uniform beauty, after all. I honestly hope it is, to
others, but certainly it is not to me. Perhaps the reason I used to
enjoy going to the Academy of Fine Arts in New York was because there
were but a few hundred paintings in it, and it did not surfeit me to go
through the list. I suppose the Academy was bacon and beans in the
Forty-Mile Desert, and a European gallery is a state dinner of thirteen
courses. One leaves no sign after him of the one dish, but the thirteen
frighten away his appetite and give him no satisfaction.
There is one thing I am certain of, though. With all the Michael
Angelos, the Raphaels, the Guidos, and the other old masters, the
sublime history of Rome remains unpainted! They painted Virgins enough,
and Popes enough, and saintly scarecrows enough, to people Paradise,
almost, and these things are all they did paint. “Nero fiddling o’er
burning Rome,” the assassination of Caesar, the stirring spectacle of a
hundred thousand people bending forward with rapt interest, in the
coliseum, to see two skilful gladiators hacking away each other’s lives,
a tiger springing upon a kneeling martyr—these and a thousand other
matters which we read of with a living interest, must be sought for only
in books—not among the rubbish left by the old masters—who are no more,
I have the satisfaction of informing the public.