Old Masters and Other Ruins
It is naturally a fine thing for one, and gratifying, to acquire a
thorough art education. Personally I do not in the least regret the time
I gave and the study I devoted to acquiring mine. I regard those two
weeks as having been well spent.
I shall not do it soon again, however, for now I know all about art. Let
others who have not enjoyed my advantages take up this study. Let others
scour the art galleries of Europe seeking masterpieces. All of them
contain masterpieces and most of them need scouring. As for me and mine,
we shall go elsewhere. I love my art, but I am not fanatical on the
subject. There is another side of my nature to which an appeal may be
made. I can take my Old Masters or I can leave them be. That is the way
I am organized--I have self-control.
I shall not deny that the earlier stages of my art education were
fraught with agreeable little surprises. Not soon shall I forget the
flush of satisfaction which ran through me on learning that this man
Dore's name was pronounced like the first two notes in the music scale,
instead of like a Cape Cod fishing boat. And lingering in my mind as a
fragrant memory is the day when I first discovered that Spagnoletto was
neither a musical instrument nor something to be served au gratin and
eaten with a fork. Such acquirements as these are very precious to me.
But for the time being I have had enough. At this hour of writing I
feel that I am stocked up with enough of Bouguereau's sorrel ladies and
Titian's chestnut ones and Rubens' bay ones and Velasquez's pintos to
last me, at a conservative estimate, for about seventy-five years. I
am too young as a theatergoer to recall much about Lydia Thompson's
Blondes, but I have seen sufficient of Botticelli's to do me amply well
for a spell. I am still willing to walk a good distance to gaze on one
of Rembrandt's portraits of one of his kinfolks, though I must say he
certainly did have a lot of mighty homely relatives; and any time there
is a first-rate Millet or Corot or Meissonier in the neighborhood I wish
somebody would drop me a line, giving the address. As for pictures by
Tintoretto, showing Venetian Doges hobnobbing informally with members
of the Holy Family, and Raphael's angels, and Michelangelo's lost souls,
and Guidos, and Murillos, I have had enough to do me for months and
months and months. Nor am I in the market for any of the dead fish of
the Flemish school. Judging by what I have observed, practically all
the Flemish painters were devout churchmen and painted their pictures on
Friday.
There was just one drawback to my complete enjoyment of that part of our
European travels we devoted to art. We would go to an art gallery, hire
a guide and start through. Presently I would come to a picture that
struck me as being distinctly worth while. To my untutored conceptions
it possessed unlimited beauty. There was, it seemed to me, life in the
figures, reality in the colors, grace in the grouping. And then, just
when I was beginning really to enjoy it, the guide would come and snatch
me away.
He would tell me the picture I thought I admired was of no account
whatsoever--that the artist who painted it had not yet been dead long
enough to give his work any permanent value; and he would drag me off to
look at a cracked and crumbling canvas depicting a collection of saints
of lacquered complexions and hardwood expressions, with cast-iron trees
standing up against cotton batting clouds in the background, and a few
extra halos floating round indiscriminately, like sun dogs on a showery
day, and, up above, the family entrance into heaven hospitably ajar; and
he would command me to bask my soul in this magnificent example of real
art and not waste time on inconsequential and trivial things. Guides
have the same idea of an artist that a Chinaman entertains for an egg.
A fresh egg or a fresh artist will not do. It must have the perfume of
antiquity behind it to make it attractive.
At the Louvre, in Paris, on the first day of the two we spent there, we
had for our guide a tall, educated Prussian, who had an air about him
of being an ex-officer of the army. All over the Continent you are
constantly running into men engaged in all manner of legitimate and
dubious callings, who somehow impress you as having served in the army
of some other country than the one in which you find them. After this
man had been chaperoning us about for some hours and we had stopped to
rest, he told a good story. It may not have been true--it has been my
experience that very few good stories are true; but it served aptly to
illustrate a certain type of American tourist numerously encountered
abroad.
"There were two of them," he said in his excellent English, "a gentleman
and his wife; and from what I saw of them I judged them to be very
wealthy. They were interested in seeing only such things as had been
recommended by the guidebook. The husband would tell me they desired
to see such and such a picture or statue. I would escort them to it and
they would glance at it indifferently, and the gentleman would take out
his lead pencil and check off that particular object in the book; and
then he would say: 'All right--we've seen that; now let's find out
what we want to look at next.' We still serve a good many people like
that--not so many as formerly, but still a good many.
"Finally I decided to try a little scheme of my own. I wanted to see
whether I could really win their admiration for something. I picked out
a medium-size painting of no particular importance and, pointing to
it, said impressively: 'Here, m'sieur, is a picture worth a million
dollars--without the frame!'
"'What's that?' he demanded excitedly. Then he called to his wife,
who had strayed ahead a few steps. 'Henrietta,' he said, 'come back
here--you're missing something. There's a picture there that's worth a
million dollars--and without the frame, too, mind you!'
"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.
He held his right arm aloft, with the first two fingers extended in the
gesture of the apostolic benediction. He was so far away from us that
in perspective his profile was reduced to the miniature proportions of
a head on a postage stamp; but, all the same, the lines of it stood out
clear and distinct. It was his Holiness, Pope Pius the Tenth, blessing a
pilgrimage.
All the guides in Rome follow a regular routine with the tourist. First,
of course, they steer you into certain shops in the hope that you will
buy something and thereby enable them to earn commissions. Then, in
turn, they carry you to an art gallery, to a church, and to a palace,
with stops at other shops interspersed between; and invariably they wind
up in the vicinity of some of the ruins. Ruins is a Roman guide's middle
name; ruins are his one best bet. In Rome I saw ruins until I was one
myself.
We devoted practically an entire day to ruins. That was the day we
drove out the Appian Way, glorious in legend and tale, but not quite
so all-fired glorious when you are reeling over its rough and rutted
pavement in an elderly and indisposed open carriage, behind a pair of
half-broken Roman-nosed horses which insist on walking on their hind
legs whenever they tire of going on four. The Appian Way, as at present
constituted, is a considerable disappointment. For long stretches it
runs between high stone walls, broken at intervals by gate-ways,
where votive lamps burn before small shrines, and by the tombs of such
illustrious dead as Seneca and the Horatii and the Curiatii. At more
frequent intervals are small wine groggeries. Being built mainly of
Italian marble, which is the most enduring and the most unyielding
substance to be found in all Italy--except a linen collar that has been
starched in an Italian laundry--the tombs are in a pretty fair state of
preservation; but the inns, without exception, stand most desperately in
need of immediate repairing.
A cow in Italy is known by the company she keeps; she rambles about, in
and out of the open parlor of the wayside inn, mingling freely with the
patrons and the members of the proprietor's household. Along the Appian
Way a cow never seems to care whom she runs with; and the same is true
of the domestic fowls and the family donkey. A donkey will spend his day
in the doorway of a wine shop when he might just as well be enjoying the
more sanitary and less crowded surroundings of a stable. It only goes to
show what an ass a donkey is.
Anon, as the fancy writers say, we skirted one of the many wrecked
aqueducts that go looping across country to the distant hills, like
great stone straddlebugs. In the vicinity of Rome you are rarely out
of sight of one of these aqueducts. The ancient Roman rulers, you know,
curried the favor of the populace by opening baths. A modern ruler could
win undying popularity by closing up a few.
We slowed up at the Circus of Romulus and found it a very sad circus, as
such things go--no elevated stage, no hippodrome track, no centerpole,
no trapeze, and only one ring. P. T. Barnum would have been ashamed
to own it. A broken wall, following the lines of an irregular oval;
a cabbage patch where the arena had been; and various tumble-down
farmsheds built into the shattered masonry--this was the Circus of
Romulus. However, it was not the circus of the original Romulus, but
of a degenerate successor of the same name who rose suddenly and fell
abruptly after the Christian era was well begun. Old John J. Romulus
would not have stood for that circus a minute.
No ride on the Appian Way is regarded as complete without half an hour's
stop at the Catacombs of Saint Calixtus; so we stopped. Guided by a
brown Trappist, and all of us bearing twisted tapers in our hands, we
descended by stone steps deep under the skin of the earth and wandered
through dim, dank underground passages, where thousands of early
Christians had lived and hid, and held clandestine worship before rude
stone altars, and had died and been buried--died in a highly unpleasant
fashion, some of them.
The experience was impressive, but malarial. Coming away from there I
had an argument with a fellow American. He said that if we had these
Catacombs in America we should undoubtedly enlarge them and put in band
stands and lunch places, and altogether make them more attractive for
picnic parties and Sunday excursionists. I contended, on the other hand,
that if they were in America the authorities would close them up and
protect the moldered bones of those early Christians from the vulgar
gaze and prying fingers of every impious relic hunter who might come
along. The dispute rose higher and grew warmer until I offered to bet
him fifty dollars that I was right and he was wrong. He took me up
promptly--he had sporting instincts; I'll say that for him--and we shook
hands on it then and there to bind the wager. I expect to win that bet.
We had turned off the Appian Way and were crossing a corner of that
unutterably hideous stretch of tortured and distorted waste known as the
Campagna, which goes tumbling away to the blue Alban Mountains, when we
came on the scene of an accident. A two-wheeled mule cart, proceeding
along a crossroad, with the driver asleep in his canopied seat, had been
hit by a speeding automobile and knocked galley-west. The automobile had
sped on--so we were excitedly informed by some other tourists who had
witnessed the collision--leaving the wreckage bottom side up in the
ditch. The mule was on her back, all entangled in the twisted ruination
of her gaudy gear, kicking out in that restrained and genteel fashion
in which a mule always kicks when she is desirous of protesting against
existing conditions, but is wishful not to damage herself while so
doing. The tourists, aided by half a dozen peasants, had dragged the
driver out from beneath the heavy cart and had carried him to a pile of
mucky straw beneath the eaves of a stable. He was stretched full length
on his back, senseless and deathly pale under the smeared grime on his
face. There was no blood; but inside his torn shirt his chest had a
caved-in look, as though the ribs had been crushed flat, and he seemed
not to breathe at all. Only his fingers moved. They kept twitching, as
though his life was running out of him through his finger ends. One felt
that if he would but grip his hands he might stay its flight and hold it
in.
Just as we jumped out of our carriage a young peasant woman, who had
been bending over the injured man, set up a shrill outcry, which was
instantly answered from behind us; and looking round we saw, running
through the bare fields, a great, bulksome old woman, with her arms
outspread and her face set in a tragic shape, shrieking as she sped
toward us in her ungainly wallowing course. She was the injured man's
mother, we judged--or possibly his grandmother.
There was nothing we could do for the human victim. Our guides, having
questioned the assembled natives, told us there was no hospital to which
he might be taken and that a neighborhood physician had already been
sent for. So, having no desire to look on the grief of his mother--if
she was his mother--a young Austrian and I turned our attention to the
neglected mule. We felt that we could at least render a little first
aid there. We had our pocket-knives out and were slashing away at the
twisted maze of ropes and straps that bound the brute down between the
shafts, when a particularly shrill chorus of shrieks checked us. We
stood up and faced about, figuring that the poor devil on the muck heap
had died and that his people were bemoaning his death. That was not it
at all. The entire group, including the fat old woman, were screaming at
us and shaking their clenched fists at us, warning us not to damage that
harness with our knives. Feeling ran high, and threatened to run higher.
So, having no desire to be mobbed on the spot, we desisted and put up
our knives; and after a while we got back into our carriage and drove
on, leaving the capsized mule still belly-up in the debris, lashing out
carefully with her skinned legs at the trappings that bound her; and the
driver was still prone on the dunghill, with his fingers twitching more
feebly now, as though the life had almost entirely fled out of him--a
grim little tragedy set in the edge of a wide and aching desolation! We
never found out his name or learned how he fared--whether he lived or
died, and if he died how long he lived before he died. It is a puzzle
which will always lie unanswered at the back of my mind, and I know
that in odd moments it will return to torment me. I will bet one thing,
though--nobody else tried to cut that mule out of her harness.
In the chill late afternoon of a Roman day the guides brought us back
to the city and took us down into the Roman Forum, which is in a hollow
instead of being up on a hill as most folks imagine it to be until they
go to Rome and see it; and we finished up the day at the Golden House of
Nero, hard by the vast ruins of the Coliseum. We had already visited the
Forum once; so this time we did not stay long; just long enough for some
ambitious pickpocket to get a wallet out of my hip pocket while I was
pushing forward with a flock of other human sheep for a better look
at the ruined portico wherein Mark Antony stood when he delivered his
justly popular funeral oration over the body of the murdered Caesar.
I never did admire the character of Mark Antony with any degree of
extravagance, and since this experience I have felt actually bitter
toward him.
The guidebooks say that no visitor to Rome should miss seeing the Golden
House of Nero. When a guidebook tries to be humorous it only succeeds in
being foolish. Practical jokes are out of place in a guidebook anyway.
Imagine a large, old-fashioned brick smokehouse, which has been struck
by lightning, burned to the roots and buried in the wreckage, and the
site used as a pasture land for goats for a great many years; imagine
the debris as having been dug out subsequently until a few of the
foundation lines are visible; surround the whole with distressingly
homely buildings of a modern aspect, and stir in a miscellaneous
seasoning of beggars and loafers and souvenir venders--and you have the
Golden House where Nero meant to round out a life already replete with
incident and abounding in romance, but was deterred from so doing
by reason of being cut down in the midst of his activities at a
comparatively early age.
In the presence of the Golden House of Nero I did my level best to
recreate before my mind's eye the scenes that had been enacted here once
on a time. I tried to picture this moldy, knee-high wall, as a great
glittering palace; and yonder broken roadbed as a splendid Roman
highway; and these American-looking tenements on the surrounding hills
as the marble dwellings of the emperors; and all the broken pillars and
shattered porticoes in the distance as arches of triumph and temples of
the gods. I tried to convert the clustering mendicants into barbarian
prisoners clanking by, chained at wrist and neck and ankle; I sought to
imagine the pestersome flower venders as being vestal virgins; the two
unkempt policemen who loafed nearby, as centurions of the guard;
the passing populace as grave senators in snowy togas; the flaunting
underwear on the many clotheslines as silken banners and gilded
trappings. I could not make it. I tried until I was lame in both legs
and my back was strained. It was no go.
If I had been a poet or a historian, or a person full of Chianti,
I presume I might have done it; but I am no poet and I had not been
drinking. All I could think of was that the guide on my left had eaten
too much garlic and that the guide on my right had not eaten enough. So
in self-defense I went away and ate a few strands of garlic myself; for
I had learned the great lesson of the proverb:
When in Rome be an aroma!