Amid the infantile fluttering confusion caused by the arrival of the
Milan express at Florence railway station, the thoughts of the artist as
he falls sheer out of the compartment upon the soft bodies of hold-alls
and struggling women, are not solely on the platform. This moment has
grandeur. This city was the home of the supreme ones--Dante, Leonardo,
Michael Angelo, and Brunelleschi. You have entered it.. . . Awe? I have
never been aware of sentiments of awe towards any artists, save Charles
Baudelaire. My secret attitude to them has always been that I would
like to shake their hands and tell them briefly in their private slang,
whatever their private slang was, that they had given immense pleasure
to another artist. I have excepted Charles Baudelaire ever since I read
his correspondence, in which he is eternally trying to borrow ten francs
from some one, and if they cannot make it ten--then five. There is
something so excessively poignant, and to me so humiliating, in the
spectacle of the grand author of La Charogne going about among his
acquaintance in search of a dollar, that I would only think about it
when I wished to inflict on myself a penance. It is a spectacle
unique. Like the King of Thule song in Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust, it
resembles nothing else of its kind. If the artist does not stand in awe
before that monumental enigma of human pride which called itself Charles
Baudelaire, how shall the artist’s posture be described?
No, I will tell you what occupied the withdrawn and undefiled spaces
of my mind as I entered Florence, drifting on the stream of labelled
menials and determined ladies with their teeth hard-set: Was it more
interesting for an artist to be born into a great age of art, where he
was beloved and appreciated, if not wholly comprehended, by relatively
large masses of people; where his senses were on every hand indulged and
pampered by the caress of the obviously beautiful; where he lived among
equals, and saw himself continually surrounded by innumerable acts
creative of beauty; and where he could feel in the very air a divine
palpitation--or, on the other hand, was it more spiritually voluptuous
for the artist to be born into a stone age, an age deaf and dumb, an age
insensible to the sublime, ignorantly rejecting beauty, and occupying
itself with the most damnable and offensive futilities that the soul of
an artist can conceive? For I was going, in my fancy, out of the one
age into the other. And I decided, upon reflection, that I would just
as soon be in the age in which I in fact was; I said that I would
not change places even with the most fortunate and miraculous of
men--Leonardo da Vinci. There is an agreeable bitterness, an exquisite
_tang_, in the thought of the loneliness of artists in an age whose
greatness and whose epic quality are quite divorced from art. And when
I think of the artist in this age, I think of the Invisible Man of H.
G. Wells, in the first pride of his invisibility (when he was not yet
hunted), walking unseen and unseeing amid multitudes, and it is long
before? anybody in the multitudes even notices the phenomenon of
mysterious footmarks that cannot be accounted for! I like to be that
man. I like to think that my fellows are few, and that even I, not
having eyes to see most of them, must now and then be disconcerted by
the appearance of unaccountable footmarks. There is something beyond
happiness, and that is, to know intensely and painfully that you are
what you are. The great Florentines of course had that knowledge, but
their circumstances were; not so favourable as mine to its cultivation
in an artist. Therein lay their disadvantage and lies my advantage.
[Illustration: 0199]
Besides, you do not suppose that I would wish to alter this age by a
single iota of its ugliness and its preposterousness! You do not suppose
I do not love it! You do not suppose I do not wallow in the trough of it
with delight! There is not one stockbroker, not one musical comedy star,
not one philanthropic giver of free libraries, not one noble brewer, not
one pander, not one titled musician, not one fashionable bishop, not
one pro-consul, that I would wish away. Where should my pride bitterly
exercise itself if not in proving that my age, exactly as it exists now,
contains nothing that is not the raw material of beauty? If I wished
to do so, I would force some among you to see that even the hotel-tout
within the portals of the city of Giotto is beautiful.
*****
At dinner I am waited upon by a young and beautiful girl who, having
almost certainly never heard of Gabriele d’Annunzio, yet speaks his
language and none other. But she wears the apron and the cap of the
English parlour-maid, in plenary correctness, and, knowing exactly how
I should be served in England, she humours me; and above us is a vaulted
ceiling. Such is the terrible might of England. I am surrounded by
ladies; the room is crammed with ladies. By the perfection of their
virtuosity in the nice conduct of forks alone is demonstrated their
ladyship. (And I who, like a savage, cannot eat pudding without a
spoon!) There is a middle-aged gentleman, whose eyeglasses are wandering
down his fine nose, lost in a bosky dell of women at the other end of
the room; and there is myself; and there is a boy, obviously in Hades.
And there are some fifty dames. Their voices, high, and with the sublime
unconscious arrogance of the English, fight quietly and steadily among
each other up in the vaulting. “Of course, I used to play cricket with
my brothers. But, will you believe me, I’ve never seen a football match
in my life!”
“No, we haven’t seen the new rector yet, but they say he’s frightfully
nice.”
“Benozzo Gozzoli--ye-es.” It is impossible not to believe, listening to
these astounding conversations, that nature, tired of imitating Balzac
any longer, has now taken to imitating the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward.
The drawing-room is an English drawing-room--yes, with the _Queen_ and
“the authoress of _Elizabeth and her German Garden_” and a Bechstein
grand. There are forty-five chairs and easy chairs in it, and fifty
ladies; the odd five ladies sit low upon hassocks or recline on each
other in attitudes of intense affection. And at the other end is a male,
neither the man with the pincenez nor the boy in Hades, but a third who
has mysteriously come out of nothing into existence. I have entered,
and I am held, as by a spell, in the doorway, the electric light raining
upon me, a San Sebastian for the fatal arrows of the fifty, who fix on
me their ingenuous eyes--