It would be really interesting to know exactly why an intelligent
person--by which I mean a person with any sort of intelligence--can and
does dislike sight-seeing. Why does the idea of a char-a-banc full of
tourists going to see the birth-place of Nelson or the death-scene of
Simon de Montfort strike a strange chill to the soul? I can tell quite
easily what this dim aversion to tourists and their antiquities does not
arise from--at least, in my case. Whatever my other vices (and they are,
of course, of a lurid cast), I can lay my hand on my heart and say that
it does not arise from a paltry contempt for the antiquities, nor yet
from the still more paltry contempt for the tourists. If there is one
thing more dwarfish and pitiful than irreverence for the past, it
is irreverence for the present, for the passionate and many-coloured
procession of life, which includes the char-a-banc among its many
chariots and triumphal cars. I know nothing so vulgar as that contempt
for vulgarity which sneers at the clerks on a Bank Holiday or the
Cockneys on Margate sands. The man who notices nothing about the clerk
except his Cockney accent would have noticed nothing about Simon de
Montfort except his French accent. The man who jeers at Jones for having
dropped an “h” might have jeered at Nelson for having dropped an arm.
Scorn springs easily to the essentially vulgar-minded, and it is as easy
to gibe at Montfort as a foreigner or at Nelson as a cripple, as to gibe
at the struggling speech and the maimed bodies of the mass of our comic
and tragic race. If I shrink faintly from this affair of tourists and
tombs, it is certainly not because I am so profane as to think lightly
either of the tombs or the tourists. I reverence those great men who
had the courage to die; I reverence also these little men who have the
courage to live.
Even if this be conceded, another suggestion may be made. It may be said
that antiquities and commonplace crowds are indeed good things, like
violets and geraniums; but they do not go together. A billycock is a
beautiful object (it may be eagerly urged), but it is not in the same
style of architecture as Ely Cathedral; it is a dome, a small rococo
dome in the Renaissance manner, and does not go with the pointed arches
that assault heaven like spears. A char-a-banc is lovely (it may be
said) if placed upon a pedestal and worshipped for its own sweet
sake; but it does not harmonize with the curve and outline of the old
three-decker on which Nelson died; its beauty is quite of another sort.
Therefore (we will suppose our sage to argue) antiquity and democracy
should be kept separate, as inconsistent things. Things may be
inconsistent in time and space which are by no means inconsistent in
essential value and idea. Thus the Catholic Church has water for the
new-born and oil for the dying: but she never mixes oil and water.
This explanation is plausible; but I do not find it adequate. The first
objection is that the same smell of bathos haunts the soul in the
case of all deliberate and elaborate visits to “beauty spots,” even
by persons of the most elegant position or the most protected privacy.
Specially visiting the Coliseum by moonlight always struck me as being
as vulgar as visiting it by limelight. One millionaire standing on the
top of Mont Blanc, one millionaire standing in the desert by the Sphinx,
one millionaire standing in the middle of Stonehenge, is just as comic
as one millionaire is anywhere else; and that is saying a good deal. On
the other hand, if the billycock had come privately and naturally into
Ely Cathedral, no enthusiast for Gothic harmony would think of objecting
to the billycock--so long, of course, as it was not worn on the head.
But there is indeed a much deeper objection to this theory of the two
incompatible excellences of antiquity and popularity. For the truth
is that it has been almost entirely the antiquities that have normally
interested the populace; and it has been almost entirely the populace
who have systematically preserved the antiquities. The Oldest Inhabitant
has always been a clodhopper; I have never heard of his being a
gentleman. It is the peasants who preserve all traditions of the sites
of battles or the building of churches. It is they who remember, so far
as any one remembers, the glimpses of fairies or the graver wonders of
saints. In the classes above them the supernatural has been slain by the
supercilious. That is a true and tremendous text in Scripture which says
that “where there is no vision the people perish.” But it is equally
true in practice that where there is no people the visions perish.
The idea must be abandoned, then, that this feeling of faint dislike
towards popular sight-seeing is due to any inherent incompatibility
between the idea of special shrines and trophies and the idea of large
masses of ordinary men. On the contrary, these two elements of sanctity
and democracy have been specially connected and allied throughout
history. The shrines and trophies were often put up by ordinary men.
They were always put up for ordinary men. To whatever things the
fastidious modern artist may choose to apply his theory of specialist
judgment, and an aristocracy of taste, he must necessarily find it
difficult really to apply it to such historic and monumental art.
Obviously, a public building is meant to impress the public. The most
aristocratic tomb is a democratic tomb, because it exists to be seen;
the only aristocratic thing is the decaying corpse, not the undecaying
marble; and if the man wanted to be thoroughly aristocratic, he should
be buried in his own back-garden. The chapel of the most narrow and
exclusive sect is universal outside, even if it is limited inside, its
walls and windows confront all points of the compass and all quarters of
the cosmos. It may be small as a dwelling-place, but it is universal
as a monument; if its sectarians had really wished to be private they
should have met in a private house. Whenever and wherever we erect a
national or municipal hall, pillar, or statue, we are speaking to the
crowd like a demagogue.
The statue of every statesman offers itself for election as much as the
statesman himself. Every epitaph on a church slab is put up for the mob
as much as a placard in a General Election. And if we follow this track
of reflection we shall, I think, really find why it is that modern
sight-seeing jars on something in us, something that is not a caddish
contempt for graves nor an equally caddish contempt for cads. For, after
all, there is many a--churchyard which consists mostly of dead cads; but
that does not make it less sacred or less sad.
The real explanation, I fancy, is this: that these cathedrals and
columns of triumph were meant, not for people more cultured and
self-conscious than modern tourists, but for people much rougher and
more casual. Those leaps of live stone like frozen fountains, were so
placed and poised as to catch the eye of ordinary inconsiderate men
going about their daily business; and when they are so seen they
are never forgotten. The true way of reviving the magic of our great
minsters and historic sepulchres is not the one which Ruskin was always
recommending. It is not to be more careful of historic buildings. Nay,
it is rather to be more careless of them. Buy a bicycle in Maidstone to
visit an aunt in Dover, and you will see Canterbury Cathedral as it was
built to be seen. Go through London only as the shortest way between
Croydon and Hampstead, and the Nelson Column will (for the first time in
your life) remind you of Nelson. You will appreciate Hereford Cathedral
if you have come for cider, not if you have come for architecture. You
will really see the Place Vendome if you have come on business, not
if you have come for art. For it was for the simple and laborious
generations of men, practical, troubled about many things, that our
fathers reared those portents. There is, indeed, another element, not
unimportant: the fact that people have gone to cathedrals to pray. But
in discussing modern artistic cathedral-lovers, we need not consider
this.