To-day, we invent a new convention—or, more often, resuscitate a combination of old conventions out of the past—exploit it, and throw it away, all in the space of five years. The fixity of the old traditions, the sure refinement of taste, born of ignorance and intolerant fastidiousness, have gone. Will they ever return? In time, no doubt, the artists will have inured themselves to the poison of the Pierian spring. The immense mass of knowledge which, in our minds, is still crude, will gradually be digested. When that has happened, some sort of fixity—or rather some slow and steady motion, for in life there is no fixity—will have been achieved. Meanwhile, we must be content to live in an age of dissipated energies, of experiment and pastiche, of restlessness and hopeless uncertainty.
The vast increase in our knowledge of art history has affected not only the artists themselves, but all those who take an interest in the arts. For tout savoir est tout pardonner; we have learned to appreciate and see the best in every style. To Voltaire and Dr. Johnson even Gothic art seemed a barbarism. What would they have said if we had asked them to admire the plastic beauties of a Polynesian statue, or the painting of an animal by an artist who lived millenniums before the dawn of history? Knowledge has enabled us to sympathize with unfamiliar points of view, to appreciate artistic conventions devised by people utterly unlike ourselves. All this, no doubt, is a very good thing. But our sympathy is so vast and we are so much afraid of showing ourselves intolerant towards the things we ought to like, that we have begun to love in our all-embracing way not merely the highest, in whatever convention, when we see it, but the lowest too.
We are not content with appreciating the good things which our ancestors condemned. Appetite grows with what it feeds on. The good is not enough to satisfy our hungry appreciation; we must swallow the bad as well. To justify ourselves in this appreciation of what is bad, we have created a whole series of new aesthetic values. The process which began some time ago has gone on with ever-increasing speed and thoroughness, till there is now almost nothing, however bad, from which we cannot derive pleasure.
Historically, I suppose, the first stage in the breaking up of the old standards of taste was the invention of the ‘picturesque.’ A picturesque object may be defined as a thing which has some quality or qualities in excess of the normal. The nature of the excessive quality is almost a matter of indifference. Thus, even an excess of dirtiness is sufficient to render an object picturesque. The ideally picturesque object or scene possesses several excessive qualities in violent contrast one with another—for example, excess of gloom contrasting with excess of light, excess of magnificence with excess of squalor.
The quaint may be defined as the picturesque made smaller and touched with the comic. Those little old houses which Dickens so loved to describe—all holes and corners and curious accidents—are typical pieces of quaintness. There is always something snug and homely about the quaint, something even, in a comic way, slightly virtuous—funnily good, like Tom Pinch in Martin Chuzzlewit. It was the Victorian middle classes who erected quaintness into a standard of aesthetic excellence. Their love of it, coupled with their love of the picturesque, permitted them to admire a vast number of things which have practically no connection with art at all. What I may call ‘arty-craftiness’ or ‘peasantry’ is a Tolstoyan derivation from the quaint.
The great invention of more recent years has been the ‘amusing.’ In origin this is a highly sophisticated, upper-class standard of value. All bad art, whose badness is a positive and not a merely negative quality of respectable dulness, may be said to be amusing. For instance, Wordsworth, when he writes badly, is not at all amusing. Moore, on the other hand, is; for Moore’s badness is of the period, highly coloured, mannered and mincing. The badness of Wordsworth, like his goodness, is of all time. The Ecclesiastical Sonnets are absolute bathos, just as the finest passages in the Prelude and Excursion are absolute poetry.
A highly developed sense of the amusing in art is now extremely common. Few of those who take any conscious interest in the arts are now without it. Amusingness has even come to have a commercial value; dealers find that they can get good prices for the papier mâché furniture of the eighteen-fifties, for the wax flowers and statuettes of the age of Louis-Philippe. The people who collect these objects appear to derive as much satisfaction from them—for a time at any rate—as they would from the most austerely graceful Heppelwhite or the choicest fourteenth-century ivories.
And there is no reason, of course, why they should not, provided that they continue to recognize the fact that Heppelwhite is better than Victorian papier mâché and that mediaeval ivories are more beautiful than wax flowers. But the trouble is that this recognition is not always so complete or so prompt as it should be. That is the great danger attendant on the cult of the amusing; it makes its votaries forget that there are such things as the beautiful and the sublime. In the end Erasmus Darwin comes to be preferred to Wordsworth, Longhi to Giotto. Indirectly, it is the Pierian spring that is responsible.
Part IV
BY THE WAY, A NIGHT AT PIETRAMALA
‘What I love best in all the world,’ says Browning in De Gustibus, ‘is a castle, precipice-encurled, in a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine.’ De Gustibus, indeed. I take the hint and shall not argue the point. Suffice it to say that, though I like the poem, I cannot share the poet’s tastes. A castle in the Apennine would come quite low in the list of the things I love. A palace in Rome, a villa just outside the gates of Siena, even a motor caravan would stand higher. For the epithet which Browning applies to the Apennine is only too appropriate. He himself, no doubt, enjoyed being grieved by the wind. I can imagine him, with bent head, tunnelling his way through one of those hellish blasts which come hooting down, in spring and winter, through the gashes between the hills.
He would feel exhilarated by the effort; his struggle against the elements would elate him and he would return to his castle to write some more than ordinarily hearty paean in praise of passion and energy—passion for passion’s sake, energy admirable, not so much for its direction as for its volume. Such, I am sure, were the effects of the wind on Browning; it confirmed him in his blustering optimism. In me, on the other hand, the wind of the Apennines begets nothing but neuralgia and the profoundest depression. It is not Prospice that I should write in the precipice-encurled castello; it is something in the style of the City of Dreadful Night.
That I am not exaggerating the horrors of the wind among the Apennines is proved by the fact that it has been found necessary, for the convenience and even the safety of travellers, to protect the most exposed places of the principal passes with high walls. I remember in particular one section of the main road from Florence to Bologna which is flanked for hundreds of yards by an immense parapet, like the great wall of China. The road at this point, which is between two and three thousand feet above the sea, cuts across the head of a deep and narrow valley, through which there sucks a perpetual draught.
Even in summer, on halcyon days, you can hear as you pass under the lee of the wall, a melancholy wailing of the winds overhead. But on rough days in winter, in the spring and autumn, the air is full of fearful noises, as though the gates of hell had been opened and the lost souls were making holiday. What happened to travellers who passed that way before, some hundred years ago, a beneficent Grand-Ducal government built the wall, I shudder to think. They must often have been, quite literally, blown off the road.
We passed that way once in March. The Italian spring, which is not so different from the spring in other countries, was inclement that year and icy. In Florence the sun shone fitfully between huge clouds. Snow still lay in patches on Monte Morello. The breeze was nipping. ‘Are the passes free of snow?’ we asked at the garage where we stopped to fill our petrol tank. Animated by that typically Italian desire to give an answer that will please the questioner, the garage man assured us that the road was perfectly clear.
And he said it with such conviction that we imagined, as northerners would naturally imagine, that he knew. Nothing is more charming than southern courtesy, southern sympathy and the southern desire to please. The heart is touched by the kindly interest which the Italians take in your affairs; you love them for their courteous inquisitiveness; they make you at home immediately, treat you at once as a human being and do their best to please you.
It is delightful. But sometimes they are really too sympathetic by half. For in order not to contradict you or give you a moment’s pain by disputing the accuracy of your ideas, they will tell you what you want to hear rather than what it would be of real use to you to hear. At the same time their own self-esteem will not
