If I could be born again and choose what I should be in my next existence, I should desire to be a man of science—not accidentally but by nature, inevitably a man of science. Fate might offer other alternatives—to have power or wealth, be a king or a statesman. These glittering temptations I should have small difficulty in rejecting; for my objection to the irritating turmoil of practical life is even stronger than my love of money or power, and since these cannot be obtained without plunging into practical life, I can sacrifice them cheerfully. It is easy to make a virtue of psychological necessity. The only thing that might make me hesitate would be an offer by fate of artistic genius. But even if I could be Shakespeare, I think I should still choose to be Faraday. True, the posthumous glory of Shakespeare is greater than that of Faraday; men still read Macbeth but not (even if they happen to be electricians)—the Experimental Researches in Electricity. The work of a man of science is a creation on which others build; it has implications, it grows.
If we want to know about electricity, we read what the contemporary successors and disciples of Faraday have to say about it. But Macbeth is a thing in itself, not a discovery on which other men can improve. There is no such thing as progress in art. Every artist begins at the beginning. The man of science, on the other hand, begins where his predecessor left off. Opinions and ideas change, under the weight of accumulated experience, from age to age. The instinctive, emotional side of man, being hereditary, remains the same. The man of science provides the experience that changes the ideas of the race; in course of time his discoveries are superseded. The artist does not go out of date because he works with materials that do not change. Lyrics composed by a palaeolithic poet would still be moving. But the views of a palaeolithic astronomer would possess, for us, a merely historical and academic interest.
And yet in spite of all this I would still rather be Faraday than Shakespeare. Posthumous fame brings nobody much satisfaction this side of the grave; and though the consciousness that one possesses a great artistic talent must be profoundly satisfying, though the free employment of it must be a source of happiness, it seems to me that the possession and employment of a scientific talent must be still more satisfying. For the artist, whose function is the apt expression and the conveyance to others of the common human emotions, must fatally pass much of his life in the emotional world of human contacts.
His reflections upon the world, his personal reactions to contacts—these form the subject matter of his art. The world in which the man of science passes the professional part of his life is non-human, has nothing to do with personal relationships and emotional reactions. We are all subdued to what we work in; and I personally would rather be subdued to intellectual contemplation than to emotion, would rather use my soul professionally for knowing than for feeling.
One of the minor disadvantages of being a great artist is the fact that the artist enjoys a considerable social prestige. Art is the subject of snobbery to a far greater extent than science. The presence of a well-known poet or painter is felt to give distinction to a dinner-party. Hostesses rarely ask one to meet bio-chemists, however distinguished. The reason for this is simple; all men and women imagine that they can appreciate the arts—and up to a point, of course, actually can—while the number who can understand the technicalities of science is remarkably small. (Vainly, alas, I wish that I myself belonged to that minority.)
To this is due the enviable immunity of the men of science from the intrusion of frivolous bores. The artist, on the other hand, is one of the favourite quarries of the unemployed rich; a good specimen is worth at least an ambassador, almost an Indian prince. If the artist is a man of strong character he will find the attentions of the lion-hunters not dangerous, indeed, but profoundly exasperating. They are only dangerous to those who allow themselves to be caught. It is pleasant to be flattered; and if one likes to waste time, there is no easier way of doing so than in casual social intercourse. The artist who succumbs to social temptations loses everything: his time, his integrity, his sense of proportion, the very hope of achieving anything important. He is the more unfortunate in being exposed to them.
Towards morning when, like a mutton chop on a cold plate, I had a little thawed my bed, the phantoms of Michael Faraday and Sir Humphry Davy departed, leaving me alone with my repressed wishes. What they may have been, I don’t know. But at any rate they fulfilled themselves, ideally and symbolically, in a confused nightmare of motor cars and snowdrifts.
The wind was still blowing when I woke up. We spent the forenoon shivering in the sitting-room of the inn. Every few minutes the landlord came in with fresh news about the state of affairs on the pass. Telephone messages had arrived from Florence and Bologna; an army of shovellers was being mobilized; now it was on the move; a man who had just come down from the pass had seen them at work; by two o’clock the road could not fail to be clear. After giving us each item of news, he bowed, smiled, rubbed his hands and went back to his kitchen to invent the next. He had a fertile imagination.
Fitfully, I read about the Armenian Church. But my interest was languid. I was too cold even to feel a proper enthusiasm over the discovery that ‘the old sacrificial hymns were probably obscene and certainly nonsensical.’ Remembering that phrase in subsequent summers, I have been delighted by it. How well, how pithily it describes not merely the old sacrificial hymns of pre-Christian Armenia, but a whole mass of modern art and self-styled science—the greater part of psycho-analytic literature, for example, the music of Schreker, most expressionist painting, Ulysses, and so on. As for the less ‘modern’ pseudo-sciences and pseudo-art, from spiritualism to commercial fiction—these do not even possess the saving grace of obscenity; they are merely nonsensical.
The morning passed; it was time for lunch. After a meal of spaghetti and broiled goat, we felt a little stronger and a little less cold. ‘How are things on the pass?’ we asked. But our host seemed suddenly to have lost his omniscience and with it his optimism. He did not know what was happening and he advised us to wait for a little. By five o’clock, however, all would undoubtedly be well. And the road by Firenzuola? That was hopeless; he was certain of that. He left us wondering what to do; whether to wait, whether to return to Florence—what? We were still in a state of painful uncertainty when a heaven-sent messenger in the form of a man with a horse and trap stopped at the inn door. We appealed to him. A miracle! Not only did he know the truth; he also imparted his knowledge in a plain unvarnished way.
No shovellers, he assured us, were working on the pass; nor would any be sent there till the wind had changed (for when the wind was blowing in this particular direction, the snow was carried back on to the road as soon as it had been taken off). The wind might change this evening, of course; but on the other hand it might only change next week. But if we wanted to go to Bologna, why hadn’t we taken the Firenzuola road? Yes, why not? said the landlord, who had joined us and was listening to the conversation. Why not take the Firenzuola road? He had seen that the game was up and that there was now no further hope of getting us to stay another night. Why not? We looked at him significantly, in silence. He smiled back, imperviously good-humoured, and retired to compile his bill.
We set out. The sky was white and full of cloudy movement. Here and there the white mountains were scarred with black, where the precipices were too steep to allow the snow to lie. From La Casetta we slid down the break-neck road that twists down into the valley of the Santerno. Within its walls Firenzuola was black, ancient and grim. From Firenzuola the road follows the Santerno. The river has tunnelled a winding passage through the mountains. The valley is deep and narrow; here and there road and river run between perpendicular walls of rock, banded slantwise with the lines of tilted stratification. Slowly the valley broadens out, the mountains degenerate into bare bleak downs. At the foot of the hills is the plain, narrowed here between the mountains and the sea, but expanding and expanding as one travels northwards into the immense unbroken flatness of the Po valley.
At Imola we turned into the great Via Emilia that runs in an undeviating straight line from Rimini to Piacenza. What cities are strung along that white stretched thread! Cesena, Forli, Faenza, Imola, Bologna, Reggio, Modena, Parma—bead after precious bead.
It was dark when we entered Bologna and the streets
