But the finest specimen of the guide-book style I have ever met with was in France. It is a description of Dijon. ‘Comme une jolie femme dont une maturité savoureuse arrondit les formes plus pleines, la capitale de la Bourgogne a fait, en grandissant, éclater la tunique étroite de ses vieilles murailles; elle a revêtu la robe plus moderne et plus confortable des larges boulevards, des places spacieuses, des faubourgs s’égrenant dans les jardins; mais elle a gardé le corps aux lignes pures, aux charmants détails que des siècles épris d’art avaient amoureusement orné.’ Hats off to France! It is with alacrity, on this occasion, that I accede to Lord Rothermere’s request.
Old guide-books, so out of date as to be historical documents, make excellent travelling-companions. An early Murray is a treasure. Indeed, any volume of European travels, however dull, is interesting, provided that it be written before the age of railways and Ruskin. It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space; you travel through time and thought as well. They are morally wholesome reading too, these old books of travel; for they make one realize the entirely accidental character of all our tastes and our fundamental intellectual beliefs.
It seems to us axiomatic, for example, that Giotto was a great artist; and yet Goethe, when he went to Assisi, did not even take the trouble to look at the frescoes in the church. For him, the only thing worth seeing at Assisi was the portico of the Roman temple. We for our part cannot get much pleasure out of Guercino; and yet Stendhal was ravished by him. We find Canova ‘amusing’ and sometimes, as in the statue of Pauline Borghese, really charming in a soft, voluptuous way (the very cushion on which she reclines bulges out voluptuously; one is reminded of those positively indecent clouds over which Correggio’s angels look down at one from the dome at Parma).
But we cannot quite agree with Byron when he says ‘Such as the Great of yore, Canova is to-day.’ And yet after all, Goethe, Stendhal, and Byron were no fools. Given their upbringing, they could not have thought differently. We would have thought just as they did, if we had lived a hundred years ago. Our altered standards of appreciation and generally greater tolerance are chiefly the result of increased acquaintance with the art of every nation and period—an acquaintance due in its turn chiefly to photography.
The vastly greater part of the world’s art has been non-realistic; we know the world’s art as our ancestors never did; it is therefore only to be expected that we should be much more favourably disposed to non-realistic art, much less impressed by realism as such than men who were brought up almost exclusively in the knowledge of Greek, Roman and modern realism. These old books teach us not to be too arrogant and cocksure in our judgments. We too shall look foolish in our turn.
There are so many of these old books and they are all so characteristic of their epoch, that one can select them almost at random from the shelves of a well-stocked library, certain that whatever one lights on will be entertaining and instructive reading. Speaking from my own personal experience, I have always found Stendhal particularly agreeable as an Italian companion. The Promenades dans Rome have accompanied me on many of my walks in that city and never failed to please. Very enjoyable too, when one is in Rome, is the too much neglected Veuillot. I will not pretend that Veuillot is a great writer. Indeed, much of his charm and apparent originality consists in the merely accidental fact that his prejudices were unlike those which most travellers bring with them to Italy. We are so much accustomed to hearing that the temporal power was an unmixed evil and that the priests were the cause of Italy’s degradation, that a man who tells us the contrary seems startlingly original.
After the denunciations of so many Protestants and freethinkers we read his book, if it be tolerably well written (and Veuillot was a first-rate journalist), with a special pleasure. (It is, in the same way, the unusualness of the point of view from which it is written that makes Les Paysans of Balzac seem an even more remarkable book than it really is. We are used to reading novels in which the humble virtues of the peasant are exalted, his hard lot deplored and the tyranny of the landlord denounced. Balzac starts with the assumption that the peasant is an unmitigated ruffian and demands our sympathy for the unhappy landlord, who is represented as suffering incessant and unmerited persecution at the hands of the peasants.
Balzac’s reading of social history may not be correct; but it is at least refreshingly unlike that of most novelists who deal with similar themes.) Les Parfums de Rome shares with Les Paysans the merit of being written from an unexpected point of view. Veuillot tours the papal states determined to see in them the earthly paradise. And he succeeds. His Holiness has only happy subjects. Outside this blessed fold prowl the wild beasts, Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi and the rest; it is the duty of every right-thinking man to see that they do not break in. This is his theme and he finds in everything he sees excuses for recurring to it. Les Parfums de Rome is written with a refreshing intemperance of language. Veuillot, like Zimmi, was
So over violent or over civil,
That every man with him was God or Devil.
Moreover he was logical and had the courage of his convictions. How admirable, for example, is his denunciation of all pagan art on the ground that it is not Christian! While all the rest of the world grovel before the Greeks and Romans, Veuillot, the logical ultramontanist, condemns them and all their works, on principle, contemptuously. It is delightful.
Of the other old travelling-companions who have given me pleasure by the way I can only mention a few. There is that mine of information, the Président des Brosses. No one is a better companion on the Italian tour. Our own Young is nearly as good in France. Miss Berry’s journals of travel are full of interest. There are good things to be got from Lady Mary Montagu. Beckford is the perfect dilettante. But plain Bible-selling Borrow has the credit of being the first man to appreciate El Greco.
If pictures are not your chief interest, there is the admirable Dr. Burney, whose Musical Tours are as instructive as they are delightful. His Italian volumes are valuable, among many other reasons, because they make one realize what had happened, during the eighteenth century, to all the prodigious talent which had gone, in the past, to painting pictures, carving statues and building churches. It had all gone into music. The very street players were accomplished contrapuntists; the peasants sang divinely (you should hear the way they sing now!), every church had a good choir which was perpetually producing new masses, motets and oratorios; there was hardly a lady or gentleman who was not a first-rate amateur performer; there were innumerable concerts. Dr. Burney found it a musician’s paradise. And what has happened to Italian genius nowadays? Does it still exist? or is it dead?
It still exists, I think; but it has been deflected out of music, as it was deflected out of the visual arts, into politics and, later, into business and engineering. The first two-thirds of the nineteenth century were sufficiently occupied in the achievement of freedom and unity. The sixty years since then have been devoted to the exploitation of the country’s resources; and such energy as has been left over from that task has gone into politics. One day, when they have finished putting modern comfort into the old house, have turned out the obstreperous servants and installed a quiet, honest housekeeper—one day, perhaps, the Italians will allow their energy and their talent to flow back into the old channels. Let us hope they will.
SPECTACLES
I never move without a plentiful supply of optical glass. A pair of spectacles for reading, a pair for long range, with a couple of monocles in reserve—these go with me everywhere. To break all these, it would need an earthquake or a railway accident. And absence of mind would have to be carried to idiocy before they could all be lost. Moreover, there is a further safety in a numerous supply: for matter, who can doubt it? is not neutral, as the men of science falsely teach, but slightly malignant, on the side of the devils against us. This being so, one pair of spectacles must inevitably break or lose itself, just when you can least afford to do without and are least able to replace it. But inanimate matter, so called, is no fool; and when a pair of spectacles realizes that you carry two or three other pairs in your pockets and suit-cases, it will understand that the game is hopeless and, so far from deliberately smashing or losing itself, will take pains to remain intact.
But when, in any month after the vernal equinox and before the autumn, my wanderings take me southwards, towards the sun, my armoury of spectacles is enlarged by the addition of three pairs of coloured glasses—two of lighter
