A Moment of Revolt

THE Contributor who protested recently against the tyranny of the ‘Old Man of the Sea’ in the shape of ‘required reading’ in preparation for seeing Italy, must have given joy to many members of the Club who have staggered under the load but lacked the courage to throw it off. But this is only one phase of the despotism of a superstition generated in minds more receptive than original. That insidious and penetrating form of disease known among its victims as Culture plays havoc with many who would not, under any circumstances, enrich the world for all time, but who might, save for this paralyzing disease, contribute to the simple enjoyment of living.

What is more delightful than the companionship of a fresh, natural, unsophisticated mind in the Tribuna or at Pæstum! What more depressing than to be caught in either place with a Person of Culture! Woe betide the man or woman whose approach to the first glimpse of an enchanting landscape with a historical background, or of half a dozen pictures of the kind that make windows in a wall, is overshadowed by the instructive mood of a Person of Culture! Nature has some rights, but if one fall into the hands of this Person, Art, which is the direct vision of the beauty of the world, has no right to exist save as educational material. There are people who have great natural capacity for appreciation if they could only get a chance to use it; but they are so dogged by Culture that they never get any simple, human happiness out of Art. They are hemmed in on every side by an organization of knowledge more highly articulated and arrogant than the Roman Curia, and they never get a chance to play with things, which is the very essence of a primary relation with Art.

Culture, as commonly practiced, is a calculated determination to know, rather than a passionate desire to feel or to enjoy. There is nothing so shocking to a Person of Culture as the ignorance of artists of the things which cultivated persons know about pictures, unless it be their almost brutal indifference to these things. There is something inexplicable in the simple-mindedness of the men who have created the material out of which the sophistication of Culture has been distilled by a sterilizing process. Many of them have been as rough-handed and devoid of the refinements of taste, which are first generalized into them and then generalized out of them, as the hard-featured peasant who grows the stuff on which the Parisian chef exercises his skill. Some man of heroic temper, willing to face the contumely of the societystudio and the scorn of the guardians of the shrine, ought to bring out the shocking truth which a deeper-sighted age than ours will no doubt face, that Art is not primarily, or even secondarily, intellectual, and that the paths of Culture often lead into a barren wilderness.

It is a great misfortune that organized Culture, more alert than the Conservation movement, has sequestrated Italy for its private uses, and that only the brave and free really see the country as it dreams and awakens under a sun that woos it in a rapture of perpetual Spring. If one can turn his back on ancient Rome and cast the Renaissance behind him, he can fairly sport with Nature in Italy, and be a child again. And it may be suspected that this is getting very near the heart of Italy, whose most wonderful secret is her youthfulness. She has outlived more and survived more than any other country in the world; for, while there are countries with a longer history than hers, there is no other that has flowered and borne fruit so often in renewed vitality, and taken on the form, and taken up the work, of so many successive civilizations.

Most people are so absorbed in the older Italy that they do not see the Italy of to-day, building itself on the old foundations with the audacity which has rebuilt the country half a dozen times. To see this new Italy and understand it, one must get away from the idea that it is an art gallery to be scrupulously guarded against change or enlargement; a well-buttressed ruin carefully preserved for travelers of taste and means; a repository of beautiful things for the restrained and modulated joy of the Person of Culture. There is a real duty here which Italy is not disposed to shirk; but the Italians have a certain rough, everyday idea that they have as much right to make themselves comfortable and prosperous as their forefathers had, and they are calmly acting on the conviction that they own the country. They are not always wise in their activities, and the blight of taste which has fallen on all Europe has not left Italy unharmed; but there is much to be said for the Italian point of view. It is not quite fair for Americans, amply provided by a prosperous country with the means of enjoying Italy, to ask the Italians to be content to remain custodians of historical places and art collections, and to put a side the chances of fortune and action in which modern life abounds. The builders of every age in Italy have handled life without gloves, and with a daring indifference to their predecessors; and it may be suspected that every generation of force and initiative will have iconoclastic moments.

Such moments come to persons of normal mind in Italy, from time to time, and they come oftenest in Florence, where the enchantments not only of the Middle Age, but of the Renaissance, still linger, and where Culture waits at the gate like the omnipresent octroi and demands tribute from any newcomer. There the Person of Culture basks in the sense of absolute superiority, and turns a scornful eye on those who profane the sanctuary with interests, emotions, and activities not laid down in the Baedeker of the elect, the unprinted handbook of the initiated. In the fair city which painters, sculptors, poets, and architects have enriched for all time, normally human persons either revolt, like the American girl, and ask, out of the unplumbed depths of gallery-fatigue, ‘When shall we get out of this picture-belt ? ’ or flee to the hills for refuge. There comes a moment when quattrocento and cinquecento make one long for the ignorance of the cave-dwellers, or the simplicity of the Etruscans who have innocently furnished so much of the apparatus of Culture.

In such an hour we planned a picnic because that seemed the most elementary human thing we could think of, and because it involved a deliberate affront to Culture. We were driven out of Florence as truly as was Dante, but with this difference: to our expulsion could not be added the atrocious insult of a monument in Santa Croce!

To make our revolt against the textbook, the art-history, the whole literature of Culture more pronounced, we took a tram at the side of the Duomo and under the shadow of the Campanile, and we went third-class! The late afternoon light was already fading from the hills when we turned up a bit of white road that soon vanished in the shade of the woods. The gray-green of the olive trees gave a restful tone to the hillsides, and above the darker pines were silently gathering the shadows that give the stars their chance. We climbed a steep road into which we presently turned, then forsook it, and scrambled up the steeper slope until we came to one of those little plateaus which show, from the scientific point of view, that picnics were part of the original plan of creation. We sat down wherever Nature had made places for us, and looked at Florence beginning to blend its outlines in the soft mystery of a dream-city. We talked of everything but the things which the Baedeker of Culture prescribes for subjects of conversation. We were not above enjoying the hastily and happily improvised supper; we saw the stars come out, and we watched Florence silently define itself in lines of light. The brioches brought no suggestion of quattrocento with them, and the delicate cakes from Giacosa’s had nothing in common with the cinquecento.

A quiet humanizing of Florence was being wrought in us. We thought of the gentle spirit of Fra Angelico painting those lovely poems of his religion on the walls of the little cells in San Marco, but we were unconcerned about the significance of his work in the development of Italian painting; we thought of the passionate heart of Dante beating against the invisible bars of his exile, but we did not discuss the terza rima. We were content with the olive trees, blurred by the dusky wing of night; we looked at Florence aglow with light, and the Arno, invisible, but moving between shining points of fire. Behind the old town what dim shadows of the past swept by with the ‘trailing garments of the night’; within, what stirrings of a life which emerges out of great memories to set its own candles aflame by its own hearthstone!