Europe Revised — 43 - Ch. XXI: Old Masters and Other Ruins, pt. 1

Old Masters and Other Ruins It is naturally a fine thing for one, and gratifying, to acquire a thorough art education.

Personally I do not in the least regret the time I gave and the study I devoted to acquiring mine.

I regard those two weeks as having been well spent.

I shall not do it soon again, however, for now I know all about art.

Let others who have not enjoyed my advantages take up this study.

Let others scour the art galleries of Europe seeking masterpieces.

All of them contain masterpieces and most of them need scouring.

As for me and mine, we shall go elsewhere.

I love my art, but I am not fanatical on the subject.

There is another side of my nature to which an appeal may be made.

I can take my Old Masters or I can leave them be.

That is the way I am organized--I have self-control.

I shall not deny that the earlier stages of my art education were fraught with agreeable little surprises.

Not soon shall I forget the flush of satisfaction which ran through me on learning that this man Dore's name was pronounced like the first two notes in the music scale, instead of like a Cape Cod fishing boat.

And lingering in my mind as a fragrant memory is the day when I first discovered that Spagnoletto was neither a musical instrument nor something to be served au gratin and eaten with a fork.

Such acquirements as these are very precious to me.

But for the time being I have had enough.

At this hour of writing I feel that I am stocked up with enough of Bouguereau's sorrel ladies and Titian's chestnut ones and Rubens' bay ones and Velasquez's pintos to last me, at a conservative estimate, for about seventy-five years.

I

am too young as a theatergoer to recall much about Lydia Thompson's Blondes, but I have seen sufficient of Botticelli's to do me amply well for a spell.

I am still willing to walk a good distance to gaze on one of Rembrandt's portraits of one of his kinfolks, though I must say he certainly did have a lot of mighty homely relatives; and any time there is a first-rate Millet or Corot or Meissonier in the neighborhood I wish somebody would drop me a line, giving the address.

As for pictures by Tintoretto, showing Venetian Doges hobnobbing informally with members of the Holy Family, and Raphael's angels, and Michelangelo's lost souls, and Guidos, and Murillos, I have had enough to do me for months and months and months.

Nor am I in the market for any of the dead fish of the Flemish school.

Judging by what I have observed, practically all the Flemish painters were devout churchmen and painted their pictures on Friday.

There was just one drawback to my complete enjoyment of that part of our European travels we devoted to art.

We would go to an art gallery, hire a guide and start through.

Presently I would come to a picture that struck me as being distinctly worth while.

To my untutored conceptions it possessed unlimited beauty.

There was, it seemed to me, life in the figures, reality in the colors, grace in the grouping.

And then, just when I was beginning really to enjoy it, the guide would come and snatch me away.

He would tell me the picture I thought I admired was of no account whatsoever--that the artist who painted it had not yet been dead long enough to give his work any permanent value; and he would drag me off to look at a cracked and crumbling canvas depicting a collection of saints of lacquered complexions and hardwood expressions, with cast-iron trees standing up against cotton batting clouds in the background, and a few extra halos floating round indiscriminately, like sun dogs on a showery day, and, up above, the family entrance into heaven hospitably ajar; and he would command me to bask my soul in this magnificent example of real art and not waste time on inconsequential and trivial things.

Guides have the same idea of an artist that a Chinaman entertains for an egg.

A fresh egg or a fresh artist will not do.

It must have the perfume of antiquity behind it to make it attractive.

At the Louvre, in Paris, on the first day of the two we spent there, we had for our guide a tall, educated Prussian, who had an air about him of being an ex-officer of the army.

All over the Continent you are constantly running into men engaged in all manner of legitimate and dubious callings, who somehow impress you as having served in the army of some other country than the one in which you find them.

After this man had been chaperoning us about for some hours and we had stopped to rest, he told a good story.

It may not have been true--it has been my experience that very few good stories are true; but it served aptly to illustrate a certain type of American tourist numerously encountered abroad.

"There were two of them," he said in his excellent English, "a gentleman and his wife; and from what I saw of them I judged them to be very wealthy.

They were interested in seeing only such things as had been recommended by the guidebook.

The husband would tell me they desired to see such and such a picture or statue.

I would escort them to it and they would glance at it indifferently, and the gentleman would take out his lead pencil and check off that particular object in the book; and then he would say: 'All right--we've seen that; now let's find out what we want to look at next.'

We still serve a good many people like that--not so many as formerly, but still a good many.

"Finally I decided to try a little scheme of my own.

I wanted to see whether I could really win their admiration for something.

I picked out a medium-size painting of no particular importance and, pointing to it, said impressively: 'Here, m'sieur, is a picture worth a million dollars--without the frame!'

"'What's that?'

he demanded excitedly.

Then he called to his wife, who had strayed ahead a few steps.

'Henrietta,' he said, 'come back here--you're missing something.

There's a picture there that's worth a million dollars--and without the frame, too, mind you!'

"She came hurrying back and for ten minutes they stood there drinking in that picture.

Every second they discovered new and subtle beauties in it.

I could hardly induce them to go on for the rest of the tour, and the next day they came back for another soul-feast in front of it."

Later along, that guide confided to me that in his opinion I had a keen appreciation of art, much keener than the average lay tourist.

The compliment went straight to my head.

It was seeking the point of least resistance, I suppose.

I branched out and undertook to discuss art matters with him on a more familiar basis.

It was a mistake; but before I realized that it was a mistake I was out in the undertow sixty yards from shore, going down for the third time, with a low gurgling cry.

He did not put out to save me, either; he left me to sink in the heaving and abysmal sea of my own fathomless ignorance.

He just stood there and let me drown.

It was a cruel thing, for which I can never forgive him.

In my own defense let me say, however, that this fatal indiscretion was committed before I had completed my art education.

It was after we had gone from France to Germany, and to Austria, and to Italy, that I learned the great lesson about art--which is that whenever and wherever you meet a picture that seems to you reasonably lifelike it is nine times in ten of no consequence whatsoever; and, unless you are willing to be regarded as a mere ignoramus, you should straightway leave it and go and find some ancient picture of a group of overdressed clothing dummies masquerading as angels or martyrs, and stand before that one and carry on regardless.

When in doubt, look up a picture of Saint Sebastian.

You never experience any difficulty in finding him--he is always represented as wearing very few clothes, being shot full of arrows to such an extent that clothes would not fit him anyway.

Or else seek out Saint Laurence, who is invariably featured in connection with a gridiron; or Saint Bartholomew, who, you remember, achieved canonization through a process of flaying, and is therefore shown with his skin folded neatly and carried over his arm like a spring overcoat.

Following this routine you make no mistakes.

Everybody is bound to accept you as one possessing a deep knowledge of art, and not mere surface art either, but the innermost meanings and conceptions of art.

Only sometimes I did get to wishing that the Old Masters had left a little more to the imagination.

They never withheld any of the painful particulars.

It seemed to me they cheapened the glorious end of those immortal fathers of the faith by including the details of the martyrdom in every picture.

Still, I would not have that admission get out and obtain general circulation.

It might be used against me as an argument that my artistic education was grounded on a false foundation.

It was in Rome, while we were doing the Vatican, that our guide furnished us with a sight that, considered as a human experience, was worth more to me than a year of Old Masters and Young Messers.

We had pushed our poor blistered feet--a dozen or more of us--past miles of paintings and sculptures and relics and art objects, and we were tired--oh, so tired!

Our eyes ached and our shoes hurt us; and the calves of our legs quivered as we trailed along from gallery to corridor, and from corridor back to gallery.

We had visited the Sistine Chapel; and, such was our weariness, we had even declined to become excited over Michelangelo's great picture of the Last Judgment.

I was disappointed, too, that he had omitted to include in his collection of damned souls a number of persons I had confidently and happily expected would be present.

I saw no one there even remotely resembling my conception of the person who first originated and promulgated the doctrine that all small children should be told at the earliest possible moment that there is no Santa Claus.

That was a very severe blow to me, because I had always believed that the descent to eternal perdition would be incomplete unless he had a front seat.

And the man who first hit on the plan of employing child labor on night shifts in cotton factories--he was unaccountably absent too.

And likewise the original inventor of the toy pistol; in fact the absentees were entirely too numerous to suit me.

There was one thing, though, to be said in praise of Michelangelo's Last Judgment; it was too large and too complicated to be reproduced successfully on a souvenir postal card;

and I think we should all be very grateful for that mercy anyway.

As I was saying, we had left the Sistine Chapel a mile or so behind us and had dragged our exhausted frames as far as an arched upper portico in a wing of the great palace, overlooking a paved courtyard inclosed at its farther end by a side wall of Saint Peter's. We saw, in another portico similar to the one where we had halted and running parallel to it, long rows of peasants, all kneeling and all with their faces turned in the same direction.

"Wait here a minute," said our guide.

"I think you will see something not included in the regular itinerary of the day."

So we waited.

In a minute or two the long lines of kneeling peasants raised a hymn; the sound of it came to us in quavering snatches.

Through the aisle formed by their bodies a procession passed the length of the long portico and back to the starting point.

First came Swiss Guards in their gay piebald uniforms, carrying strange-looking pikes and halberds;

and behind them were churchly dignitaries, all bared of head; and last of all came a very old and very feeble man, dressed in white, with a wide-brimmed white hat--and he had white hair and a white face, which seemed drawn and worn, but very gentle and kindly and beneficent.

He held his right arm aloft, with the first two fingers extended in the gesture of the apostolic benediction.

He was so far away from us that in perspective his profile was reduced to the miniature proportions of a head on a postage stamp; but, all the same, the lines of it stood out clear and distinct.

It was his Holiness, Pope Pius the Tenth, blessing a pilgrimage.