Post-Prandial Philosophy

13. Concerning Zeitgeist

A certain story is told about Mr. Ruskin, no doubt apocryphal, but at

any rate characteristic. A young lady, fresh from the Abyss of

Bayswater, met the sage one evening at dinner--a gushing young lady, as

many such there be--who, aglow with joy, boarded the Professor at once

with her private art-experiences. "Oh, Mr. Ruskin," she cried, clasping

her hands, "do you know, I hadn't been two days in Florence before I

discovered what you meant when you spoke about the supreme

unapproachableness of Botticelli." "Indeed?" Ruskin answered. "Well,

that's very remarkable; for it took me, myself, half a lifetime to

discover it."

The answer, of course, was meant to be crushing. How should _she_, a

brand plucked from the burning of Bayswater, be able all at once, on the

very first blush, to appreciate Botticelli? And it took the greatest

critic of his age half a lifetime! Yet I venture to maintain, for all

that, that the young lady was right, and that the critic was wrong--if

such a thing be conceivable. I know, of course, that when we speak of

Ruskin we must walk delicately, like Agag. But still, I repeat it, the

young lady was right; and it was largely the unconscious, pervasive

action of Mr. Ruskin's own personality that enabled her to be so.

It's all the Zeitgeist: that's where it is. The slow irresistible

Zeitgeist. Fifty years ago, men's taste had been so warped and distorted

by current art and current criticism that they _couldn't_ see

Botticelli, however hard they tried at it. He was a sealed book to our

fathers. In those days it required a brave, a vigorous, and an original

thinker to discover any merit in any painter before Raffael, except

perhaps, as Goldsmith wisely remarked, Perugino. The man who went then

to the Uffizi or the Pitti, after admiring as in duty bound his High

Renaissance masters, found himself suddenly confronted with the Judith

or the Calumny, and straightway wondered what manner of strange wild

beasts these were that some insane early Tuscan had once painted to

amuse himself in a lucid interval. They were not in the least like the

Correggios and the Guidos, the Lawrences and the Opies, that the men of

that time had formed their taste upon, and accepted as their sole

artistic standards. To people brought up upon pure David and

Thorvaldsen, the Primavera at the Belle Arti must naturally have seemed

like a wild freak of madness. The Zeitgeist then went all in the

direction of cold lifeless correctness; the idea that the painter's soul

counted for something in art was an undreamt of heresy.

On your way back from Paris some day, stop a night at Amiens and take

the Cathedral seriously. Half the stately interior of that glorious

thirteenth century pile is encrusted and overlaid by hideous gewgaw

monstrosities of the flashiest Bernini and _baroque_ period. There they

sprawl their obtrusive legs and wave their flaunting theatrical wings to

the utter destruction of all repose and consistency in one of the

noblest and most perfect buildings of Europe. Nowadays, any child, any

workman can see at a glance how ugly and how disfiguring those floppy

creatures are; it is impossible to look at them without saying to

oneself: "Why don't they clear away all this high-faluting rubbish, and

let us see the real columns and arches and piers as their makers

designed them?" Yet who was it that put them there, those unspeakable

angels in muslin drapery, those fly-away nymphs and graces and seraphim?

Why, the best and most skilled artists of their day in Europe. And

whence comes it that the merest child can now see instinctively how out

of place they are, how disfiguring, how incongruous? Why, because the

Gothic revival has taught us all by degrees to appreciate the beauty and

delicacy of a style which to our eighteenth century ancestors was mere

barbaric medi******; has taught us to admire its exquisite purity, and

to dislike the obstrusive introduction into its midst of incongruous and

meretricious Bernini-like flimsiness.

The Zeitgeist has changed, and we have changed with it.

It is just the same with our friend Botticelli. Scarce a dozen years

ago, it was almost an affectation to pretend you admired him. It is no

affectation now. Hundreds of assorted young women from the Abyss of

Bayswater may rise any morning here in sacred Florence and stand

genuinely enchanted before the Adoration of the Kings, or the Venus who

floats on her floating shell in a Botticellian ocean. And why? Because

Leighton, Holman Hunt, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown, Strudwick,

have led them slowly up to it by golden steps innumerable. Thirty years

ago the art of the early Tuscan painters was something to us Northerners

exotic, strange, unconnected, arch********. Gradually, it has been

brought nearer and nearer to us on the walls of the Grosvenor and the

New Gallery, till now he that runs may read; the ingenuous maiden,

fished from the Abyss of Bayswater, can drink in at a glance what it

took a Ruskin many years of his life and much slow development to attain

to piecemeal.

That is just what all great men are for--to make the world accept as a

truism in the generation after them what it rejected as a paradox in the

generation before them.

Not, of course, that there isn't a little of affectation, and still more

of fashion, to the very end in all of it. An immense number of people,

incapable of genuinely admiring anything for its own sake at all, are

anxious only to be told what they "ought to admire, don't you know," and

will straightway proceed as conscientiously as they can to get up an

admiration for it. A friend of mine told me a beautiful example. Two

aspiring young women, of the limp-limbed, short-haired, ****************, were standing rapt before the circular Madonna at the Uffizi.

They had gazed at it long and lovingly, seeing it bore on its frame the

magic name of Botticelli. Of a sudden one of the pair happened to look a

little nearer at the accusing label. "Why, this is not Sandro," she

cried, with a revulsion of disgust; "this is only Aless." And

straightway they went off from the spot in high dudgeon at having been

misled as they supposed into examining the work of "another person of

the same name."

Need I point the moral of my apologue, in this age of enlightenment, by

explaining, for the benefit of the junior members, that the gentleman's

full name was really Alessandro, and that both abbreviations are

impartially intended to cover his one and indivisible personality? The

first half is official, like Alex.; the second affectionate and

familiar, like Sandy.

Still, even after making due allowance for such humbugs as these, a vast

residuum remains of people who, if born sixty years ago, could never by

any possibility have been made to see there was anything admirable in

Lippi, Botticelli, Giotto; but who, having been born thirty years ago,

see it without an effort. Hundreds who read these lines must themselves

remember the unmistakable thrill of genuine pleasure with which they

first gazed upon the Fra Angelicos at San Marco, the Memlings at Bruges,

the Giottos in the Madonna dell' Arena at Padua. To many of us, those

are real epochs in our inner life. To the men of fifty years ago, the

bare avowal itself would have seemed little short of affected silliness.

Is the change all due to the teaching of the teachers and the preaching

of the preachers? I think not entirely. For, after all, the teachers and

the preachers are but a little ahead of the age they live in. They see

things earlier; they help to lead us up to them; but they do not wholly

produce the revolutions they inaugurate. Humanity as a whole develops

consistently along certain pre-established and predestined lines. Sooner

or later, a certain point must inevitably be reached; but some of us

reach it sooner, and most of us later. That's all the difference. Every

great change is mainly due to the fact that we have all already attained

a certain point in development. A step in advance becomes inevitable

after that, and one after another we are sure to take it. In one word,

what it needed a man of genius to see dimly thirty years ago, it needs a

singular fool not to see clearly nowadays.