Now this distinction between two conceptions of genius, the Something more and the Something different, very deeply influences the effect of painting upon the public. The great painters had all the things which we call weaknesses in the great poets; they constantly pot-boiled, they occasionally pandered. They often seemed to care little for glory, and sometimes not quite enough for honour; they threw things off, and as Ruskin truly said, gave their great frescoes ‘to be blasted by the sea wind, or wasted by the worm’. But if they had the everyday vices, they had the everyday virtues also; and whether they were good men or no, their idea of a good man was the same as everybody else’s. If they too seldom attempted to reform their conduct, they never attempted to reform their conscience. The consequence is that they preserved a mass of primitive intuitions, appetites, and unconscious instincts, which are the same as those of the common people even in our corrupt modern cities; and which in our corrupt modern cities have now a great part to play.

  For without raising, even in parentheses, the old argument of Swift’s and Temple’s time about the relative merits of Ancients and Moderns, we may be quite certain that for democratic purposes the ancients are better. A few scratches of grey and green on a piece of brown paper may really be as good in its own way as a `still life’ by a Flemish painter or a Holy Family by an Italian painter. But it must be perfectly obvious to anybody that the two latter are more likely to make a plain man understand what painting means. We talk somewhat lightly about ‘schools’ of art. Whether or no the art of Raphael be better as an art it is certainly better as a school. Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Post-post-Impressionism and the rest, are developments which may be credited or criticised according to every man’s aesthetic philosophy. It may be the end of art, in the sense of the object of art. It may be the end of art in the sense of the abolition of art. But anyhow it is not the beginning of art; it is not the initiation, the origin, the introductory motive. What art is to begin with, what it obviously is, what is the reason that anyone ever made it, that people can learn today from the Old Masters. And they can learn it from nobody else.

  A hundred cases could be taken, but take the case of a common phrase: a common sneer with the art critics. I mean the phrase `a picture that tells a story’. There could not be a sharper instance of the difference between the old hero who was man and more than man and the new hero who is not man at all. A picture by Leonardo da Vinci tells a story. A picture by Paul Veronese tells a story. A picture by Titian or Tintoretto tells a story. The first and most important question is, what story? Most medieval and Renaissance pictures tell the story; the story on which all our European civilisation is founded, and is founded as finally if the thing is a fairy tale or if the thing is a truth. The objection to pictures which `tell a story’ only began in our time, for the very simple reason that the story was a dull story. I will not discuss here whether the great story of God made Man has been destroyed. I will confine myself to saying that it has certainly not been replaced.

  There are other qualities in which the Old Masters are demagogues as well as demi-gods. I mean there are other elements in which they eternally appeal to a popular instinct which was in them and in their patrons and in their populace. I should select the two examples of clarity and solidity. In Michelangelo’s `Vision of Judgment’ a real man appears in the real skies. The man is solid. The skies are lucid. To the cultured it may appear incredible; but it will be much more credible to mankind, that universal church of which culture is a small and doubtful sect. To mankind, to men as they ordinarily are, a complete man appearing in a clear sky, will not be incredible. It will be much more credible than an impressionist portrait of a real person or a post-impressionist picture of a real place.

  I should therefore urge the re-publication of old and good pictures as a real part of that grossly neglected thing — public education. Our historians lie much more than our journalists; our fashionable conceptions of the past change with every fashion; and like most fashions, are fantastic and hideous. But the old colours and the old canvases do not lie; they were really achieved in the ages which we parody or pervert; and the squareness of their drawing, the brightness of their colours, the substantial sincerity of their subject, will still tell us something of the fathers we have forgotten. I do not go so far as to say we have relapsed into barbarism. But I do say that we can just now learn best from picture writing.

  HERE AND THERE

  Walking Tours

  The close of the holiday season sets most of us reflecting on the philosophy of travel, and many of us upon the simplest form of it, the philosophy of walking tours. Among serious and imaginative pedestrians there are only two schools or parties, and one school maintains that the pedestrian should go forth without map or compass, and wander until a wood beckons to him or a pathway points like a finger. The other school maintains that he should map out with every circumstance of detail the place he is going to, and then go somewhere else. The idea of having a fixed intention on such an occasion, and adhering to it through thick and thin would make an excellent medieval religious vow, but makes a very poor holiday. Some people set out upon walking tours with the most horrible indifference to that idea of loneliness and liberty which is the essence of such an enterprise. Some even send a bag on before them to the hotels to which they intend to go: a dark and depraved aspect in which to regard human nature. They might as well station footmen in livery at intervals of every three miles carrying coffee and liqueurs. The whole beauty and meaning of pedestrianism vanishes if the pedestrian is once tied to a particular hotel, even if it is thirty miles away. Then he is no longer a wild thing like the hawk or the hare, he is only a cow on a particularly long tether. The sending on of bags is predestination: it is a sort of holiday Calvinism, when the very soul of walking is free will. If a travelling companion is sought he should always be sought among those lovers of the errant and the spontaneous. He should be sought among those true worshippers of liberty who feel a certain degradation whenever they take a return ticket. Those who are interested in antiquities should be avoided, but those who are interested in what they call nature are worse. Great public buildings were after all in some sense made to be stared at, but to regard our mother earth merely as a thing to be stared at is like exhibiting one’s maiden aunt in a cage. A man should walk in the country in order to become a part of the country, not in order to get to the top of a particular hill and see a distressing number of counties.

  The man who goes upon a walking tour should be open to all the usual interests. He should enjoy the country and enjoy the churches and enjoy the beetles, but also, and as a very important item, he should enjoy the walk. He should not be consumed with any devouring preference for going anywhere. His desires should be no more fixed upon the end of the walk than the desire of a child upon the end of a sugarstick. The walk should be a work of art, the real colour and value of which do not appear until it is completed. The objects of a walk are often disappointing, but the accidents are magnificent. The true adventurer does not walk so much in the hope of finding cities or mountains as in the hope of discovering by the end of his journey why he came out. The darkness of this great mystery will always be present to his mind. Every twist of roadway, every knot of trees may conceal behind it the explanation of his own superb folly. He is in search of the central incident of his journey, and it may be a strange sunset or a fight with a foot-pad, a patch of primroses or a lunatic with a green umbrella. Just as some primitive hero trusted himself upon the back of a dragon or hippogriff, the traveller trusts himself upon that wildest of steeds — a runaway road. Upon the whole, it may be admitted that the pedestrian should carry a map, but he should not consult it often, and he should always cherish the thrilling and secret thought that it may be all wrong. In fact, a map should be taken chiefly because it is such a particularly beautiful thing in itself. A great many other things should be selected and retained on the same principle. A walking tour, for example, is unthinkable without a walking-stick, though the experienced will have the strongest internal doubts whether it is any use, and the walking-stick of all walking-sticks for such a purpose is one cut in the woods, as being the most rough and crooked and inconvenient. Carrying such a staff a man feels himself a thing of the earth. He is almost a walking portion of the woods, he carries a tree like the army which brought Birnam to Dunsinane. And if he has walked well and cheerfully, by the time he sticks his staff in the ground and sits down to rest in the evening he will do it in such a state of inward glory that he would scarcely be surprised if the staff broke into flower before him like the Pope’s rod in Tannhäuser. The essential ground of the unwisdom and unprofitableness of planning a walk too systematically with maps and guide books is a thing easy to feel, but not quite so easy to analyse. One point, however, may be noticed. In our days, when we have names for everything and accurate plans of everywhere, we tend very much to forget that there does exist a place called the world. The world was the place, for example, into which the heroes of the fairy tales went out to seek their fortune. It began at the end of their father’s garden, and it stretched away into infinity full of everything from birds’ nests to dragons, from apple trees to ogres. This remarkable place, the world, is the only place that is not marked even upon the latest and most accurate geographical charts. We have so cut up the face of the earth into our own arbitrary divisions, that it is always Sussex, or Essex, or Kent, or Norway, or Patagonia, and never simply the earth. Science has given us a vulgar familiarity with the earth, a familiarity without knowledge. We have set the seal of the commonplace upon inaccessible peaks that no man has ever trodden, and unfathomable seas inhabited by monsters that have never risen to the surface. We have names and tickets for sights and regions which we no more possess than if they existed only in someone else’s dreams. Thousands and thousands of leagues beyond the farthest limit of our possible personal experience the earth contains things as marvellous as any fairy tale. But we have not the wisdom as the men of the fairy tales had, the wisdom to call these places fairyland or the castle east of the sun and west of the moon. We call them Jonestown, and Smith’s River, and Snooksville, U.S.A.

  The perfect pedestrian should always set forth like the third son in the fairy tale. It is a mystic and beautiful dispensation of Providence that every person in this world has an inward conviction that in the cosmic system he himself is the third son. He should go into Kent if he likes, or Buckinghamshire if he likes, or Normandy, or Italy, or China if he likes, but first and foremost into the world. He should go forth with any object he pleases: to shoot lions, or pick flowers, or collect fossils, or find a desert island, or find a wife, but first and foremost he should go out, in the old fairy tale phrase, to seek his fortune. In the life of industrial civilisation, where everything is done by a kind of clockwork, most of us have forgotten that we have a fortune. Most of us have forgotten that somewhere in the nooks and corners of the world there has, perhaps, been waiting for us all our lives a neglected destiny. When we praise the order of Nature it is only as we might praise a mangle or a mincing machine, useful for our own practical purpose, just as the old silversmiths cried ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’. Like them we have forgotten the true identity of the moon who was the patroness of lunatics and the goddess of crossroads.

  The Blindness of the Sightseer

  I once had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of an American, a very intelligent and inspiriting person, who, during a pause in a discussion on scenery, said, with the inimitable accent, `Well, I can’t see when you have seen the highest mountain in Switzerland what you want to see the rest for’. So completely obsessed was he with this American sense of competition that he admitted competition even among mountains, and judged of some hundreds of the towering crests of the earth as he would have judged of six American hotel servants who struggled at the station for his bag. There is a very general idea — how general I cannot imagine — that competition is productive of or conducive to individuality. The defenders of the extreme forms of competition invariably insist upon this argument, that the struggle develops personality and variety. Of course, it does nothing of the sort. Competition is simply imitation, and however fierce and ruthless competition may be it only becomes a fierce and ruthless imitation. When the most important object in a landscape must be the thing which is down in the guidebook — the highest hill, the largest tree, the roundest hole in the wall — thousands of other beauties for miles round waste themselves like the neglected talents of humanity. People see the Madeleine and the Louvre, but they do not see Paris. They see the Pfalz Castle and the Drachenfels, but they do not see the Rhine. They see Westminster Abbey and Stratford-on-Avon, but they have never seen England; England is still to them an undiscovered Atlantis. They see pyramids, dolmens, sloping towers, great walls, hanging gardens, catacombs, colossal statues; but they have never seen that one miracle to which all these are nothing. They have seen the seven wonders of the world, but they have never seen the world.

  Let me hasten to say at once that I have not a gleam of sympathy with that contempt which is sometimes expressed by the languid for those who travel. My complaint is not that people are enthusiastic about the Drachenfels, but that they are not enthusiastic about other things. The real evil is that which takes these sights out of their setting and holds them up as the reason for travel. A man of any imagination gains enormously by travelling in France or Germany. My only suggestion is that he would gain scarcely an atom less if he never saw any one of the places to which such tours are universally and systematically directed. If a man could come upon these places suddenly and naturally the effect would be magnificent. Statues and cathedrals would waylay him like a patch of blossom in the hedges or a shape in the clouds. To walk across the magnificent hills of Sussex, to come upon the long lines of a great forest and a great fortress, and to be told that it is the Castle of the Howards. To walk along the sands of the great Norman coast, and behold out at sea a village clinging upon a spire of rock, and to know that it is the Mountain of St Michael; this would indeed be to be educated by travel. But, then, the great sights would come as the culmination of a series of lesser ones, enjoyed and admired in the same manner. The man who did not enjoy the Sussex Downs would not really enjoy the Castle of Arundel. The man who was not impressed by mere sand and sea would not be impressed by the awful crag of the Archangel. But the system of modern travel takes these things out of their environment, makes them prodigies, valuable in themselves. There is not a pin to choose in essential superstition between the medieval pilgrim who would walk miles that for a moment he might touch a particular stone and the modern tourist who will drive leagues that for a moment he may stare at it. We can all feel this essential difference between seeing a sight as an example of its environment and seeing a sight as an exception to its environment, if we merely imagine the principle applied to other forms in nature. If we walked down a long lane in Surrey, and saw, let us say, an incomparable hedge of wild roses extending apparently for miles, we might be stricken still with an exceptionable wonder at the height and splendour of some exceptionable branch or bloom. But if, because this branch was the highest in the lane, it was suddenly given a name, and advertised through the country; if we heard that a station had been opened near it, that omnibuses and excursion trains were run down to it on Bank Holidays, and that by these facilities some hundreds of harmless human beings were dragged out of London, dropped down in front of it for a minute or two to stare, and then dragged back again, we should say that the magic had departed. And if we were wise, we should see that the magic had not departed, as some superfine people suppose, because trains and trippers are ugly. Trains are very poetical things, and so are trippers; for only the wildest kind of poetry can furnish any explanation of why they trip. But the magic would have gone from that branch of wild roses for the very simple reason that the magic had not resided in that alone; the magic was partly the magic of the lane itself and of loneliness, of the combination of the two strangest and most impressive of things — silence and life. Now, steamers and conducted tours have done precisely this very thing for places like the Rhine: they have found the wild rose and they have lost the lane. It is better a hundred times to wander about the lane and never see its most glorious and natural product than to see that product and regard it as a monstrosity. In so far as a thing is what people call marvellous it is not and cannot be representative. To judge of Italy by the leaning tower is like judging of the human race by the bearded woman at a fair. That type of wonders of the world is based upon the principle that the wonderful consists in things going wrong: to a somewhat more essential imagination the genuine wonder is that things go right. The leaning tower of Pisa is, if we realise man’s history seriously, by no means so astonishing as the nearest waterworks tower. The marvel is that all our turrets and tenements do not reel this way and that, like a scene from the Day of Judgment.

  In one sense, the great buildings and great cities which we labour to visit are less worth the labour than those common scenes and figures in the street which we pass easily by. For great buildings belong to great traditions of European civilisation which are akin throughout Europe, and whether or no a man could get as much education from Westminster Abbey as from Cologne Cathedral, at least it would be education upon the same lines. It is in a chance strip of landscape, a chance group in the street that we see the real difference which it is worth while to cross the sea to find. The architecture of a German cathedral and that of an English one belong to the same school; but the architecture of a German and that of an Englishman exhibit the most fascinating differences. Every land, every town, has its dark and sacred individuality. The man who has found this out, and he alone, has visited that land or town. And, perhaps, when we have wandered, in obedience to modern culture, among all the kingdoms of the earth, and gathered the knowledge of them, we may begin to penetrate into that most unexplored of all territories, our own country. We may realise what it is that consitutes an English landscape, and in the wild developments of some future century, may begin to be patriots.