Personally I Disagree With Smollett, Though The
Balance Of Cultivated Opinion Has Since Come Round To His Side.
The guilt of Smollett lay in criticizing what was above
criticism, as the contents of the Tribuna were then held to be.
And in defence of this point of view it may at least be said that
the Uffizi was then, with the exception of the Vatican, the only
gallery of first-rate importance open to the travelling public on
the Grand Tour. Founded by Cosimo I, built originally by George
Vasari, and greatly enlarged by Francis I, who succeeded to the
Grand Duchy in 1574, the gallery owed most perhaps to the
Cardinal, afterwards Ferdinand I, who constructed the Tribuna,
and to Cardinal Leopold, an omnivorous collector, who died in
1675. But all the Medici princes added to the rarities in the
various cabinets, drawing largely upon the Villa Medici at Rome
for this purpose, and the last of them, John Gaston (1723-1737),
was one of the most liberal as regards the freedom of access
which he allowed to his accumulated treasures. Among the
distinguished antiquaries who acted as curators and cicerones
were Sebastiano Bianchi, Antonio Cocchi, Raymond Cocchi, Joseph
Bianchi, J. B. Pelli, the Abbe Lanzi, and Zacchiroli. The last
three all wrote elaborate descriptions of the Gallery during the
last decades of the eighteenth century. There was unhappily an
epidemic of dishonesty among the custodians of gems at this
period, and, like the notorious Raspe, who fled from Cassel in
1775, and turned some of his old employers to ridicule in his
Baron Munchausen, Joseph Bianchi was convicted first of robbing
his cabinet and then attempting to set it on fire, for which
exploit the "learned and judicious Bianchi," as Smollett called
him in his first edition, was sent to prison for life. The
Arrotino which Smollett so greatly admired, and which the
delusive Bianchi declared to be a representation of the Augur
Attus Naevius, is now described as "A Scythian whetting his knife
to flay Marsyas."
Kinglake has an amusingly cynical passage on the impossibility of
approaching the sacred shrines of the Holy Land in a fittingly
reverential mood. Exactly the same difficulty is experienced in
approaching the sacred shrines of art. Enthusiasm about great
artistic productions, though we may readily understand it to be
justifiable, is by no means so easily communicable. How many
people possessing a real claim to culture have felt themselves
puzzled by their insensibility before some great masterpiece!
Conditions may be easily imagined in which the inducement to
affect an ecstasy becomes so strong as to prove overpowering.
Many years ago at Florence the loiterers in the Tribuna were
startled by the sudden rush into the place of a little man whose
literary fame gave him high claims to intuitive taste. He placed
himself with high clasped hand before the chief attraction in
that room of treasures. "There," he murmured, "is the Venus de
Medicis, and here I must stay - for ever and for ever." He had
scarcely uttered these words, each more deeply and solemnly than
the preceding, when an acquaintance entered, and the enthusiast,
making a hasty inquiry if Lady So-and-So had arrived, left the
room not to return again that morning. Before the same statue
another distinguished countryman used to pass an hour daily. His
acquaintance respected his raptures and kept aloof; but a young
lady, whose attention was attracted by sounds that did not seem
expressive of admiration, ventured to approach, and found the
poet sunk in profound, but not silent, slumber. From such
absurdities as these, or of the enthusiast who went into raptures
about the head of the Elgin Ilissos (which is unfortunately a
headless trunk), we are happily spared in the pages of Smollett.
In him complete absence of gush is accompanied by an independent
judgement, for which it may quite safely be claimed that good
taste is in the ascendant in the majority of cases.
From Florence Smollett set out in October 1764 for Siena, a
distance of forty-two miles, in a good travelling coach; he slept
there, and next day, seven and a half miles farther on, at Boon
Convento, hard by Montepulciano, now justly celebrated for its
wine, he had the amusing adventure with the hostler which gave
occasion for his vivid portrait of an Italian uffiziale, and also
to that irresistible impulse to cane the insolent hostler, from
the ill consequences of which he was only saved by the
underling's precipitate flight. The night was spent at
Radicofani, five and twenty miles farther on. A clever postilion
diversified the route to Viterbo, another forty-three miles. The
party was now within sixteen leagues, or ten hours, of Rome. The
road from Radicofani was notoriously bad all the way, but
Smollett was too excited or too impatient to pay much attention
to it. "You may guess what I felt at first sight of the city of
Rome."
"When you arrive at Rome," he says later, in somewhat more
accustomed vein, "you receive cards from all your country folk in
that city. They expect to have the visit returned next day, when
they give orders not to be at home, and you never speak to one
another in the sequel. This is a refinement in hospitality and
politeness which the English have invented by the strength of
their own genius without any assistance either from France,
Italy, or Lapland." It is needless to recapitulate Smollett's
views of Rome. Every one has his own, and a passing traveller's
annotations are just about as nourishing to the imagination as a
bibliographer's note on the Bible. Smollett speaks in the main
judiciously of the Castle of St. Angelo, the Piazza and the
interior of St. Peter's, the Pincian, the Forum, the Coliseum,
the Baths of Caracalla, and the other famous sights of successive
ages. On Roman habits and pastimes and the gullibility of the
English cognoscente he speaks with more spice of authority.
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