On the hoof lk
PETER VANSITTART
The Age of the Grand Tour Anthony Burgess, Francis Haskell and Francis Watson (Elek £8 8s) If read on public transport this rectangular, uncomfortable volume would demand an extra seat. It is a wide expensive tribute to eighteenth century travel, itself a wide expensive process. Extracts from famous writers describe visits to the galleries, opera houses, cathedrals, palaces, ruins scattered between Vienna and Naples. The protean Anthony Burgess supplies a long introduction, like a patient Chain slum- ming. 'You go to your feather-bed drunk with wine and history. You dream 6f Dante, his profile like the prow of a ship ploughing through hell and purgatory, reaching port in the stars that are also the eyes of Beatrice.' His generalisations are sometimes disputable. Was the French peasantry really starving? The travellers here, who include Arthur Young, did not notice it.
The democratic mediaeval pilgrimages had been 'refined into the Grand Tour in which, Burgess reminds us, prodigies of art were pre- ferred to those of nature. (An attitude that generations later appealed to Firbank : 'Some- times I feel like shaking Switzerland'). With Italy as the supreme goal, particularly for the English, the Tour was a branch of the classi- cal revival, 'a glorified museum with bordello attached.' This volume is more informative on the former. Revolution and war were later to produce the Romantic, Childe Harold, with passion for nature rather than calm admiration for art. The ancien regime painters that the English could have seen included Watteau and Tiepolo, and Professor Haskell notes the effect of English money and insular taste on the rise of Italian landscape and portrait painting; also the cult of the antique and its influence on English architecture and building. Students of this writer, however, are warned that his contribution is barely two pages.
The Grand TOur was a convention, and an excellent one, and this is a conventional collec- tion, an anthology from all known anthologies, with some well-seasoned chestnuts. Boswell listening to Voltaire agitating against religion until he fainted; Boswell describing to Rous- seau the Roman prostitutes licensed by the Cardinal Vicar; Gibbon on Venice, which `afforded some hours of astonishment and some days of disgust.' Stendhal in Milan, 'In the confirmed absence of any lover a woman may expect her husband to escort her. Upon occasions I have heard a young and notably handsome husband make ,h_trneless complaint against this nuisance.' Shelley at Pompeii, Goethe in Venice, Byron crossing the Alps. Fenimore Cooper is a more unusual find.
One can extract entertaining snippets, about fairs, transport, holy relics, temptations, Genoese galley-slaves, disgusting hotels, great men behaving abominably, the Venetian state encouraging gambling (to get foreign currency), Madame de Stael's views on German women, Italian operagoers wearing hats, so as to be able to doff them to royalty, the 'excruciating cacophany' of papal castrati (Stendhal), French landlords offering 'an abundance of dirt and the most flagrant imposition' (Smollett). Hazlitt found French cooking 'comprehends English and easily condescends to it,' and that the Parisian 'character was whiffling, skittish, snappish, inconsequential, volatile, unmeaning.. The amateurishness of travel arrangements had some unpredictable results, cultural and other- wise, lacking in the efficient tourist deals of today. At its best the Tour was a saunter through liberal studies. Our own age howls for specialisation, with lamentable results: the Gordon Walkers might consider granting A-levels to students parachuted at random over Europe and left to find their own way home.
Those, however, who want more than mildly entertaining historical veneer from this book must be chiefly grateful to Francis Watson, Director of the Wallace Collection, for help- ing to assemble 236 monochrome contemporary illustrations of streets, houses, churches, car- toons, passports, advertisements, fashions. The sixteen coloured plates, including Watteau, Turner, Panini, Canaletto, Tiepolo, are ex- cellently reproduced, perhaps justifying an otherwise disappointing offering.
Previous page
