MARGINAL COMMENT By HAROLD NICOLSON S IR KENNETH CLARK, in his
excellent book Landscape into Art, has described the modes of vision favoured by successive generations in their attitude towards the beauties or terrors of the natural world. The power of enlightenment posses-sed by the Slade Professor to the Univer- sity of Oxford is not applied to ethical or aesthetic exhor- tation, but to sharing amicably with others the profits of his curiosity and zest. He handles erudition with such tidy charm that his students are never oppressed by their own ignorance ; prattling confidently (as no ,man or woman would have dared to prattle with Ruskin) we clasp Sir Kenneth's hand as he leads us through the galleries of time. He explains to us how the early depiction of nature was little more than a stylised background for human devoutness, the trees and rocks being repeated as decorative symbols or ideographs like the cypresses or palmettes of a Persian carpet. He shows us how gradually the artists came to take an interest in the facts of the external world, to depict the scenery with which they were familiar, and to pay attention to the ever-changing quality of light and shadow. Thereafter succeeded the mode of fantasy and the mode of the ideal landscape. The cultured rich of the eighteenth century would bring with them tinted glasses in order that the plains, lakes and mountains should be viewed through what they believed to be the golden glow of Claude Lorrain. There followed naturalism, impressionism and cubism, until with the dawn of the twentieth century painters -became bored by describing facts and decided to abandon the representation of natural appearances. These sequences of fashion have taught us many alternative ways of appreciating form and colour and have thereby increased our range of responsiveness. " We owe," writes Sir Kenneth Clark, " much of our pleasure in looking at the world to the great artists who have looked at it before us."
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* * It is true that there exist in nature many shapes, lights and colours of which we might have remained unaware had not their significance been emphasised and interpreted for us by some dead or living artist. Yet it would be sad if the habit which we have all contracted of identifying scenery and external objects with certain schools of painting were to limit our response. In the eighteenth century a person of refine- ment was not supposed to admire anything which went beyond the range of Salvator Rosa. The present generation, possessing as they, do a far wider variety of modes of vision, ought to be limited by no such intellectual conventions. They should be able to respond spontaneously and without affectation to Cuyp or Pollaiuolo, to the shimmer of Seurat as well as to the rectangles of Cezanne. It may be true that this diversity of appreciation, this unconfined range of response, indicate that there exists today no general standard of taste, and that the universality of our enjoyment is a proof, not of a wider culture, but of a culture so dispersed and undisciplined as to have lost all claim to seriousness. , It may be true that it is irritating, as one passes from north to south, if one's companions murmur Hobbema " at one, and then " Poussin," and then ".Benozzo Gozzoli." Such identifica- tions should remain/ private and inarticulate. But it is important that this useful and agreeable habit of seeing nature in terms of art should not lead us to exclude from our appreciation those aspects of beauty which we associate with artists who are uncongenial, unfashionable or bad. Sophis- tication no doubt is a useful antidote to vulgarity ; but when one goes on one's travels it should be left behind.
* * * • I was relieved to notice, during a recent holiday in France and Italy, that, although I -had retained the habit of identi- fying nature with art, I did not mind in the very least-whether the artists of whom I was successively reminded were good or bad. My first night in France, for instance, was spent in a tower, not dissimilar to the vieux donjons with which Victor Hugo would enliven the margins of his manuscripts. The room on the ground floor, containing the oubliette, was several feet smaller than the rooms above, since the thickness of the stone walls diminished as one rose from earth. The austerity of La Tour de Saint Loup, rising solid and somnolent from the heart of Ile de France, has been softened by the love its present owner bears it, so that it reflects both the solemn harshness of French history and the elegant vivacity of the French way of life. The drawings of Victor Hugo may be curiosities of literature rather than of art, but how pleasant to recall them when pacing the gravelled garden paths of Saint Loup, or descending the stone steps which fall so steeply between box- hedges towards the opening in the woods.
Glad I am that my sensibilities have not become so refined that I am unable to recapture more primitive exultations and can enjoy the obvious as much as the abstruse. I rejoice that I can still be soothed by the curves of the Tuscan landscape and find pleasure in the sight of black bells in a pink tower against the sky. Yet these sweet spinster moods do not preclude the observation of „harsher patterns or muffle the apprehension that all this may not be seen again. Upon the ochre walls which once bore the words " Duce ! Duce !" or such diverting slogans as " Morte a Eden," are now imprinted the hammer and sickle in stylised form. From loud-speakers in the open spaces beyond the ramparts gramophone records relay speeches which are emphatic and untrue. The Italian proletariate, both rural and urban, who as individuals are so alert and independent, become sadly gregarious when politics are concerned. Italian friends assure me that the defeat of Communism in Korea will have a chilling effect upon the many millions of voters who possess no individual judgement, but who desire only to be in with the winning side. I wish that I could share their confidence. On my last night in Florence I leant over the high parapet of a villa at Bellosguardo, talking to a man who had studied and witnessed many revolutions in many lands. Below us the moon threw the shadows of cy- presses and statues across the terraced garden ; in the valley the dome of the cathedral hovered aloof above a million twinkling lights. " We are standing," my friend murmured, " on the prow of a ship which seems to be sinking. And which we must save." His remark increased the sadness of departure, but not my sense of personal competence. " Noi siam venuti at luogo," I thought, " to the place where one can see the wretched tribes of men who have lost the power to think."
* * * * Now that I have returned to the inviolate Island of the sage and free, I find that the memories of the past fortnight are not superimposed or blurred, but that each picture falls neatly within the category of the school of painting with which it is associated. That habit, in that it. clarifies recollection, is a further advantage of viewing landscape in terms of art. Impressions, people, the voices of women calling each to each across a courtyard, fade quickly as the long train rumbles through the night. But the paintings remain detached. How glad I am to have found that my picture postcard side remains as fresh, as vivid and as jubilant as it was some forty years ago. A slight patina- of appre- hension, a varnish of insecurity, may have softened the con- fident colours which before the two wars appeared so enduring. But the exultation was still there ; and will remain, if only as an entrancing memory.
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