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