Chapter 50

CHAPTER L [Titian Bad and Titian Good]

I wonder why some things are? For instance, Art is allowed as much
indecent license today as in earlier times--but the privileges of
Literature in this respect have been sharply curtailed within the
past eighty or ninety years. Fielding and Smollett could portray the
beastliness of their day in the beastliest language; we have plenty
of foul subjects to deal with in our day, but we are not allowed to
approach them very near, even with nice and guarded forms of speech.
But not so with Art. The brush may still deal freely with any subject,
however revolting or indelicate. It makes a body ooze sarcasm at every
pore, to go about Rome and Florence and see what this last generation
has been doing with the statues. These works, which had stood in
innocent nakedness for ages, are all fig-leaved now. Yes, every one of
them. Nobody noticed their nakedness before, perhaps; nobody can help
noticing it now, the fig-leaf makes it so conspicuous. But the comical
thing about it all, is, that the fig-leaf is confined to cold and pallid
marble, which would be still cold and unsuggestive without this sham and
ostentatious symbol of modesty, whereas warm-blood paintings which do
really need it have in no case been furnished with it.

At the door of the Uffizzi, in Florence, one is confronted by statues
of a man and a woman, noseless, battered, black with accumulated
grime--they hardly suggest human beings--yet these ridiculous creatures
have been thoughtfully and conscientiously fig-leaved by this fastidious
generation. You enter, and proceed to that most-visited little gallery
that exists in the world--the Tribune--and there, against the wall,
without obstructing rag or leaf, you may look your fill upon the
foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses--Titian's
Venus. It isn't that she is naked and stretched out on a bed--no, it is
the attitude of one of her arms and hand. If I ventured to describe
that attitude, there would be a fine howl--but there the Venus lies, for
anybody to gloat over that wants to--and there she has a right to lie,
for she is a work of art, and Art has its privileges. I saw young
girls stealing furtive glances at her; I saw young men gaze long and
absorbedly at her; I saw aged, infirm men hang upon her charms with a
pathetic interest. How I should like to describe her--just to see what
a holy indignation I could stir up in the world--just to hear the
unreflecting average man deliver himself about my grossness and
coarseness, and all that. The world says that no worded description of
a moving spectacle is a hundredth part as moving as the same spectacle
seen with one's own eyes--yet the world is willing to let its son
and its daughter and