Letters from England/The Pilgrim Goes Over More Museums

by Karel Čapek

The Pilgrim Goes Over More Museums

 

WEALTHY England has amassed the treasures of the whole world in her collections; none too creative herself, she has carted away the metope of the Acropolis and the Egyptian colossi of porphyry or granite, the Assyrian bas-reliefs, knotty plastic works of ancient Yucatan, smiling Buddhas, Japanese wood-carvings and lacquer-work, the pick of continental art and a medley of souvenirs from the colonies: iron-work, fabrics, glass, vases, snuff-boxes, book-bindings, statues, pictures, enamel, inlaid escritoires, Saracen swords, and heaven alone knows what else; perhaps everything in the world that is of any value.

I now should assuredly be very learned about various styles and cultures; I should relate something about the stages in the development of art; in my head I should sort out and distribute all this material, which is here exhibited for wonderment and instruction. But instead of this I have rent my garment, and I ask: Where is the perfection of man? How dreadful that it is everywhere; how awful a discovery to find the perfection of man even at the very beginning of existence; to find it in the formation of the first stone arrow; to find it in a Bushman drawing; to find it in China, in Fiji and in ancient Nineveh and in every place where man has left a memory of his creative activities. I saw so many things, and I could have chosen; very well, then, I will tell you that I do not know whether man is more perfect, more advanced or more attractive when shaping the first urn than when decorating a splendid Portland vase; I do not know which is more perfect: to be a cave-man, or to be an Englishman in the West End; I do not know which is the loftier and diviner art: to paint a portrait of Queen Victoria on canvas or the portrait of a penguin with one’s fingers in the air, as is done by the aborigines of Terra del Fuego. I tell you, this is a dreadful thing; dreadful is the relativity of culture and history; nowhere behind us or before us is there a point of rest, of an ideal, of the finish and perfection of man; for it is everywhere and nowhere, and every spot in space and time where man has set up his work is unsurpassable. And now I really cannot tell whether a portrait by Rembrandt is more perfect than a dancing mask from the Gold Coast; I have seen too much. We, too, must equal Rembrandt or mask from the Gold or Ivory Coast; there is no progress, there is no “above” or “below”; there is only an unendingly new creativeness. This is the only lesson to be learnt from the history, cultures, collections and treasures of the whole world: create like savages, create perpetually; at this spot, in this moment, the acme of perfection of human work is to be created; it is necessary to mount as high as fifty thousand years ago or as in the Gothic Madonna, or as in that stormy landscape by Constable. If there are ten thousand traditions, there is no tradition at all; nothing can be selected from all-abundance; the only thing that can be done is to add to it something previously nonexistent.

If you search in the London collections for ivory carvings or embroidered tobacco pouches, you will find them; if you search for the perfection of human work, you will find it in the Indian museum and the Babylonian gallery, in the Daumiers, Turners, and Watteaus, or in the Elgin marbles. But then you leave this accumulation of all the world’s treasures and you can ride for hours and miles on the top of a bus from Ealing to East Ham, and from Clapham to Bethnal Green; and you will scarcely find a place where your eye could derive pleasure from the beauty and lavishness of human work. Art is what is deposited behind glass in galleries, museums and in the rooms of rich people; but it does not move about here in the streets, it does not twinkle from the handsome cornices of windows, it does not take up its stand at the street-corner like a statue, it does not greet you in a winsome and monumental speech. I do not know: perhaps after all it is only Protestantism which has drained this country dry in an artistic respect.