na RENAISSANCES

Palladio's buildings, have brought Ancient forms back to life.1 The con-
centration of his interest on this genre was carried by him to such extremes
that at Venice he had no eye for Titian's pictures, and at Assisi none for
the celebrated Franciscan Church with its picture-covered walls and
ceiling.3 The nearer Goethe approached to Rome, the more passionate and
tempestuous became his yearning to set foot in the Capital of the World.3
After his arrival there on the zoth October [, 1786], he lived through his
Roman days in a state of high beatitude. Here he found himself renewing
his youth. He felt himself regenerated and endowed with a new capacity
for the enjoyment of Life, the enjoyment of History, Art and Antiquity.1*

1 Talladio was penetrated (durchdrungeri), through and through, by the essence of the
Ancients, and was conscious of the pettiness and narrowness of his own age—in the
spirit of a great man who is resolved not to resign himself but to re-mould the rest of
Creation (das Uebrige) as far as possible in accordance with his own noble concepts.*—
Goethe: Italienische Reise, ed. by Schuchardt, Chr. (Stuttgart 1862, Cotta, a vols.)»

2 'The monstrous substructures of the churches—piled one on top of another, Baby-
lonian fashion—in which Saint Francis rests, did not detain me. I gave tht'm a wide
berth to my left, with a feeling of aversion. . . . Then I asked a handsome youngster the
way to the Maria della Minerva [the ci-devant pagan Hellenic temple in the heart of the
city]. . . . The growth in spiritual stature that I owe to the contemplation oi? this work
of art is something ineffable. It -will bear everlasting fruit. . . . [As I made my way down
again,] the dear Minerva gave me one more last glimpse of her benign and consoling
countenance, and then I took a side glance to my left at the melancholy cathedral of
Saint Francis' (ibid., pp. 159—61).

3 'My yearning (Begierde) to reach Rome was so great, and was increasing by such
leaps and bounds from moment to moment, that it would brook no further delay; so
I made no more than a three-hours' stop in Florence. ... I hurried through the place
post-haste—the cathedral, the baptistery and all that. Here, once again, an entirely new
and unknown world confronts me—and it is a world on which I have no inclination to
linger (yerweileri). The lay-put of the Boboli Gardens is exquisite, At Florence my exit
was as rapid as my entry* (ibid., pp. 168 and 156).

Students of Goethe's outlook and e"thos will be reminded of a more famous paHange in
which the same verb venaeilen is employed apropos of the same temptation to linger on
the course of a journey—heading, in this case, not towards a physical Rome, but towards
a spiritual goal of human endeavours. In agreeing the terms of his fateful wager With
Mephistopheles, Faust makes the following commitment:

Werd' ich zum Augenblicke sagen:

'Verweile dochl Du bist so schSnl*

Dann rnagst du mich in Fesseln schlagen,

Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehen 1

Goethe: Faustt 11. 1699-170*, quoted m II. i. »8r.

*• Karl Alt in Goethe's Werke: Ausvoahl (Berlin, N.0., Bong, 4 vols.)» vol. i, pp, xxix-
xxx. While the paramount objective of the Modern Western fgrand tour1 wns to venerate
the relics, and set eyes upon the scenes, of an antecedent Hellenic culture whose legacy
to an affiliated Western Civilization had at last come to be appreciated at its full value
by latter-day Western Humanists, this was not, of course, the cultivated traveller'a eola
concern. The typical Modern French, Dutch, English, German, Scandinavian, or Ameri-
can visitor to Italy was, unlike Goethe, eager also to acquaint himself at first hand with
the Italian monuments of an earlier phase of his own Western culture, and also to
improve his own mastery; of this culture in its contemporary phase by sampling other
contemporary local varieties of it besides the one in which he himself had been educated
owing to the accident of his having been born in the particular province of the Western,
World of which he happened to be a native.

The interest in the tourist's own civilization's past which was one of the attraction*
exercised by Italy on a Transalpine or Transmarine Modem Western secular pilgrim
was a manifestation, not of the renaissance of an antecedent culture* but of a different
vein of nostalgia which we have labelled 'Archaism' (see V. vi. 49-07), This Modem
Western transposition of an archaistic yearning from the Time-dimension into the Space-
dimension by giving vent to it by way of a secular pilgrimage had had ita counterpart in.
Hellenic history in the grand tours that had been in the fashion for cultivated Romans
from the second century B.C. until the onset of the paroxysm with which an elderly
Hellenic Society was afflicted in the third century of the Christian Era. After the Hellenic
World had recovered from this stroke—in so far as it ever did recover from it—the
secular Hesperian pilgrim to Greece, in the wake of a Titus Flammimis, a Cicero* a Nero,
a Hadrian, and an Aulus GelHus, gave way to the religious Hesperian pilgrim to Palestine