A Room with a View - E. M. Forster [7]
But in addition to showing Lucy’s tendency to apply to higher authority, Forster demonstrates just how those higher authorities can insinuate their ideas into one’s individual perspective. We find Lucy on her first morning in Florence gazing idly out the window and taking in the everyday activity on the street. The narrator comments: “Over such trivialities as these many a valuable hour may slip away, and the traveler who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it” (pp. 18—19). Later that morning, alone in Santa Croce and bereft of her Baedeker (Miss Lavish has inadvertently run off with it), Lucy is faced with the challenge of negotiating the church’s formidable artistic holdings without aid.
Of course, it must be a wonderful building. But how like a barn!
And how very cold! Of course, it contained frescoes by Giotto, in the
presence of whose tactile values she was capable of feeling what was
proper. But who was to tell her which they were? (p. 23).
Taken under the Emersons’ wing, she finds the frescoes at last and issues her judgment.
“I like Giotto,” she replied. “It is so wonderful what they say about
his tactile values. Though I like things like the Della Robbia babies
better” (p. 28).
Clearly Lucy has read somewhere that Giotto’s tactile values are noteworthy. (It would likely have been in Bernard Berenson’s The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, written in 1896, which praised the Italian master’s ability to stimulate the sense of touch with his work—and which Forster apparently despised.) Forster shows us, by tracing the phrase from the narrative voice to Lucy’s thoughts and finally to her conversation, how an idea like “tactile values” gets reproduced, how it insinuates itself into and shapes one’s perception. But because he leaves out exactly what “they” say about Giotto’s tactile values, and what would be “proper” to feel in front of them, Lucy is reduced to merely parroting an observation that is empty; she doesn’t really seem to believe in it, and it serves only to distance her from the frescoes she has been so eager to see. Her own visceral reactions—the vastness of Santa Croce, its coldness, and the vitality of the Della Robbia babies—contain much more spirit, but she is not yet confident enough to trust in it.
Because the viewing of art is such an integral part of the tourist experience, it becomes an integral part of the narrative experience as well, one from which few characters are spared. At the climax of the Florence section of the novel, when George Emerson impulsively kisses Lucy in a field of violets, a fellow tourist interrupts the two. “Before she could speak, almost before she could feel, a voice called, ‘Lucy! Lucy! Lucy!’ The silence of life had been broken by Miss Bartlett, who stood brown against the view” (p. 67). It is Charlotte, but with this description she is condensed into a literal blot on the landscape, a kind of impressionistic smudge; she is nothing more than a voice and the color of her dress, a mere pairing of sensory perceptions, and significantly, she appears as such at a moment when Lucy’s senses have been assaulted in a completely new way. The description, in other words, is perfectly in keeping with the situation; the language not only records the plot, but subtly illuminates it.
And so we find, in A Room with a View, that looking at people is not so different from looking at art, though unfortunately without