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Title: The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry

Author: Walter Pater

Release date: November 1, 2000 [eBook #2398]
Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
RENAISSANCE: STUDIES IN ART AND POETRY ***

THE RENAISSANCE

STUDIES IN ART AND POETRY

by

Walter Pater

Sixth Edition

Dedication
To C.L.S.

PREFACE

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define
beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find a
universal formula for it. The value of these attempts has most often been in
the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way. Such discussions
help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to
discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to
use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning
than they would otherwise have. Beauty, like all other qualities presented to
human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning
and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty, not in the
most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not a
universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately
this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of
aesthetics.

"To see the object as in itself it really is," has been justly said to be the
aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism the first step
towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression
as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. The objects with
which aesthetic criticism deals—music, poetry, artistic and accomplished
forms of human life—are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces:
they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities. What
is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a
book, to ME? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me
pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature
modified by its presence, and under its influence? The answers to these
questions are the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do;
and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such
primary data for oneself, or not at all. And he who experiences these
impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis
of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what
beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experience—
metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions
elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, answerable or not, of no
interest to him.

The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to do,
all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or
forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or
unique kind. This influence he feels, and wishes to explain, analysing it and
reducing it to its elements. To him, the picture, the landscape, the engaging
personality in life or in a book, La Gioconda, the hills of Carrara, Pico of
Mirandola, are valuable for their virtues, as we say, in speaking of a herb, a
wine, a gem; for the property each has of affecting one with a special, a
unique, impression of pleasure. Our education becomes complete in
proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and
variety. And the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, analyse,
and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a
fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of
beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and
under what conditions it is experienced. His end is reached when he has
disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural

element, for himself and others; and the rule for those who would reach this
end is stated with great exactness in the words of a recent critic of Sainte-
Beuve:—De se borner a connaitre de pres les belles choses, et a s'en nourrir
en exquis amateurs, en humanistes accomplis.

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct
abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of
temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful
objects. He will remember always that beauty exists in many forms. To him
all periods, types, schools of taste, are in themselves equal. In all ages there
have been some excellent workmen, and some excellent work done. The
question he asks is always:—In whom did the stir, the genius, the sentiment
of the period find itself? where was the receptacle of its refinement, its
elevation, its taste? "The ages are all equal," says William Blake, "but
genius is always above its age."

Often it will require great nicety to disengage this virtue from the
commoner elements with which it may be found in combination. Few
artists, not Goethe or Byron even, work quite cleanly, casting off all debris,
and leaving us only what the heat of their imagination has wholly fused and
transformed. Take, for instance, the writings of Wordsworth. The heat of his
genius, entering into the substance of his work, has crystallised a part, but
only a part, of it; and in that great mass of verse there is much which might
well be forgotten. But scattered up and down it, sometimes fusing and
transforming entire compositions, like the Stanzas on Resolution and
Independence, and the Ode on the Recollections of Childhood, sometimes,
as if at random, depositing a fine crystal here or there, in a matter it does
not wholly search through and transform, we trace the action of his unique,
incommunicable faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a life in natural
things, and of man's life as a part of nature, drawing strength and colour and
character from local influences, from the hills and streams, and from natural
sights and sounds. Well! that is the virtue, the active principle in
Wordsworth's poetry; and then the function of the critic of Wordsworth is to
follow up that active principle, to disengage it, to mark the degree in which
it penetrates his verse.

The subjects of the following studies are taken from the history of the
Renaissance, and touch what I think are the chief points in that complex,
many-sided movement. I have explained in the first of them what I
understand by the word, giving it a much wider scope than was intended by
those who originally used it to denote only that revival of classical antiquity
in the fifteenth century which was but one of many results of a general
excitement and enlightening of the human mind, of which the great aim and
achievements of what, as Christian art, is often falsely opposed to the
Renaissance, were another result. This outbreak of the human spirit may be
traced far into the middle age itself, with its qualities already clearly
pronounced, the care for physical beauty, the worship of the body, the
breaking down of those limits which the religious system of the middle age
imposed on the heart and the imagination. I have taken as an example of
this movement, this earlier Renaissance within the middle age itself, and as
an expression of its qualities, two little compositions in early French; not
because they constitute the best possible expression of them, but because
they help the unity of my series, inasmuch as the Renaissance ends also in
France, in French poetry, in a phase of which the writings of Joachim du
Bellay are in many ways the most perfect illustration; the Renaissance thus
putting forth in France an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, the products
of which have to the full that subtle and delicate sweetness which belongs
to a refined and comely decadence; just as its earliest phases have the
freshness which belongs to all periods of growth in art, the charm of
ascesis, of the austere and serious girding of the loins in youth.

But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that the interest of the
Renaissance mainly lies,—in that solemn fifteenth century which can
hardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results in the things
of the intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art, its special and
prominent personalities, with their profound aesthetic charm, but for its
general spirit and character, for the ethical qualities of which it is a
consummate type.

The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the
culture of an age, move for the most part from different starting-points, and
by unconnected roads. As products of the same generation they partake
indeed of a common character, and unconsciously illustrate each other; but

of the producers themselves, each group is solitary, gaining what advantage
or disadvantage there may be in intellectual isolation. Art and poetry,
philosophy and the religious life, and that other life of refined pleasure and
action in the open places of the world, are each of them confined to its own
circle of ideas, and those who prosecute either of them are generally little
curious of the thoughts of others. There come, however, from time to time,
eras of more favourable conditions, in which the thoughts of men draw
nearer together than is their wont, and the many interests of the intellectual
world combine in one complete type of general culture. The fifteenth
century in Italy is one of these happier eras; and what is sometimes said of
the age of Pericles is true of that of Lorenzo:—it is an age productive in
personalities, many-sided, centralised, complete. Here, artists and
philosophers and those whom the action of the world has elevated and made
keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe a common air, and catch light and
heat from each other's thoughts. There is a spirit of general elevation and
enlightenment in which all alike communicate. It is the unity of this spirit
which gives unity to all the various products of the Renaissance; and it is to
this intimate alliance with mind, this participation in the best thoughts
which that age produced, that the art of Italy in the fifteenth century owes
much of its grave dignity and influence.

I have added an essay on Winckelmann, as not incongruous with the
studies which precede it, because Winckelmann, coming in the eighteenth
century, really belongs in spirit to an earlier age. By his enthusiasm for the
things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, by his
Hellenism, his life-long struggle to attain to the Greek spirit, he is in
sympathy with the humanists of an earlier century. He is the last fruit of the
Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motive and tendencies.

CONTENTS
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
SANDRO BOTTICELLI
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
LEONARDO DA VINCI
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
JOACHIM DU BELLAY
WINCKELMANN
CONCLUSION

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES

The history of the Renaissance ends in France, and carries us away from
Italy to the beautiful cities of the country of the Loire. But it was in France
also, in a very important sense, that the Renaissance had begun; and French
writers, who are so fond of connecting the creations of Italian genius with a
French origin, who tell us how Francis of Assisi took not his name only, but
all those notions of chivalry and romantic love which so deeply penetrated
his thoughts, from a French source, how Boccaccio borrowed the outlines
of his stories from the old French fabliaux, and how Dante himself
expressly connects the origin of the art of miniature-painting with the city
of Paris, have often dwelt on this notion of a Renaissance in the end of the
twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, a Renaissance within the
limits of the middle age itself—a brilliant, but in part abortive effort to do
for human life and the human mind what was afterwards done in the
fifteenth. The word Renaissance, indeed, is now generally used to denote
not merely that revival of classical antiquity which took place in the

fifteenth century, and to which the word was first applied, but a whole
complex movement, of which that revival of classical antiquity was but one
element or symptom. For us the Renaissance is the name of a many-sided
but yet united movement, in which the love of the things of the intellect and
the imagination for their own sake, the desire for a more liberal and comely
way of conceiving life, make themselves felt, urging those who experience
this desire to search out first one and then another means of intellectual or
imaginative enjoyment, and directing them not merely to the discovery of
old and forgotten sources of this enjoyment, but to the divination of fresh
sources thereof—new experiences, new subjects of poetry, new forms of
art. Of such feeling there was a great outbreak in the end of the twelfth and
the beginning of the following century. Here and there, under rare and
happy conditions, in Pointed architecture, in the doctrines of romantic love,
in the poetry of Provence, the rude strength of the middle age turns to
sweetness; and the taste for sweetness generated there becomes the seed of
the classical revival in it, prompting it constantly to seek after the springs of
perfect sweetness in the Hellenic world. And coming after a long period in
which this instinct had been crushed, that true "dark age," in which so many
sources of intellectual and imaginative enjoyment had actually disappeared,
this outbreak is rightly called a Renaissance, a revival.

Theories which bring into connexion with each other modes of thought
and feeling, periods of taste, forms of art and poetry, which the narrowness
of men's minds constantly tends to oppose to each other, have a great
stimulus for the intellect, and are almost always worth understanding. It is
so with this theory of a Renaissance within the middle age, which seeks to
establish a continuity between the most characteristic work of the middle
age, the sculpture of Chartres and the windows of Le Mans, and the work of
the later Renaissance, the work of Jean Cousin and Germain Pilon, and thus
heals that rupture between the middle age and the Renaissance which has so
often been exaggerated. But it is not so much the ecclesiastical art of the
middle age, its sculpture and painting—work certainly done in a great
measure for pleasure's sake, in which even a secular, a rebellious spirit often
betrays itself—but rather the profane poetry of the middle age, the poetry of
Provence, and the magnificent after-growth of that poetry in Italy and
France, which those French writers have in view, when they speak of this
Renaissance within the middle age. In that poetry, earthly passion, with its

intimacy, its freedom, its variety—the liberty of the heart—makes itself felt;
and the name of Abelard, the great clerk and the great lover, connects the
expression of this liberty of heart with the free play of human intelligence
around all subjects presented to it, with the liberty of the intellect, as that
age understood it. Every one knows the legend of Abelard, a legend hardly
less passionate, certainly not less characteristic of the middle age, than the
legend of Tannhaeuser; how the famous and comely clerk, in whom
Wisdom herself, self-possessed, pleasant, and discreet, seemed to sit
enthroned, came to live in the house of a canon of the church of Notre-
Dame, where dwelt a girl Heloise, believed to be the old priest's orphan
niece, his love for whom he had testified by giving her an education then
unrivalled, so that rumour even asserted that, through the knowledge of
languages, enabling her to penetrate into the mysteries of the older world,
she had become a sorceress, like the Celtic druidesses; and how as Abelard
and Heloise sat together at home there, to refine a little further on the nature
of abstract ideas, "Love made himself of the party with them." You
conceive the temptations of the scholar, who, in such dreamy tranquillity,
amid the bright and busy spectacle of the "Island," lived in a world of
something like shadows; and that for one who knew so well how to assign
its exact value to every abstract idea, those restraints which lie on the
consciences of other men had been relaxed. It appears that he composed
many verses in the vulgar tongue: already the young men sang them on the
quay below the house. Those songs, says M. de Remusat, were probably in
the taste of the Trouveres, of whom he was one of the first in date, or, so to
speak, the predecessor. It is the same spirit which has moulded the famous
"letters," written in the quaint Latin of the middle age. At the foot of that
early Gothic tower, which the next generation raised to grace the precincts
of Abelard's school, on the "Mountain of Saint Genevieve," the historian
Michelet sees in thought "a terrible assembly; not the hearers of Abelard
alone, fifty bishops, twenty cardinals, two popes, the whole body of
scholastic philosophy; not only the learned Heloise, the teaching of
languages, and the Renaissance; but Arnold of Brescia—that is to say, the
revolution." And so from the rooms of this shadowy house by the Seine side
we see that spirit going abroad, with its qualities already well defined, its
intimacy, its languid sweetness, its rebellion, its subtle skill in dividing the
elements of human passion, its care for physical beauty, its worship of the

body, which penetrated the early literature of Italy, and finds an echo in
Dante.

That Abelard is not mentioned in the Divine Comedy may appear a
singular omission to the reader of Dante, who seems to have inwoven into
the texture of his work whatever had impressed him as either effective in
colour or spiritually significant among the recorded incidents of actual life.
Nowhere in his great poem do we find the name, nor so much as an allusion
to the story of one who had left so deep a mark on the philosophy of which
Dante was an eager student, of whom in the Latin Quarter, and from the lips
of scholar or teacher in the University of Paris, during his sojourn among
them, he can hardly have failed to hear. We can only suppose that he had
indeed considered the story and the man, and had abstained from passing
judgment as to his place in the scheme of "eternal justice." In the famous
legend of Tannhaeuser, the erring knight makes his way to Rome, to seek
absolution at what was then the centre of Christian religion. "So soon,"
thought and said the Pope, "as the staff in his hand should bud and blossom,
so soon might the soul of Tannhaeuser be saved, and no sooner; and it came
to pass not long after that the dry wood of a staff which the Pope had
carried in his hand was covered with leaves and flowers." So, in the cloister
of Godstow a petrified tree was shown, of which the nuns told that the fair
Rosamond, who had died among them, had declared that, the tree being
then alive and green, it would be changed into stone at the hour of her
salvation. When Abelard died, like Tannhaeuser, he was on his way to
Rome: what might have happened had he reached his journey's end is
uncertain; and it is in this uncertain twilight that his relation to the general
beliefs of his age has always remained. In this, as in other things, he
prefigures the character of the Renaissance, that movement in which, in
various ways, the human mind wins for itself a new kingdom of feeling and
sensation and thought, not opposed to, but only beyond and independent of
the spiritual system then actually realised. The opposition into which
Abelard is thrown, which gives its colour to his career, which breaks his
soul to pieces, is a no less subtle opposition than that between the merely
professional, official, hireling ministers of that system, with their ignorant
worship of system for its own sake, and the true child of light, the humanist,
with reason and heart and senses quick, while theirs were almost dead. He
reaches out towards, he attains, modes of ideal living, beyond the

prescribed limits of that system, though possibly contained in essential
germ within it. As always happens, the adherents of the poorer and
narrower culture had no sympathy with, because no understanding of, a
culture richer and more ample than their own: after the discovery of wheat
they would still live upon acorns—apres l'invention du ble ils voulaient
encore vivre du gland; and would hear of no service to the higher needs of
humanity with instruments not of their forging.

But the human spirit, bold through those needs, was too strong for them.
Abelard and Heloise write their letters—letters with a wonderful outpouring
of soul—in medieval Latin; and Abelard, though he composes songs in the
vulgar tongue, writes also in Latin those treatises in which he tries to find a
ground of reality below the abstractions of philosophy, as one bent on trying
all things by their congruity with human experience, who had felt the hand
of Heloise, and looked into her eyes, and tested the resources of humanity
in her great and energetic nature. Yet it is only a little later, early in the
thirteenth century, that French prose romance begins; and in one of the
pretty volumes of the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne some of the most striking
fragments of it may be found, edited with much intelligence. In one of these
thirteenth-century stories, Li Amitiez de Ami et Amile, that free play of
human affection, of the claims of which Abelard's story is an assertion,
makes itself felt in the incidents of a great friendship, a friendship pure and
generous, pushed to a sort of passionate exaltation, and more than faithful
unto death. Such comradeship, though instances of it are to be found
everywhere, is still especially a classical motive; Chaucer expressing the
sentiment of it so strongly in an antique tale, that one knows not whether
the love of both Palamon and Arcite for Emelya, or of those two for each
other, is the chiefer subject of the Knight's Tale—
He cast his eyen upon Emelya,
And therewithal he bleynte and cried, ah!
As that he stongen were unto the herte.

What reader does not refer part of the bitterness of that cry to the
spoiling, already foreseen, of that fair friendship, which had hitherto made
the prison of the two lads sweet with its daily offices—though the
friendship is saved at last?

The friendship of Amis and Amile is deepened by the romantic
circumstance of an entire personal resemblance between the two heroes, so
that they pass for each other again and again, and thereby into many strange
adventures; that curious interest of the Doppelgaenger, which begins among
the stars with the Dioscuri, being entwined in and out through all the
incidents of the story, like an outward token of the inward similitude of
their souls. With this, again, like a second reflexion of that inward
similitude, is connected the conceit of two marvellously beautiful cups, also
exactly like each other—children's cups, of wood, but adorned with gold
and precious stones. These two cups, which by their resemblance help to
bring the friends together at critical moments, were given to them by the
Pope, when he baptized them at Rome, whither the parents had taken them
for that purpose, in thankfulness for their birth, and cross and recross in the
narrative, serving the two heroes almost like living things, and with that
well-known effect of a beautiful object kept constantly before the eye in a
story or poem, of keeping sensation well awake, and giving a certain air of
refinement to all the scenes into which it enters; with a heightening also of
that sense of fate, which hangs so much of the shaping of human life on
trivial objects, like Othello's strawberry handkerchief; and witnessing to the
enjoyment of beautiful handiwork by primitive people, almost dazzled by it,
so that they give it an oddly significant place among the factors of a human
history.

Amis and Amile, then, are true to their comradeship through all trials;
and in the end it comes to pass that at a moment of great need Amis takes
the place of Amile in a tournament for life or death. "After this it happened
that a leprosy fell upon Amis, so that his wife would not approach him, and
wrought to strangle him; and he departed from his home, and at last prayed
his servants to carry him to the house of Amile"; and it is in what follows
that the curious strength of the piece shows itself:—

"His servants, willing to do as he commanded, carried him to the place
where Amile was: and they began to sound their rattles before the court of
Amile's house, as lepers are accustomed to do. And when Amile heard the
noise he commanded one of his servants to carry meat and bread to the sick
man, and the cup which was given to him at Rome filled with good wine.
And when the servant had done as he was commanded, he returned and

said, Sir, if I had not thy cup in my hand, I should believe that the cup
which the sick man has was thine, for they are alike, the one to the other, in
height and fashion. And Amile said, Go quickly and bring him to me. And
when Amis stood before his comrade Amile demanded of him who he was,
and how he had gotten that cup. I am of Briquam le Chastel, answered
Amis, and the cup was given to me by the Bishop of Rome, who baptized
me. And when Amile heard that, he knew that it was his comrade Amis,
who had delivered him from death, and won for him the daughter of the
King of France to be his wife. And straightway he fell upon him, and began
to weep greatly, and kissed him. And when his wife heard that, she ran out
with her hair in disarray, weeping and distressed exceedingly, for she
remembered that it was he who had slain the false Ardres. And thereupon
they placed him in a fair bed, and said to him, Abide with us until God's
will be accomplished in thee, for all that we have is at thy service. So he
and the two servants abode with them.

"And it came to pass one night, when Amis and Amile lay in one
chamber without other companions, that God sent His angel Raphael to
Amis, who said to him, Amis, art thou asleep? And he, supposing that
Amile had called him, answered and said, I am not asleep, fair comrade!
And the angel said to him, Thou hast answered well, for thou art the
comrade of the heavenly citizens.—I am Raphael, the angel of our Lord,
and am come to tell thee how thou mayest be healed; for thy prayers are
heard. Thou shalt bid Amile, thy comrade, that he slay his two children and
wash thee in their blood, and so thy body shall be made whole. And Amis
said to him, Let not this thing be, that my comrade should become a
murderer for my sake. But the angel said, It is convenient that he do this.
And thereupon the angel departed.

"And Amile also, as if in sleep, heard those words; and he awoke and
said, Who is it, my comrade, that hath spoken with thee? And Amis
answered, No man; only I have prayed to our Lord, as I am accustomed.
And Amile said, Not so! but some one hath spoken with thee. Then he arose
and went to the door of the chamber; and finding it shut he said, Tell me,
my brother, who it was said those words to thee to-night. And Amis began
to weep greatly, and told him that it was Raphael, the angel of the Lord,
who had said to him, Amis, our Lord commands thee that thou bid Amile

slay his two children, and wash thee in their blood, and thou shalt be healed
of thy leprosy. And Amile was greatly disturbed at those words, and said, I
would have given to thee my man-servants and my maid-servants and all
my goods, and thou feignest that an angel hath spoken to thee that I should
slay my two children. And immediately Amis began to weep, and said, I
know that I have spoken to thee a terrible thing, but constrained thereto; I
pray thee cast me not away from the shelter of thy house. And Amile
answered that what he had covenanted with him, that he would perform,
unto the hour of his death: But I conjure thee, said he, by the faith which
there is between me and thee, and by our comradeship, and by the baptism
we received together at Rome, that thou tell me whether it was man or angel
said that to thee. And Amis answered, So truly as an angel hath spoken to
me this night, so may God deliver me from my infirmity!

"Then Amile began to weep in secret, and thought within himself: If this
man was ready to die before the king for me, shall I not for him slay my
children? Shall I not keep faith with him who was faithful to me even unto
death? And Amile tarried no longer, but departed to the chamber of his wife,
and bade her go hear the Sacred Office. And he took a sword, and went to
the bed where the children were lying, and found them asleep. And he lay
down over them and began to weep bitterly and said, Hath any man yet
heard of a father who of his own will slew his children? Alas, my children!
I am no longer your father, but your cruel murderer.

"And the children awoke at the tears of their father, which fell upon
them; and they looked up into his face and began to laugh. And as they
were of the age of about three years, he said, Your laughing will be turned
into tears, for your innocent blood must now be shed, and therewith he cut
off their heads. Then he laid them back in the bed, and put the heads upon
the bodies, and covered them as though they were sleeping: and with the
blood which he had taken he washed his comrade, and said, Lord Jesus
Christ! who hast commanded men to keep faith on earth, and didst heal the
leper by Thy word! cleanse now my comrade, for whose love I have shed
the blood of my children.

"Then Amis was cleansed of his leprosy. And Amile clothed his
companion in his best robes; and as they went to the church to give thanks,

the bells, by the will of God, rang of their own accord. And when the people
of the city heard that, they ran together to see the marvel. And the wife of
Amile, when she saw Amis and Amile coming, began to ask which of the
twain was her husband, and said, I know well the vesture of them both, but
I know not which of them is Amile. And Amile said to her, I am Amile, and
my companion is Amis, who is healed of his sickness. And she was full of
wonder, and desired to know in what manner he was healed. Give thanks to
our Lord, answered Amile, but trouble not thyself as to the manner of the
healing.

"Now neither the father nor the mother had yet entered where the
children were; but the father sighed heavily because of their death, and the
mother asked for them, that they might rejoice together; but Amile said,
Dame! Let the children sleep. And it was already the hour of Tierce. And
going in alone to the children to weep over them, he found them at play in
the bed; only, in the place of the sword-cuts about their throats was as it
were a thread of crimson. And he took them in his arms and carried them to
his wife and said, Rejoice greatly, for thy children whom I had slain by the
commandment of the angel are alive, and by their blood is Amis healed."

There, as I said, is the strength of the old French story. For the
Renaissance has not only the sweetness which it derives from the classical
world, but also that curious strength of which there are great resources in
the true middle age. And as I have illustrated the early strength of the
Renaissance by the story of Amis and Amile, a story which comes from the
North, in which even a certain racy Teutonic flavour is perceptible, so I
shall illustrate that other element of its early sweetness, a languid excess of
sweetness even, by another story printed in the same volume of the
Bibliotheque Elzevirienne, and of about the same date, a story which
comes, characteristically, from the South, and connects itself with the
literature of Provence.

The central love-poetry of Provence, the poetry of the Tenson and the
Aubade, of Bernard de Ventadour and Pierre Vidal, is poetry for the few, for
the elect and peculiar people of the kingdom of sentiment. But below this
intenser poetry there was probably a wide range of literature, less serious
and elevated, reaching, by lightness of form and comparative homeliness of

interest, an audience which the concentrated passion of those higher lyrics
left untouched. This literature has long since perished, or lives only in later
French or Italian versions. One such version, the only representative of its
species, M. Fauriel thought he detected in the story of Aucassin and
Nicolette, written in the French of the latter half of the thirteenth century,
and preserved in a unique manuscript, in the national library of Paris; and
there were reasons which made him divine for it a still more ancient
ancestry, traces in it of an Arabian origin, as in a leaf lost out of some early
Arabian Nights.* The little book loses none of its interest through the
criticism which finds in it only a traditional subject, handed on by one
people to another; for after passing thus from hand to hand, its outline is
still clear, its surface untarnished; and, like many other stories, books,
literary and artistic conceptions of the middle age, it has come to have in
this way a sort of personal history, almost as full of risk and adventure as
that of its own heroes. The writer himself calls the piece a cantefable, a tale
told in prose, but with its incidents and sentiment helped forward by songs,
inserted at irregular intervals. In the junctions of the story itself there are
signs of roughness and want of skill, which make one suspect that the prose
was only put together to connect a series of songs—a series of songs so
moving and attractive that people wished to heighten and dignify their
effect by a regular framework or setting. Yet the songs themselves are of the
simplest kind, not rhymed even, but only imperfectly assonant, stanzas of
twenty or thirty lines apiece, all ending with a similar vowel sound. And
here, as elsewhere in that early poetry, much of the interest lies in the
spectacle of the formation of a new artistic sense. A new music is arising,
the music of rhymed poetry, and in the songs of Aucassin and Nicolette,
which seem always on the point of passing into true rhyme, but which halt
somehow, and can never quite take flight, you see people just growing
aware of the elements of a new music in their possession, and anticipating
how pleasant such music might become. The piece was probably intended
to be recited by a company of trained performers, many of whom, at least
for the lesser parts, were probably children. The songs are introduced by the
rubric, Or se cante (ici on chante); and each division of prose by the rubric,
Or dient et content et fabloient (ici on conte). The musical notes of part of
the songs have been preserved; and some of the details are so descriptive
that they suggested to M. Fauriel the notion that the words had been
accompanied throughout by dramatic action. That mixture of simplicity and

refinement which he was surprised to find in a composition of the thirteenth
century, is shown sometimes in the turn given to some passing expression
or remark; thus, "the Count de Garins was old and frail, his time was
over"—Li quens Garins de Beaucaire estoit vix et frales; si avoit son tans
trespasse. And then, all is so realised! One still sees the ancient forest, with
its disused roads grown deep with grass, and the place where seven roads
meet—u a forkeut set cemin qui s'en vont par le pais; we hear the light-
hearted country people calling each other by their rustic names, and putting
forward, as their spokesman, one among them who is more eloquent and
ready than the rest—li un qui plus fu enparles des autres; for the little book
has its burlesque element also, so that one hears the faint, far-off laughter
still. Rough as it is, the piece certainly possesses this high quality of poetry,
that it aims at a purely artistic effect. Its subject is a great sorrow, yet it
claims to be a thing of joy and refreshment, to be entertained not for its
matter only, but chiefly for its manner; it is cortois, it tells us, et bien assis.
*Recently, Aucassin and Nicolette has been edited and translated into English,
with much graceful scholarship, by Mr. F. W. Bourdillon. More recently still we
have had a translation—a poet's translation—from the ingenious and versatile
pen of Mr. Andrew Lang. The reader should consult also the chapter on "The
Out-door Poetry," in Vernon Lee's most interesting Euphorion; being Studies of
the Antique and Mediaeval in the Renaissance, a work abounding in knowledge
and insight on the subjects of which it treats.

For the student of manners, and of the old language and literature, it has
much interest of a purely antiquarian order. To say of an ancient literary
composition that it has an antiquarian interest, often means that it has no
distinct aesthetic interest for the reader of to-day. Antiquarianism, by a
purely historical effort, by putting its object in perspective, and setting the
reader in a certain point of view, from which what gave pleasure to the past
is pleasurable for him also, may often add greatly to the charm we receive
from ancient literature. But the first condition of such aid must be a real,
direct, aesthetic charm in the thing itself; unless it has that charm, unless
some purely artistic quality went to its original making, no merely
antiquarian effort can ever give it an aesthetic value, or make it a proper
subject of aesthetic criticism. This quality, wherever it exists, it is always
pleasant to define, and discriminate from the sort of borrowed interest
which an old play, or an old story, may very likely acquire through a true
antiquarianism. The story of Aucassin and Nicolette has something of this

quality. Aucassin, the only son of Count Garins of Beaucaire, is
passionately in love with Nicolette, a beautiful girl of unknown parentage,
bought of the Saracens, whom his father will not permit him to marry. The
story turns on the adventures of these two lovers, until at the end of the
piece their mutual fidelity is rewarded. These adventures are of the simplest
sort, adventures which seem to be chosen for the happy occasion they
afford of keeping the eye of the fancy, perhaps the outward eye, fixed on
pleasant objects, a garden, a ruined tower, the little hut of flowers which
Nicolette constructs in the forest whither she has escaped from her enemies,
as a token to Aucassin that she has passed that way. All the charm of the
piece is in its details, in a turn of peculiar lightness and grace given to the
situations and traits of sentiment, especially in its quaint fragments of early
French prose.

All through it one feels the influence of that faint air of overwrought
delicacy, almost of wantonness, which was so strong a characteristic of the
poetry of the Troubadours. The Troubadours themselves were often men of
great rank; they wrote for an exclusive audience, people of much leisure
and great refinement, and they came to value a type of personal beauty
which has in it but little of the influence of the open air and sunshine. There
is a languid Eastern deliciousness in the very scenery of the story, the full-
blown roses, the chamber painted in some mysterious manner where
Nicolette is imprisoned, the cool brown marble, the almost nameless
colours, the odour of plucked grass and flowers. Nicolette herself well
becomes this scenery, and is the best illustration of the quality I mean—the
beautiful, weird, foreign girl, whom the shepherds take for a fay, who has
the knowledge of simples, the healing and beautifying qualities of leaves
and flowers, whose skilful touch heals Aucassin's sprained shoulder, so that
he suddenly leaps from the ground; the mere sight of whose white flesh, as
she passed the place where he lay, healed a pilgrim stricken with sore
disease, so that he rose up, and returned to his own country. With this girl
Aucassin is so deeply in love that he forgets all his knightly duties. At last
Nicolette is shut up to get her out of his way, and perhaps the prettiest
passage in the whole piece is the fragment of prose which describes her
escape from this place:—

"Aucassin was put in prison, as you have heard, and Nicolette remained
shut up in her chamber. It was summer-time, in the month of May, when the
days are warm and long and clear, and the nights coy and serene.

"One night Nicolette, lying on her bed, saw the moon shine clear through
the little window, and heard the nightingale sing in the garden, and then
came the memory of Aucassin, whom she so much loved. She thought of
the Count Garins of Beaucaire, who so mortally hated her, and, to be rid of
her, might at any moment cause her to be burned or drowned. She perceived
that the old woman who kept her company was asleep; she rose and put on
the fairest gown she had; she took the bed-clothes and the towels, and
knotted them together like a cord, as far as they would go. Then she tied the
end to a pillar of the window, and let herself slip down quite softly into the
garden, and passed straight across it, to reach the town.

"Her hair was yellow in small curls, her smiling eyes blue-green, her
face clear and feat, the little lips very red, the teeth small and white; and the
daisies which she crushed in passing, holding her skirt high behind and
before, looked dark against her feet; the girl was so white!

"She came to the garden-gate and opened it, and walked through the
streets of Beaucaire, keeping on the dark side of the way to avoid the light
of the moon, which shone quietly in the sky. She walked as fast as she
could, until she came to the tower where Aucassin was. The tower was set
about with pillars, here and there. She pressed herself against one of the
pillars, wrapped herself closely in her mantle, and putting her face to a
chink of the tower, which was old and ruined, she heard Aucassin crying
bitterly within, and when she had listened awhile she began to speak."

But scattered up and down through this lighter matter, always tinged
with humour and often passing into burlesque, which makes up the general
substance of the piece, there are morsels of a different quality, touches of
some intenser sentiment, coming it would seem from the profound and
energetic spirit of the Provencal poetry itself, to which the inspiration of the
book has been referred. Let me gather up these morsels of deeper colour,
these expressions of the ideal intensity of love, the motive which really
unites together the fragments of the little composition. Dante, the perfect
flower of ideal love, has recorded how the tyranny of that "Lord of terrible

aspect" became actually physical, blinding his senses, and suspending his
bodily forces. In this Dante is but the central expression and type of
experiences known well enough to the initiated, in that passionate age.
Aucassin represents this ideal intensity of passion—
Aucassin, li biax, li blons,
Li gentix, li amorous;

the slim, tall, debonair figure, dansellon, as the singers call him, with curled
yellow hair, and eyes of vair, who faints with love, as Dante fainted, who
rides all day through the forest in search of Nicolette, while the thorns tear
his flesh, so that one night have traced him by the blood upon the grass, and
who weeps at evening because he has not found her—who has the malady
of his love, so that he neglects all knightly duties. Once he is induced to put
himself at the head of his people, that they, seeing him before them, might
have more heart to defend themselves; then a song relates how the sweet,
grave figure goes forth to battle, in dainty, tight-laced armour. It is the very
image of the Provencal love-god, no longer a child, but grown to pensive
youth, as Pierre Vidal met him, riding on a white horse, fair as the morning,
his vestment embroidered with flowers. He rode on through the gates into
the open plain beyond. But as he went, that great malady of his love came
upon him, so that the bridle fell from his hands; and like one who sleeps
walking, he was carried on into the midst of his enemies, and heard them
talking together how they might most conveniently kill him.

One of the strongest characteristics of that outbreak of the reason and the
imagination, of that assertion of the liberty of the heart, in the middle age,
which I have termed a medieval Renaissance, was its antinomianism, its
spirit of rebellion and revolt against the moral and religious ideas of the
time. In their search after the pleasures of the senses and the imagination, in
their care for beauty, in their worship of the body, people were impelled
beyond the bounds of the Christian ideal; and their love became sometimes
a strange idolatry, a strange rival religion. It was the return of that ancient
Venus, not dead, but only hidden for a time in the caves of the Venusberg,
of those old pagan gods still going to and fro on the earth, under all sorts of
disguises. And this element in the middle age, for the most part ignored by
those writers who have treated it pre-eminently as the "Age of Faith"—this
rebellious and antinomian element, the recognition of which has made the

delineation of the middle age by the writers of the Romantic school in
France, by Victor Hugo for instance in Notre-Dame de Paris, so suggestive
and exciting, is found alike in the history of Abelard and the legend of
Tannhaeuser. More and more, as we come to mark changes and distinctions
of temper in what is often in one all-embracing confusion called the middle
age, this rebellious element, this sinister claim for liberty of heart and
thought, comes to the surface. The Albigensian movement, connected so
strangely with the history of Provencal poetry, is deeply tinged with it. A
touch of it makes the Franciscan order, with its poetry, its mysticism, its
"illumination," from the point of view of religious authority, justly suspect.
It influences the thoughts of those obscure prophetical writers, like Joachim
of Flora, strange dreamers in a world of flowery rhetoric of that third and
final dispensation of a "spirit of freedom," in which law shall have passed
away. Of this spirit Aucassin and Nicolette contains perhaps the most
famous expression: it is the answer Aucassin gives when he is threatened
with the pains of hell, if he makes Nicolette his mistress. A creature wholly
of affection and the senses, he sees on the way to paradise only a feeble
company of aged priests, "clinging day and night to the chapel altars,"
barefoot or in patched sandals. With or even without Nicolette, "his sweet
mistress whom he so much loves," he, for his part, is ready to start on the
way to hell, along with "the good scholars," as he says, and the actors, and
the fine horsemen dead in battle, and the men of fashion,* and "the fair
courteous ladies who had two or three chevaliers apiece beside their own
true lords," all gay with music, in their gold and silver and beautiful furs
—"the vair and the grey."
*Parage, peerage—which came to signify all that ambitious youth affected most
on the outside of life, in that old world of the Troubadours, with whom this term
is of frequent recurrence.

But in the House Beautiful the saints too have their place; and the
student of the Renaissance has this advantage over the student of the
emancipation of the human mind in the Reformation, or the French
Revolution, that in tracing the footsteps of humanity to higher levels, he is
not beset at every turn by the inflexibilities and antagonisms of some well-
recognised controversy, with rigidly defined opposites, exhausting the
intelligence and limiting one's sympathies. The opposition of the
professional defenders of a mere system to that more sincere and general

play of the forces of human mind and character, which I have noted as the
secret of Abelard's struggle, is indeed always powerful. But the
incompatibility of souls really "fair" is not essential; and within the
enchanted region of the Renaissance, one needs not be for ever on one's
guard: here there are no fixed parties, no exclusions: all breathes of that
unity of culture in which "whatsoever things are comely" are reconciled, for
the elevation and adorning of our spirits. And just in proportion as those
who took part in the Renaissance become centrally representative of it, just
so much the more is this condition realised in them. The wicked popes, and
the loveless tyrants, who from time to time became its patrons, or mere
speculators in its fortunes, lend themselves easily to disputations, and, from
this side or that, the spirit of controversy lays just hold upon them. But the
painter of the Last Supper, with his kindred, live in a land where
controversy has no breathing-place, and refuse to be classified. In the story
of Aucassin and Nicolette, in the literature which it represents, the note of
defiance, of the opposition of one system to another, is sometimes harsh: let
me conclude with a morsel from Amis and Amile, in which the harmony of
human interests is still entire. For the story of the great traditional
friendship, in which, as I said, the liberty of the heart makes itself felt,
seems, as we have it, to have been written by a monk—La vie des saints
martyrs Amis et Amile. It was not till the end of the seventeenth century
that their names were finally excluded from the martyrology; and their story
ends with this monkish miracle of earthly comradeship, more than faithful
unto death:—

"For, as God had united them in their lives in one accord, so they were
not divided in their death, falling together side by side, with a host of other
brave men, in battle for King Charles at Mortara, so called from that great
slaughter. And the bishops gave counsel to the king and queen that they
should bury the dead, and build a church in that place; and their counsel
pleased the king greatly; and there were built there two churches, the one by
commandment of the king in honour of Saint Oseige, and the other by
commandment of the queen in honour of Saint Peter.

"And the king caused the two chests of stone to be brought in the which
the bodies of Amis and Amile lay; and Amile was carried to the church of
Saint Peter, and Amis to the church of Saint Oseige; and the other corpses

were buried, some in one place and some in the other. But lo! next morning,
the body of Amile in his coffin was found lying in the church of Saint
Oseige, beside the coffin of Amis his comrade. Behold then this wondrous
amity, which by death could not be dissevered!

"This miracle God did, who gave to His disciples power to remove
mountains. And by reason of this miracle the king and queen remained in
that place for a space of thirty days, and performed the offices of the dead
who were slain, and honoured the said churches with great gifts: and the
bishop ordained many clerks to serve in the church of Saint Oseige, and
commanded them that they should guard duly, with great devotion, the
bodies of the two companions, Amis and Amile."

1872.

PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA

No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of
the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to
reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece. To reconcile
forms of sentiment which at first sight seem incompatible, to adjust the
various products of the human mind to each other in one many-sided type
of intellectual culture, to give humanity, for heart and imagination to feed
upon, as much as it could possibly receive, belonged to the generous
instincts of that age. An earlier and simpler generation had seen in the gods
of Greece so many malignant spirits, the defeated but still living centres of
the religion of darkness, struggling, not always in vain, against the kingdom
of light. Little by little, as the natural charm of pagan story reasserted itself
over minds emerging out of barbarism, the religious significance which had
once belonged to it was lost sight of, and it came to be regarded as the
subject of a purely artistic or poetical treatment. But it was inevitable that
from time to time minds should arise, deeply enough impressed by its
beauty and power to ask themselves whether the religion of Greece was

indeed a rival of the religion of Christ; for the older gods had rehabilitated
themselves, and men's allegiance was divided. And the fifteenth century
was an impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that it
consecrated everything with which art had to do as a religious object. The
restored Greek literature had made it familiar, at least in Plato, with a style
of expression concerning the earlier gods, which had about it much of the
warmth and unction of a Christian hymn. It was too familiar with such
language to regard mythology as a mere story; and it was too serious to play
with a religion.

"Let me briefly remind the reader"—says Heine, in the Gods in Exile, an
essay full of that strange blending of sentiment which is characteristic of the
traditions of the middle age concerning the pagan religions—"how the gods
of the older world, at the time of the definite triumph of Christianity, that is,
in the third century, fell into painful embarrassments, which greatly
resembled certain tragical situations of their earlier life. They now found
themselves beset by the same troublesome necessities to which they had
once before been exposed during the primitive ages, in that revolutionary
epoch when the Titans broke out of the custody of Orcus, and, piling Pelion
on Ossa, scaled Olympus. Unfortunate Gods! They had then to take flight
ignominiously, and hide themselves among us here on earth, under all sorts
of disguises. The larger number betook themselves to Egypt, where for
greater security they assumed the forms of animals, as is generally known.
Just in the same way, they had to take flight again, and seek entertainment
in remote hiding-places, when those iconoclastic zealots, the black brood of
monks, broke down all the temples, and pursued the gods with fire and
curses. Many of these unfortunate emigrants, now entirely deprived of
shelter and ambrosia, must needs take to vulgar handicrafts, as a means of
earning their bread. Under these circumstances, many whose sacred groves
had been confiscated, let themselves out for hire as wood-cutters in
Germany, and were forced to drink beer instead of nectar. Apollo seems to
have been content to take service under graziers, and as he had once kept
the cows of Admetus, so he lived now as a shepherd in Lower Austria.
Here, however, having become suspected on account of his beautiful
singing, he was recognised by a learned monk as one of the old pagan gods,
and handed over to the spiritual tribunal. On the rack he confessed that he
was the god Apollo; and before his execution he begged that he might be

suffered to play once more upon the lyre, and to sing a song. And he played
so touchingly, and sang with such magic, and was withal so beautiful in
form and feature, that all the women wept, and many of them were so
deeply impressed that they shortly afterwards fell sick. And some time
afterwards the people wished to drag him from the grave again, so that a
stake might be driven through his body, in the belief that he had been a
vampire, and that the sick women would by this means recover. But they
found the grave empty."

The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great
rather by what it designed than by what it achieved. Much which it aspired
to do, and did but imperfectly or mistakenly, was accomplished in what is
called the eclaircissement of the eighteenth century, or in our own
generation; and what really belongs to the rival of the fifteenth century is
but the leading instinct, the curiosity, the initiatory idea. It is so with this
very question of the reconciliation of the religion of antiquity with the
religion of Christ. A modern scholar occupied by this problem might
observe that all religions may be regarded as natural products; that, at least
in their origin, their growth, and decay, they have common laws, and are not
to be isolated from the other movements of the human mind in the periods
in which they respectively prevailed; that they arise spontaneously out of
the human mind, as expressions of the varying phases of its sentiment
concerning the unseen world; that every intellectual product must be judged
from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.
He might go on to observe that each has contributed something to the
development of the religious sense, and ranging them as so many stages in
the gradual education of the human mind, justify the existence of each. The
basis of the reconciliation of the religions of the world would thus be the
inexhaustible activity and creativeness of the human mind itself, in which
all religions alike have their root, and in which all alike are reconciled; just
as the fancies of childhood and the thoughts of old age meet and are laid to
rest, in the experience of the individual. Far different was the method
followed by the scholars of the fifteenth century. They lacked the very
rudiments of the historic sense, which, by an imaginative act, throws itself
back into a world unlike one's own, and estimates every intellectual creation
in its connexion with the age from which it proceeded; they had no idea of
development, of the differences of ages, of the gradual education of the

human race. In their attempts to reconcile the religions of the world, they
were thus thrown back upon the quicksand of allegorical interpretation. The
religions of the world were to be reconciled, not as successive stages, in a
gradual development of the religious sense, but as subsisting side by side,
and substantially in agreement with each other. And here the first necessity
was to misrepresent the language, the conceptions, the sentiments, it was
proposed to compare and reconcile. Plato and Homer must be made to
speak agreeably to Moses. Set side by side, the mere surfaces could never
unite in any harmony of design. Therefore one must go below the surface,
and bring up the supposed secondary, or still more remote meaning, that
diviner signification held in reserve, in recessu divinius aliquid, latent in
some stray touch of Homer, or figure of speech in the books of Moses.

And yet as a curiosity of the human mind, a "madhouse-cell," if you will,
into which we peep for a moment, and see it at work weaving strange
fancies, the allegorical interpretation of the fifteenth century has its interest.
With its strange web of imagery, its quaint conceits, its unexpected
combinations and subtle moralising, it is an element in the local colour of a
great age. It illustrates also the faith of that age in all oracles, its desire to
hear all voices, its generous belief that nothing which had ever interested
the human mind could wholly lose its vitality. It is the counterpart, though
certainly the feebler counterpart, of that practical truce and reconciliation of
the gods of Greece with the Christian religion, which is seen in the art of
the time; and it is for his share in this work, and because his own story is a
sort of analogue or visible equivalent to the expression of this purpose in his
writings, that something of a general interest still belongs to the name of
Pico della Mirandola, whose life, written by his nephew Francis, seemed
worthy, for some touch of sweetness in it, to be translated out of the original
Latin by Sir Thomas More, that great lover of Italian culture, among whose
works this life of Pico, Earl of Mirandola, and a great lord of Italy, as he
calls him, may still be read, in its quaint, antiquated English.

Marsilio Ficino has told us how Pico came to Florence. It was the very
day—some day probably in the year 1482—on which Ficino had finished
his famous translation of Plato into Latin, the work to which he had been
dedicated from childhood by Cosmo de' Medici, in furtherance of his desire
to resuscitate the knowledge of Plato among his fellow-citizens. Florence

indeed, as M. Renan has pointed out, had always had an affinity for the
mystic and dreamy philosophy of Plato, while the colder and more practical
philosophy of Aristotle had flourished in Padua, and other cities of the
north; and the Florentines, though they knew perhaps very little about him,
had had the name of the great idealist often on their lips. To increase this
knowledge, Cosmo had founded the Platonic academy, with periodical
discussions at the villa of Careggi. The fall of Constantinople in 1453, and
the council in 1438 for the reconciliation of the Greek and Latin Churches,
had brought to Florence many a needy Greek scholar. And now the work
was completed, the door of the mystical temple lay open to all who could
construe Latin, and the scholar rested from his labour; when there was
introduced into his study, where a lamp burned continually before the bust
of Plato, as other men burned lamps before their favourite saints, a young
man fresh from a journey, "of feature and shape seemly and beauteous, of
stature goodly and high, of flesh tender and soft, his visage lovely and fair,
his colour white, intermingled with comely reds, his eyes grey, and quick of
look, his teeth white and even, his hair yellow and abundant," and trimmed
with more than the usual artifice of the time. It is thus that Sir Thomas More
translates the words of the biographer of Pico, who, even in outward form
and appearance, seems an image of that inward harmony and completeness,
of which he is so perfect an example. The word mystic has been usually
derived from a Greek word which signifies to shut, as if one shut one's lips,
brooding on what cannot be uttered; but the Platonists themselves derive it
rather from the act of shutting the eyes, that one may see the more,
inwardly. Perhaps the eyes of the mystic Ficino, now long past the midway
of life, had come to be thus half-closed; but when a young man, not unlike
the archangel Raphael, as the Florentines of that age depicted him in his
wonderful walk with Tobit, or Mercury, as he might have appeared in a
painting by Sandro Botticelli or Piero di Cosimo, entered his chamber, he
seems to have thought there was something not wholly earthly about him; at
least, he ever afterwards believed that it was not without the co-operation of
the stars that the stranger had arrived on that day. For it happened that they
fell into a conversation, deeper and more intimate than men usually fall into
at first sight. During this conversation Ficino formed the design of devoting
his remaining years to the translation of Plotinus, that new Plato, in whom
the mystical element in the Platonic philosophy had been worked out to the

utmost limit of vision and ecstasy; and it is in dedicating this translation to
Lorenzo de' Medici that Ficino has recorded these incidents.

It was after many wanderings, wanderings of the intellect as well as
physical journeys, that Pico came to rest at Florence. He was then about
twenty years old, having been born in 1463. He was called Giovanni at
baptism; Pico, like all his ancestors, from Picus, nephew of the Emperor
Constantine, from whom they claimed to be descended; and Mirandola,
from the place of his birth, a little town afterwards part of the duchy of
Modena, of which small territory his family had long been the feudal lords.
Pico was the youngest of the family, and his mother, delighting in his
wonderful memory, sent him at the age of fourteen to the famous school of
law at Bologna. From the first, indeed, she seems to have had some
presentiment of his future fame, for, with a faith in omens characteristic of
her time, she believed that a strange circumstance had happened at the time
of Pico's birth—the appearance of a circular flame which suddenly vanished
away, on the wall of the chamber where she lay. He remained two years at
Bologna; and then, with an inexhaustible, unrivalled thirst for knowledge,
the strange, confused, uncritical learning of that age, passed through the
principal schools of Italy and France, penetrating, as he thought, into the
secrets of all ancient philosophies, and many eastern languages. And with
this flood of erudition came the generous hope, so often disabused, of
reconciling the philosophers with each other, and all alike with the Church.
At last he came to Rome. There, like some knight-errant of philosophy, he
offered to defend nine hundred bold paradoxes, drawn from the most
opposite sources, against all comers. But the pontifical court was led to
suspect the orthodoxy of some of these propositions, and even the reading
of the book which contained them was forbidden by the Pope. It was not
until 1493 that Pico was finally absolved, by a brief of Alexander the Sixth.
Ten years before that date he had arrived at Florence; an early instance of
those who, after following the vain hope of an impossible reconciliation
from system to system, have at last fallen back unsatisfied on the
simplicities of their childhood's belief.

The oration which Pico composed for the opening of this philosophical
tournament still remains; its subject is the dignity of human nature, the
greatness of man. In common with nearly all medieval speculation, much of

Pico's writing has this for its drift; and in common also with it, Pico's theory
of that dignity is founded on a misconception of the place in nature both of
the earth and of man. For Pico the earth is the centre of the universe: and
around it, as a fixed and motionless point, the sun and moon and stars
revolve, like diligent servants or ministers. And in the midst of all is placed
man, nodus et vinculum mundi, the bond or copula of the world, and the
"interpreter of nature": that famous expression of Bacon's really belongs to
Pico. Tritum est in scholis, he says, esse hominem minorem mundum, in
quo mixtum ex elementis corpus et spiritus coelestis et plantarum anima
vegetalis et brutorum sensus et ratio et angelica mens et Dei similitudo
conspicitur.—"It is a commonplace of the schools that man is a little world,
in which we may discern a body mingled of earthy elements, and ethereal
breath, and the vegetable life of plants, and the senses of the lower animals,
and reason, and the intelligence of angels, and a likeness to God."—A
commonplace of the schools! But perhaps it had some new significance and
authority, when men heard one like Pico reiterate it; and, false as its basis
was, the theory had its use. For this high dignity of man, thus bringing the
dust under his feet into sensible communion with the thoughts and
affections of the angels, was supposed to belong to him, not as renewed by
a religious system, but by his own natural right. The proclamation of it was
a counterpoise to the increasing tendency of medieval religion to depreciate
man's nature, to sacrifice this or that element in it, to make it ashamed of
itself, to keep the degrading or painful accidents of it always in view. It
helped man onward to that reassertion of himself, that rehabilitation of
human nature, the body, the senses, the heart, the intelligence, which the
Renaissance fulfils. And yet to read a page of one of Pico's forgotten books
is like a glance into one of those ancient sepulchres, upon which the
wanderer in classical lands has sometimes stumbled, with the old disused
ornaments and furniture of a world wholly unlike ours still fresh in them.
That whole conception of nature is so different from our own. For Pico the
world is a limited place, bounded by actual crystal walls, and a material
firmament; it is like a painted toy, like that map or system of the world,
held, as a great target or shield, in the hands of the grey-headed father of all
things, in one of the earlier frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa. How
different from this childish dream is our own conception of nature, with its
unlimited space, its innumerable suns, and the earth but a mote in the beam;
how different the strange new awe, or superstition, with which it fills our

minds! "The silence of those infinite spaces," says Pascal, contemplating a
starlight night, "the silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me"—Le silence
eternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.

He was already almost wearied out when he came to Florence. He had
loved much and been beloved by women, "wandering over the crooked hills
of delicious pleasure"; but their reign over him was over, and long before
Savonarola's famous "bonfire of vanities," he had destroyed those love-
songs in the vulgar tongue, which would have been such a relief to us, after
the scholastic prolixity of his Latin writings. It was in another spirit that he
composed a Platonic commentary, the only work of his in Italian which has
come down to us, on the "Song of Divine Love"—secondo la mente ed
opinione dei Platonici—"according to the mind and opinion of the
Platonists," by his friend Hieronymo Beniveni, in which, with an ambitious
array of every sort of learning, and a profusion of imagery borrowed
indifferently from the astrologers, the Cabala, and Homer, and Scripture,
and Dionysius the Areopagite, he attempts to define the stages by which the
soul passes from the earthly to the unseen beauty. A change indeed had
passed over him, as if the chilling touch of the abstract and disembodied
beauty Platonists profess to long for was already upon him; and perhaps it
was a sense of this, coupled with that over-brightness which in the popular
imagination always betokens an early death, that made Camilla Rucellai,
one of those prophetic women whom the preaching of Savonarola had
raised up in Florence, declare, seeing him for the first time, that he would
depart in the time of lilies—prematurely, that is, like the field-flowers
which are withered by the scorching sun almost as soon as they are sprung
up. It was now that he wrote down those thoughts on the religious life
which Sir Thomas More turned into English, and which another English
translator thought worthy to be added to the books of the Imitation. "It is
not hard to know God, provided one will not force oneself to define Him":
—has been thought a great saying of Joubert's. "Love God," Pico writes to
Angelo Politian, "we rather may, than either know Him, or by speech utter
Him. And yet had men liefer by knowledge never find that which they seek,
than by love possess that thing, which also without love were in vain
found."

Yet he who had this fine touch for spiritual things did not—and in this is
the enduring interest of his story—even after his conversion, forget the old
gods. He is one of the last who seriously and sincerely entertained the
claims on men's faith of the pagan religions; he is anxious to ascertain the
true significance of the obscurest legend, the lightest tradition concerning
them. With many thoughts and many influences which led him in that
direction, he did not become a monk; only he became gentle and patient in
disputation; retaining "somewhat of the old plenty, in dainty viand and
silver vessel," he gave over the greater part of his property to his friend, the
mystical poet Beniveni, to be spent by him in works of charity, chiefly in
the sweet charity of providing marriage-dowries for the peasant girls of
Florence. His end came in 1494, when, amid the prayers and sacraments of
Savonarola, he died of fever, on the very day on which Charles the Eighth
entered Florence, the seventeenth of November, yet in the time of lilies—
the lilies of the shield of France, as the people now said, remembering
Camilla's prophecy. He was buried in the cloister at Saint Mark's, in the
hood and white frock of the Dominican order.

It is because the life of Pico, thus lying down to rest in the Dominican
habit, yet amid thoughts of the older gods, himself like one of those comely
divinities, reconciled indeed to the new religion, but still with a tenderness
for the earlier life, and desirous literally to "bind the ages each to each by
natural piety"—it is because this life is so perfect a parallel to the attempt
made in his writings to reconcile Christianity with the ideas of paganism,
that Pico, in spite of the scholastic character of those writings, is really
interesting. Thus, in the Heptaplus, or Discourse on the Seven Days of the
Creation, he endeavours to reconcile the accounts which pagan philosophy
had given of the origin of the world with the account given in the books of
Moses—the Timaeus of Plato with the book of Genesis. The Heptaplus is
dedicated to Lorenzo the Magnificent, whose interest, the preface tells us,
in the secret wisdom of Moses is well known. If Moses seems in his
writings simple and even popular, rather than either a philosopher or a
theologian, that is because it was an institution with the ancient
philosophers, either not to speak of divine things at all, or to speak of them
dissemblingly: hence their doctrines were called mysteries. Taught by them,
Pythagoras became so great a "master of silence," and wrote almost
nothing, thus hiding the words of God in his heart, and speaking wisdom

only among the perfect. In explaining the harmony between Plato and
Moses, Pico lays hold on every sort of figure and analogy, on the double
meanings of words, the symbols of the Jewish ritual, the secondary
meanings of obscure stories in the later Greek mythologists. Everywhere
there is an unbroken system of correspondences. Every object in the
terrestrial world is an analogue, a symbol or counterpart, of some higher
reality in the starry heavens, and this again of some law of the angelic life
in the world beyond the stars. There is the element of fire in the material
world; the sun is the fire of heaven; and in the super-celestial world there is
the fire of the seraphic intelligence. "But behold how they differ! The
elementary fire burns, the heavenly fire vivifies, the super-celestial fire
loves." In this way, every natural object, every combination of natural
forces, every accident in the lives of men, is filled with higher meanings.
Omens, prophecies, supernatural coincidences, accompany Pico himself all
through life. There are oracles in every tree and mountain-top, and a
significance in every accidental combination of the events of life.

This constant tendency to symbolism and imagery gives Pico's work a
figured style, by which it has some real resemblance to Plato's, and he
differs from other mystical writers of his time by a real desire to know his
authorities at first hand. He reads Plato in Greek, Moses in Hebrew, and by
this his work really belongs to the higher culture. Above all, we have a
constant sense in reading him, that his thoughts, however little their positive
value may be, are connected with springs beneath them of deep and
passionate emotion; and when he explains the grades or steps by which the
soul passes from the love of a physical object to the love of unseen beauty,
and unfolds the analogies between this process and other movements
upward of human thought, there is a glow and vehemence in his words
which remind one of the manner in which his own brief existence flamed
itself away.

I said that the Renaissance of the fifteenth century was in many things
great, rather by what it designed or aspired to do, than by what it actually
achieved. It remained for a later age to conceive the true method of
effecting a scientific reconciliation of Christian sentiment with the imagery,
the legends, the theories about the world, of pagan poetry and philosophy.
For that age the only possible reconciliation was an imaginative one, and

resulted from the efforts of artists, trained in Christian schools, to handle
pagan subjects; and of this artistic reconciliation work like Pico's was but
the feebler counterpart. Whatever philosophers had to say on one side or the
other, whether they were successful or not in their attempts to reconcile the
old to the new, and to justify the expenditure of so much care and thought
on the dreams of a dead faith, the imagery of the Greek religion, the direct
charm of its story, were by artists valued and cultivated for their own sake.
Hence a new sort of mythology, with a tone and qualities of its own. When
the ship-load of sacred earth from the soil of Jerusalem was mingled with
the common clay in the Campo Santo at Pisa, a new flower grew up from it,
unlike any flower men had seen before, the anemone with its concentric
rings of strangely blended colour, still to be found by those who search long
enough for it, in the long grass of the Maremma. Just such a strange flower
was that mythology of the Italian Renaissance, which grew up from the
mixture of two traditions, two sentiments, the sacred and the profane.
Classical story was regarded as so much imaginative material to be received
and assimilated. It did not come into men's minds to ask curiously of
science concerning its origin, its primary form and import, its meaning for
those who projected it. It sank into their minds, to issue forth again with all
the tangle about it of medieval sentiment and ideas. In the Doni Madonna in
the Tribune of the Uffizii, Michelangelo actually brings the pagan religion,
and with it the unveiled human form, the sleepy-looking fauns of a
Dionysiac revel, into the presence of the Madonna, as simpler painters had
introduced there other products of the earth, birds or flowers; and he has
given to that Madonna herself much of the uncouth energy of the older and
more primitive "Mighty Mother."

It is because this picturesque union of contrasts, belonging properly to
the art of the close of the fifteenth century, pervades, in Pico della
Mirandola, an actual person, that the figure of Pico is so attractive. He will
not let one go; he wins one on, in spite of oneself, to turn again to the pages
of his forgotten books, although we know already that the actual solution
proposed in them will satisfy us as little as perhaps it satisfied him. It is said
that in his eagerness for mysterious learning he once paid a great sum for a
collection of cabalistic manuscripts, which turned out to be forgeries; and
the story might well stand as a parable of all he ever seemed to gain in the
way of actual knowledge. He had sought knowledge, and passed from

system to system, and hazarded much; but less for the sake of positive
knowledge than because he believed there was a spirit of order and beauty
in knowledge, which would come down and unite what men's ignorance
had divided, and renew what time had made dim. And so, while his actual
work has passed away, yet his own qualities are still active, and he himself
remains, as one alive in the grave, caesiis et vigilibus oculis, as his
biographer describes him, and with that sanguine, clear skin, decenti rubore
interspersa, as with the light of morning upon it; and he has a true place in
that group of great Italians who fill the end of the fifteenth century with
their names, he is a true HUMANIST. For the essence of humanism is that
belief of which he seems never to have doubted, that nothing which has
ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality—no
language they have spoken, nor oracle beside which they have hushed their
voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds,
nothing about which they have ever been passionate, or expended time and
zeal.

1871.

SANDRO BOTTICELLI

In Leonardo's treatise on painting only one contemporary is mentioned
by Name—Sandro Botticelli. This pre-eminence may be due to chance only,
but to some will rather appear a result of deliberate judgment; for people
have begun to find out the charm of Botticelli's work, and his name, little
known in the last century, is quietly becoming important. In the middle of
the fifteenth century he had already anticipated much of that meditative
subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to the great imaginative
workmen of its close. Leaving the simple religion which had occupied the
followers of Giotto for a century, and the simple naturalism which had
grown out of it, a thing of birds and flowers only, he sought inspiration in
what to him were works of the modern world, the writings of Dante and
Boccaccio, and in new readings of his own of classical stories: or, if he

painted religious incidents, painted them with an under-current of original
sentiment, which touches you as the real matter of the picture through the
veil of its ostensible subject. What is the peculiar sensation, what is the
peculiar quality of pleasure, which his work has the property of exciting in
us, and which we cannot get elsewhere? For this, especially when he has to
speak of a comparatively unknown artist, is always the chief question which
a critic has to answer.

In an age when the lives of artists were full of adventure, his life is
almost colourless. Criticism indeed has cleared away much of the gossip
which Vasari accumulated, has touched the legend of Lippo and Lucrezia,
and rehabilitated the character of Andrea del Castagno; but in Botticelli's
case there is no legend to dissipate. He did not even go by his true name:
Sandro is a nickname, and his true name is Filipepi, Botticelli being only
the name of the goldsmith who first taught him art. Only two things
happened to him, two things which he shared with other artists:—he was
invited to Rome to paint in the Sistine Chapel, and he fell in later life under
the influence of Savonarola, passing apparently almost out of men's sight in
a sort of religious melancholy, which lasted till his death in 1515, according
to the received date. Vasari says that he plunged into the study of Dante, and
even wrote a comment on the Divine Comedy. But it seems strange that he
should have lived on inactive so long; and one almost wishes that some
document might come to light, which, fixing the date of his death earlier,
might relieve one, in thinking of him, of his dejected old age.

He is before all things a poetical painter, blending the charm of story and
sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of line and
colour, the medium of abstract painting. So he becomes the illustrator of
Dante. In a few rare examples of the edition of 1481, the blank spaces, left
at the beginning of every canto for the hand of the illuminator, have been
filled, as far as the nineteenth canto of the Inferno, with impressions of
engraved plates, seemingly by way of experiment, for in the copy in the
Bodleian Library, one of the three impressions it contains has been printed
upside down, and much awry, in the midst of the luxurious printed page.
Giotto, and the followers of Giotto, with their almost childish religious aim,
had not learned to put that weight of meaning into outward things, light,
colour, everyday gesture, which the poetry of the Divine Comedy involves,

and before the fifteenth century Dante could hardly have found an
illustrator. Botticelli's illustrations are crowded with incident, blending,
with a naive carelessness of pictorial propriety, three phases of the same
scene into one plate. The grotesques, so often a stumbling-block to painters
who forget that the words of a poet, which only feebly present an image to
the mind, must be lowered in key when translated into form, make one
regret that he has not rather chosen for illustration the more subdued
imagery of the Purgatorio. Yet in the scene of those who "go down quick
into hell," there is an invention about the fire taking hold on the upturned
soles of the feet, which proves that the design is no mere translation of
Dante's words, but a true painter's vision; while the scene of the Centaurs
wins one at once, for, forgetful of the actual circumstances of their
appearance, Botticelli has gone off with delight on the thought of the
Centaurs themselves, bright, small creatures of the woodland, with arch
baby face and mignon forms, drawing tiny bows.

Botticelli lived in a generation of naturalists, and he might have been a
mere naturalist among them. There are traces enough in his work of that
alert sense of outward things, which, in the pictures of that period, fills the
lawns with delicate living creatures, and the hillsides with pools of water,
and the pools of water with flowering reeds. But this was not enough for
him; he is a visionary painter, and in his visionariness he resembles Dante.
Giotto, the tried companion of Dante, Masaccio, Ghirlandajo even, do but
transcribe, with more or less refining, the outward image; they are dramatic,
not visionary painters; they are almost impassive spectators of the action
before them. But the genius of which Botticelli is the type usurps the data
before it as the exponent of ideas, moods, visions of its own; in this interest
it plays fast and loose with those data, rejecting some and isolating others,
and always combining them anew. To him as to Dante, the scene, the
colour, the outward image or gesture, comes with all its incisive and
importunate reality; but awakes in him, moreover, by some subtle law of his
own structure, a mood which it awakes in no one else, of which it is the
double or repetition, and which it clothes, that all may share it, with
sensuous circumstance.

But he is far enough from accepting the conventional orthodoxy of
Dante which, referring all human action to the simple formula of purgatory,

heaven and hell, leaves an insoluble element of prose in the depths of
Dante's poetry. One picture of his, with the portrait of the donor, Matteo
Palmieri, below, had the credit or discredit of attracting some shadow of
ecclesiastical censure. This Matteo Palmieri—two dim figures move under
that name in contemporary history—was the reputed author of a poem, still
unedited, La Citta Divina, which represented the human race as an
incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer, were neither for
Jehovah nor for His enemies, a fantasy of that earlier Alexandrian
philosophy about which the Florentine intellect in that century was so
curious. Botticelli's picture may have been only one of those familiar
compositions in which religious reverie has recorded its impressions of the
various forms of beatified existence—Glorias, as they were called, like that
in which Giotto painted the portrait of Dante; but somehow it was suspected
of embodying in a picture the wayward dream of Palmieri, and the chapel
where it hung was closed. Artists so entire as Botticelli are usually careless
about philosophical theories, even when the philosopher is a Florentine of
the fifteenth century, and his work a poem in terza rima. But Botticelli, who
wrote a commentary on Dante, and became the disciple of Savonarola, may
well have let such theories come and go across him. True or false, the story
interprets much of the peculiar sentiment with which he infuses his profane
and sacred persons, comely, and in a certain sense like angels, but with a
sense of displacement or loss about them—the wistfulness of exiles,
conscious of a passion and energy greater than any known issue of them
explains, which runs through all his varied work with a sentiment of
ineffable melancholy.

So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of heaven and hell,
Botticelli accepts, that middle world in which men take no side in great
conflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great refusals. He thus sets
for himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by any moral ambition,
does its most sincere and surest work. His interest is neither in the
untempered goodness of Angelico's saints, nor the untempered evil of
Orcagna's Inferno; but with men and women, in their mixed and uncertain
condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes by passion with a character
of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually by the shadow upon
them of the great things from which they shrink. His morality is all
sympathy; and it is this sympathy, conveying into his work somewhat more

than is usual of the true complexion of humanity, which makes him,
visionary as he is, so forcible a realist.

It is this which gives to his Madonnas their unique expression and
charm. He has worked out in them a distinct and peculiar type, definite
enough in his own mind, for he has painted it over and over again,
sometimes one might think almost mechanically, as a pastime during that
dark period when his thoughts were so heavy upon him. Hardly any
collection of note is without one of these circular pictures, into which the
attendant angels depress their heads so naively. Perhaps you have
sometimes wondered why those peevish-looking Madonnas, conformed to
no acknowledged or obvious type of beauty, attract you more and more, and
often come back to you when the Sistine Madonna and the Virgins of Fra
Angelico are forgotten. At first, contrasting them with those, you may have
thought that there was something in them mean or abject even, for the
abstract lines of the face have little nobleness, and the colour is wan. For
with Botticelli she too, though she holds in her hands the "Desire of all
nations," is one of those who are neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies;
and her choice is on her face. The white light on it is cast up hard and
cheerless from below, as when snow lies upon the ground, and the children
look up with surprise at the strange whiteness of the ceiling. Her trouble is
in the very caress of the mysterious child, whose gaze is always far from
her, and who has already that sweet look of devotion which men have never
been able altogether to love, and which still makes the born saint an object
almost of suspicion to his earthly brethren. Once, indeed, he guides her
hand to transcribe in a book the words of her exaltation, the Ave, and the
Magnificat, and the Gaude Maria, and the young angels, glad to rouse her
for a moment from Her dejection, are eager to hold the inkhorn and to
support the book; but the pen almost drops from her hand, and the high cold
words have no meaning for her, and her true children are those others,
among whom in her rude home, the intolerable honour came to her, with
that look of wistful inquiry on their irregular faces which you see in startled
animals—gipsy children, such as those who, in Apennine villages, still hold
out their long brown arms to beg of you, but on Sundays become enfants du
choeur, with their thick black hair nicely combed, and fair white linen on
their sunburnt throats.

What is strangest is that he carries this sentiment into classical subjects,
its most complete expression being a picture in the Uffizii, of Venus rising
from the sea, in which the grotesque emblems of the middle age, and a
landscape full of its peculiar feeling, and even its strange draperies,
powdered all over in the Gothic manner with a quaint conceit of daisies,
frame a figure that reminds you of the faultless nude studies of Ingres. At
first, perhaps, you are attracted only by a quaintness of design, which seems
to recall all at once whatever you have read of Florence in the fifteenth
century; afterwards you may think that this quaintness must be incongruous
with the subject, and that the colour is cadaverous or at least cold. And yet,
the more you come to understand what imaginative colouring really is, that
all colour is no mere delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon
them by which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you will like
this peculiar quality of colour; and you will find that quaint design of
Botticelli's a more direct inlet into the Greek temper than the works of the
Greeks themselves even of the finest period. Of the Greeks as they really
were, of their difference from ourselves, of the aspects of their outward life,
we know far more than Botticelli, or his most learned contemporaries; but
for us long familiarity has taken off the edge of the lesson, and we are
hardly conscious of what we owe to the Hellenic spirit. But in pictures like
this of Botticelli's you have a record of the first impression made by it on
minds turned back towards it, in almost painful aspiration, from a world in
which it had been ignored so long; and in the passion, the energy, the
industry of realisation, with which Botticelli carries out his intention, is the
exact measure of the legitimate influence over the human mind of the
imaginative system of which this is the central myth. The light is indeed
cold—mere sunless dawn; but a later painter would have cloyed you with
sunshine; and you can see the better for that quietness in the morning air
each long promontory, as it slopes down to the water's edge. Men go forth
to their labours until the evening; but she is awake before them, and you
might think that the sorrow in her face was at the thought of the whole long
day of love yet to come. An emblematical figure of the wind blows hard
across the grey water, moving forward the dainty-lipped shell on which she
sails, the sea "showing his teeth" as it moves in thin lines of foam, and
sucking in, one by one, the falling roses, each severe in outline, plucked off
short at the stalk but embrowned a little, as Botticelli's flowers always are.
Botticelli meant all that imagery to be altogether pleasurable; and it was

partly an incompleteness of resources, inseparable from the art of that time,
that subdued and chilled it; but his predilection for minor tones counts also;
and what is unmistakable is the sadness with which he has conceived the
goddess of pleasure, as the depositary of a great power over the lives of
men.

I have said that the peculiar character of Botticelli is the result of a
blending in him of a sympathy for humanity in its uncertain condition, its
attractiveness, its investiture at rarer moments in a character of loveliness
and energy, with his consciousness of the shadow upon it of the great things
from which it shrinks, and that this conveys into his work somewhat more
than painting usually attains of the true complexion of humanity. He paints
the story of the goddess of pleasure in other episodes besides that of her
birth from the sea, but never without some shadow of death in the grey flesh
and wan flowers. He paints Madonnas, but they shrink from the pressure of
the divine child, and plead in unmistakable undertones for a warmer, lower
humanity. The same figure—tradition connects it with Simonetta, the
Mistress of Giuliano de' Medici—appears again as Judith, returning home
across the hill country, when the great deed is over, and the moment of
revulsion come, when the olive branch in her hand is becoming a burthen;
as Justice, sitting on a throne, but with a fixed look of self-hatred which
makes the sword in her hand seem that of a suicide; and again as Veritas, in
the allegorical picture of Calumnia, where one may note in passing the
suggestiveness of an accident which identifies the image of Truth with the
person of Venus. We might trace the same sentiment through his
engravings; but his share in them is doubtful, and the object of this brief
study has been attained, if I have defined aright the temper in which he
worked.

But, after all, it may be asked, is a painter like Botticelli—a secondary
painter—a proper subject for general criticism? There are a few great
painters, like Michelangelo or Leonardo, whose work has become a force in
general culture, partly for this very reason that they have absorbed into
themselves all such workmen as Sandro Botticelli; and, over and above
mere technical or antiquarian criticism, general criticism may be very well
employed in that sort of interpretation which adjusts the position of these
men to general culture, whereas smaller men can be the proper subjects

only of technical or antiquarian treatment. But, besides those great men,
there is a certain number of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own
by which they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot
get elsewhere; and these, too, have their place in general culture, and must
be interpreted to it by those who have felt their charm strongly, and are
often the objects of a special diligence and a consideration wholly
affectionate, just because there is not about them the stress of a great name
and authority. Of this select number Botticelli is one; he has the freshness,
the uncertain and diffident promise which belongs to the earlier
Renaissance itself, and makes it perhaps the most interesting period in the
history of the mind: in studying his work one begins to understand to how
great a place in human culture the art of Italy had been called.

1870.

LUCA DELLA ROBBIA

The Italian sculptors of the earlier half of the fifteenth century are more
than mere forerunners of the great masters of its close, and often reach
perfection, within the narrow limits which they chose to impose on their
work. Their sculpture shares with the paintings of Botticelli and the
churches of Brunelleschi that profound expressiveness, that intimate
impress of an indwelling soul, which is the peculiar fascination of the art of
Italy in that century. Their works have been much neglected, and often
almost hidden away amid the frippery of modern decoration, and we come
with some surprise on the places where their fire still smoulders. One longs
to penetrate into the lives of the men who have given expression to so much
power and sweetness; but it is part of the reserve, the austere dignity and
simplicity of their existence, that their histories are for the most part lost, or
told but briefly. From their lives, as from their work, all tumult of sound and
colour has passed away. Mino, the Raffaelle of sculpture, Maso del
Rodario, whose works add a new grace to the church of Como, Donatello

even—one asks in vain for more than a shadowy outline of their actual
days.

Something more remains of Luca della Robbia; something more of a
history, of outward changes and fortunes, is expressed through his work. I
suppose nothing brings the real air of a Tuscan town so vividly to mind as
those pieces of pale blue and white earthenware, by which he is best known,
like fragments of the milky sky itself, fallen into the cool streets, and
breaking into the darkened churches. And no work is less imitable; like
Tuscan wine, it loses its savour when moved from its birthplace, from the
crumbling walls where it was first placed. Part of the charm of this work, its
grace and purity and finish of expression, is common to all the Tuscan
sculptors of the fifteenth century; for Luca was first of all a worker in
marble, and his works in earthenware only transfer to a different material
the principles of his sculpture.

These Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century worked for the most part
in low relief, giving even to their monumental effigies something of its
depression of surface, getting into them by this means a pathetic suggestion
of the wasting and etherealisation of death. They are haters of all heaviness
and emphasis, of strongly-opposed light and shade, and seek their means of
expression among those last refinements of shadow, which are almost
invisible except in a strong light, and which the finest pencil can hardly
follow. The whole essence of their work is EXPRESSION, the passing of a
smile over the face of a child, the ripple of the air on a still day over the
curtain of a window ajar.

What is the precise value of this system of sculpture, this low relief?
Luca della Robbia, and the other sculptors of the school to which he
belongs, have before them the universal problem of their art; and this
system of low relief is the means by which they meet and overcome the
special limitation of sculpture—a limitation resulting from the material and
the essential conditions of all sculptured work, and which consists in the
tendency of this work to a hard realism, a one-sided presentment of mere
form, that solid material frame which only motion can relieve, a thing of
heavy shadows, and an individuality of expression pushed to caricature.
Against this tendency to the hard presentment of mere form trying vainly to

compete with the reality of nature itself, all noble sculpture constantly
struggles: each great system of sculpture resisting it in its own way,
etherealising, spiritualising, relieving its hardness, its heaviness and death.
The use of colour in sculpture is but an unskilful contrivance to effect, by
borrowing from another art, what the nobler sculpture effects by strictly
appropriate means. To get not colour, but the equivalent of colour; to secure
the expression and the play of life; to expand the too fixed individuality of
pure, unrelieved, uncoloured form—this is the problem which the three
great styles in sculpture have solved in three different ways.

Allgemeinheit—breadth, generality, universality—is the word chosen by
Winckelmann, and after him by Goethe and many German critics, to
express that law of the most excellent Greek sculptors, of Pheidias and his
pupils, which prompted them constantly to seek the type in the individual,
to abstract and express only what is structural and permanent, to purge from
the individual all that belongs only to him, all the accidents, the feelings,
and actions of the special moment, all that (because in its own nature it
endures but for a moment) is apt to look like a frozen thing if one arrests it.

In this way their works came to be like some subtle extract or essence, or
almost like pure thoughts or ideas: and hence the breadth of humanity in
them, that detachment from the conditions of a particular place or people,
which has carried their influence far beyond the age which produced them,
and insured them universal acceptance.

That was the Greek way of relieving the hardness and unspirituality of
pure form. But it involved to a certain degree the sacrifice of what we call
expression; and a system of abstraction which aimed always at the broad
and general type, at the purging away from the individual of what belonged
only to him, and of the mere accidents of a particular time and place,
imposed upon the range of effects open to the Greek sculptor limits
somewhat narrowly defined; and when Michelangelo came, with a genius
spiritualised by the reverie of the middle age, penetrated by its spirit of
inwardness and introspection, living not a mere outward life like the Greek,
but a life full of inward experiences, sorrows, consolations, a system which
sacrificed so much of what was inward and unseen could not satisfy him. To
him, lover and student of Greek sculpture as he was, work which did not

bring what was inward to the surface, which was not concerned with
individual expression, with individual character and feeling, the special
history of the special soul, was not worth doing at all.

And so, in a way quite personal and peculiar to himself, which often is,
and always seems, the effect of accident, he secured for his work
individuality and intensity of expression, while he avoided a too hard
realism, that tendency to harden into caricature which the representation of
feeling in sculpture must always have. What time and accident, its centuries
of darkness under the furrows of the "little Melian farm," have done with
singular felicity of touch for the Venus of Melos, fraying its surface and
softening its lines, so that some spirit in the thing seems always on the point
of breaking out, as though in it classical sculpture had advanced already one
step into the mystical Christian age, its expression being in the whole range
of ancient work most like that of Michelangelo's own:—this effect
Michelangelo gains by leaving nearly all his sculpture in a puzzling sort of
incompleteness, which suggests rather than realises actual form. Something
of the wasting of that snow-image which he moulded at the command of
Piero de' Medici, when the snow lay one night in the court of the Pitti
palace, almost always lurks about it, as if he had determined to make the
quality of a task, exacted from him half in derision, the pride of all his
work. Many have wondered at that incompleteness, suspecting, however,
that Michelangelo himself loved and was loath to change it, and feeling at
the same time that they too would lose something if the half-realised form
ever quite emerged from the stone, so rough hewn here, so delicately
finished there; and they have wished to fathom the charm of this
incompleteness. Well! that incompleteness is Michelangelo's equivalent for
colour in sculpture; it is his way of etherealising pure form, of relieving its
hard realism, and communicating to it breath, pulsation, the effect of life. It
was a characteristic too which fell in with his peculiar temper and mode of
life, his disappointments and hesitations. And it was in reality perfect finish.
In this way he combines the utmost amount of passion and intensity with
the sense of a yielding and flexible life: he gets not vitality merely, but a
wonderful force of expression.

Midway between these two systems—the system of the Greek sculptors
and the system of Michelangelo—comes the system of Luca della Robbia.

And the other Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century, partaking both of
the Allgemeinheit of the Greeks, their way of extracting certain select
elements only of pure form and sacrificing all the rest, and the studied
incompleteness of Michelangelo, relieving that expression of intensity,
passion, energy, which might otherwise have hardened into caricature. Like
Michelangelo, these sculptors fill their works with intense and
individualised expression: their noblest works are the studied sepulchral
portraits of particular persons—the monument of Conte Ugo in the Badia of
Florence, of the youthful Medea Colleoni, with the wonderful, long throat,
in the chapel on the cool north side of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore
at Bergamo—monuments which abound in the churches of Rome,
inexhaustible in suggestions of repose, of a subdued Sabbatic joy, a kind of
sacred grace and refinement:—and they unite these elements of tranquillity,
of repose, to that intense and individual expression by a system of
conventionalism as skilful and subtle as that of the Greeks, subduing all
such curves as indicate solid form, and throwing the whole into lower relief.

The life of Luca, a life of labour and frugality, with no adventure and no
excitement except what belongs to the trial of new artistic processes, the
struggle with new artistic difficulties, the solution of purely artistic
problems, fills the first seventy years of the fifteenth century. After
producing many works in marble for the Duomo and the Campanile of
Florence, which place him among the foremost sculptors of that age, he
became desirous to realise the spirit and manner of that sculpture, in a
humbler material, to unite its science, its exquisite and expressive system of
low relief, to the homely art of pottery, to introduce those high qualities into
common things, to adorn and cultivate daily household life. In this he is
profoundly characteristic of the Florence of that century, of that in it which
lay below its superficial vanity and caprice, a certain old-world modesty
and seriousness and simplicity. People had not yet begun to think that what
was good art for churches was not so good, or less fitted, for their own
houses. Luca's new work was in plain white earthenware at first, a mere
rough imitation of the costly, laboriously wrought marble, finished in a few
hours. But on this humble path he found his way to a fresh success, to
another artistic grace. The fame of the oriental pottery, with its strange,
bright colours—colours of art, colours not to be attained in the natural stone
—mingled with the tradition of the old Roman pottery of the

neighbourhood. The little red, coral-like jars of Arezzo, dug up in that
district from time to time, are still famous. These colours haunted Luca's
fancy. "He still continued seeking something more," his biographer says of
him; "and instead of making his figures of baked earth simply white, he
added the further invention of giving them colour, to the astonishment and
delight of all who beheld them"—Cosa singolare, e multo utile per la state!
—a curious thing, and very useful for summertime, full of coolness and
repose for hand and eye. Luca loved the forms of various fruits, and
wrought them into all sorts of marvellous frames and garlands, giving them
their natural colours, only subdued a little, a little paler than nature. But in
his nobler terra-cotta work he never introduces colour into the flesh,
keeping mostly to blue and white, the colours of the Virgin Mary.

I said that the work of Luca della Robbia possessed in an unusual
measure that special characteristic which belongs to all the workmen of his
school, a characteristic which, even in the absence of much positive
information about their actual history, seems to bring those workmen
themselves very near to us—the impress of a personal quality, a profound
expressiveness, what the French call intimite, by which is meant some
subtler sense of originality—the seal on a man's work of what is most
inward and peculiar in his moods, and manner of apprehension: it is what
we call expression, carried to its highest intensity of degree. That
characteristic is rare in poetry, rarer still in art, rarest of all in the abstract art
of sculpture; yet essentially, perhaps, it is the quality which alone makes
works in the imaginative and moral order really worth having at all. It is
because the works of the artists of the fifteenth century possess this quality
in an unmistakable way that one is anxious to know all that can be known
about them, and explain to oneself the secret of their charm.

1872.

THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO

Critics of Michelangelo have sometimes spoken as if the only
characteristic of his genius were a wonderful strength, verging, as in the
things of the imagination great strength always does, on what is singular or
strange. A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe, is
indeed an element in all true works of art; that they shall excite or surprise
us is indispensable. But that they shall give pleasure and exert a charm over
us is indispensable too; and this strangeness must be sweet also—a lovely
strangeness. And to the true admirers of Michelangelo this is the true type
of the Michelangelesque—sweetness and strength, pleasure with surprise,
an energy of conception which seems at every moment about to break
through all the conditions of comely form, recovering, touch by touch, a
loveliness found usually only in the simplest natural things—ex forti
dulcedo.

In this way he sums up for them the whole character of medieval art
itself in that which distinguishes it most clearly from classical work, the
presence of a convulsive energy in it, becoming in lower hands merely
monstrous or forbidding, but felt, even in its most graceful products, as a
subdued quaintness or grotesque. Yet those who feel this grace or sweetness
in Michelangelo might at the first moment be puzzled if they were asked
wherein precisely the quality resided. Men of inventive temperament—
Victor Hugo, for instance, in whom, as in Michelangelo, people have for the
most part been attracted or repelled by the strength, while few have
understood his sweetness—have sometimes relieved conceptions of merely
moral or spiritual greatness, but with little aesthetic charm of their own, by
lovely accidents or accessories, like the butterfly which alights on the
blood-stained barricade in Les Miserables, or those sea-birds for which the
monstrous Gilliatt comes to be as some wild natural thing, so that they are
no longer afraid of him, in Les Travailleurs de la Mer. But the austere
genius of Michelangelo will not depend for its sweetness on any mere
accessories like these. The world of natural things has almost no existence
for him; "When one speaks of him," says Grimm, "woods, clouds, seas, and
mountains disappear, and only what is formed by the spirit of man remains
behind"; and he quotes a few slight words from a letter of his to Vasari as
the single expression in all he has left of a feeling for nature. He has traced
no flowers, like those with which Leonardo stars over his gloomiest rocks;
nothing like the fretwork of wings and flames in which Blake frames his

most startling conceptions; no forest-scenery like Titian's fills his
backgrounds, but only blank ranges of rock, and dim vegetable forms as
blank as they, as in a world before the creation of the first five days.

Of the whole story of the creation he has painted only the creation of the
first man and woman, and, for him at least, feebly, the creation of light. It
belongs to the quality of his genius thus to concern itself almost exclusively
with the creation of man. For him it is not, as in the story itself, the last and
crowning act of a series of developments, but the first and unique act, the
creation of life itself in its supreme form, off-hand and immediately, in the
cold and lifeless stone. With him the beginning of life has all the
characteristics of resurrection; it is like the recovery of suspended health or
animation, with its gratitude, its effusion, and eloquence. Fair as the young
men of the Elgin marbles, the Adam of the Sistine Chapel is unlike them in
a total absence of that balance and completeness which express so well the
sentiment of a self-contained, independent life. In that languid figure there
is something rude and satyr-like, something akin to the rugged hillside on
which it lies. His whole form is gathered into an expression of mere
expectation and reception; he has hardly strength enough to lift his finger to
touch the finger of the creator; yet a touch of the finger-tips will suffice.

This creation of life—life coming always as relief or recovery, and
always in strong contrast with the rough-hewn mass in which it is kindled—
is in various ways the motive of all his work, whether its immediate subject
be Pagan or Christian, legend or allegory; and this, although at least one-
half of his work was designed for the adornment of tombs—the tomb of
Julius, the tombs of the Medici. Not the Judgment but the Resurrection is
the real subject of his last work in the Sistine Chapel; and his favourite
Pagan subject is the legend of Leda, the delight of the world breaking from
the egg of a bird. As I have already pointed out, he secures that ideality of
expression which in Greek sculpture depends on a delicate system of
abstraction, and in early Italian sculpture on lowness of relief, by an
incompleteness, which is surely not always undesigned, and which I
suppose no one regrets, and trusts to the spectator to complete the half-
emergent form. And as his persons have something of the unwrought stone
about them, so, as if to realise the expression by which the old Florentine
records describe a sculptor—master of live stone—with him the very rocks

seem to have life; they have but to cast away the dust and scurf that they
may rise and stand on their feet. He loved the very quarries of Carrara,
those strange grey peaks which even at mid-day convey into any scene from
which they are visible something of the solemnity and stillness of evening,
sometimes wandering among them month after month, till at last their pale
ashen colours seem to have passed into his painting; and on the crown of
the head of the David there still remains a morsel of uncut stone, as if by
one touch to maintain its connexion with the place from which it was hewn.

And it is in this penetrative suggestion of life that the secret of that
sweetness of his is to be found. He gives us indeed no lovely natural objects
like Leonardo or Titian, but only the coldest, most elementary shadowing of
rock or tree; no lovely draperies and comely gestures of life, but only the
austere truths of human nature; "simple persons"—as he replied in his
rough way to the querulous criticism of Julius the Second, that there was no
gold on the figures of the Sistine Chapel—"simple persons, who wore no
gold on their garments"; but he penetrates us with a sense of that power
which we associate with all the warmth and fulness of the world, and the
sense of which brings into one's thoughts a swarm of birds and flowers and
insects. The brooding spirit of life itself is there; and the summer may burst
out in a moment.

He was born in an interval of a rapid midnight journey in March, at a
place in the neighbourhood of Arezzo, the thin, clear air of which, as was
then thought, being favourable to the birth of children of great parts. He
came of a race of grave and dignified men, who, claiming kinship with the
family of Canossa, and some colour of imperial blood in their veins, had,
generation after generation, received honourable employment under the
government of Florence. His mother, a girl of nineteen years, put him out to
nurse at a country house among the hills of Settignano, where every other
inhabitant is a worker in the marble quarries, and the child early became
familiar with that strange first stage in the sculptor's art. To this succeeded
the influence of the sweetest and most placid master Florence had yet seen,
Domenico Ghirlandajo. At fifteen he was at work among the curiosities of
the garden of the Medici, copying and restoring antiques, winning the
condescending notice of the great Lorenzo. He knew too how to excite
strong hatreds; and it was at this time that in a quarrel with a fellow-student

he received a blow on the face which deprived him for ever of the
comeliness of outward form. It was through an accident that he came to
study those works of the early Italian sculptors which suggested much of
his own grandest work, and impressed it with so deep a sweetness. He
believed in dreams and omens. One of his friends dreamed twice that
Lorenzo, then lately dead, appeared to him in grey and dusty apparel. To
Michelangelo this dream seemed to portend the troubles which afterwards
really came, and with the suddenness which was characteristic of all his
movements, he left Florence. Having occasion to pass through Bologna, he
neglected to procure the little seal of red wax which the stranger entering
Bologna must carry on the thumb of his right hand. He had no money to
pay the fine, and would have been thrown into prison had not one of the
magistrates interposed. He remained in this man's house a whole year,
rewarding his hospitality by readings from the Italian poets whom he loved.
Bologna, with its endless colonnades and fantastic leaning towers, can
never have been one of the lovelier cities of Italy. But about the portals of
its vast unfinished churches and its dark shrines, half hidden by votive
flowers and candles, lie some of the sweetest works of the early Tuscan
sculptors, Giovanni da Pisa and Jacopo della Quercia, things as winsome as
flowers; and the year which Michelangelo spent in copying these works was
not a lost year. It was now, on returning to Florence, that he put forth that
unique presentment of Bacchus, which expresses, not the mirthfulness of
the god of wine, but his sleepy seriousness, his enthusiasm, his capacity for
profound dreaming. No one ever expressed more truly than Michelangelo
the notion of inspired sleep, of faces charged with dreams. A vast fragment
of marble had long lain below the Loggia of Orcagna, and many a sculptor
had had his thoughts of a design which should just fill this famous block of
stone, cutting the diamond, as it were, without loss. Under Michelangelo's
hand it became the David which stood till lately on the steps of the Palazzo
Vecchio, when it was replaced below the Loggia. Michelangelo was now
thirty years old, and his reputation was established. Three great works fill
the remainder of his life—three works often interrupted, carried on through
a thousand hesitations, a thousand disappointments, quarrels with his
patrons, quarrels with his family, quarrels perhaps most of all with himself
—the Sistine Chapel, the Mausoleum of Julius the Second, and the Sacristy
of San Lorenzo.

In the story of Michelangelo's life the strength, often turning to
bitterness, is not far to seek; a discordant note sounds throughout it which
almost spoils the music. He "treats the Pope as the King of France himself
would not dare to treat him"; he goes along the streets of Rome "like an
executioner," Raffaelle says of him. Once he seems to have shut himself up
with the intention of starving himself to death. As we come in reading his
life on its harsh, untempered incidents, the thought again and again arises
that he is one of those who incur the judgment of Dante, as having "wilfully
lived in sadness." Even his tenderness and pity are embittered by their
strength. What passionate weeping in that mysterious figure which, in the
Creation of Adam, crouches below the image of the Almighty, as he comes
with the forms of things to be, woman and her progeny, in the fold of his
garment! What a sense of wrong in those two captive youths, who feel the
chains like scalding water on their proud and delicate flesh! The idealist
who became a reformer with Savonarola, and a republican superintending
the fortification of Florence—the nest where he was born, il nido ove
naqqu'io, as he calls it once, in a sudden throb of affection—in its last
struggle for liberty, yet believed always that he had imperial blood in his
veins and was of the kindred of the great Matilda, had within the depths of
his nature some secret spring of indignation or sorrow. We know little of his
youth, but all tends to make one believe in the vehemence of its passions.
Beneath the Platonic calm of the sonnets there is latent a deep delight in
carnal form and colour. There, and still more in the madrigals, he often falls
into the language of less tranquil affections; while some of them have the
colour of penitence, as from a wanderer returning home. He who spoke so
decisively of the supremacy in the imaginative world of the unveiled human
form had not been always, we may think, a mere Platonic lover. Vague and
wayward his loves may have been; but they partook of the strength of his
nature, and sometimes, it may be, would by no means become music, so
that the comely order of his days was quite put out: par che amaro ogni mio
dolce io senta.

But his genius is in harmony with itself; and just as in the products of his
art we find resources of sweetness within their exceeding strength, so in his
own story also, bitter as the ordinary sense of it may be, there are select
pages shut in among the rest—pages one might easily turn over too lightly,
but which yet sweeten the whole volume. The interest of Michelangelo's

poems is that they make us spectators of this struggle; the struggle of a
strong nature to adorn and attune itself; the struggle of a desolating passion,
which yearns to be resigned and sweet and pensive, as Dante's was. It is a
consequence of the occasional and informal character of his poetry, that it
brings us nearer to himself, his own mind and temper, than any work done
only to support a literary reputation could possibly do. His letters tell us
little that is worth knowing about him—a few poor quarrels about money
and commissions. But it is quite otherwise with these songs and sonnets,
written down at odd moments, sometimes on the margins of his sketches,
themselves often unfinished sketches, arresting some salient feeling or
unpremeditated idea as it passed. And it happens that a true study of these
has become within the last few years for the first time possible. A few of the
sonnets circulated widely in manuscript, and became almost within
Michelangelo's own lifetime a subject of academical discourses. But they
were first collected in a volume in 1623 by the great-nephew of
Michelangelo, Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger. He omitted much, re-
wrote the sonnets in part, and sometimes compressed two or more
compositions into one, always losing something of the force and
incisiveness of the original. So the book remained, neglected even by
Italians themselves in the last century, through the influence of that French
taste which despised all compositions of the kind, as it despised and
neglected Dante. "His reputation will ever be on the increase, because he is
so little read," says Voltaire of Dante.—But in 1858 the last of the
Buonarroti bequeathed to the municipality of Florence the curiosities of his
family. Among them was a precious volume containing the autograph of the
sonnets. A learned Italian, Signor Cesare Guasti, undertook to collate this
autograph with other manuscripts at the Vatican and elsewhere, and in 1863
published a true version of Michelangelo's poems, with dissertations and a
paraphrase.*
*The sonnets have been translated into English, with much poetic taste and skill,
by Mr. J. A. Symonds.

People have often spoken of these poems as if they were a mere cry of
distress, a lover's complaint over the obduracy of Vittoria Colonna. But
those who speak thus forget that though it is quite possible that
Michelangelo had seen Vittoria, that somewhat shadowy figure, as early as
1537, yet their closer intimacy did not begin till about the year 1542, when

Michelangelo was nearly seventy years old. Vittoria herself, an ardent neo-
catholic, vowed to perpetual widowhood since the news had reached her,
seventeen years before, that her husband, the youthful and princely
Marquess of Pescara, lay dead of the wounds he had received in the battle
of Pavia, was then no longer an object of great passion. In a dialogue
written by the painter, Francesco d'Ollanda, we catch a glimpse of them
together in an empty church at Rome, one Sunday afternoon, discussing
indeed the characteristics of various schools of art, but still more the
writings of Saint Paul, already following the ways and tasting the sunless
pleasures of weary people, whose hold on outward things is slackening. In a
letter still extant he regrets that when he visited her after death he had
kissed her hands only. He made, or set to work to make, a crucifix for her
use, and two drawings, perhaps in preparation for it, are now in Oxford.
From allusions in the sonnets, we may divine that when they first
approached each other he had debated much with himself whether this last
passion would be the most unsoftening, the most desolating of all—un
dolce amaro, un si e no mi muovi; is it carnal affection, or, del suo prestino
stato (Plato's ante-natal state) il raggio ardente? The older, conventional
criticism, dealing with the text of 1623, had lightly assumed that all or
nearly all the sonnets were actually addressed to Vittoria herself; but Signor
Guasti finds only four, or at most five, which can be so attributed on
genuine authority. Still, there are reasons which make him assign the
majority of them to the period between 1542 and 1547, and we may regard
the volume as a record of this resting-place in Michelangelo's story. We
know how Goethe escaped from the stress of sentiments too strong for him
by making a book about them; and for Michelangelo, to write down his
passionate thoughts at all, to make sonnets about them, was already in some
measure to command, and have his way with them—
La vita del mia amor non e il cor mio,
Ch'amor, di quel ch'io t'amo, e senza core.

It was just because Vittoria raised no great passion that the space in his
life where she reigns has such peculiar suavity; and the spirit of the sonnets
is lost if we once take them out of that dreamy atmosphere in which men
have things as they will, because the hold of all outward things upon them
is faint and thin. Their prevailing tone is a calm and meditative sweetness.
The cry of distress is indeed there, but as a mere residue, a trace of bracing

chalybeate salt, just discernible in the song which rises as a clear, sweet
spring from a charmed space in his life.

This charmed and temperate space in Michelangelo's life, without which
its excessive strength would have been so imperfect, which saves him from
the judgment of Dante on those who "wilfully lived in sadness," is then a
well-defined period there, reaching from the year 1542 to the year 1547, the
year of Vittoria's death. In it the lifelong effort to tranquillise his vehement
emotions by withdrawing them into the region of ideal sentiment, becomes
successful; and the significance of Vittoria there is, that she realises for him
a type of affection which even in disappointment may charm and sweeten
his spirit. In this effort to tranquillise and sweeten life by idealising its
vehement sentiments, there were two great traditional types, either of which
an Italian of the sixteenth century might have followed. There was Dante,
whose little book of the Vita Nuova had early become a pattern of
imaginative love, maintained somewhat feebly by the later followers of
Petrarch; and since Plato had become something more than a name in Italy
by the publication of the Latin translation of his works by Marsilio Ficino,
there was the Platonic tradition also. Dante's belief in the resurrection of the
body, through which, even in heaven, Beatrice loses for him no tinge of
flesh-colour, or fold of raiment even—and the Platonic dream of the
passage of the soul through one form of life after another, with its
passionate haste to escape from the burden of bodily form altogether—are,
for all effects of art or poetry, principles diametrically opposite; and it is the
Platonic tradition rather than Dante's that has moulded Michelangelo's
verse. In many ways no sentiment could have been less like Dante's love for
Beatrice than Michelangelo's for Vittoria Colonna. Dante's comes in early
youth: Beatrice is a child, with the wistful, ambiguous vision of a child,
with a character still unaccentuated by the influence of outward
circumstances, almost expressionless. Vittoria is a woman already weary, in
advanced age, of grave intellectual qualities. Dante's story is a piece of
figured wood, inlaid with lovely incidents. In Michelangelo's poems, frost
and fire are almost the only images—the refining fire of the goldsmith;
once or twice the phoenix; ice melting at the fire; fire struck from the rock
which it afterwards consumes. Except one doubtful allusion to a journey,
there are almost no incidents. But there is much of the bright, sharp,
unerring skill, with which in boyhood he gave the look of age to the head of

a faun by chipping a tooth from its jaw with a single stroke of the hammer.
For Dante, the amiable and devout materialism of the middle age sanctifies
all that is presented by hand and eye. Michelangelo is always pressing
forward from the outward beauty—il bel del fuor che agli occhi piace—to
apprehend the unseen beauty; trascenda nella forma universale—that
abstract form of beauty, about which the Platonists reason. And this gives
the impression in him of something flitting and unfixed, of the houseless
and complaining spirit, almost clairvoyant through the frail and yielding
flesh. He accounts for love at first sight by a previous state of existence—la
dove io t'amai prima.

And yet there are many points in which he is really like Dante, and
comes very near to the original image, beyond those later and feebler
followers of Petrarch. He learns from Dante rather than from Plato, that for
lovers, the surfeiting of desire—ove gran desir gran copia affrena, is a state
less happy than misery full of hope—una miseria di speranza piena. He
recalls him in the repetition of the words gentile and cortesia, in the
personification of Amor, in the tendency to dwell minutely on the physical
effects of the presence of a beloved object on the pulses and the heart.
Above all, he resembles Dante in the warmth and intensity of his political
utterances, for the lady of one of his noblest sonnets was from the first
understood to be the city of Florence; and he avers that all must be asleep in
heaven, if she, who was created "of angelic form," for a thousand lovers, is
appropriated by one alone, some Piero, or Alessandro de' Medici. Once and
again he introduces Love and Death, who dispute concerning him; for, like
Dante and all the nobler souls of Italy, he is much occupied with thoughts of
the grave, and his true mistress is death; death at first as the worst of all
sorrows and disgraces, with a clod of the field for its brain; afterwards,
death in its high distinction, its detachment from vulgar needs, the angry
stains of life and action escaping fast.

Some of those whom the gods love die young. This man, because the
gods loved him, lingered on to be of immense, patriarchal age, till the
sweetness it had taken so long to secrete in him was found at last. Out of the
strong came forth sweetness, ex forti dulcedo. The world had changed
around him. The New-catholicism had taken the place of the Renaissance.
The spirit of the Roman Church had changed: in the vast world's cathedral

which his skill had helped to raise for it, it looked stronger than ever. Some
of the first members of the Oratory were among his intimate associates.
They were of a spirit as unlike as possible from that of Lorenzo, or
Savonarola even. The opposition of the Reformation to art has been often
enlarged upon; far greater was that of the Catholic revival. But in thus
fixing itself in a frozen orthodoxy, the Roman Catholic Church has passed
beyond him, and he was a stranger to it. In earlier days, when its beliefs had
been in a fluid state, he too might have been drawn into the controversy; he
might have been for spiritualising the papal sovereignty, like Savonarola; or
for adjusting the dreams of Plato and Homer with the words of Christ, like
Pico of Mirandola. But things had moved onward, and such adjustments
were no longer possible. For himself, he had long since fallen back on that
divine ideal, which above the wear and tear of creeds has been forming
itself for ages as the possession of nobler souls. And now he began to feel
the soothing influence which since that time the Roman Church has often
exerted over spirits too independent to be its subjects, yet brought within
the neighbourhood of its action; consoled and tranquillised, as a traveller
might be, resting for one evening in a strange city, by its stately aspect, and
the sentiment of its many fortunes, just because with those fortunes he has
nothing to do. So he lingers on; a revenant, as the French say, a ghost out of
another age, in a world too coarse to touch his faint sensibilities too closely;
dreaming, in a worn-out society, theatrical in its life, theatrical in its art,
theatrical even in its devotion, on the morning of the world's history, on the
primitive form of man, on the images under which that primitive world had
conceived of spiritual forces.

I have dwelt on the thought of Michelangelo as thus lingering beyond his
time in a world not his own, because, if one is to distinguish the peculiar
savour of his work, he must be approached, not through his followers, but
through his predecessors; not through the marbles of Saint Peter's, but
through the work of the sculptors of the fifteenth century over the tombs
and altars of Tuscany. He is the last of the Florentines, of those on whom
the peculiar sentiment of the Florence of Dante and Giotto descended: he is
the consummate representative of the form that sentiment took in the
fifteenth century with men like Luca Signorelli and Mino da Fiesole. Up to
him the tradition of sentiment is unbroken, the progress towards surer and
more mature methods of expressing that sentiment continuous. But his

professed disciples did not share this temper; they are in love with his
strength only, and seem not to feel his grave and temperate sweetness.
Theatricality is their chief characteristic; and that is a quality as little
attributable to Michelangelo as to Mino or Luca Signorelli. With him, as
with them, all Is serious, passionate, impulsive.

This discipleship of Michelangelo, this dependence of his on the
tradition of the Florentine schools, is nowhere seen more clearly than in his
treatment of the Creation. The Creation of Man had haunted the mind of the
middle age like a dream; and weaving it into a hundred carved ornaments of
capital or doorway, the Italian sculptors had early impressed upon it that
pregnancy of expression which seems to give it many veiled meanings. As
with other artistic conceptions of the middle age, its treatment became
almost conventional, handed on from artist to artist, with slight changes, till
it came to have almost an independent, abstract existence of its own. It was
characteristic of the medieval mind thus to give an independent traditional
existence to a special pictorial conception, or to a legend, like that of
Tristram or Tannhaeuser, or even to the very thoughts and substance of a
book, like the Imitation, so that no single workman could claim it as his
own, and the book, the image, the legend, had itself a legend, and its
fortunes, and a personal history; and it is a sign of the medievalism of
Michelangelo, that he thus receives from tradition his central conception,
and does but add the last touches, in transferring it to the frescoes of the
Sistine Chapel.

But there was another tradition of those earlier more serious Florentines,
of which Michelangelo is the inheritor, to which he gives the final
expression, and which centres in the sacristy of San Lorenzo, as the
tradition of the Creation centres in the Sistine Chapel. It has been said that
all the great Florentines were preoccupied with death. Outre-tombe! Outre-
tombe!—is the burden of their thoughts, from Dante to Savonarola. Even
the gay and licentious Boccaccio gives a keener edge to his stories by
putting them in the mouths of a party of people who had taken refuge from
the danger of death by plague, in a country-house. It was to this inherited
sentiment, this practical decision that to be pre-occupied with the thought of
death was in itself dignifying, and a note of high quality, that the
seriousness of the great Florentines of the fifteenth century was partly due;

and it was reinforced in them by the actual sorrows of their times. How
often, and in what various ways, had they seen life stricken down, in their
streets and houses! La bella Simonetta dies in early youth, and is borne to
the grave with uncovered face. The young Cardinal Jacopo di Portogallo
dies on a visit to Florence—insignis forma fui et mirabili modestia—his
epitaph dares to say. Antonio Rossellino carves his tomb in the church of
San Miniato, with care for the shapely hands and feet, and sacred attire;
Luca della Robbia puts his skyeyest works there; and the tomb of the
youthful and princely prelate became the strangest and most beautiful thing
in that strange and beautiful place. After the execution of the Pazzi
conspirators, Botticelli is employed to paint their portraits. This
preoccupation with serious thoughts and sad images might easily have
resulted, as it did, for instance, in the gloomy villages of the Rhine, or in the
overcrowded parts of medieval Paris, as it still does in many a village of the
Alps, in something merely morbid or grotesque, in the Danse Macabre of
many French and German painters, or the grim inventions of Duerer. From
such a result the Florentine masters of the fifteenth century were saved by
their high Italian dignity and culture, and still more by their tender pity for
the thing itself. They must often have leaned over the lifeless body, when all
was at length quiet and smoothed out. After death, it is said, the traces of
slighter and more superficial dispositions disappear; the lines become more
simple and dignified; only the abstract lines remain, in a great indifference.
They came thus to see death in its distinction; and following it perhaps one
stage further, dwelling for a moment on the point where all that transitory
dignity must break up, and discerning with no clearness a new body, they
paused just in time, and abstained, with a sentiment of profound pity.

Of all this sentiment Michelangelo is the achievement; and first of all, of
pity. Pieta—pity—the pity of the Virgin Mother over the dead body of
Christ, expanded into the pity of all mothers over all dead sons, the
entombment, with its cruel "hard stones"—that is the subject of his
predilection. He has left it in many forms, sketches, half-finished designs,
finished and unfinished groups of sculpture; but always as a hopeless,
rayless, almost heathen sorrow—no divine sorrow, but mere pity and awe at
the stiff limbs and colourless lips. There is a drawing of his at Oxford, in
which the dead body has sunk to the earth between the mother's feet, with
the arms extended over her knees. The tombs in the sacristy of San Lorenzo

are memorials, not of any of the nobler and greater Medici, but of Giuliano,
and Lorenzo the younger, noticeable chiefly for their somewhat early death.
It is mere human nature therefore which has prompted the sentiment here.
The titles assigned traditionally to the four symbolical figures, Night and
Day, The Twilight and The Dawn, are far too definite for them; for these
figures come much nearer to the mind and spirit of their author, and are a
more direct expression of his thoughts, than any merely symbolical
conceptions could possibly have been. They concentrate and express, less
by way of definite conceptions than by the touches, the promptings of a
piece of music, all those vague fancies, misgivings, presentiments, which
shift and mix and define themselves and fade again, whenever the thoughts
try to fix themselves with sincerity on the conditions and surroundings of
the disembodied spirit. I suppose no one would come to the sacristy of San
Lorenzo for consolation; for seriousness, for solemnity, for dignity of
impression, perhaps, but not for consolation. It is a place neither of terrible
nor consoling thoughts, but of vague and wistful speculation. Here, again,
Michelangelo is the disciple not so much of Dante as of the Platonists.
Dante's belief in immortality is formal, precise, and firm, as much so almost
as that of a child, who thinks the dead will hear if you cry loud enough. But
in Michelangelo you have maturity, the mind of the grown man, dealing
cautiously and dispassionately with serious things; and what hope he has is
based on the consciousness of ignorance—ignorance of man, ignorance of
the nature of the mind, its origin and capacities. Michelangelo is so ignorant
of the spiritual world, of the new body and its laws, that he does not surely
know whether the consecrated Host may not be the body of Christ. And of
all that range of sentiment he is the poet, a poet still alive, and in possession
of our inmost thoughts—dumb inquiry over the relapse after death into the
formlessness which preceded life, the change, the revolt from that change,
then the correcting, hallowing, consoling rush of pity; at last, far off, thin
and vague, yet not more vague than the most definite thoughts men have
had through three centuries on a matter that has been so near their hearts,
the new body—a passing light, a mere intangible, external effect, over those
too rigid, or too formless faces; a dream that lingers a moment, retreating in
the dawn, incomplete, aimless, helpless; a thing with faint hearing, faint
memory, faint power of touch; a breath, a flame in the doorway, a feather in
the wind.

The qualities of the great masters in art or literature, the combination of
those qualities, the laws by which they moderate, support, relieve each
other, are not peculiar to them; but most often typical standards, or
revealing instances, of the laws by which certain aesthetic effects are
produced. The old masters indeed are simpler; their characteristics are
written larger, and are easier to read, than their analogues in all the mixed,
confused productions of the modern mind. But when once we have
succeeded in defining for ourselves those characteristics, and the law of
their combination, we have acquired a standard or measure which helps us
to put in its right place many a vagrant genius, many an unclassified talent,
many precious though imperfect products of art. It is so with the
components of the true character of Michelangelo. That strange interfusion
of sweetness and strength is not to be found in those who claimed to be his
followers; but it is found in many of those who worked before him, and in
many others down to our own time, in William Blake, for instance, and
Victor Hugo, who, though not of his school, and unaware, are his true sons,
and help us to understand him, as he in turn interprets and justifies them.
Perhaps this is the chief use in studying old masters.

1871.

LEONARDO DA VINCI

HOMO MINISTER ET INTERPRES NATURAE

In Vasari's life of Leonardo da Vinci as we now read it there are some
variations from the first edition. There, the painter who has fixed the
outward type of Christ for succeeding centuries was a bold speculator,
holding lightly by other men's beliefs, setting philosophy above
Christianity. Words of his, trenchant enough to justify this impression, are
not recorded, and would have been out of keeping with a genius of which
one characteristic is the tendency to lose itself in a refined and graceful
mystery. The suspicion was but the time-honoured mode in which the world
stamps its appreciation of one who has thoughts for himself alone, his high
indifference, his intolerance of the common forms of things; and in the
second edition the image was changed into something fainter and more
conventional. But it is still by a certain mystery in his work, and something
enigmatical beyond the usual measure of great men, that he fascinates, or
perhaps half repels. His life is one of sudden revolts, with intervals in which
he works not at all, or apart from the main scope of his work. By a strange
fortune the works on which his more popular fame rested disappeared early
from the world, as the Battle of the Standard; or are mixed obscurely with
the work of meaner hands, as the Last Supper. His type of beauty is so
exotic that it fascinates a larger number than it delights, and seems more
than that of any other artist to reflect ideas and views and some scheme of
the world within; so that he seemed to his contemporaries to be the
possessor of some unsanctified and sacred wisdom; as to Michelet and
others to have anticipated modern ideas. He trifles with his genius, and
crowds all his chief work into a few tormented years of later life; yet he is
so possessed by his genius that he passes unmoved through the most tragic
events, overwhelming his country and friends, like one who comes across
them by chance on some secret errand.

His legend, as the French say, with the anecdotes which every one
knows, is one of the most brilliant in Vasari. Later writers merely copied it,
until, in 1804, Carlo Amoretti applied to it a criticism which left hardly a
date fixed, and not one of those anecdotes untouched. The various questions
thus raised have since that time become, one after another, subjects of
special study, and mere antiquarianism has in this direction little more to
do. For others remain the editing of the thirteen books of his manuscripts,
and the separation by technical criticism of what in his reputed works is
really his, from what is only half his, or the work of his pupils. But a lover
of strange souls may still analyse for himself the impression made on him
by those works, and try to reach through it a definition of the chief elements
of Leonardo's genius. The legend, corrected and enlarged by its critics, may
now and then intervene to support the results of this analysis.

His life has three divisions—thirty years at Florence, nearly twenty years
at Milan, then nineteen years of wandering, till he sinks to rest under the
protection of Francis the First at the Chateau de Clou. The dishonour of
illegitimacy hangs over his birth. Piero Antonio, his father, was of a noble
Florentine house, of Vinci in the Val d'Arno, and Leonardo, brought up
delicately among the true children of that house, was the love-child of his
youth, with the keen, puissant nature such children often have. We see him
in his youth fascinating all men by his beauty, improvising music and
songs, buying the caged birds and setting them free, as he walked the streets
of Florence, fond of odd bright dresses and spirited horses.

From his earliest years he designed many objects, and constructed
models in relief, of which Vasari mentions some of women smiling. His
father, pondering over this promise in the child, took him to the workshop
of Andrea del Verrocchio, then the most famous artist in Florence. Beautiful
objects lay about there—reliquaries, pyxes, silver images for the pope's
chapel at Rome, strange fancy-work of the middle age, keeping odd
company with fragments of antiquity, then but lately discovered. Another
student Leonardo may have seen there—a boy into whose soul the level
light and aerial illusions of Italian sunsets had passed, in after days famous
as Perugino. Verrocchio was an artist of the earlier Florentine type, carver,
painter, and worker in metals, in one; designer, not of pictures only, but of
all things for sacred or household use, drinking-vessels, ambries,

instruments of music, making them all fair to look upon, filling the common
ways of life with the reflexion of some far-off brightness; and years of
patience had refined his hand till his work was now sought after from
distant places.

It happened that Verrocchio was employed by the brethren of
Vallombrosa to paint the Baptism of Christ, and Leonardo was allowed to
finish an angel in the left hand corner. It was one of those moments in
which the progress of a great thing—here, that of the art of Italy—presses
hard and sharp on the happiness of an individual, through whose
discouragement and decrease, humanity, in more fortunate persons, comes a
step nearer to its final success.

For beneath the cheerful exterior of the mere well-paid craftsman,
chasing brooches for the copes of Santa Maria Novella, or twisting metal
screens for the tombs of the Medici, lay the ambitious desire of expanding
the destiny of Italian art by a larger knowledge and insight into things, a
purpose in art not unlike Leonardo's still unconscious purpose; and often, in
the modelling of drapery, or of a lifted arm, or of hair cast back from the
face, there came to him something of the freer manner and richer humanity
of a later age. But in this Baptism the pupil had surpassed the master; and
Verrocchio turned away as one stunned, and as if his sweet earlier work
must thereafter be distasteful to him, from the bright animated angel of
Leonardo's hand.

The angel may still be seen in Florence, a space of sunlight in the cold,
laboured old picture; but the legend is true only in sentiment, for painting
had always been the art by which Verrocchio set least store. And as in a
sense he anticipates Leonardo, so to the last Leonardo recalls the studio of
Verrocchio, in the love of beautiful toys, such as the vessel of water for a
mirror, and lovely needle-work about the implicated hands in the Modesty
and Vanity, and of reliefs like those cameos which in the Virgin of the
Balances hang all round the girdle of Saint Michael, and of bright
variegated stones, such as the agates in the Saint Anne, and in a hieratic
preciseness and grace, as of a sanctuary swept and garnished. Amid all the
cunning and intricacy of his Lombard manner this never left him. Much of
it there must have been in that lost picture of Paradise, which he prepared as

a cartoon for tapestry, to be woven in the looms of Flanders. It was the
perfection of the older Florentine style of miniature-painting, with patient
putting of each leaf upon the trees and each flower in the grass, where the
first man and woman were standing.

And because it was the perfection of that style, it awoke in Leonardo
some seed of discontent which lay in the secret places of his nature. For the
way to perfection is through a series of disgusts; and this picture—all that
he had done so far in his life at Florence—was after all in the old slight
manner. His art, if it was to be something in the world, must be weighted
with more of the meaning of nature and purpose of humanity. Nature was
"the true mistress of higher intelligences." So he plunged into the study of
nature. And in doing this he followed the manner of the older students; he
brooded over the hidden virtues of plants and crystals, the lines traced by
the stars as they moved in the sky, over the correspondences which exist
between the different orders of living things, through which, to eyes
opened, they interpret each other; and for years he seemed to those about
him as one listening to a voice, silent for other men.

He learned here the art of going deep, of tracking the sources of
expression to their subtlest retreats, the power of an intimate presence in the
things he handled. He did not at once or entirely desert his art; only he was
no longer the cheerful, objective painter, through whose soul, as through
clear glass, the bright figures of Florentine life, only made a little mellower
and more pensive by the transit, passed on to the white wall. He wasted
many days in curious tricks of design, seeming to lose himself in the
spinning of intricate devices of lines and colours. He was smitten with a
love of the impossible—the perforation of mountains, changing the course
of rivers, raising great buildings, such as the church of San Giovanni, in the
air; all those feats for the performance of which natural magic professed to
have the key. Later writers, indeed, see in these efforts an anticipation of
modern mechanics; in him they were rather dreams, thrown off by the
overwrought and labouring brain. Two ideas were especially fixed in him,
as reflexes of things that had touched his brain in childhood beyond the
measure of other impressions—the smiling of women and the motion of
great waters.

And in such studies some interfusion of the extremes of beauty and
terror shaped itself, as an image that might be seen and touched, in the mind
of this gracious youth, so fixed that for the rest of his life it never left him;
and as catching glimpses of it in the strange eyes or hair of chance people,
he would follow such about the streets of Florence till the sun went down,
of whom many sketches of his remain. Some of these are full of a curious
beauty, that remote beauty apprehended only by those who have sought it
carefully; who, starting with acknowledged types of beauty, have refined as
far upon these, as these refine upon the world of common forms. But
mingled inextricably with this there is an element of mockery also; so that,
whether in sorrow or scorn, he caricatures Dante even. Legions of
grotesques sweep under his hand; for has not nature too her grotesques—the
rent rock, the distorting light of evening on lonely roads, the unveiled
structure of man in the embryo, or the skeleton?

All these swarming fancies unite in the Medusa of the Uffizii. Vasari's
story of an earlier Medusa, painted on a wooden shield, is perhaps an
invention; and yet, properly told, has more of the air of truth about it than
any-thing else in the whole legend. For its real subject is not the serious
work of a man, but the experiment of a child. The lizards and glow-worms
and other strange small creatures which haunt an Italian vineyard bring
before one the whole picture of a child's life in a Tuscan dwelling—half
castle, half farm—and are as true to nature as the pretended astonishment of
the father for whom the boy has prepared a surprise. It was not in play that
he painted that other Medusa, the one great picture which he left behind
him in Florence. The subject has been treated in various ways; Leonardo
alone cuts to its centre; he alone realises it as the head of a corpse,
exercising its powers through all the circumstances of death. What may be
called the fascination of corruption penetrates in every touch its exquisitely
finished beauty. About the dainty lines of the cheek the bat flits unheeded.
The delicate snakes seem literally strangling each other in terrified struggle
to escape from the Medusa brain. The hue which violent death always
brings with it is in the features: features singularly massive and grand, as
we catch them inverted, in a dexterous foreshortening, sloping upwards,
almost sliding down upon us, crown foremost, like a great calm stone
against which the wave of serpents breaks. But it is a subject that may well
be left to the beautiful verses of Shelley.

The science of that age was all divination, clairvoyance, unsubjected to
our exact modern formulas, seeking in an instant of vision to concentrate a
thousand experiences. Later writers, thinking only of the well-ordered
treatise on painting which a Frenchman, Raffaelle du Fresne, a hundred
years afterwards, compiled from Leonardo's bewildered manuscripts,
written strangely, as his manner was, from right to left, have imagined a
rigid order in his inquiries. But this rigid order was little in accordance with
the restlessness of his character; and if we think of him as the mere reasoner
who subjects design to anatomy, and composition to mathematical rules, we
shall hardly have of him that impression which those about him received
from him. Poring over his crucibles, making experiments with colour,
trying, by a strange variation of the alchemist's dream, to discover the
secret, not of an elixir to make man's natural life immortal, but rather of
giving immortality to the subtlest and most delicate effects of painting, he
seemed to them rather the sorcerer or the magician, possessed of curious
secrets and a hidden knowledge, living in a world of which he alone
possessed the key. What his philosophy seems to have been most like is that
of Paracelsus or Cardan; and much of the spirit of the older alchemy still
hangs about it, with its confidence in short cuts and odd byways to
knowledge. To him philosophy was to be something giving strange
swiftness and double sight, divining the sources of springs beneath the earth
or of expression beneath the human countenance, clairvoyant of occult gifts
in common or uncommon things, in the reed at the brook-side, or the star
which draws near to us but once in a century. How, in this way, the clear
purpose was overclouded, the fine chaser's hand perplexed, we but dimly
see; the mystery which at no point quite lifts from Leonardo's life is deepest
here. But it is certain that at one period of his life he had almost ceased to
be an artist.

The year 1483—the year of the birth of Raffaelle and the thirty-first of
Leonardo's life—is fixed as the date of his visit to Milan by the letter in
which he recommends himself to Ludovico Sforza, and offers to tell him,
for a price, strange secrets in the art of war. It was that Sforza who
murdered his young nephew by slow poison, yet was so susceptible of
religious impressions that he blended mere earthly passions with a sort of
religious sentimentalism, and who took for his device the mulberry-tree—
symbol, in its long delay and sudden yielding of flowers and fruit together,

of a wisdom which economises all forces for an opportunity of sudden and
sure effect. The fame of Leonardo had gone before him, and he was to
model a colossal statue of Francesco, the first Duke of Milan. As for
Leonardo himself, he came not as an artist at all, or careful of the fame of
one; but as a player on the harp, a strange harp of silver of his own
construction, shaped in some curious likeness to a horse's skull. The
capricious spirit of Ludovico was susceptible also of the charm of music,
and Leonardo's nature had a kind of spell in it. Fascination is always the
word descriptive of him. No portrait of his youth remains; but all tends to
make us believe that up to this time some charm of voice and aspect, strong
enough to balance the disadvantage of his birth, had played about him. His
physical strength was great; it was said that he could bend a horse-shoe like
a coil of lead.

The Duomo, the work of artists from beyond the Alps, so fantastic to the
eye of a Florentine used to the mellow, unbroken surfaces of Giotto and
Arnolfo, was then in all its freshness; and below, in the streets of Milan,
moved a people as fantastic, changeful and dreamlike. To Leonardo least of
all men could there be anything poisonous in the exotic flowers of
sentiment which grew there. It was a life of brilliant sins and exquisite
amusements: Leonardo became a celebrated designer of pageants: and it
suited the quality of his genius, composed in almost equal parts of curiosity
and the desire of beauty, to take things as they came.

Curiosity and the desire of beauty—these are the two elementary forces
in Leonardo's genius; curiosity often in conflict with the desire of beauty,
but generating, in union with it, a type of subtle and curious grace.

The movement of the fifteenth century was twofold; partly the
Renaissance, partly also the coming of what is called the "modern spirit,"
with its realism, its appeal to experience: it comprehended a return to
antiquity, and a return to nature. Raffaelle represents the return to antiquity,
and Leonardo the return to nature. In this return to nature, he was seeking to
satisfy a boundless curiosity by her perpetual surprises, a microscopic sense
of finish by her finesse, or delicacy of operation, that subtilitas naturae
which Bacon notices. So we find him often in intimate relations with men
of science,—with Fra Luca Poccioli the mathematician, and the anatomist

Marc Antonio della Torre. His observations and experiments fill thirteen
volumes of manuscript; and those who can judge describe him as
anticipating long before, by rapid intuition, the later ideas of science. He
explained the obscure light of the unilluminated part of the moon, knew that
the sea had once covered the mountains which contain shells, and the
gathering of the equatorial waters above the polar.

He who thus penetrated into the most secret parts of nature preferred
always the more to the less remote, what, seeming exceptional, was an
instance of law more refined, the construction about things of a peculiar
atmosphere and mixed lights. He paints flowers with such curious felicity
that different writers have attributed to him a fondness for particular
flowers, as Clement the cyclamen, and Rio the jasmin; while, at Venice,
there is a stray leaf from his portfolio dotted all over with studies of violets
and the wild rose. In him first appears the taste for what is bizarre or
recherche in landscape; hollow places full of the green shadow of
bituminous rocks, ridged reefs of trap-rock which cut the water into quaint
sheets of light—their exact antitype is in our own western seas; all the
solemn effects of moving water; you may follow it springing from its
distant source among the rocks on the heath of the Madonna of the
Balances, passing, as a little fall, into the treacherous calm of the Madonna
of the Lake, next, as a goodly river, below the cliffs of the Madonna of the
Rocks, washing the white walls of its distant villages, stealing out in a
network of divided streams in La Gioconda to the seashore of the Saint
Anne—that delicate place, where the wind passes like the hand of some fine
etcher over the surface, and the untorn shells are lying thick upon the sand,
and the tops of the rocks, to which the waves never rise, are green with
grass, grown fine as hair. It is the landscape, not of dreams or of fancy, but
of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand with a miracle
of finesse. Through Leonardo's strange veil of sight things reach him so; in
no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light of eclipse, or in some brief
interval of falling rain at daybreak, or through deep water.

And not into nature only; but he plunged also into human personality,
and became above all a painter of portraits; faces of a modelling more
skilful than has been seen before or since, embodied with a reality which
almost amounts to illusion, on dark air. To take a character as it was, and

delicately sound its stops, suited one so curious in observation, curious in
invention. So he painted the portraits of Ludovico's mistresses, Lucretia
Crivelli and Cecilia Galerani the poetess, of Ludovico himself, and the
Duchess Beatrice. The portrait of Cecilia Galerani is lost; but that of
Lucretia Crivelli has been identified with La Belle Feroniere of the Louvre,
and Ludovico's pale, anxious face still remains in the Ambrosian library.
Opposite is the portrait of Beatrice d'Este, in whom Leonardo seems to have
caught some presentiment of early death, painting her precise and grave,
full of the refinement of the dead, in sad earth-coloured raiment, set with
pale stones.

Sometimes this curiosity came in conflict with the desire of beauty; it
tended to make him go too far below that outside of things in which art
begins and ends. This struggle between the reason and its ideas, and the
senses, the desire of beauty, is the key to Leonardo's life at Milan—his
restlessness, his endless re-touchings, his odd experiments with colour.
How much must he leave unfinished, how much recommence! His problem
was the transmutation of ideas into images. What he had attained so far had
been the mastery of that earlier Florentine style, with its naive and limited
sensuousness. Now he was to entertain in this narrow medium those
divinations of a humanity too wide for it, that larger vision of the opening
world, which is only not too much for the great, irregular art of Shakspere;
and everywhere the effort is visible in the work of his hands. This agitation,
this perpetual delay, give him an air of weariness and ennui. To others he
seems to be aiming at an impossible effect, to do something that art, that
painting, can never do. Often the expression of physical beauty at this or
that point seems strained and marred in the effort, as in those heavy German
foreheads—too German and heavy for perfect beauty.

For there was a touch of Germany in that genius which, as Goethe said,
had "thought itself weary"—muede sich gedacht. What an anticipation of
modern Germany, for instance, in that debate on the question whether
sculpture or painting is the nobler art.* But there is this difference between
him and the German, that, with all that curious science, the German would
have thought nothing more was needed; and the name of Goethe himself
reminds one how great for the artist may be the danger of overmuch
science; how Goethe, who, in the Elective Affinities and the first part of

Faust, does transmute ideas into images, who wrought many such
transmutations, did not invariably find the spell-word, and in the second
part of Faust presents us with a mass of science which has almost no artistic
character at all. But Leonardo will never work till the happy moment comes
—that moment of bien-etre, which to imaginative men is a moment of
invention. On this moment he waits; other moments are but a preparation,
or after-taste of it. Few men distinguish between them as jealously as he
did. Hence so many flaws even in the choicest work. But for Leonardo the
distinction is absolute, and, in the moment of bien-etre, the alchemy
complete: the idea is stricken into colour and imagery: a cloudy mysticism
is refined to a subdued and graceful mystery, and painting pleases the eye
while it satisfies the soul.
*How princely, how characteristic of Leonardo, the answer, Quanto piu, un'arte
porta seco fatica di corpo, tanto piu e vile!

This curious beauty is seen above all in his drawings, and in these
chiefly in the abstract grace of the bounding lines. Let us take some of these
drawings, and pause over them awhile; and, first, one of those at Florence—
the heads of a woman and a little child, set side by side, but each in its own
separate frame. First of all, there is much pathos in the reappearance in the
fuller curves of the face of the child, of the sharper, more chastened lines of
the worn and older face, which leaves no doubt that the heads are those of a
little child and its mother. A feeling for maternity is indeed always
characteristic of Leonardo; and this feeling is further indicated here by the
half-humorous pathos of the diminutive, rounded shoulders of the child.
You may note a like pathetic power in drawings of a young man seated in a
stooping posture, his face in his hands, as in sorrow; of a slave sitting in an
uneasy inclined posture, in some brief interval of rest; of a small Madonna
and Child, peeping sideways in half-reassured terror, as a mighty griffin
with batlike wings, one of Leonardo's finest inventions, descends suddenly
from the air to snatch up a lion wandering near them. But note in these, as
that which especially belongs to art, the contour of the young man's hair, the
poise of the slave's arm above his head, and the curves of the head of the
child, following the little skull within, thin and fine as some seashell worn
by the wind.

Take again another head, still more full of sentiment, but of a different
kind, a little drawing in red chalk which every one remembers who has
examined at all carefully the drawings by old masters at the Louvre. It is a
face of doubtful sex, set in the shadow of its own hair, the cheek-line in
high light against it, with something voluptuous and full in the eyelids and
the lips. Another drawing might pass for the same face in childhood, with
parched and feverish lips, but with much sweetness in the loose, short-
waisted childish dress, with necklace and bulla, and in the daintily bound
hair. We might take the thread of suggestion which these two drawings
offer, when thus set side by side, and, following it through the drawings at
Florence, Venice, and Milan, construct a sort of series, illustrating better
than anything else Leonardo's type of womanly beauty. Daughters of
Herodias, with their fantastic head-dresses knotted and folded so strangely
to leave the dainty oval of the face disengaged, they are not of the Christian
family, or of Raffaelle's. They are the clairvoyants, through whom, as
through delicate instruments, one becomes aware of the subtler forces of
nature, and the modes of their action, all that is magnetic in it, all those
finer conditions wherein material things rise to that subtlety of operation
which constitutes them spiritual, where only the finer nerve and the keener
touch can follow: it is as if in certain revealing instances we actually saw
them at their work on human flesh. Nervous, electric, faint always with
some inexplicable faintness, they seem to be subject to exceptional
conditions, to feel powers at work in the common air unfelt by others, to
become, as it were, receptacles of them, and pass them on to us in a chain of
secret influences.

But among the more youthful heads there is one at Florence which Love
chooses for its own—the head of a young man, which may well be the
likeness of Andrea Salaino, beloved of Leonardo for his curled and waving
hair—belli capelli ricci e inanellati—and afterwards his favourite pupil and
servant. Of all the interests in living men and women which may have filled
his life at Milan, this attachment alone is recorded; and in return Salaino
identified himself so entirely with Leonardo, that the picture of Saint Anne,
in the Louvre, has been attributed to him. It illustrates Leonardo's usual
choice of pupils, men of some natural charm of person or intercourse like
Salaino, or men of birth and princely habits of life like Francesco Melzi—
men with just enough genius to be capable of initiation into his secret, for

the sake of which they were ready to efface their own individuality. Among
them, retiring often to the Villa of the Melzi at Canonica al Vaprio, he
worked at his fugitive manuscripts and sketches, working for the present
hour, and for a few only, perhaps chiefly for himself. Other artists have
been as careless of present or future applause, in self-forgetfulness, or
because they set moral or political ends above the ends of art; but in him
this solitary culture of beauty seems to have hung upon a kind of self-love,
and a carelessness in the work of art of all but art itself. Out of the secret
places of a unique temperament he brought strange blossoms and fruits
hitherto unknown; and for him, the novel impression conveyed, the
exquisite effect woven, counted as an end in itself—a perfect end.

And these pupils of his acquired his manner so thoroughly, that though
the number of Leonardo's authentic works is very small indeed, there is a
multitude of other men's pictures through which we undoubtedly see him,
and come very near to his genius. Sometimes, as in the little picture of the
Madonna of the Balances, in which, from the bosom of His mother, Christ
weighs the pebbles of the brooks against the sins of men, we have a hand,
rough enough by contrast, working upon some fine hint or sketch of his.
Sometimes, as in the subjects of the Daughter of Herodias and the Head of
John the Baptist, the lost originals have been re-echoed and varied upon
again and again by Luini and others. At other times the original remains, but
has been a mere theme or motive, a type of which the accessories might be
modified or changed; and these variations have but brought out the more
the purpose, or expression of the original. It is so with the so-called Saint
John the Baptist of the Louvre—one of the few naked figures Leonardo
painted—whose delicate brown flesh and woman's hair no one would go
out into the wilderness to seek, and whose treacherous smile would have us
understand something far beyond the outward gesture or circumstance. But
the long, reedlike cross in the hand, which suggests Saint John the Baptist,
becomes faint in a copy at the Ambrosian Library, and disappears altogether
in another, in the Palazzo Rosso at Genoa. Returning from the last to the
original, we are no longer surprised by Saint John's strange likeness to the
Bacchus which hangs near it, which set Theophile Gautier thinking of
Heine's notion of decayed gods, who, to maintain themselves, after the fall
of paganism, took employment in the new religion. We recognise one of
those symbolical inventions in which the ostensible subject is used, not as

matter for definite pictorial realisation, but as the starting-point of a train of
sentiment as subtle and vague as a piece of music. No one ever ruled over
his subject more entirely than Leonardo, or bent it more dexterously to
purely artistic ends. And so it comes to pass that though he handles sacred
subjects continually, he is the most profane of painters; the given person or
subject, Saint John in the Desert, or the Virgin on the knees of Saint Anne,
is often merely the pretext for a kind of work which carries one quite out of
the range of its conventional associations.

About the Last Supper, its decay and restorations, a whole literature has
risen up, Goethe's pensive sketch of its sad fortunes being far the best. The
death in childbirth of the Duchess Beatrice was followed in Ludovico by
one of those paroxysms of religious feeling which in him were
constitutional. The low, gloomy Dominican church of Saint Mary of the
Graces had been the favourite shrine of Beatrice. She had spent her last
days there, full of sinister presentiments; at last it had been almost
necessary to remove her from it by force; and now it was here that mass
was said a hundred times a day for her repose. On the damp wall of the
refectory, oozing with mineral salts, Leonardo painted the Last Supper. A
hundred anecdotes were told about it, his retouchings and delays. They
show him refusing to work except at the moment of invention, scornful of
whoever thought that art was a work of mere industry and rule, often
coming the whole length of Milan to give a single touch. He painted it, not
in fresco, where all must be impromptu, but in oils, the new method which
he had been one of the first to welcome, because it allowed of so many
afterthoughts, so refined a working out of perfection. It turned out that on a
plastered wall no process could have been less durable. Within fifty years it
had fallen into decay. And now we have to turn back to Leonardo's own
studies, above all to one drawing of the central head at the Brera, which, in
a union of tenderness and severity in the face-lines, reminds one of the
monumental work of Mino da Fiesole, to trace it as it was.

It was another effort to lift a given subject out of the range of its
conventional associations. Strange, after all the misrepresentations of the
middle age, was the effort to see it, not as the pale Host of the altar, but as
one taking leave of his friends. Five years afterwards the young Raffaelle, at
Florence, painted it with sweet and solemn effect in the refectory of Saint

Onofrio; but still with all the mystical unreality of the school of Perugino.
Vasari pretends that the central head was never finished; but finished or
unfinished, or owing part of its effect to a mellowing decay, this central
head does but consummate the sentiment of the whole company—ghosts
through which you see the wall, faint as the shadows of the leaves upon the
wall, on autumn afternoons; this figure is but the faintest, most spectral of
them all. It is the image of what the history it symbolises has more and
more become for the world, paler and paler as it recedes into the distance.
Criticism came with its appeal from mystical unrealities to originals, and
restored no lifelike reality but these transparent shadows, spirits which have
not flesh and bones.

The Last Supper was finished in 1497; in 1498 the French entered Milan,
and whether or not the Gascon bowmen used it as a mark for their arrows,
the model of Francesco Sforza certainly did not survive. What, in that age,
such work was capable of being—of what nobility, amid what racy
truthfulness to fact—we may judge from the bronze statue of Bartolomeo
Colleoni on horseback, modelled by Leonardo's master, Verrocchio (he died
of grief, it was said, because, the mould accidentally failing, he was unable
himself to complete it), still standing in the piazza of Saint John and Saint
Paul at Venice. Some traces of the thing may remain in certain of
Leonardo's drawings, and also, perhaps, by a singular circumstance, in a
far-off town of France. For Ludovico became a prisoner, and ended his days
at Loches in Touraine;—allowed at last, it is said, to breathe fresher air for
awhile in one of the rooms of a high tower there, after many years of
captivity in the dungeons below, where all seems sick with barbarous feudal
memories, and where his prison is still shown, its walls covered with
strange painted arabesques, ascribed by tradition to his hand, amused a
little, in this way, through the tedious years:—vast helmets and faces and
pieces of armour, among which, in great letters, the motto Infelix Sum is
woven in and out, and in which, perhaps, it is not too fanciful to see the
fruit of a wistful after-dreaming over all those experiments with Leonardo
on the armed figure of the great duke, that had occupied the two so often
during the days of his good fortune at Milan.

The remaining years of Leonardo's life are more or less years of
wandering. From his brilliant life at court he had saved nothing, and he

returned to Florence a poor man. Perhaps necessity kept his spirit excited:
the next four years are one prolonged rapture or ecstasy of invention. He
painted the pictures of the Louvre, his most authentic works, which came
there straight from the cabinet of Francis the First, at Fontainebleau. One
picture of his, the Saint Anne—not the Saint Anne of the Louvre, but a mere
cartoon, now in London—revived for a moment a sort of appreciation more
common in an earlier time, when good pictures had still seemed
miraculous; and for two days a crowd of people of all qualities passed in
naive excitement through the chamber where it hung, and gave Leonardo a
taste of Cimabue's triumph. But his work was less with the saints than with
the living women of Florence; for he lived still in the polished society that
he loved, and in the houses of Florence, left perhaps a little subject to light
thoughts by the death of Savonarola—the latest gossip (1869) is of an
undraped Monna Lisa, found in some out-of-the-way corner of the late
Orleans collection—he saw Ginevra di Benci, and Lisa, the young third
wife of Francesco del Giocondo. As we have seen him using incidents of
sacred story, not for their own sake, or as mere subjects for pictorial
realisation, but as a symbolical language for fancies all his own, so now he
found a vent for his thoughts in taking one of these languid women, and
raising her, as Leda or Pomona, Modesty or Vanity, to the seventh heaven of
symbolical expression.

La Gioconda is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the
revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness, only
the Melancholia of Duerer is comparable to it; and no crude symbolism
disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. We all know the face
and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in that cirque of fantastic
rocks, as in some faint light under sea. Perhaps of all ancient pictures time
has chilled it least.* As often happens with works in which invention seems
to reach its limits, there is an element in it given to, not invented by, the
master. In that inestimable folio of drawings, once in the possession of
Vasari, were certain designs by Verrocchio, faces of such impressive beauty
that Leonardo in his boyhood copied them many times. It is hard not to
connect with these designs of the elder, by-past master, as with its germinal
principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something
sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work. Besides, the picture is a
portrait. From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of

his dreams; and but for express historical testimony, we might fancy that
this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last. What was the
relationship of a living Florentine to this creature of his thought? By means
of what strange affinities had the person and the dream grown up thus apart,
and yet so closely together? Present from the first incorporeally in
Leonardo's thought, dimly traced in the designs of Verrocchio, she is found
present at last in Il Giocondo's house. That there is much of mere portraiture
in the picture is attested by the legend that by artificial means, the presence
of mimes and flute-players, that subtle expression was protracted on the
face. Again, was it in four years and by renewed labour never really
completed, or in four months and as by stroke of magic, that the image was
projected?
*Yet for Vasari there was some further magic of crimson in the lips and cheeks,
lost for us.

The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive
of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the
head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a
little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the
deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and
exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek
goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled
by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the
thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in
that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward
form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle
age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the
Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among
which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned
the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their
fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern
merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint
Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of
lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded
the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of
a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one;
and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon

by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady
Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the
modern idea.

During these years at Florence Leonardo's history is the history of his
art; he himself is lost in the bright cloud of it. The outward history begins
again in 1502, with a wild journey through central Italy, which he makes as
the chief engineer of Caesar Borgia. The biographer, putting together the
stray jottings of his manuscripts, may follow him through every day of it,
up the strange tower of Siena, which looks towards Rome, elastic like a
bent bow, down to the seashore at Piombino, each place appearing as
fitfully as in a fever dream.

One other great work was left for him to do, a work all trace of which
soon vanished, The Battle of the Standard, in which he had Michelangelo
for his rival. The citizens of Florence, desiring to decorate the walls of the
great council-chamber, had offered the work for competition, and any
subject might be chosen from the Florentine wars of the fifteenth century.
Michelangelo chose for his cartoon an incident of the war with Pisa, in
which the Florentine soldiers, bathing in the Arno, are surprised by the
sound of trumpets, and run to arms. His design has reached us only in an
old engraving, which perhaps helps us less than what we remember of the
background of his Holy Family in the Uffizii to imagine in what
superhuman form, such as might have beguiled the heart of an earlier
world, those figures may have risen from the water. Leonardo chose an
incident from the battle of Anghiari, in which two parties of soldiers fight
for a standard. Like Michelangelo's, his cartoon is lost, and has come to us
only in sketches, and in a fragment of Rubens. Through the accounts given
we may discern some lust of terrible things in it, so that even the horses tore
each other with their teeth; and yet one fragment of it, in a drawing of his at
Florence, is far different—a waving field of lovely armour, the chased
edgings running like lines of sunlight from side to side. Michelangelo was
twenty-seven years old; Leonardo more than fifty; and Raffaelle, then
nineteen years old, visiting Florence for the first time, came and watched
them as they worked.

We catch a glimpse of him again, at Rome in 1514, surrounded by his
mirrors and vials and furnaces, making strange toys that seemed alive of
wax and quicksilver. The hesitation which had haunted him all through life,
and made him like one under a spell, was upon him now with double force.
No one had ever carried political indifferentism farther; it had always been
his philosophy to "fly before the storm"; he is for the Sforzas, or against
them, as the tide of their fortune turns. Yet now in the political society of
Rome, he came to be suspected of concealed French sympathies. It
paralysed him to find himself among enemies; and he turned wholly to
France, which had long courted him.

France was about to become an Italy more Italian than Italy itself.
Francis the First, like Lewis the Twelfth before him, was attracted by the
finesse of Leonardo's work; La Gioconda was already in his cabinet, and he
offered Leonardo the little Chateau de Clou, with its vineyards and
meadows, in the pleasant valley of the Masse, just outside the walls of the
town of Amboise, where, especially in the hunting season, the court then
frequently resided. A Monsieur Lyonard, peinteur du Roy pour Amboyse—
so the letter of Francis the First is headed. It opens a prospect, one of the
most interesting in the history of art, where, under a strange mixture of
lights, Italian art dies away as a French exotic.

Two questions remain, after much busy antiquarianism, concerning
Leonardo's death—the question of the precise form of his religion, and the
question whether Francis the First was present at the time. They are of
about equally little importance in the estimate of Leonardo's genius. The
directions in his will about the thirty masses and the great candles for the
church of Saint Florentin are things of course, their real purpose being
immediate and practical; and on no theory of religion could these hurried
offices be of much consequence. We forget them in speculating how one
who had been always so desirous of beauty, but desired it always in such
definite and precise forms, as hands or flowers or hair, looked forward now
into the vague land, and experienced the last curiosity.

1869.

THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE

It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and
Painting—all the various products of art—as but translations into different
languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought,
supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in painting—of
sound, in music—of rhythmical words, in poetry. In this way, the sensuous
element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic,
is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite
principle—that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special
phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an
order of impressions distinct in kind—is the beginning of all true aesthetic
criticism. For, as art addresses not pure sense, still less the pure intellect,
but the "imaginative reason" through the senses, there are differences of
kind in aesthetic beauty, corresponding to the differences in kind of the gifts
of sense themselves. Each art, therefore, having its own peculiar and
incommunicable sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reaching the
imagination, its own special responsibilities to its material. One of the
functions of aesthetic criticism is to define these limitations; to estimate the
degree in which a given work of art fulfils its responsibilities to its special
material; to note in a picture that true pictorial charm, which is neither a
mere poetical thought nor sentiment, on the one hand, nor a mere result of
communicable technical skill in colour or design, on the other; to define in
a poem that true poetical quality, which is neither descriptive nor meditative
merely, but comes of an inventive handling of rhythmical language—the
element of song in the singing; to note in music the musical charm—that
essential music, which presents no words, no matter of sentiment or
thought, separable from the special form in which it is conveyed to us.

To such a philosophy of the variations of the beautiful, Lessing's analysis
of the spheres of sculpture and poetry, in the Laocoon, was a very important
contribution. But a true appreciation of these things is possible only in the
light of a whole system of such art-casuistries. And it is in the criticism of
painting that this truth most needs enforcing, for it is in popular judgments
on pictures that that false generalisation of all art into forms of poetry is

most prevalent. To suppose that all is mere technical acquirement in
delineation or touch, working through and addressing itself to the
intelligence, on the one side, or a merely poetical, or what may be called
literary interest, addressed also to the pure intelligence, on the other;—this
is the way of most spectators, and of many critics, who have never caught
sight, all the time, of that true pictorial quality which lies between (unique
pledge of the possession of the pictorial gift) the inventive or creative
handling of pure line and colour, which, as almost always in Dutch
painting, as often also in the works of Titian or Veronese, is quite
independent of anything definitely poetical in the subject it accompanies. It
is the drawing—the design projected from that peculiar pictorial
temperament or constitution, in which, while it may possibly be ignorant of
true anatomical proportions, all things whatever, all poetry, every idea
however abstract or obscure, floats up as a visible scene, or image: it is the
colouring—that weaving as of just perceptible gold threads of light through
the dress, the flesh, the atmosphere, in Titian's Lace-girl—the staining of
the whole fabric of the thing with a new, delightful physical quality. This
drawing, then—the arabesque traced in the air by Tintoret's flying figures,
by Titian's forest branches; this colouring—the magic conditions of light
and hue in the atmosphere of Titian's Lace-girl, or Rubens's Descent from
the Cross—these essential pictorial qualities must first of all delight the
sense, delight it as directly and sensuously as a fragment of Venetian glass;
and through this delight only be the medium of whatever poetry or science
may lie beyond them, in the intention of the composer. In its primary
aspect, a great picture has no more definite message for us than an
accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a moment, on the wall or floor:
is itself, in truth, a space of such fallen light, caught as the colours are
caught in an Eastern carpet, but refined upon, and dealt with more subtly
and exquisitely than by nature itself. And this primary and essential
condition fulfilled, we may trace the coming of poetry into painting, by fine
gradations upwards; from Japanese fan-painting, for instance, where we get,
first, only abstract colour; then, just a little interfused sense of the poetry of
flowers; then, sometimes, perfect flower-painting; and so, onwards, until in
Titian we have, as his poetry in the Ariadne, so actually a touch of true
childlike humour in the diminutive, quaint figure with its silk gown, which
ascends the temple stairs, in his picture of the Presentation of the Virgin, at
Venice.

But although each art has thus its own specific order of impressions, and
an untranslatable charm, while a just apprehension of the ultimate
differences of the arts is the beginning of aesthetic criticism; yet it is
noticeable that, in its special mode of handling its given material, each art
may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art, by what
German critics term an Anders-streben—a partial alienation from its own
limitations, by which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the place of
each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces.

Thus some of the most delightful music seems to be always approaching
to figure, to pictorial definition. Architecture, again, though it has its own
laws—laws esoteric enough, as the true architect knows only too well—yet
sometimes aims at fulfilling the conditions of a picture, as in the Arena
chapel; or of sculpture, as in the flawless unity of Giotto's tower at
Florence; and often finds a true poetry, as in those strangely twisted
staircases of the chateaux of the country of the Loire, as if it were intended
that among their odd turnings the actors in a wild life might pass each other
unseen: there being a poetry also of memory and of the mere effect of time,
by which it often profits greatly. Thus, again, sculpture aspires out of the
hard limitation of pure form towards colour, or its equivalent; poetry also,
in many ways, finding guidance from the other arts, the analogy between a
Greek tragedy and a work of Greek sculpture, between a sonnet and a relief,
of French poetry generally with the art of engraving, being more than mere
figures of speech; and all the arts in common aspiring towards the principle
of music; music being the typical, or ideally consummate art, the object of
the great Anders-streben of all art, of all that is artistic, or partakes of
artistic qualities.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all
other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and
the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant
effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance—
its subject, its given incidents or situation; that the mere matter of a picture
—the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a
landscape—should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling;
that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should

penetrate every part of the matter:—this is what all art constantly strives
after, and achieves in different degrees.

This abstract language becomes clear enough, if we think of actual
examples. In an actual landscape we see a long white road, lost suddenly on
the hill-verge. That is the matter of one of the etchings of M. Legros: only,
in this etching, it is informed by an indwelling solemnity of expression,
seen upon it or half-seen, within the limits of an exceptional moment, or
caught from his own mood perhaps, but which he maintains as the very
essence of the thing, throughout his work. Sometimes a momentary tint of
stormy light may invest a homely or too familiar scene with a character
which might well have been drawn from the deep places of the imagination.
Then we might say that this particular effect of light, this sudden inweaving
of gold thread through the texture of the haystack, and the poplars, and the
grass, gives the scene artistic qualities; that it is like a picture. And such
tricks of circumstance are commonest in landscape which has little salient
character of its own; because, in such scenery, all the material details are so
easily absorbed by that informing expression of passing light, and elevated,
throughout their whole extent, to a new and delightful effect by it. And
hence the superiority, for most conditions of the picturesque, of a river-side
in France to a Swiss valley, because, on the French river-side, mere
topography, the simple material, counts for so little, and, all being so pure,
untouched, and tranquil in itself, mere light and shade have such easy work
in modulating it to one dominant tone. The Venetian landscape, on the other
hand, has in its material conditions much which is hard, or harshly definite;
but the masters of the Venetian school have shown themselves little
burdened by them. Of its Alpine background they retain certain abstracted
elements only, of cool colour and tranquillising line; and they use its actual
details, the brown windy turrets, the straw-coloured fields, the forest
arabesques, but as the notes of a music which duly accompanies the
presence of their men and women, presenting us with the spirit or essence
only of a certain sort of landscape—a country of the pure reason or half-
imaginative memory.

Poetry, again, works with words addressed in the first instance to the
mere intelligence; and it deals, most often, with a definite subject or
situation. Sometimes it may find a noble and quite legitimate function in the

expression of moral or political aspiration, as often in the poetry of Victor
Hugo. In such instances it is easy enough for the understanding to
distinguish between the matter and the form, however much the matter, the
subject, the element which is addressed to the mere intelligence, has been
penetrated by the informing, artistic spirit. But the ideal types of poetry are
those in which this distinction is reduced to its minimum; so that lyrical
poetry, precisely because in it we are least able to detach the matter from
the form, without a deduction of something from that matter itself, is, at
least artistically, the highest and most complete form of poetry. And the
very perfection of such poetry often seems to depend, in part, on a certain
suppression or vagueness of mere subject, so that the meaning reaches us
through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding, as in some of
the most imaginative compositions of William Blake, and often in
Shakspere's songs, as pre-eminently in that song of Mariana's page in
Measure for Measure, in which the kindling force and poetry of the whole
play seems to pass for a moment into an actual strain of music.

And this principle holds good of all things that partake in any degree of
artistic qualities, of the furniture of our houses, and of dress, for instance, of
life itself, of gesture and speech, and the details of daily intercourse; these
also, for the wise, being susceptible of a suavity and charm, caught from the
way in which they are done, which gives them a worth in themselves;
wherein, indeed, lies what is valuable and justly attractive, in what is called
the fashion of a time, which elevates the trivialities of speech, and manner,
and dress, into "ends in themselves," and gives them a mysterious grace and
attractiveness in the doing of them.

Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere
intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its
responsibilities to its subject or material; the ideal examples of poetry and
painting being those in which the constituent elements of the composition
are so welded together, that the material or subject no longer strikes the
intellect only; nor the form, the eye or the ear only; but form and matter, in
their union or identity, present one single effect to the "imaginative reason,"
that complex faculty for which every thought and feeling is twin-born with
its sensible analogue or symbol.

It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal,
this perfect identification of form and matter. In its ideal, consummate
moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter,
the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each
other; and to it, therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the
arts may be supposed constantly to tend and aspire. Music, then, and not
poetry, as is so often supposed, is the true type or measure of perfected art.
Therefore, although each art has its incommunicable element, its
untranslatable order of impressions, its unique mode of reaching the
"imaginative reason," yet the arts may be represented as continually
struggling after the law or principle of music, to a condition which music
alone completely realises; and one of the chief functions of aesthetic
criticism, dealing with the products of art, new or old, is to estimate the
degree in which each of those products approaches, in this sense, to musical
law.

By no school of painters have, the necessary limitations of the art of
painting been so unerringly though instinctively apprehended, and the
essence of what is pictorial in a picture so justly conceived, as by the school
of Venice; and the train of thought suggested in what has been now said is,
perhaps, a not unfitting introduction to a few pages about Giorgione, who,
though much has been taken by recent criticism from what was reputed to
be his work, yet, more entirely than any other painter, sums up, in what we
know of himself and his art, the spirit of the Venetian school.

The beginnings of Venetian painting link themselves to the last, stiff,
half-barbaric splendours of Byzantine decoration, and are but the
introduction into the crust of marble and gold on the walls of the Duomo of
Murano, or of Saint Mark's, of a little more of human expression. And
throughout the course of its later development, always subordinate to
architectural effect, the work of the Venetian school never escaped from the
influence of its beginnings. Unassisted, and therefore unperplexed, by
naturalism, religious mysticism, philosophical theories, it had no Giotto, no
Angelico, no Botticelli. Exempt from the stress of thought and sentiment,
which taxed so severely the resources of the generations of Florentine
artists, those earlier Venetian painters, down to Carpaccio and the Bellini,
seem never for a moment to have been tempted even to lose sight of the

scope of their art in its strictness, or to forget that painting must be, before
all things decorative, a thing for the eye; a space of colour on the wall, only
more dexterously blent than the marking of its precious stone or the chance
interchange of sun and shade upon it—this, to begin and end with—
whatever higher matter of thought, or poetry, or religious reverie might play
its part therein, between. At last, with final mastery of all the technical
secrets of his art, and with somewhat more than "a spark of the divine fire"
to his share, comes Giorgione. He is the inventor of genre, of those easily
movable pictures which serve neither for uses of devotion, nor of
allegorical or historic teaching—little groups of real men and women, amid
congruous furniture or landscape—morsels of actual life, conversation or
music or play, refined upon or idealised, till they come to seem like
glimpses of life from afar. Those spaces of more cunningly blent colour,
obediently filling their places, hitherto, in a mere architectural scheme,
Giorgione detaches from the wall; he frames them by the hands of some
skilful carver, so that people may move them readily and take with them
where they go, like a poem in manuscript, or a musical instrument, to be
used, at will, as a means of self-education, stimulus or solace, coming like
an animated presence, into one's cabinet, to enrich the air as with some
choice aroma, and, like persons, live with us, for a day or a lifetime. Of all
art like this, art which has played so large a part in men's culture since that
time, Giorgione is the initiator. Yet in him too that old Venetian clearness or
justice, in the apprehension of the essential limitations of the pictorial art, is
still undisturbed; and, while he interfuses his painted work with a high-
strung sort of poetry, caught directly from a singularly rich and high-strung
sort of life, yet in his selection of subject, or phase of subject, in the
subordination of mere subject to pictorial design, to the main purpose of a
picture, he is typical of that aspiration of all the arts towards music, which I
have endeavoured to explain,—towards the perfect identification of matter
and form.

Born so near to Titian, though a little before him, that these two
companion pupils of the aged Giovanni Bellini may almost be called
contemporaries, Giorgione stands to Titian in something like the
relationship of Sordello to Dante, in Mr. Browning's poem. Titian, when he
leaves Bellini, becomes, in turn, the pupil of Giorgione; he lives in constant
labour more than sixty years after Giorgione is in his grave; and with such

fruit, that hardly one of the greater towns of Europe is without some
fragment of it. But the slightly older man, with his so limited actual product
(what remains to us of it seeming, when narrowly examined, to reduce itself
to almost one picture, like Sordello's one fragment of lovely verse), yet
expresses, in elementary motive and principle, that spirit—itself the final
acquisition of all the long endeavours of Venetian art—which Titian spreads
over his whole life's activity.

And, as we might expect, something fabulous and illusive has always
mingled itself in the brilliancy of Giorgione's fame. The exact relationship
to him of many works—drawings, portraits, painted idylls—often
fascinating enough, which in various collections went by his name, was
from the first uncertain. Still, six or eight famous pictures at Dresden,
Florence and the Louvre, were undoubtedly attributed to him, and in these,
if anywhere, something of the splendour of the old Venetian humanity
seemed to have been preserved. But of those six or eight famous pictures it
is now known that only one is certainly from Giorgione's hand. The
accomplished science of the subject has come at last, and, as in other
instances, has not made the past more real for us, but assured us that we
possess of it less than we seemed to possess. Much of the work on which
Giorgione's immediate fame depended, work done for instantaneous effect,
in all probability passed away almost within his own age, like the frescoes
on the facade of the fondaco dei Tedeschi at Venice, some crimson traces of
which, however, still give a strange additional touch of splendour to the
scene of the Rialto. And then there is a barrier or borderland, a period about
the middle of the sixteenth century, in passing through which the tradition
miscarries, and the true outlines of Giorgione's work and person become
obscured. It became fashionable for wealthy lovers of art, with no critical
standard of authenticity, to collect so-called works of Giorgione, and a
multitude of imitations came into circulation. And now, in the "new
Vasari,"* the great traditional reputation, woven with so profuse demand on
men's admiration, has been scrutinised thread by thread; and what remains
of the most vivid and stimulating of Venetian masters, a live flame, as it
seemed, in those old shadowy times, has been reduced almost to a name by
his most recent critics.
*Crowe and Cavalcaselle: History of Painting in North Italy.

Yet enough remains to explain why the legend grew up, above the name,
why the name attached itself, in many instances, to the bravest work of
other men. The Concert in the Pitti Palace, in which a monk, with cowl and
tonsure, touches the keys of a harpsichord, while a clerk, placed behind
him, grasps the handle of the viol, and a third, with hat and plume, seems to
wait upon the true interval for beginning to sing, is undoubtedly
Giorgione's. The outline of the lifted finger, the trace of the plume, the very
threads of the fine linen, which fasten themselves on the memory, in the
moment before they are lost altogether in that calm unearthly glow, the skill
which has caught the waves of wandering sound, and fixed them for ever on
the lips and hands—these are indeed the master's own; and the criticism
which, while dismissing so much hitherto believed to be Giorgione's, has
established the claims of this one picture, has left it among the most
precious things in the world of art.

It is noticeable that the "distinction" of this Concert, its sustained
evenness of perfection, alike in design, in execution, and in choice of
personal type, becomes for the "new Vasari" the standard of Giorgione's
genuine work. Finding here enough to explain his influence, and the true
seal of mastery, its authors assign to Pellegrino da San Daniele the Holy
Family in the Louvre, for certain points in which it comes short of that
standard, but which will hardly diminish the spectator's enjoyment of a
singular charm of liquid air, with which the whole picture seems instinct,
filling the eyes and lips, the very garments, of its sacred personages, with
some wind-searched brightness and energy; of which fine air the blue peak,
clearly defined in the distance, is, as it were, the visible pledge. Similarly,
another favourite picture in the Louvre, the subject of a Sonnet by a poet
whose own painted work often comes to mind as one ponders over these
precious things—the Fete Champetre, is assigned to an imitator of
Sebastian del Piombo; and the Tempest, in the Academy at Venice (a
slighter loss, perhaps, though not without its pleasant effect of clearing
weather, towards the left, its one untouched morsel), to Paris Bordone, or
perhaps to "some advanced craftsman of the sixteenth century." From the
gallery at Dresden, the Knight embracing a Lady, where the knight's broken
gauntlets seem to mark some well-known pause in a story we would
willingly hear the rest of; is conceded to "a Brescian hand," and Jacob
meeting Rachel to a pupil of Palma; and, whatever their charm, we are

called on to give up the Ordeal and the Finding of Moses with its jewel-like
pools of water, perhaps to Bellini.

Nor has the criticism, which thus so freely diminishes the number of his
authentic works, added anything important to the well-known outline of the
life and personality of the man: only, it has fixed one or two dates, one or
two circumstances, a little more exactly. Giorgione was born before the year
1477, and spent his childhood at Castelfranco, where the last crags of the
Venetian Alps break down romantically, with something of parklike grace,
to the plain. A natural child of the family of the Barbarelli by a peasant-girl
of Vedelago, he finds his way early into the circle of notable persons—
people of courtesy; and becomes initiated into those differences of personal
type, manner, and even of dress, which are best understood there—that
"distinction" of the Concert of the Pitti Palace. Not far from his home lives
Catherine of Cornara, formerly Queen of Cyprus; and, up in the towers
which still remain, Tuzio Costanzo, the famous condottiere—a picturesque
remnant of medieval manners, amid a civilisation rapidly changing.
Giorgione paints their portraits; and when Tuzio's son, Matteo, dies in early
youth, adorns in his memory a chapel in the church of Castelfranco,
painting on this occasion, perhaps, the altar-piece, foremost among his
authentic works, still to be seen there, with the figure of the warrior-saint,
Liberale, of which the original little study in oil, with the delicately
gleaming, silver-grey armour, is one of the greater treasures of the National
Gallery, and in which, as in some other knightly personages attributed to
him, people have supposed the likeness of his own presumably gracious
presence. Thither, at last, he is himself brought home from Venice, early
dead, but celebrated. It happened, about his thirty-fourth year, that in one of
those parties at which he entertained his friends with music, he met a
certain lady of whom he became greatly enamoured, and "they rejoiced
greatly," says Vasari, "the one and the other, in their loves." And two quite
different legends concerning it agree in this, that it was through this lady he
came by his death: Ridolfi relating that, being robbed of her by one of his
pupils, he died of grief at the double treason;—Vasari, that she being
secretly stricken of the plague, and he making his visits to her as usual, he
took the sickness from her mortally, along with her kisses, and so briefly
departed.

But, although the number of Giorgione's extant works has been thus
limited by recent criticism, all is not done when the real and the traditional
elements in what concerns him have been discriminated; for, in what is
connected with a great name, much that is not real is often very stimulating;
and, for the aesthetic philosopher, over and above the real Giorgione and his
authentic extant works, there remains the Giorgionesque also—an
influence, a spirit or type in art, active in men so different as those to whom
many of his supposed works are really assignable—a veritable school,
which grew together out of all those fascinating works rightly or wrongly
attributed to him; out of many copies from, or variations on him, by
unknown or uncertain workmen, whose drawings and designs were, for
various reasons, prized as his; out of the immediate impression he made
upon his contemporaries, and with which he continued in men's minds; out
of many traditions of subject and treatment, which really descend from him
to our own time, and by retracing which we fill out the original image;
Giorgione thus becoming a sort of impersonation of Venice itself, its
projected reflex or ideal, all that was intense or desirable in it thus
crystallising about the memory of this wonderful young man.

And now, finally, let me illustrate some of the characteristics of this
School of Giorgione, as we may call it, which, for most of us,
notwithstanding all that negative criticism of the "new Vasari," will still
identify itself with those famous pictures at Florence, Dresden and Paris;
and in which a certain artistic ideal is defined for us—the conception of a
peculiar aim and procedure in art, which we may understand as the
Giorgionesque, wherever we find it, whether in Venetian work generally, or
in work of our own time—and of which the Concert, that undoubted work
of Giorgione in the Pitti Palace, is the typical instance, and a pledge
authenticating the connexion of the school with the master.

I have spoken of a certain interpretation of the matter or subject of a
work of art with the form of it, a condition realised absolutely only in
music, as the condition to which every form of art is perpetually aspiring. In
the art of painting, the attainment of this ideal condition, this perfect
interpretation of the subject with colour and design, depends, of course, in
great measure, on dexterous choice of that subject, or phase of subject; and
such choice is one of the secrets of Giorgione's school. It is the school of

genre, and employs itself mainly with "painted idylls," but, in the
production of this pictorial poetry, exercises a wonderful tact in the
selecting of such matter as lends itself most readily and entirely to pictorial
form, to complete expression by drawing and colour. For although its
productions are painted poems, they belong to a sort of poetry which tells
itself without an articulated story. The master is pre-eminent for the
resolution, the ease and quickness, with which he reproduces instantaneous
motion—the lacing-on of armour, with the head bent back so stately—the
fainting lady—the embrace, rapid as the kiss caught, with death itself, from
dying lips—the momentary conjunction of mirrors and polished armour and
still water, by which all the sides of a solid image are presented at once,
solving that casuistical question whether painting can present an object as
completely as sculpture. The sudden act, the rapid transition of thought, the
passing expression—this he arrests with that vivacity which Vasari has
attributed to him, il fuoco Giorgionesco, as he terms it. Now it is part of the
ideality of the highest sort of dramatic poetry, that it presents us with a kind
of profoundly significant and animated instants, a mere gesture, a look, a
smile, perhaps—some brief and wholly concrete moment—into which,
however, all the motives, all the interests and effects of a long history, have
condensed themselves, and which seem to absorb past and future in an
intense consciousness of the present. Such ideal instants the school of
Giorgione selects, with its admirable tact, from that feverish, tumultuously
coloured life of the old citizens of Venice—exquisite pauses in time, in
which, arrested thus, we seem to be spectators of all the fulness of
existence, and which are like some consummate extract or quintessence of
life.

It is to the law or condition of music, as I said, that all art like this is
really aspiring and, in the school of Giorgione, the perfect moments of
music itself, the making or hearing of music, song or its accompaniment,
are themselves prominent as subjects. On that background of the silence of
Venice, which the visitor there finds so impressive, the world of Italian
music was then forming. In choice of subject, as in all besides, the Concert
of the Pitti Palace is typical of all that Giorgione, himself an admirable
musician, touched with his influence; and in sketch or finished picture, in
various collections, we may follow it through many intricate variations—
men fainting at music, music heard at the pool-side while people fish, or

mingled with the sound of the pitcher in the well, or heard across running
water, or among the flocks; the tuning of instruments—people with intent
faces, as if listening, like those described by Plato in an ingenious passage,
to detect the smallest interval of musical sound, the smallest undulation in
the air, or feeling for music in thought on a stringless instrument, ear and
finger refining themselves infinitely, in the appetite for sweet sound—a
momentary touch of an instrument in the twilight, as one passes through
some unfamiliar room, in a chance company.

In such favourite incidents, then, of Giorgione's school, music or music-
like intervals in our existence, life itself is conceived as a sort of listening—
listening to music, to the reading of Bandello's novels, to the sound of
water, to time as it flies. Often such moments are really our moments of
play, and we are surprised at the unexpected blessedness of what may seem
our least important part of time; not merely because play is in many
instances that to which people really apply their own best powers, but also
because at such times, the stress of our servile, everyday attentiveness being
relaxed, the happier powers in things without us are permitted free passage,
and have their way with us. And so, from music, the school of Giorgione
passes often to the play which is like music; to those masques in which men
avowedly do but play at real life, like children "dressing up," disguised in
the strange old Italian dresses, parti-coloured, or fantastic with embroidery
and furs, of which the master was so curious a designer, and which, above
all the spotless white linen at wrist and throat, he painted so dexterously.

And when people are happy in this thirsty land water will not be far off;
and in the school of Giorgione, the presence of water—the well, or marble-
rimmed pool, the drawing or pouring of water, as the woman pours it from a
pitcher with her jewelled hand in the Fete Champetre, listening, perhaps, to
the cool sound as it falls, blent with the music of the pipes—is as
characteristic, and almost as suggestive, as that of music itself. And the
landscape feels, and is glad of it also—a landscape full of clearness, of the
effects of water, of fresh rain newly passed through the air, and collected
into the grassy channels; the air, too, in the school of Giorgione, seeming as
vivid as the people who breathe it, and literally empyrean, all impurities
being burnt out of it, and no taint, no floating particle of anything but its
own proper elements allowed to subsist within it.

Its scenery is such as in England we call "park scenery," with some
elusive refinement felt about the rustic buildings, the choice grass, the
grouped trees, the undulations deftly economised for graceful effect. Only,
in Italy all natural things are, as it were, woven through and through with
gold thread, even the cypress revealing it among the folds of its blackness.
And it is with gold dust, or gold thread, that these Venetian painters seem to
work, spinning its fine filaments, through the solemn human flesh, away
into the white plastered walls of the thatched huts. The harsher details of the
mountains recede to a harmonious distance, the one peak of rich blue above
the horizon remaining but as the visible warrant of that due coolness which
is all we need ask here of the Alps, with their dark rains and streams. Yet
what real, airy space, as the eye passes from level to level, through the long-
drawn valley in which Jacob embraces Rachel among the flocks! Nowhere
is there a truer instance of that balance, that modulated unison of landscape
and persons—of the human image and its accessories—already noticed as
characteristic of the Venetian school, so that, in it, neither personage nor
scenery is ever a mere pretext for the other.

Something like this seems to me to be the vraie verite about Giorgione, if
I may adopt a serviceable expression, by which the French recognise those
more liberal and durable impressions which, in respect of any really
considerable person or subject, anything that has at all intricately occupied
men's attention, lie beyond, and must supplement, the narrower range of the
strictly ascertained facts about it. In this, Giorgione is but an illustration of a
valuable general caution we may abide by in all criticism. As regards
Giorgione himself, we have indeed to take note of all those negations and
exceptions, by which, at first sight, a "new Vasari" seems merely to have
confused our apprehension of a delightful object, to have explained away
out of our inheritance from past time what seemed of high value there. Yet
it is not with a full understanding even of those exceptions that one can
leave off just at this point. Properly qualified, such exceptions are but a salt
of genuineness in our knowledge; and beyond all those strictly ascertained
facts, we must take note of that indirect influence by which one like
Giorgione, for instance, enlarges his permanent efficacy and really makes
himself felt in our culture. In a just impression of that, is the essential truth,
the vraie verite concerning him.

1877.

JOACHIM DU BELLAY

In the middle of the sixteenth century, when the spirit of the Renaissance
was everywhere, and people had begun to look back with distaste on the
works of the middle age, the old Gothic manner had still one chance more,
in borrowing something from the rival which was about to supplant it. In
this way there was produced, chiefly in France, a new and peculiar phase of
taste with qualities and a charm of its own, blending the somewhat
attenuated grace of Italian ornament with the general outlines of Northern
design. It produced the Chateau de Gaillon, as you may still see it in the
delicate engravings of Israel Silvestre—a Gothic donjon veiled faintly by a
surface of dainty Italian traceries—Chenonceaux, Blois, Chambord, and the
church of Brou. In painting, there came from Italy workmen like Maitre
Roux and the masters of the school of Fontainebleau, to have their later
Italian voluptuousness attempered by the naive and silvery qualities of the
native style; and it was characteristic of these painters that they were most
successful in painting on glass, an art so essentially medieval. Taking it up
where the middle age had left it, they found their whole work among the
last subtleties of colour and line; and keeping within the true limits of their
material, they got quite a new order of effects from it, and felt their way to
refinements on colour never dreamed of by those older workmen, the glass-
painters of Chartres or Le Mans. What is called the Renaissance in France is
thus not so much the introduction of a wholly new taste ready-made from
Italy, but rather the finest and subtlest phase of the middle age itself, its last
fleeting splendour and temperate Saint Martin's summer. In poetry, the
Gothic spirit in France had produced a thousand songs; and in the
Renaissance, French poetry too did but borrow something to blend with a
native growth, and the poems of Ronsard, with their ingenuity, their
delicately figured surfaces, their slightness, their fanciful combinations of
rhyme, are but the correlative of the traceries of the house of Jacques Coeur
at Bourges, or the Maison de Justice at Rouen.

There was indeed something in the native French taste naturally akin to
that Italian finesse. The characteristic of French work had always been a
certain nicety, a remarkable daintiness of hand, une nettete remarquable
d'execution. In the paintings of Francois Clouet, for example, or rather of
the Clouets—for there was a whole family of them—painters remarkable
for their resistance to Italian influences, there is a silveriness of colour and a
clearness of expression which distinguish them very definitely from their
Flemish neighbours, Hemling or the Van Eycks. And this nicety is not less
characteristic of old French poetry. A light, aerial delicacy, a simple
elegance—une nettete remarquable d'execution:—these are essential
characteristics alike of Villon's poetry, and of the Hours of Anne of Brittany.
They are characteristic too of a hundred French Gothic carvings and
traceries. Alike in the old Gothic cathedrals, and in their counterpart, the old
Gothic chansons de geste, the rough and ponderous mass becomes, as if by
passing for a moment into happier conditions, or through a more gracious
stratum of air, graceful and refined, like the carved ferneries on the granite
church at Folgoat, or the lines which describe the fair priestly hands of
Archbishop Turpin, in the song of Roland; although below both alike there
is a fund of mere Gothic strength, or heaviness.*
*The purely artistic aspects of this subject have been interpreted, in a work of
great taste and learning, by Mrs. Mark Pattison:—The Renaissance of Art in
France.

And Villon's songs and Clouet's paintings are like these. It is the higher
touch making itself felt here and there, betraying itself, like nobler blood in
a lower stock, by a fine line or gesture or expression, the turn of a wrist, the
tapering of a finger. In Ronsard's time that rougher element seemed likely to
predominate. No one can turn over the pages of Rabelais without feeling
how much need there was of softening, of castigation. To effect this
softening is the object of the revolution in poetry which is connected with
Ronsard's name. Casting about for the means of thus refining upon and
saving the character of French literature, he accepted that influx of
Renaissance taste, which, leaving the buildings, the language, the art, the
poetry of France, at bottom, what they were, old French Gothic still, gilds
their surfaces with a strange, delightful, foreign aspect passing over all that
Northern land, in itself neither deeper nor more permanent than a chance
effect of light. He reinforces, he doubles the French daintiness by Italian

finesse. Thereupon, nearly all the force and all the seriousness of French
work disappear; only the elegance, the aerial touch, the perfect manner
remain. But this elegance, this manner, this daintiness of execution are
consummate, and have an unmistakable aesthetic value.

So the old French chanson, which, like the old Northern Gothic
ornament, though it sometimes refined itself into a sort of weird elegance,
was often, in its essence, something rude and formless, became in the hands
of Ronsard a Pindaric ode. He gave it structure, a sustained system, strophe
and antistrophe, and taught it a changefulness and variety of metre which
keep the curiosity always excited, so that the very aspect of it, as it lies
written on the page, carries the eye lightly onwards, and of which this is a
good instance:—
Avril, la grace, et le ris
De Cypris,
Le flair et la douce haleine;
Avril, le parfum des dieux,
Qui, des cieux,
Sentent l'odeur de la plaine;

C'est toy, courteis et gentil,
Qui, d'exil
Retire ces passageres,
Ces arondelles qui vont,
Et qui sont
Du printemps les messageres.

That is not by Ronsard, but by Remy Belleau, for Ronsard soon came to
have a school. Six other poets threw in their lot with him in his literary
revolution—this Remy Belleau, Antoine de Baif, Pontus de Tyard, Etienne
Jodelle, Jean Daurat, and lastly Joachim du Bellay; and with that strange
love of emblems which is characteristic of the time, which covered all the
works of Francis the First with the salamander, and all the works of Henry
the Second with the double crescent, and all the works of Anne of Brittany
with the knotted cord, they called themselves the Pleiad; seven in all,
although, as happens with the celestial Pleiad, if you scrutinise this
constellation of poets more carefully you may find there a great number of
minor stars.

The first note of this literary revolution was struck by Joachim du Bellay
in a little tract written at the early age of twenty-four, which coming to us
through three centuries seems of yesterday, so full is it of those delicate
critical distinctions which are sometimes supposed peculiar to modern
writers. The piece has for its title La Deffense et Illustration de la langue
Francoyse; and its problem is how to illustrate or ennoble the French
language, to give it lustre. We are accustomed to speak of the varied critical
and creative movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the
Renaissance, and because we have a single name for it we may sometimes
fancy that there was more unity in the thing itself than there really was.
Even the Reformation, that other great movement of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, had far less unity, far less of combined action, than is at
first sight supposed; and the Renaissance was infinitely less united, less
conscious of combined action, than the Reformation. But if anywhere the
Renaissance became conscious, as a German philosopher might say, if ever
it was understood as a systematic movement by those who took part in it, it
is in this little book of Joachim du Bellay's, which it is impossible to read
without feeling the excitement, the animation, of change, of discovery. "It is
a remarkable fact," says M. Sainte-Beuve, "and an inversion of what is true
of other languages, that, in French, prose has always had the precedence
over poetry." Du Bellay's prose is perfectly transparent, flexible, and chaste.
In many ways it is a more characteristic example of the culture of the Pleiad
than any of its verse; and those who love the whole movement of which the
Pleiad is a part, for a weird foreign grace in it, and may be looking about for
a true specimen of it, cannot have a better than Joachim du Bellay and this
little treatise of his.

Du Bellay's object is to adjust the existing French culture to the
rediscovered classical culture; and in discussing this problem, and
developing the theories of the Pleiad, he has lighted upon many principles
of permanent truth and applicability. There were some who despaired of the
French language altogether, who thought it naturally incapable of the
fulness and elegance of Greek and Latin—cette elegance et copie qui est en
la langue Grecque et Romaine—that science could be adequately discussed,
and poetry nobly written, only in the dead languages. "Those who speak
thus," says Du Bellay, "make me think of those relics which one may only
see through a little pane of glass, and must not touch with one's hands. That

is what these people do with all branches of culture, which they keep shut
up in Greek and Latin books, not permitting one to see them otherwise, or
transport them out of dead words into those which are alive, and wing their
way daily through the months of men." "Languages," he says again, "are
not born like plants and trees, some naturally feeble and sickly, others
healthy and strong and apter to bear the weight of men's conceptions, but all
their virtue is generated in the world of choice and men's freewill
concerning them. Therefore, I cannot blame too strongly the rashness of
some of our countrymen, who being anything rather than Greeks or Latins,
depreciate and reject with more than stoical disdain everything written in
French; nor can I express my surprise at the odd opinion of some learned
men who think that our vulgar tongue is wholly incapable of erudition and
good literature."

It was an age of translations. Du Bellay himself translated two books of
the Aeneid, and other poetry, old and new, and there were some who
thought that the translation of the classical literature was the true means of
ennobling the French language:—strangers are ever favourites with us—
nous favorisons toujours les etrangers. Du Bellay moderates their
expectations. "I do not believe that one can learn the right use of them"—he
is speaking of figures and ornament in language—"from translations,
because it is impossible to reproduce them with the same grace with which
the original author used them. For each language has, I know not what
peculiarity of its own; and if you force yourself to express the naturalness
(le naif) of this, in another language, observing the law of translation, which
is, not to expatiate beyond the limits of the author himself; your words will
be constrained, cold and ungraceful." Then he fixes the test of all good
translation:—"To prove this, read me Demosthenes and Homer in Latin,
Cicero and Virgil in French, and see whether they produce in you the same
affections which you experience in reading those authors in the original."

In this effort to ennoble the French language, to give it grace, number,
perfection, and as painters do to their pictures, that last, so desirable, touch
—cette derniere main que nous desirons—what Du Bellay is pleading for is
his mother-tongue, the language, that is, in which one will have the utmost
degree of what is moving and passionate. He recognised of what force the
music and dignity of languages are, how they enter into the inmost part of

things; and in pleading for the cultivation of the French language, he is
pleading for no merely scholastic interest, but for freedom, impulse, reality,
not in literature merely, but in daily communion of speech. After all, it was
impossible to have this impulse in Greek and Latin, dead languages shut up
in books as in reliquaries—peris et mises en reliquaires de livres. By aid of
this starveling stock—pauvre plante et vergette—of the French language, he
must speak delicately, movingly, if he is ever to speak so at all: that, or
none, must be for him the medium of what he calls, in one of his great
phrases, le discours fatal des choses mondaines—that discourse about
affairs which decides men's fates. And it is his patriotism not to despair of
it; he sees it already perfect in all elegance and beauty of words—parfait en
toute elegance et venuste de paroles.

Du Bellay was born in the disastrous year 1525, the year of the battle of
Pavia, and the captivity of Francis the First. . His parents died early, and to
him, as the younger son, his mother's little estate, ce petit Lire, the beloved
place of his birth, descended. He was brought up by a brother only a little
older than himself; and left to themselves, the two boys passed their lives in
day-dreams of military glory. Their education was neglected; "The time of
my youth," says Du Bellay, "was lost, like the flower which no shower
waters, and no hand cultivates." He was just twenty years old when the
elder brother died, leaving Joachim to be the guardian of his child. It was
with regret, with a shrinking feeling of incapacity, that he took upon him the
burden of this responsibility. Hitherto he had looked forward to the
profession of a soldier, hereditary in his family. But at this time a sickness
attacked him which brought him cruel sufferings, and seemed likely to be
mortal. It was then for the first time that he read the Greek and Latin poets.
These studies came too late to make him what he so much desired to be, a
trifler in Greek and Latin verse, like so many others of his time now
forgotten; instead, they made him a lover of his own homely native tongue,
that poor starveling stock of the French language. It was through this
fortunate shortcoming in his education that he became national and modern;
and he learned afterwards to look back on that wild garden of his youth
with only a half regret. A certain Cardinal du Bellay was the successful
member of the family, a man often employed in high official affairs. It was
to him that the thoughts of Joachim turned when it became necessary to
choose a profession, and in 1552 he accompanied the Cardinal to Rome. He

remained there nearly five years, burdened with the weight of affairs, and
languishing with home-sickness. Yet it was under these circumstances that
his genius yielded its best fruits. From Rome, which to most men of an
imaginative temperament such as his would have yielded so many
pleasurable sensations, with all the curiosities of the Renaissance still fresh
there, his thoughts went back painfully, longingly, to the country of the
Loire, with its wide expanses of waving corn, its homely pointed roofs of
grey slate, and its far-off scent of the sea. He reached home at last, but only
to die there, quite suddenly, one wintry day, at the early age of thirty-five.

Much of Du Bellay's poetry illustrates rather the age and school to which
he belonged than his own temper and genius. As with the writings of
Ronsard and the other poets of the Pleiad, its interest depends not so much
on the impress of individual genius upon it, as on the circumstance that it
was once poetry a la mode, that it is part of the manner of a time—a time
which made much of manner, and carried it to a high degree of perfection.
It is one of the decorations of an age which threw much of its energy into
the work of decoration. We feel a pensive pleasure in seeing these faded
decorations, and observing how a group of actual men and women pleased
themselves long ago. Ronsard's poems are a kind of epitome of his age. Of
one side of that age, it is true, of the strenuous, the progressive, the serious
movement, which was then going on, there is little; but of the catholic side,
the losing side, the forlorn hope, hardly a figure is absent. The Queen of
Scots, at whose desire Ronsard published his odes, reading him in her
northern prison, felt that he was bringing back to her the true flavour of her
early days in the court of Catherine at the Louvre, with its exotic Italian
gaieties. Those who disliked that poetry, disliked it because they found that
age itself distasteful. The poetry of Malherbe came, with its sustained style
and weighty sentiment, but with nothing that set people singing; and the
lovers of such poetry saw in the poetry of the Pleiad only the latest
trumpery of the middle age. But the time came also when the school of
Malherbe had had its day; and the Romanticists, who in their eagerness for
excitement, for strange music and imagery, went back to the works of the
middle age, accepted the Pleiad too with the rest; and in that new middle
age which their genius has evoked, the poetry of the Pleiad has found its
place. At first, with Malherbe, you may find it, like the architecture, the
whole mode of life, the very dresses of that time, fantastic, faded, rococo.

But if you look long enough to understand it, to conceive its sentiment, you
will find that those wanton lines have a spirit guiding their caprices. For
there is style there; one temper has shaped the whole; and everything that
has style, that has been done as no other man or age could have done it, as it
could never, for all our trying, be done again, has its true value and interest.
Let us dwell upon it for a moment, and try to gather from it that special
flower, ce fleur particulier, which Ronsard himself tells us every garden has.

It is poetry not for the people, but for a confined circle, for courtiers,
great lords and erudite persons, people who desire to be humoured, to
gratify a certain refined voluptuousness they have in them. Ronsard loves,
or dreams that he loves, a rare and peculiar type of beauty, la petite pucelle
Angevine, with golden hair and dark eyes. But he has the ambition not only
of being a courtier and a lover, but a great scholar also; he is anxious about
orthography, about the letter e Grecque, the true spelling of Latin names in
French writing, and the restoration of the letter i to its primitive liberty—
del' i voyelle en sa premiere liberte. His poetry is full of quaint, remote
learning. He is just a little pedantic, true always to his own express
judgment, that to be natural is not enough for one who in poetry desires to
produce work worthy of immortality. And therewithal a certain number of
Greek words, which charmed Ronsard and his circle by their gaiety and
daintiness, and a certain air of foreign elegance about them, crept into the
French language: and there were other strange words which the poets of the
Pleiad forged for themselves, and which had only an ephemeral existence.

With this was mixed the desire to taste a more exquisite and various
music than that of the older French verse, or of the classical poets. The
music of the measured, scanned verse of Latin and Greek poetry is one
thing; the music of the rhymed, unscanned verse of Villon and the old
French poets, la poesie chantee, is another. To unite together these two
kinds of music in a new school of French poetry, to make verse which
should scan and rhyme as well, to search out and harmonise the measure of
every syllable, and unite it to the swift, flitting, swallow-like motion of
rhyme, to penetrate their poetry with a double music—this was the ambition
of the Pleiad. They are insatiable of music, they cannot have enough of it;
they desire a music of greater compass perhaps than words can possibly

yield, to drain out the last drops of sweetness which a certain note or accent
contains.

This eagerness for music is almost the only serious thing in the poetry of
the Pleiad; and it was Goudimel, the severe and protestant Goudimel, who
set Ronsard's songs to music. But except in this matter these poets seem
never quite in earnest. The old Greek and Roman mythology, which for the
great Italians had been a motive so weighty and severe, becomes with them
a mere toy. That "Lord of terrible aspect," Amor, has become Love, the boy
or the babe. They are full of fine railleries; they delight in diminutives,
ondelette, fontelette, doucelette, Cassandrette. Their loves are only half real,
a vain effort to prolong the imaginative loves of the middle age beyond
their natural lifetime. They write love-poems for hire. Like that party of
people who tell the tales in Boccaccio's Decameron, they form a circle
which in an age of great troubles, losses, anxieties, amuses itself with art,
poetry, intrigue. But they amuse themselves with wonderful elegance; and
sometimes their gaiety becomes satiric, for, as they play, real passions
insinuate themselves, and at least the reality of death; their dejection at the
thought of leaving this fair abode of our common daylight—le beau sejour
du commun jour—is expressed by them with almost wearisome reiteration.
But with this sentiment too they are able to trifle: the imagery of death
serves for delicate ornament, and they weave into the airy nothingness of
their verses their trite reflexions on the vanity of life; just as the grotesques
of the charnel-house nest themselves, together with birds and flowers and
the fancies of the pagan mythology, in the traceries of the architecture of
that time, which wantons in its delicate arabesques with the images of old
age and death.

Ronsard became deaf at sixteen; and it was this circumstance which
finally determined him to be a man of letters instead of a diplomatist,
significantly, one might fancy; of a certain premature agedness, and of the
tranquil, temperate sweetness appropriate to that, in the school of poetry
which he founded. Its charm is that of a thing not vigorous or original, but
full of the grace that comes of long study and reiterated refinements, and
many steps repeated, and many angles worn down, with an exquisite
faintness, une fadeur exquise, a certain tenuity and caducity, as for those
who can bear nothing vehement or strong; for princes weary of love, like

Francis the First, or of pleasure, like Henry the Third, or of action, like
Henry the Fourth. Its merits are those of the old,—grace and finish, perfect
in minute detail. For these people are a little jaded, and have a constant
desire for a subdued and delicate excitement, to warm their creeping fancy a
little. They love a constant change of rhyme in poetry, and in their houses
that strange, fantastic interweaving of thin, reed-like lines, which are a kind
of rhetoric in architecture.

But the poetry of the Pleiad is true not only to the physiognomy of its
age, but also to its country—ce pays du Vendomois—the names and scenery
of which so often recur in it; the great Loire, with its long spaces of white
sand; the little river Loir; the heathy, upland country, with its scattered pools
of water and waste road-sides, and retired manors, with their crazy old
feudal defences half fallen into decay; La Beauce, the granary of France,
where the vast rolling fields of corn seem to anticipate the great western sea
itself. It is full of the traits of that country. We see Du Bellay and Ronsard
gardening, or hunting with their dogs, or watch the pastimes of a rainy day;
and with this is connected a domesticity, a homeliness and simple goodness,
by which this Northern country gains upon the South. They have the love of
the aged for warmth, and understand the poetry of winter; for they are not
far from the Atlantic, and the west wind which comes up from it, turning
the poplars white, spares not this new Italy in France. So the fireside often
appears, with the pleasures of winter, about the vast emblazoned chimneys
of the time, and with a bonhomie as of little children, or old people.

It is in Du Bellay's Olive, a collection of sonnets in praise of a half-
imaginary lady, Sonnetz a la louange d'Olive, that these characteristics are
most abundant. Here is a perfectly crystallised specimen:—
D'amour, de grace, et de haulte valeur
Les feux divins estoient ceinctz et les cieulx
S'estoient vestuz d'un manteau precieux
A raiz ardens di diverse couleur:
Tout estoit plein de beaute, de bonheur,
La mer tranquille, et le vent gracieulx,
Quand celle la nasquit en ces bas lieux
Qui a pille du monde tout l'honneur.
Ell' prist son teint des beux lyz blanchissans,
Son chef de l'or, ses deux levres des rozes,
Et du soleil ses yeux resplandissans:
Le ciel usant de liberalite,

Mist en l'esprit ses semences encloses,
Son nom des Dieux prist l'immortalite.

That he is thus a characteristic specimen of the poetical taste of that age,
is indeed Du Bellay's chief interest. But if his work is to have the highest
sort of interest, if it is to do something more than satisfy curiosity, if it is to
have an aesthetic as distinct from an historical value, it is not enough for a
poet to have been the true child of his age, to have conformed to its
aesthetic conditions, and by so conforming to have charmed and stimulated
that age; it is necessary that there should be perceptible in his work
something individual, inventive, unique, the impress there of the writer's
own temper and personality. This impress M. Sainte-Beuve thought he
found in the Antiquites de Rome, and the Regrets, which he ranks as what
has been called poesie intime, that intensely modern sort of poetry in which
the writer has for his aim the portraiture of his own most intimate moods,
and to take the reader into his confidence. That generation had other
instances of this intimacy of sentiment: Montaigne's Essays are full of it, the
carvings of the church of Brou are full of it. M. Sainte-Beuve has perhaps
exaggerated the influence of this quality in Du Bellay's Regrets; but the
very name of the book has a touch of Rousseau about it, and reminds one of
a whole generation of self-pitying poets in modern times. It was in the
atmosphere of Rome, to him so strange and mournful, that these pale
flowers grew up; for that journey to Italy, which he deplored as the greatest
misfortune of his life, put him in full possession of his talent, and brought
out all its originality. And in effect you do find intimacy, intimite, here. The
trouble of his life is analysed, and the sentiment of it conveyed directly to
our minds; not a great sorrow or passion, but only the sense of loss in
passing days, the ennui of a dreamer who has to plunge into the world's
affairs, the opposition between actual life and the ideal, a longing for rest,
nostalgia, home-sickness—that pre-eminently childish, but so suggestive
sorrow, as significant of the final regret of all human creatures for the
familiar earth and limited sky. The feeling for landscape is often described
as a modern one; still more so is that for antiquity, the sentiment of ruins.
Du Bellay has this sentiment. The duration of the hard, sharp outlines of
things is a grief to him, and passing his wearisome days among the ruins of
ancient Rome, he is consoled by the thought that all must one day end, by

the sentiment of the grandeur of nothingness—la grandeur du rien. With a
strange touch of far-off mysticism, he thinks that the great whole—le grand
tout—into which all other things pass and lose themselves, ought itself
sometimes to perish and pass away. Nothing less can relieve his weariness.
From the stately aspects of Rome his thoughts went back continually to
France, to the smoking chimneys of his little village, the longer twilight of
the North, the soft climate of Anjou—la douceur Angevine; yet not so much
to the real France, we may be sure, with its dark streets and its roofs of
rough-hewn slate, as to that other country, with slenderer towers, and more
winding rivers, and trees like flowers, and with softer sunshine on more
gracefully-proportioned fields and ways, which the fancy of the exile, and
the pilgrim, and of the schoolboy far from home, and of those kept at home
unwillingly, everywhere builds up before or behind them.

He came home at last, through the Grisons, by slow journeys; and there,
in the cooler air of his own country, under its skies of milkier blue, the
sweetest flower of his genius sprang up. There have been poets whose
whole fame has rested on one poem, as Gray's on the Elegy in a Country
Churchyard, or Ronsard's, as many critics have thought, on the eighteen
lines of one famous ode. Du Bellay has almost been the poet of one poem;
and this one poem of his is an Italian thing transplanted into that green
country of Anjou; out of the Latin verses of Andrea Navagero, into French:
but it is a thing in which the matter is almost nothing, and the form almost
everything; and the form of the poem as it stands, written in old French, is
all Du Bellay's own. It is a song which the winnowers are supposed to sing
as they winnow the corn, and they invoke the winds to lie lightly on the
grain.
D'UN VANNEUR DE BLE AUX VENTS*

A vous trouppe legere
Qui d'aile passagere
Par le monde volez,
Et d'un sifflant murmure
L'ombrageuse verdure
Doulcement esbranlez.

J'offre ces violettes,
Ces lis & ces fleurettes,
Et ces roses icy,
Ces vermeillettes roses

Sont freschement ecloses,
Et ces oelliets aussi.

De vostre doulce haleine,
Eventez ceste plaine
Eventez ce sejour;
Ce pendant que j'ahanne
A mon ble que je vanne
A la chaleur du jour.

*A graceful translation of this and some other poems of the Pleiad may be found
in Ballads and Lyrics of old France, by Mr. Andrew Lang.

That has, in the highest degree, the qualities, the value, of the whole
Pleiad school of poetry, of the whole phase of taste from which that school
derives—a certain silvery grace of fancy, nearly all the pleasures of which
is in the surprise at the happy and dexterous way in which a thing slight in
itself is handled. The sweetness of it is by no means to be got at by
crushing, as you crush wild herbs to get at their perfume. One seems to hear
the measured falling of the fans, with a child's pleasure on coming across
the incident for the first time, in one of those great barns of Du Bellay's own
country, La Beauce, the granary of France. A sudden light transfigures a
trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the
barn door: a moment—and the thing has vanished, because it was pure
effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may
happen again.

1872.

WINCKELMANN

ET EGO IN ARCADIA FUI

Goethe's fragments of art-criticism contain a few pages of strange
pregnancy on the character of Winckelmann. He speaks of the teacher who
had made his career possible, but whom he had never seen, as of an abstract

type of culture, consummate, tranquil, withdrawn already into the region of
ideals, yet retaining colour from the incidents of a passionate intellectual
life. He classes him with certain works of art, possessing an inexhaustible
gift of suggestion, to which criticism may return again and again with
renewed freshness. Hegel, in his lectures on the Philosophy of Art,
estimating the work of his predecessors, has also passed a remarkable
judgment on Winckelmann's writings:—"Winckelmann, by contemplation
of the ideal works of the ancients, received a sort of inspiration, through
which he opened a new sense for the study of art. He is to be regarded as
one of those who, in the sphere of art, have known how to initiate a new
organ for the human spirit." That it has given a new sense, that it has laid
open a new organ, is the highest that can be said of any critical effort. It is
interesting then to ask what kind of man it was who thus laid open a new
organ. Under what conditions was that effected?

Johann Joachim Winckelmann was born at Stendal, in Brandenburg, in
the year 1717. The child of a poor tradesman, he passed through many
struggles in early youth, the memory of which ever remained in him as a
fitful cause of dejection. In 1763, in the full emancipation of his spirit,
looking over the beautiful Roman prospect, he writes—"One gets spoiled
here; but God owed me this; in my youth I suffered too much." Destined to
assert and interpret the charm of the Hellenic spirit, he served first a painful
apprenticeship in the tarnished intellectual world of Germany in the earlier
half of the eighteenth century. Passing out of that into the happy light of the
antique, he had a sense of exhilaration almost physical. We find him as a
child in the dusky precincts of a German school, hungrily feeding on a few
colourless books. The master of this school grows blind; Winckelmann
becomes his famulus. The old man would have had him study theology.
Winckelmann, free of the master's library, chooses rather to become
familiar with the Greek classics. Herodotus and Homer win, with their
"vowelled" Greek, his warmest enthusiasm; whole nights of fever are
devoted to them; disturbing dreams of an Odyssey of his own come to him.
"He felt in himself," says Madame de Stael, "an ardent attraction towards
the South." In German imaginations even now traces are often to be found
of that love of the sun, that weariness of the North (cette fatigue du nord),
which carried the northern peoples away into those countries of the South.
A fine sky brings to birth sentiments not unlike the love of one's Fatherland.

To most of us, after all our steps towards it, the antique world, in spite of
its intense outlines, its perfect self-expression, still remains faint and
remote. To him, closely limited except on the one side of the ideal, building
for his dark poverty "a house not made with hands," it early came to seem
more real than the present. In the fantastic plans of foreign travel
continually passing through his mind, to Egypt, for instance, and to France,
there seems always to be rather a wistful sense of something lost to be
regained, than the desire of discovering anything new. Goethe has told us
how, in his eagerness actually to handle the antique, he became interested in
the insignificant vestiges of it which the neighbourhood of Strasburg
contained. So we hear of Winckelmann's boyish antiquarian wanderings
among the ugly Brandenburg sandhills. Such a conformity between himself
and Winckelmann, Goethe would have gladly noted.

At twenty-one he enters the University at Halle, to study theology, as his
friends desire; instead, he becomes the enthusiastic translator of Herodotus.
The condition of Greek learning in German schools and universities had
fallen, and there were no professors at Halle who could satisfy his sharp,
intellectual craving. Of his professional education he always speaks with
scorn, claiming to have been his own teacher from first to last. His
appointed teachers did not perceive that a new source of culture was within
their hands. Homo vagus et inconstans!—one of them pedantically reports
of the future pilgrim to Rome, unaware on which side his irony was
whetted. When professional education confers nothing but irritation on a
Schiller, no one ought to be surprised; for Schiller, and such as he, are
primarily spiritual adventurers. But that Winckelmann, the votary of the
gravest of intellectual traditions, should get nothing but an attempt at
suppression from the professional guardians of learning, is what may well
surprise us.

In 1743 he became master of a school at Seehausen. This was the most
wearisome period of his life. Notwithstanding a success in dealing with
children, which seems to testify to something simple and primeval in his
nature, he found the work of teaching very depressing. Engaged in this
work, he writes that he still has within him a longing desire to attain to the
knowledge of beauty—sehnlich wuenschte zur Kenntniss des Schoenen zu
gelangen. He had to shorten his nights, sleeping only four hours, to gain

time for reading. And here Winckelmann made a step forward in culture. He
multiplied his intellectual force by detaching from it all flaccid interests. He
renounced mathematics and law, in which his reading had been
considerable,—all but the literature of the arts. Nothing was to enter into his
life unpenetrated by its central enthusiasm. At this time he undergoes the
charm of Voltaire. Voltaire belongs to that flimsier, more artificial, classical
tradition, which Winckelmann was one day to supplant, by the clear ring,
the eternal outline of the genuine antique. But it proves the authority of
such a gift as Voltaire's that it allures and wins even those born to supplant
it. Voltaire's impression on Winckelmann was never effaced; and it gave
him a consideration for French literature which contrasts with his contempt
for the literary products of Germany. German literature transformed,
siderealised, as we see it in Goethe, reckons Winckelmann among its
initiators. But Germany at that time presented nothing in which he could
have anticipated Iphigenie, and the formation of an effective classical
tradition in German literature.

Under this purely literary influence, Winckelmann protests against
Christian Wolff and the philosophers. Goethe, in speaking of this protest,
alludes to his own obligations to Emmanuel Kant. Kant's influence over the
culture of Goethe, which he tells us could not have been resisted by him
without loss, consisted in a severe limitation to the concrete. But he adds,
that in born antiquaries, like Winckelmann, constant handling of the
antique, with its eternal outline, maintains that limitation as effectually as a
critical philosophy. Plato, however, saved so often for his redeeming literary
manner, is excepted from Winckelmann's proscription of the philosophers.
The modern student most often meets Plato on that side which seems to
pass beyond Plato into a world no longer pagan, based on the conception of
a spiritual life. But the element of affinity which he presents to
Winckelmann is that which is wholly Greek, and alien from the Christian
world, represented by that group of brilliant youths in the Lysis, still
uninfected by any spiritual sickness, finding the end of all endeavour in the
aspects of the human form, the continual stir and motion of a comely
human life.

This new-found interest in Plato's dialogues could not fail to increase his
desire to visit the countries of the classical tradition. "It is my misfortune,"

he writes, "that I was not born to great place, wherein I might have had
cultivation, and the opportunity of following my instinct and forming
myself." A visit to Rome probably was already purposed, and he silently
preparing for it. Count Buenau, the author of an historical work then of
note, had collected at Noethenitz a valuable library, now part of the library
of Dresden. In 1784 Winckelmann wrote to Buenau in halting French:—He
is emboldened, he says, by Buenau's indulgence for needy men of letters.
He desires only to devote himself to study, having never allowed himself to
be dazzled by favourable prospects of the Church. He hints at his doubtful
position "in a metaphysical age, when humane literature is trampled under
foot. At present," he goes on, "little value is set on Greek literature, to
which I have devoted myself so far as I could penetrate, when good books
are so scarce and expensive." Finally, he desires a place in some corner of
Buenau's library. "Perhaps, at some future time, I shall become more useful
to the public, if, drawn from obscurity in whatever way, I can find means to
maintain myself in the capital."

Soon afterwards we find Winckelmann in the library at Noethenitz.
Thence he made many visits to the collection of antiquities at Dresden. He
became acquainted with many artists, above all with Oeser, Goethe's future
friend and master, who, uniting a high culture with the practical knowledge
of art, was fitted to minister to Winckelmann's culture. And now there
opened for him a new way of communion with the Greek life. Hitherto he
had handled the words only of Greek poetry, stirred indeed and roused by
them, yet divining beyond the words an unexpressed pulsation of sensuous
life. Suddenly he is in contact with that life, still fervent in the relics of
plastic art. Filled as our culture is with the classical spirit, we can hardly
imagine how deeply the human mind was moved, when, at the Renaissance,
in the midst of a frozen world, the buried fire of ancient art rose up from
under the soil. Winckelmann here reproduces for us the earlier sentiment of
the Renaissance. On a sudden the imagination feels itself free. How facile
and direct, it seems to say, is this life of the senses and the understanding,
when once we have apprehended it! Here, surely, is the more liberal life we
have been seeking so long, so near to us all the while. How mistaken and
roundabout have been our efforts to reach it by mystic passion, and
monastic reverie; how they have deflowered the flesh; how little they have
emancipated us! Hermione melts from her stony posture, and the lost

proportions of life right themselves. Here, then, we see in vivid realisation
the native tendency of Winckelmann to escape from abstract theory to
intuition, to the exercise of sight and touch. Lessing, in the Laocoon, has
theorised finely on the relation of poetry to sculpture; and philosophy can
give us theoretical reasons why not poetry but sculpture should be the most
sincere and exact expression of the Greek ideal. By a happy, unperplexed
dexterity, Winckelmann solves the question in the concrete. It is what
Goethe calls his Gewahrwerden der griechischen Kunst, his FINDING of
Greek art.

Through the tumultuous richness of Goethe's culture, the influence of
Winckelmann is always discernible, as the strong, regulative under-current
of a clear, antique motive. "One learns nothing from him," he says to
Eckermann, "but one becomes something." If we ask what the secret of this
influence was, Goethe himself will tell us—elasticity, wholeness,
intellectual integrity. And yet these expressions, because they fit Goethe,
with his universal culture, so well, seem hardly to describe the narrow,
exclusive interest of Winckelmann. Doubtless Winckelmann's perfection is
a narrow perfection: his feverish nursing of the one motive of his life is a
contrast to Goethe's various energy. But what affected Goethe, what
instructed him and ministered to his culture, was the integrity, the truth to
its type, of the given force. The development of his force was the single
interest of Winckelmann, unembarrassed by anything else in him. Other
interests, practical or intellectual, those slighter talents and motives not
supreme, which in most men are the waste part of nature, and drain away
their vitality, he plucked out and cast from him. The protracted longing of
his youth is not a vague, romantic longing: he knows what he longs for,
what he wills. Within its severe limits his enthusiasm burns like lava. "You
know," says Lavater, speaking of Winckelmann's countenance, "that I
consider ardour and indifference by no means incompatible in the same
character. If ever there was a striking instance of that union, it is in the
countenance before us." "A lowly childhood," says Goethe, "insufficient
instruction in youth, broken, distracted studies in early manhood, the burden
of school-keeping! He was thirty years old before he enjoyed a single
favour of fortune: but as soon as he had attained to an adequate condition of
freedom, he appears before us consummate and entire, complete in the
ancient sense."

But his hair is turning grey, and he has not yet reached the south. The
Saxon court had become Roman Catholic, and the way to favour at Dresden
was through Romish ecclesiastics. Probably the thought of a profession of
the Romish religion was not new to Winckelmann. At one time he had
thought of begging his way to Rome, from cloister to cloister, under the
pretence of a disposition to change his faith. In 1751, the papal nuncio,
Archinto, was one of the visitors at Noethenitz. He suggested Rome as the
fitting stage for Winckelmann's attainments, and held out the hope of a
place in the papal library. Cardinal Passionei, charmed with Winckelmann's
beautiful Greek writing, was ready to play the part of Maecenas, on
condition that the necessary change should be made. Winckelmann
accepted the bribe, and visited the nuncio at Dresden. Unquiet still at the
word "profession," not without a struggle, he joined the Romish Church,
July the 11th, 1754.

Goethe boldly pleads that Winckelmann was a pagan, that the landmarks
of Christendom meant nothing to him. It is clear that he intended to deceive
no one by his disguise; fears of the inquisition are sometimes visible during
his life in Rome; he entered Rome notoriously with the works of Voltaire in
his possession; the thought of what Count Buenau might be thinking of him
seems to have been his greatest difficulty. On the other hand, he may have
had a sense of a certain antique, and as it were pagan grandeur in the
Roman Catholic religion. Turning from the crabbed Protestantism, which
had been the weariness of his youth, he might reflect that while Rome had
reconciled itself to the Renaissance, the Protestant principle in art had cut
off Germany from the supreme tradition of beauty. And yet to that
transparent nature, with its simplicity as of the earlier world, the loss of
absolute sincerity must have been a real loss. Goethe understands that
Winckelmann had made this sacrifice. Yet at the bar of the highest criticism,
perhaps, Winckelmann may be absolved. The insincerity of his religious
profession was only one incident of a culture in which the moral instinct,
like the religious or political, was merged in the artistic. But then the artistic
interest was that by desperate faithfulness to which Winckelmann was
saved from the mediocrity, which, breaking through no bounds, moves ever
in a bloodless routine, and misses its one chance in the life of the spirit and
the intellect. There have been instances of culture developed by every high
motive in turn, and yet intense at every point; and the aim of our culture

should be to attain not only as intense but as complete a life as possible. But
often the higher life is only possible at all, on condition of the selection of
that in which one's motive is native and strong; and this selection involves
the renunciation of a crown reserved for others. Which is better?—to lay
open a new sense, to initiate a new organ for the human spirit, or to
cultivate many types of perfection up to a point which leaves us still beyond
the range of their transforming power? Savonarola is one type of success;
Winckelmann is another; criticism can reject neither, because each is true to
itself. Winckelmann himself explains the motive of his life when he says,
"It will be my highest reward, if posterity acknowledges that I have written
worthily."

For a time he remained at Dresden. There his first book appeared,
Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works of Art in Painting and Sculpture.
Full of obscurities as it was, obscurities which baffled but did not offend
Goethe when he first turned to art-criticism, its purpose was direct—an
appeal from the artificial classicism of the day to the study of the antique.
The book was well received, and a pension supplied through the king's
confessor. In September 1755 he started for Rome, in the company of a
young Jesuit. He was introduced to Raphael Mengs, a painter then of note,
and found a home near him, in the artists' quarter, in a place where he could
"overlook, far and wide, the eternal city." At first he was perplexed with the
sense of being a stranger on what was to him, spiritually, native soil.
"Unhappily," he cries in French, often selected by him as the vehicle of
strong feeling, "I am one of those whom the Greeks call opsimatheis.—I
have come into the world and into Italy too late." More than thirty years
afterwards, Goethe also, after many aspirations and severe preparation of
mind, visited Italy. In early manhood, just as he too was FINDING Greek
art, the rumour of that high artist's life of Winckelmann in Italy had strongly
moved him. At Rome, spending a whole year drawing from the antique, in
preparation for Iphigenie, he finds the stimulus of Winckelmann's memory
ever active. Winckelmann's Roman life was simple, primeval, Greek. His
delicate constitution permitted him the use only of bread and wine.
Condemned by many as a renegade, he had no desire for places of honour,
but only to see his merits acknowledged, and existence assured to him. He
was simple without being niggardly; he desired to be neither poor nor rich.

Winckelmann's first years in Rome present all the elements of an
intellectual situation of the highest interest. The beating of the intellect
against its bars, the sombre aspect, the alien traditions, the still barbarous
literature of Germany, are afar off; before him are adequate conditions of
culture, the sacred soil itself, the first tokens of the advent of the new
German literature, with its broad horizons, its boundless intellectual
promise. Dante, passing from the darkness of the Inferno, is filled with a
sharp and joyful sense of light, which makes him deal with it, in the
opening of the Purgatorio, in a wonderfully touching and penetrative way.
Hellenism, which is the principle pre-eminently of intellectual light (our
modern culture may have more colour, the medieval spirit greater heat and
profundity, but Hellenism is pre-eminent for light), has always been most
effectively conceived by those who have crept into it out of an intellectual
world in which the sombre elements predominate. So it had been in the ages
of the Renaissance. This repression, removed at last, gave force and glow to
Winckelmann's native affinity to the Hellenic spirit. "There had been known
before him," says Madame de Stael, "learned men who might be consulted
like books; but no one had, if I may say so, made himself a pagan for the
purpose of penetrating antiquity." "One is always a poor executant of
conceptions not one's own."—On execute mal ce qu'on n'a pas concu soi-
meme*—words spoken on so high an occasion—are true in their measure
of every genuine enthusiasm. Enthusiasm—that, in the broad Platonic sense
of the Phaedrus, was the secret of his divinatory power over the Hellenic
world. This enthusiasm, dependent as it is to a great degree on bodily
temperament, has a power of re-enforcing the purer emotions of the
intellect with an almost physical excitement. That his affinity with
Hellenism was not merely intellectual, that the subtler threads of
temperament were inwoven in it, is proved by his romantic, fervent
friendships with young men. He has known, he says, many young men
more beautiful than Guido's archangel. These friendships, bringing him in
contact with the pride of human form, and staining his thoughts with its
bloom, perfected his reconciliation with the spirit of Greek sculpture. A
letter on taste, addressed from Rome to a young nobleman, Friedrich von
Berg, is the record of such a friendship.
*Words of Charlotte Corday before the Convention.

"I shall excuse my delay," he begins, "in fulfilling my promise of an
essay on the taste for beauty in works of art, in the words of Pindar. He says
to Agesidamus, a youth of Locri—ideai te kalon, horai te kekramenon—
whom he had kept waiting for an intended ode, that a debt paid with usury
is the end of reproach. This may win your good-nature on behalf of my
present essay, which has turned out far more detailed and circumstantial
than I had at first intended.

"It is from yourself that the subject is taken. Our intercourse has been
short, too short both for you and me; but the first time I saw you, the
affinity of our spirits was revealed to me: your culture proved that my hope
was not groundless; and I found in a beautiful body a soul created for
nobleness, gifted with the sense of beauty. My parting from you was
therefore one of the most painful in my life; and that this feeling continues
our common friend is witness, for your separation from me leaves me no
hope of seeing you again. Let this essay be a memorial of our friendship,
which, on my side, is free from every selfish motive, and ever remains
subject and dedicate to yourself alone."

The following passage is characteristic—

"As it is confessedly the beauty of man which is to be conceived under
one general idea, so I have noticed that those who are observant of beauty
only in women, and are moved little or not at all by the beauty of men,
seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for beauty in art. To such
persons the beauty of Greek art will ever seem wanting, because its
supreme beauty is rather male than female. But the beauty of art demands a
higher sensibility than the beauty of nature, because the beauty of art, like
tears shed at a play, gives no pain, is without life, and must be awakened
and repaired by culture. Now, as the spirit of culture is much more ardent in
youth than in manhood, the instinct of which I am speaking must be
exercised and directed to what is beautiful, before that age is reached, at
which one would be afraid to confess that one had no taste for it."

Certainly, of that beauty of living form which regulated Winckelmann's
friendships, it could not be said that it gave no pain. One notable friendship,
the fortune of which we may trace through his letters, begins with an
antique, chivalrous letter in French, and ends noisily in a burst of angry fire.

Far from reaching the quietism, the bland indifference of art, such
attachments are nevertheless more susceptible than any others of equal
strength of a purely intellectual culture. Of passion, of physical excitement,
they contain only just so much as stimulates the eye to the finest delicacies
of colour and form. These friendships, often the caprices of a moment,
make Winckelmann's letters, with their troubled colouring, an instructive
but bizarre addition to the History of Art, that shrine of grave and mellow
light for the mute Olympian family. The impression which Winckelmann's
literary life conveyed to those about him was that of excitement, intuition,
inspiration, rather than the contemplative evolution of general principles.
The quick, susceptible enthusiast, betraying his temperament even in
appearance, by his olive complexion, his deep-seated, piercing eyes, his
rapid movements, apprehended the subtlest principles of the Hellenic
manner, not through the understanding, but by instinct or touch. A German
biographer of Winckelmann has compared him to Columbus. That is not the
aptest of comparisons; but it reminds one of a passage in which M. Edgar
Quinet describes the great discoverer's famous voyage. His science was
often at fault; but he had a way of estimating at once the slightest indication
of land, in a floating weed or passing bird; he seemed actually to come
nearer to nature than other men. And that world in which others had moved
with so much embarrassment, seems to call out in Winckelmann new senses
fitted to deal with it. He is in touch with it; it penetrates him, and becomes
part of his temperament. He remodels his writings with constant renewal of
insight; he catches the thread of a whole sequence of laws in some
hollowing of the hand, or dividing of the hair; he seems to realise that fancy
of the reminiscence of a forgotten knowledge hidden for a time in the mind
itself; as if the mind of one, lover and philosopher at once in some phase of
pre-existence-philosophesas pote met' erotos—fallen into a new cycle, were
beginning its intellectual culture over again, yet with a certain power of
anticipating its results. So comes the truth of Goethe's judgments on his
works; they are a life, a living thing, designed for those who are alive—ein
Lebendiges fuer die Lebendigen geschrieben, ein Leben selbst.

In 1785 Cardinal Albani, who possessed in his Roman villa a precious
collection of antiquities, became Winckelmann's patron. Pompeii had just
opened its treasures; Winckelmann gathered its first-fruits. But his plan of a
visit to Greece remained unfulfilled. From his first arrival in Rome he had

kept the History of Ancient Art ever in view. All his other writings were a
preparation for that. It appeared, finally, in 1764; but even after its
publication Winckelmann was still employed in perfecting it. It is since his
time that many of the most significant examples of Greek art have been
submitted to criticism. He had seen little or nothing of what we ascribe to
the age of Pheidias; and his conception of Greek art tends, therefore, to put
the mere elegance of the imperial society of ancient Rome in place of the
severe and chastened grace of the palaestra. For the most part he had to
penetrate to Greek art through copies, imitations, and later Roman art itself;
and it is not surprising that this turbid medium has left in Winckelmann's
actual results much that a more privileged criticism can correct.

He had been twelve years in Rome. Admiring Germany had many calls
to him; at last, in 1768, he set out to revisit the country of his birth; and as
he left Rome, a strange, inverted home-sickness, a strange reluctance to
leave it at all, came over him. He reached Vienna: there he was loaded with
honours and presents: other cities were awaiting him. Goethe, then nineteen
years old, studying art at Leipsic, was expecting his coming, with that
wistful eagerness which marked his youth, when the news of
Winckelmann's murder arrived. All that "weariness of the North" had
revived with double force. He left Vienna, intending to hasten back to
Rome. At Trieste a delay of a few days occurred. With characteristic
openness, Winckelmann had confided his plans to a fellow-traveller, a man
named Arcangeli, and had shown him the gold medals received at Vienna.
Arcangeli's avarice was aroused. One morning he entered Winckelmann's
room, under pretence of taking leave; Winckelmann was then writing
"memoranda for the future editor of the History of Art," still seeking the
perfection of his great work. Arcangeli begged to see the medals once more.
As Winckelmann stooped down to take them from the chest, a cord was
thrown round his neck. Some time afterwards, a child whose friendship
Winckelmann had made to beguile the delay, knocked at the door, and
receiving no answer, gave an alarm. Winckelmann was found dangerously
wounded, and died a few hours later, after receiving the sacraments of the
Romish Church. It seemed as if the gods, in reward for his devotion to
them, had given him a death which, for its swiftness and its opportunity, he
might well have desired. "He has," says Goethe, "the advantage of figuring
in the memory of posterity, as one eternally able and strong; for the image

in which one leaves the world is that in which one moves among the
shadows." Yet, perhaps, it is not fanciful to regret that the meeting with
Goethe did not take place. Goethe, then in all the pregnancy of his
wonderful youth, still unruffled by the press and storm of his earlier
manhood, was awaiting Winckelmann with a curiosity of the worthiest
kind. As it was, Winckelmann became to him something like what Virgil
was to Dante. And Winckelmann, with his fiery friendships, had reached
that age and that period of culture at which emotions hitherto fitful,
sometimes concentrate themselves in a vital, unchangeable relationship.
German literary history seems to have lost the chance of one of those
famous friendships, the very tradition of which becomes a stimulus to
culture, and exercises an imperishable influence.

In one of the frescoes of the Vatican, Raffaelle has commemorated the
tradition of the Catholic religion. Against a strip of peaceful sky, broken in
upon by the beatific vision, are ranged the great personages of. Christian
history, with the Sacrament in the midst. Another fresco of Raffaelle in the
same apartment presents a very different company, Dante alone appearing
in both. Surrounded by the muses of Greek mythology, under a thicket of
myrtles, sits Apollo, with the sources of Castalia at his feet. On either side
are grouped those on whom the spirit of Apollo descended, the classical and
Renaissance poets, to whom the waters of Castalia come down, a river
making glad this other city of God. In this fresco it is the classical tradition,
the orthodoxy of taste, that Raffaelle commemorates. Winckelmann's
intellectual history authenticates the claims of this tradition in human
culture. In the countries where that tradition arose, where it still lurked
about its own artistic relics, and changes of language had not broken its
continuity, national pride might sometimes light up anew an enthusiasm for
it. Aliens might imitate that enthusiasm, and classicism become from time
to time an intellectual fashion. But Winckelmann was not further removed
by language, than by local aspects and associations, from those vestiges of
the classical spirit; and he lived at a time when, in Germany, classical
studies were out of favour. Yet, remote in time and place, he feels after the
Hellenic world, divines the veins of ancient art, in which its life still
circulates, and, like Scyles, the half-barbarous yet Hellenising king, in the
beautiful story of Herodotus, is irresistibly attracted by it. This testimony to
the authority of the Hellenic tradition, its fitness to satisfy some vital

requirement of the intellect, which Winckelmann contributes as a solitary
man of genius, is offered also by the general history of culture. The spiritual
forces of the past, which have prompted and informed the culture of a
succeeding age, live, indeed, within that culture, but with an absorbed,
underground life. The Hellenic element alone has not been so absorbed, or
content with this underground life; from time to time it has started to the
surface; culture has been drawn back to its sources to be clarified and
corrected. Hellenism is not merely an absorbed element in our intellectual
life; it is a conscious tradition in it.

Again, individual genius works ever under conditions of time and place:
its products are coloured by the varying aspects of nature, and type of
human form, and outward manners of life. There is thus an element of
change in art; criticism must never for a moment forget that "the artist is the
child of his time." But besides these conditions of time and place, and
independent of them, there is also an element of permanence, a standard of
taste, which genius confesses. This standard is maintained in a purely
intellectual tradition; it acts upon the artist, not as one of the influences of
his own age, but by means of the artistic products of the previous
generation, which in youth have excited, and at the same time directed into
a particular channel, his sense of beauty. The supreme artistic products of
each generation thus form a series of elevated points, taking each from each
the reflexion of a strange light, the source of which is not in the atmosphere
around and above them, but in a stage of society remote from ours. This
standard takes its rise in Greece, at a definite historical period. A tradition
for all succeeding generations, it originates in a spontaneous growth out of
the influences of Greek society. What were the conditions under which this
ideal, this standard of artistic orthodoxy, was generated? How was Greece
enabled to force its thought upon Europe?

Greek art, when we first catch sight of it, is entangled with Greek
religion. We are accustomed to think of Greek religion as the religion of art
and beauty, the religion of which the Olympian Zeus and the Athena Polias
are the idols, the poems of Homer the sacred books. Thus Cardinal Newman
speaks of "the classical polytheism which was gay and graceful, as was
natural in a civilised age." Yet such a view is only a partial one; in it the eye
is fixed on the sharp, bright edge of high Hellenic culture but loses sight of

the sombre world across which it strikes. Greek religion, where we can
observe it most distinctly, is at once a magnificent ritualistic system, and a
cycle of poetical conceptions. Religions, as they grow by natural laws out
of man's life, are modified by whatever modifies his life. They brighten
under a bright sky, they become liberal as the social range widens, they
grow intense and shrill in the clefts of human life, where the spirit is narrow
and confined, and the stars are visible at noonday; and a fine analysis of
these differences is one of the gravest functions of religious criticism. Still,
the broad foundation, in mere human nature, of all religions as they exist for
the greatest number, is a universal pagan sentiment, a paganism which
existed before the Greek religion, and has lingered far onward into the
Christian world, ineradicable, like some persistent vegetable growth,
because its seed is an element of the very soil out of which it springs. This
pagan sentiment measures the sadness with which the human mind is filled,
whenever its thoughts wander far from what is here, and now. It is beset by
notions of irresistible natural powers, for the most part ranged against man,
but the secret also of his fortune, making the earth golden and the grape
fiery for him. He makes gods in his own image, gods smiling and flower-
crowned, or bleeding by some sad fatality, to console him by their wounds,
never closed from generation to generation. It is with a rush of home-
sickness that the thought of death presents itself. He would remain at home
for ever on the earth if he could: as it loses its colour and the senses fail, he
clings ever closer to it; but since the mouldering of bones and flesh must go
on to the end, he is careful for charms and talismans, that may chance to
have some friendly power in them, when the inevitable shipwreck comes.
Such sentiment is a part of the eternal basis of all religions, modified indeed
by changes of time and place, but indestructible, because its root is so deep
in the earth of man's nature. The breath of religious initiators passes over
them; a few "rise up with wings as eagles," but the broad level of religious
life is not permanently changed. Religious progress, like all purely spiritual
progress, is confined to a few. This sentiment fixes itself in the earliest
times to certain usages of patriarchal life, the kindling of fire, the washing
of the body, the slaughter of the flock, the gathering of harvest, holidays
and dances. Here are the beginnings of a ritual, at first as occasional and
unfixed as the sentiment which it expresses, but destined to become the
permanent element of religious life. The usages of patriarchal life change;
but this germ of ritual remains, developing, but always in a religious

interest, losing its domestic character, and therefore becoming more and
more inexplicable with each generation. This pagan worship, in spite of
local variations, essentially one, is an element in all religions. It is the
anodyne which the religious principle, like one administering opiates to the
incurable, has added to the law which makes life sombre for the vast
majority of mankind.

More definite religious conceptions come from other sources, and fix
themselves upon this ritual in various ways, changing it, and giving it new
meanings. In Greece they were derived from mythology, itself not due to a
religious source at all, but developing in the course of time into a body of
religious conceptions, entirely human in form and character. To the
unprogressive ritual element it brought these conceptions, itself—he pterou
dunamis, the power of the wing—an element of refinement, of ascension,
with the promise of an endless destiny. While the ritual remains fixed, the
aesthetic element, only accidentally connected with it, expands with the
freedom and mobility of the things of the intellect. Always, the fixed
element is the religious observance; the fluid, unfixed element is the myth,
the religious conception. This religion is itself pagan, and has in any broad
view of it the pagan sadness. It does not at once, and for the majority,
become the higher Hellenic religion. The country people, of course, cherish
the unlovely idols of an earlier time, such as those which Pausanias found
still devoutly preserved in Arcadia. Athenaeus tells the story of one who,
coming to a temple of Latona, had expected to find some worthy
presentment of the mother of Apollo, and laughed on seeing only a
shapeless wooden figure. The wilder people have wilder gods, which,
however, in Athens, or Corinth, or Lacedaemon, changing ever with the
worshippers in whom they live and move and have their being, borrow
something of the lordliness and distinction of human nature there. Greek
religion too has its mendicants, its purifications, its antinomian mysticism,
its garments offered to the gods, its statues worn with kissing, its
exaggerated superstitions for the vulgar only, its worship of sorrow, its
addolorata, its mournful mysteries. Scarcely a wild or melancholy note of
the medieval church but was anticipated by Greek polytheism! What should
we have thought of the vertiginous prophetess at the very centre of Greek
religion? The supreme Hellenic culture is a sharp edge of light across this
gloom. The fiery, stupefying wine becomes in a happier region clear and

exhilarating. The Dorian worship of Apollo, rational, chastened, debonair,
with his unbroken daylight, always opposed to the sad Chthonian divinities,
is the aspiring element, by force and spring of which Greek religion
sublimes itself. Out of Greek religion, under happy conditions, arises Greek
art, to minister to human culture. It was the privilege of Greek religion to be
able to transform itself into an artistic ideal.

For the thoughts of the Greeks about themselves, and their relation to the
world generally, were ever in the happiest readiness to be transformed into
objects for the senses. In this lies the main distinction between Greek art
and the mystical art of the Christian middle age, which is always struggling
to express thoughts beyond itself. Take, for instance, a characteristic work
of the middle age, Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin, in the cloister of
Saint Mark's at Florence. In some strange halo of a moon Christ and the
Virgin Mary are sitting, clad in mystical white raiment, half shroud, half
priestly linen. Our Lord, with rosy nimbus and the long pale hair—tanquam
lana alba et tanquam nix—of the figure in the Apocalypse, sets with slender
finger-tips a crown of pearl on the head of his mother, who, corpse-like in
her refinement, is bending forward to receive it, the light lying like snow
upon her forehead. Certainly, it cannot be said of Angelico's fresco that it
throws into a sensible form our highest thoughts about man and his relation
to the world; but it did not do this adequately even for Angelico. For him,
all that is outward or sensible in his work—the hair like wool, the rosy
nimbus, the crown of pearl—is only the symbol or type of an inexpressible
world, to which he wishes to direct the thoughts; he would have shrunk
from the notion that what the eye apprehended was all. Such forms of art,
then, are inadequate to the matter they clothe; they remain ever below its
level. Something of this kind is true also of oriental art. As in the middle
age from an exaggerated inwardness, so in the East from a vagueness, a
want of definition, in thought, the matter presented to art is unmanageable:
forms of sense struggle vainly with it. The many-headed gods of the East,
the orientalised Diana of Ephesus, with its numerous breasts, like
Angelico's fresco, are at best overcharged symbols, a means of hinting at an
idea which art cannot adequately express, which still remains in the world
of shadows.

But take a work of Greek art,—the Venus of Melos. That is in no sense a
symbol, a suggestion of anything beyond its own victorious fairness. The
mind begins and ends with the finite image, yet loses no part of the spiritual
motive. That motive is not lightly and loosely attached to the sensuous
form, as the meaning to the allegory, but saturates and is identical with it.
The Greek mind had advanced to a particular stage of self-reflexion, but
was careful not to pass beyond it. In oriental thought there is a vague
conception of life everywhere, but no true appreciation of itself by the
mind, no knowledge of the distinction of man's nature: in its consciousness
of itself, humanity is still confused with the fantastic, indeterminate life of
the animal and vegetable world. In Greek thought the "lordship of the soul"
is recognised; that lordship gives authority and divinity to human eyes and
hands and feet; inanimate nature is thrown into the background. But there
Greek thought finds its happy limit; it has not yet become too inward; the
mind has not begun to boast of its independence of the flesh; the spirit has
not yet absorbed everything with its emotions, nor reflected its own colour
everywhere. It has indeed committed itself to a train of reflexion which
must end in a defiance of form, of all that is outward, in an exaggerated
idealism. But that end is still distant: it has not yet plunged into the depths
of religious mysticism.

This ideal art, in which the thought does not outstrip or lie beyond its
sensible embodiment, could not have arisen out of a phase of life that was
uncomely or poor. That delicate pause in Greek reflexion was joined, by
some supreme good luck, to the perfect animal nature of the Greeks. Here
are the two conditions of an artistic ideal. The influences which perfected
the animal nature of the Greeks are part of the process by which the ideal
was evolved. Those "Mothers" who, in the second part of Faust, mould and
remould the typical forms which appear in human history, preside, at the
beginning of Greek culture, over such a concourse of happy physical
conditions as ever generates by natural laws some rare type of intellectual
or spiritual life. That delicate air, "nimbly and sweetly recommending itself"
to the senses, the finer aspects of nature, the finer lime and clay of the
human form, and modelling of the dainty framework of the human
countenance:—these are the good luck of the Greek when he enters upon
life. Beauty becomes a distinction, like genius, or noble place.

"By no people," says Winckelmann, "has beauty been so highly
esteemed as by the Greeks. The priests of a youthful Jupiter at Aegae, of the
Ismenian Apollo, and the priest who at Tanagra led the procession of
Mercury, bearing a lamb upon his shoulders, were always youths to whom
the prize of beauty had been awarded. The citizens of Egesta, in Sicily,
erected a monument to a certain Philip, who was not their fellow-citizen,
but of Croton, for his distinguished beauty; and the people made offerings
at it. In an ancient song, ascribed to Simonides or Epicharmus, of four
wishes, the first was health, the second beauty. And as beauty was so longed
for and prized by the Greeks, every beautiful person sought to become
known to the whole people by this distinction, and above all to approve
himself to the artists, because they awarded the prize; and this was for the
artists an opportunity of having supreme beauty ever before their eyes.
Beauty even gave a right to fame; and we find in Greek histories the most
beautiful people distinguished. Some were famous for the beauty of one
single part of their form; as Demetrius Phalereus, for his beautiful
eyebrows, was called Charito-blepharos. It seems even to have been
thought that the procreation of beautiful children might be promoted by
prizes: this is shown by the existence of contests for beauty, which in
ancient times were established by Cypselus, King of Arcadia, by the river
Alpheus; and, at the feast of Apollo of Philae, a prize was offered to the
youths for the deftest kiss. This was decided by an umpire; as also at
Megara, by the grave of Diodes. At Sparta, and at Lesbos, in the temple of
Juno, and among the Parrhasii, there were contests for beauty among
women. The general esteem for beauty went so far, that the Spartan women
set up in their bedchambers a Nireus, a Narcissus, or a Hyacinth, that they
might bear beautiful children."

So, from a few stray antiquarianisms, a few faces cast up sharply from
the waves, Winckelmann, as his manner is, divines the temperament of the
antique world, and that in which it had delight. It has passed away with that
distant age, and we may venture to dwell upon it. What sharpness and
reality it has is the sharpness and reality of suddenly arrested life. The
Greek system of gymnastics originated as part of a religious ritual. The
worshipper was to recommend himself to the gods by becoming fleet and
fair, white and red, like them. The beauty of the palaestra, and the beauty of
the artist's studio, reacted on each other. The youth tried to rival his gods;

and his increased beauty passed back into them.—"I take the gods to
witness, I had rather have a fair body than a king's crown"—Omnumi
pantas theous me helesthai an ten basileos arkhen anti tou kalos einai.—
That is the form in which one age of the world chose the higher life—a
perfect world, if the gods could have seemed for ever only fleet and fair,
white and red. Let us not regret that this unperplexed youth of humanity,
seeing itself and satisfied, passed, at the due moment, into a mournful
maturity; for already the deep joy was in store for the spirit, of finding the
ideal of that youth still red with life in the grave.

It followed that the Greek ideal expressed itself pre-eminently in
sculpture. All art has a sensuous element, colour, form, sound—in poetry a
dexterous recalling of these, together with the profound, joyful
sensuousness of motion: each of these may be a medium for the ideal: it is
partly accident which in any individual case makes the born artist, poet, or
painter rather than sculptor. But as the mind itself has had an historical
development, one form of art, by the very limitations of its material, may be
more adequate than another for the expression of any one phase of its
experience. Different attitudes of the imagination have a native affinity with
different types of sensuous form, so that they combine, with completeness
and ease. The arts may thus be ranged in a series, which corresponds to a
series of developments in the human mind itself. Architecture, which begins
in a practical need, can only express by vague hint or symbol the spirit or
mind of the artist. He closes his sadness over him, or wanders in the
perplexed intricacies of things, or projects his purpose from him clean-cut
and sincere, or bares himself to the sunlight. But these spiritualities, felt
rather than seen, can but lurk about architectural form as volatile effects, to
be gathered from it by reflexion; their expression is not really sensuous at
all. As human form is not the subject with which it deals, architecture is the
mode in which the artistic effort centres, when the thoughts of man
concerning himself are still indistinct, when he is still little preoccupied
with those harmonies, storms, victories, of the unseen and intellectual
world, which, wrought out into the bodily form, give it an interest and
significance communicable to it alone. The art of Egypt, with its supreme
architectural effects, is, according to Hegel's beautiful comparison, a
Memnon waiting for the day, the day of the Greek spirit, the humanistic
spirit, with its power of speech. Again, painting, music, and poetry, with

their endless power of complexity, are the special arts of the romantic and
modern ages. Into these, with the utmost attenuation of detail, may be
translated every delicacy of thought and feeling, incidental to a
consciousness brooding with delight over itself. Through their gradations of
shade, their exquisite intervals, they project in an external form that which
is most inward in humour, passion, sentiment. Between architecture and the
romantic arts of painting, music, and poetry, comes sculpture, which, unlike
architecture, deals immediately with man, while it contrasts with the
romantic arts, because it is not self-analytical. It has to do more exclusively
than any other art with the human form, itself one entire medium of
spiritual expression, trembling, blushing, melting into dew, with inward
excitement. That spirituality which only lurks about architecture as a
volatile effect, in sculpture takes up the whole given material, and
penetrates it with an imaginative motive; and at first sight sculpture, with its
solidity of form, seems a thing more real and full than the faint, abstract
world of poetry or painting. Still the fact is the reverse. Discourse and
action show man as he is, more directly than the springing of the muscles
and the moulding of the flesh; and over these poetry has command.
Painting, by the flushing of colour in the face and dilatation of light in the
eye—music, by its subtle range of tones—can refine most delicately upon a
single moment of passion, unravelling its finest threads.

But why should sculpture thus limit itself to pure form? Because, by this
limitation, it becomes a perfect medium of expression for one peculiar
motive of the imaginative intellect. It therefore renounces all these
attributes of its material which do not help forward that motive. It has had,
indeed, from the beginning an unfixed claim to colour; but this element of
colour in it has always been more or less conventional, with no melting or
modulation of tones, never admitting more than a very limited realism. It
was maintained chiefly as a religious tradition. In proportion as the art of
sculpture ceased to be merely decorative, and subordinate to architecture, it
threw itself upon pure form. It renounces the power of expression by
sinking or heightening tones. In it, no member of the human form is more
significant than the rest; the eye is wide, and without pupil; the lips and
brow are hardly less significant than hands, and breasts, and feet. The
limitation of its resources is part of its pride it has no backgrounds, no sky
or atmosphere, to suggest and interpret a train of feeling; a little of

suggested motion, and much of pure light on its gleaming surfaces, with
pure form—only these. And it gains more than it loses by this limitation to
its own distinguishing motives; it unveils man in the repose of his
unchanging characteristics. Its white light, purged from the angry, bloodlike
stains of action and passion, reveals, not what is accidental in man, but the
god in him, as opposed to man's restless movement. The art of sculpture
records the first naive, unperplexed recognition of man by himself; and it is
a proof of the high artistic capacity of the Greeks, that they apprehended
and remained true to these exquisite limitations, yet, in spite of them, gave
to their creations a vital and mobile individuality.

Heiterkeit—blitheness or repose, and Allgemeinheit—generality or
breadth, are, then, the supreme characteristics of the Hellenic ideal. But that
generality or breadth has nothing in common with the lax observation, the
unlearned thought, the flaccid execution, which have sometimes claimed
superiority in art, on the plea of being "broad" or "general." Hellenic
breadth and generality come of a culture minute, severe, constantly
renewed, rectifying and concentrating its impressions into certain pregnant
types. The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in
a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world of its own creation
in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself
an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming,
recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the
imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a
choice of subject almost unlimited. The range of characters or persons open
to them is as various as life itself; no character, however trivial, misshapen,
or unlovely, can resist their magic. That is because those arts can
accomplish their function in the choice and development of some special
situation, which lifts or glorifies a character, in itself not poetical. To realise
this situation, to define in a chill and empty atmosphere, the focus where
rays, in themselves pale and impotent, unite and begin to burn, the artist has
to employ the most cunning detail, to complicate and refine upon thought
and passion a thousand-fold. The poems of Robert Browning supply
brilliant examples of this power. His poetry is pre-eminently the poetry of
situations. The characters themselves are always of secondary importance;
often they are characters in themselves of little interest; they seem to come
to him by strange accidents from the ends of the world. His gift is shown by

the way in which he accepts such a character, and throws it into some
situation, or apprehends it in some delicate pause of life, in which for a
moment it becomes ideal. Take an instance from Dramatis Personae. In the
poem entitled Le Byron de nos Jours, we have a single moment of passion
thrown into relief in this exquisite way. Those two jaded Parisians are not
intrinsically interesting; they only begin to interest us when thrown into a
choice situation. But to discriminate that moment, to make it appreciable by
us, that we may "find" it, what a cobweb of allusions, what double and
treble reflexions of the mind upon itself, what an artificial light is
constructed and broken over the chosen situation; on how fine a needle's
point that little world of passion is balanced! Yet, in spite of this intricacy,
the poem has the clear ring of a central motive; we receive from it the
impression of one imaginative tone, of a single creative act.

To produce such effects at all requires all the resources of painting, with
its power of indirect expression, of subordinate but significant detail, its
atmosphere, its foregrounds and backgrounds. To produce them in a pre-
eminent degree requires all the resources of poetry, language in its most
purged form, its remote associations and suggestions, its double and treble
lights. These appliances sculpture cannot command. In it, therefore, not the
special situation, but the type, the general character of the subject to be
delineated, is all-important. In poetry and painting, the situation
predominates over the character; in sculpture, the character over the
situation. Excluded by the limitations of its material from the development
of exquisite situations, it has to choose from a select number of types
intrinsically interesting—interesting, that is, independently of any special
situation into which they may be thrown. Sculpture finds the secret of its
power in presenting these types, in their broad, central, incisive lines. This it
effects not by accumulation of detail, but by abstracting from it. All that is
accidental, all that distracts the simple effect upon us of the supreme types
of humanity, all traces in them of the commonness of the world, it gradually
purges away.

Works of art produced under this law, and only these, are really
characterised by Hellenic generality or breadth. In every direction it is a law
of limitation; it keeps passion always below that degree of intensity at
which it must necessarily be transitory, never winding up the features to one

note of anger, or desire, or surprise. In some of the feebler allegorical
designs of the middle age, we find isolated qualities portrayed as by so
many masks; its religious art has familiarised us with faces fixed
immovably into blank types of placid reverie; and men and women, in the
hurry of life, often wear the sharp impress of one absorbing motive, from
which it is said death sets their features free. All such instances may be
ranged under the grotesque; and the Hellenic ideal has nothing in common
with the grotesque. It allows passion to play lightly over the surface of the
individual form, losing thereby nothing of its central impassivity, its depth
and repose. To all but the highest culture, the reserved faces of the gods will
ever have something of insipidity. Again, in the best Greek sculpture, the
archaic immobility has been thawed, its forms are in motion; but it is a
motion ever kept in reserve, which is very seldom committed to any definite
action. Endless as are the attitudes of Greek sculpture, exquisite as is the
invention of the Greeks in this direction, the actions or situations it permits
are simple and few. There is no Greek Madonna; the goddesses are always
childless. The actions selected are those which would be without
significance, except in a divine person—binding on a sandal or preparing
for the bath. When a more complex and significant action is permitted, it is
most often represented as just finished, so that eager expectancy is
excluded, as in the image of Apollo just after the slaughter of the Python, or
of Venus with the apple of Paris already in her hand. The Laocoon, with all
that patient science through which it has triumphed over an almost
unmanageable subject, marks a period in which sculpture has begun to aim
at effects legitimate, because delightful, only in painting. The hair, so rich a
source of expression in painting, because, relatively to the eye or to the lip,
it is mere drapery, is withdrawn from attention; its texture, as well as the
colour, is lost, its arrangement faintly and severely indicated, with no
enmeshed or broken light. The eyes are wide and directionless, not fixing
anything with their gaze, or riveting the brain to any special external object;
the brows without hair. It deals almost exclusively with youth, where the
moulding of the bodily organs is still as if suspended between growth and
completion, indicated but not emphasised; where the transition from curve
to curve is so delicate and elusive, that Winckelmann compares it to a quiet
sea, which, although we understand it to be in motion, we nevertheless
regard as an image of repose; where, therefore, the exact degree of
development is so hard to apprehend. If one had to choose a single product

of Hellenic art, to save in the wreck of all the rest, one would choose from
the "beautiful multitude" of the Panathenaic frieze, that line of youths on
horseback, with their level glances, their proud, patient lips, their chastened
reins, their whole bodies in exquisite service. This colourless, unclassified
purity of life, with its blending and interpenetration of intellectual, spiritual,
and physical elements, still folded together, pregnant with the possibilities
of a whole world closed within it, is the highest expression of that
indifference which lies beyond all that is relative or partial. Everywhere
there is the effect of an awaking, of a child's sleep just disturbed. All these
effects are united in a single instance—the adorante of the museum of
Berlin, a youth who has gained the wrestler's prize, with hands lifted and
open, in praise for the victory. Fresh, unperplexed, it is the image of man as
he springs first from the sleep of nature; his white light taking no colour
from any one-sided experience, characterless, so far as character involves
subjection to the accidental influences of life.

"This sense," says Hegel, "for the consummate modelling of divine and
human forms was pre-eminently at home in Greece. In its poets and orators,
its historians and philosophers, Greece cannot be conceived from a central
point, unless one brings, as a key to the understanding of it, an insight into
the ideal forms of sculpture, and regards the images of statesmen and
philosophers, as well as epic and dramatic heroes, from the artistic point of
view; for those who act, as well as those who create and think, have, in
those beautiful days of Greece, this plastic character. They are great and
free, and have grown up on the soil of their own individuality, creating
themselves out of themselves, and moulding themselves to what they were,
and willed to be. The age of Pericles was rich in such characters; Pericles
himself, Pheidias, Plato, above all Sophocles, Thucydides also, Xenophon
and Socrates, each in his own order, the perfection of one remaining
undiminished by that of the others. They are ideal artists of themselves, cast
each in one flawless mould, works of art, which stand before us as an
immortal presentment of the gods. Of this modelling also are those bodily
works of art, the victors in the Olympic games; yes, and even Phryne, who,
as the most beautiful of women, ascended naked out of the water, in the
presence of assembled Greece."

This key to the understanding of the Greek spirit, Winckelmann
possessed in his own nature, itself like a relic of classical antiquity, laid
open by accident to our alien modern atmosphere. To the criticism of that
consummate Greek modelling he brought not only his culture but his
temperament. We have seen how definite was the leading motive of his
culture; how, like some central root-fibre, it maintained the well-rounded
unity of his life through a thousand distractions. Interests not his, nor meant
for him, never disturbed him. In morals, as in criticism, he followed the clue
of an unerring instinct. Penetrating into the antique world by his passion,
his temperament, he enunciates no formal principles, always hard and one-
sided. Minute and anxious as his culture was, he never became one-sidedly
self-analytical. Occupied ever with himself, perfecting himself and
cultivating his genius, he was not content, as so often happens with such
natures, that the atmosphere between him and other minds should be thick
and clouded; he was ever jealously refining his meaning into a form,
express, clear, objective. This temperament he nurtured and invigorated by
friendships which kept him ever in direct contact with the spirit of youth.
The beauty of the Greek statues was a sexless beauty; the statues of the
gods had the least traces of sex. Here there is a moral sexlessness, a kind of
ineffectual wholeness of nature, yet with a true beauty and significance of
its own.

One result of this temperament is a serenity—Heiterkeit—which
characterises Winckelmann's handling of the sensuous side of Greek art.
This serenity is, perhaps, in great measure, a negative quality; it is the
absence of any sense of want, or corruption, or shame. With the sensuous
element in Greek art he deals in the pagan manner; and what is implied in
that? It has been sometimes said that art is a means of escape from "the
tyranny of the senses." It may be so for the spectator; he may find that the
spectacle of supreme works of art takes from the life of the senses
something of its turbid fever. But this is possible for the spectator only
because the artist, in producing those works, has gradually sunk his
intellectual and spiritual ideas in sensuous form. He may live, as Keats
lived, a pure life; but his soul, like that of Plato's false astronomer, becomes
more and more immersed in sense, until nothing which lacks an appeal to
sense has interest for him. How could such an one ever again endure the
greyness of the ideal or spiritual world? The spiritualist is satisfied in seeing

the sensuous elements escape from his conceptions; his interest grows, as
the dyed garment bleaches in the keener air. But the artist steeps his thought
again and again into the fire of colour. To the Greek this immersion in the
sensuous was indifferent. Greek sensuousness, therefore, does not fever the
blood; it is shameless and childlike. Christian asceticism, on the other hand,
discrediting the slightest touch of sense, has from time to time provoked
into strong emphasis the contrast or antagonism to itself, of the artistic life,
with its inevitable sensuousness.—I did but taste a little honey with the end
of the rod that was in mine hand, and lo, I must die!—It has sometimes
seemed hard to pursue that life without something of conscious disavowal
of a spiritual world; and this imparts to genuine artistic interests a kind of
intoxication. From this intoxication Winckelmann is free; he fingers those
pagan marbles with unsinged hands, with no sense of shame or loss. That is
to deal with the sensuous side of art in the pagan manner.

The longer we contemplate that Hellenic ideal, in which man is at unity
with himself, with his physical nature, with the outward world, the more we
may be inclined to regret that he should ever have passed beyond it, to
contend for a perfection that makes the blood turbid, and frets the flesh, and
discredits the actual world about us. But if he was to be saved from the
ennui which ever attaches itself to realisation, even the realisation of
perfection, it was necessary that a conflict should come, and some sharper
note grieve the perfect harmony, to the end that the spirit chafed by it might
beat out at last a larger and profounder music. In Greek tragedy this conflict
has begun; man finds himself face to face with rival claims. Greek tragedy
shows how such a conflict may be treated with serenity, how the evolution
of it may be a spectacle of the dignity, not of the impotence, of the human
spirit. But it is not only in tragedy that the Greek spirit showed itself
capable of thus winning joy out of matter in itself full of discouragements.
Theocritus, too, often strikes a note of romantic sadness. But what a blithe
and steady poise, above these discouragements, in a clear and sunny stratum
of the air!

Into this stage of Greek achievement Winckelmann did not enter.
Supreme as he is where his true interest lay, his insight into the typical unity
and repose of the highest sort of sculpture seems to have involved limitation
in another direction. His conception of art excludes that bolder type of it

which deals confidently and serenely with life, conflict, evil. Living in a
world of exquisite but abstract and colourless form, he could hardly have
conceived of the subtle and penetrative, but somewhat grotesque art of the
modern world. What would he have thought of Gilliatt, in Victor Hugo's
Travailleurs de la Mer, or of the bleeding mouth of Fantine in the first part
of Les Miserables, penetrated as it is with a sense of beauty, as lively and
transparent as that of a Greek? There is even a sort of preparation for the
romantic temper within the limits of the Greek ideal itself, which
Winckelmann failed to see. For Greek religion has not merely its mournful
mysteries of Adonis, of Hyacinthus, of Demeter, but it is conscious also of
the fall of earlier divine dynasties. Hyperion gives way to Apollo, Oceanus
to Poseidon. Around the feet of that tranquil Olympian family still crowd
the weary shadows of an earlier, more formless, divine world. Even their
still minds are troubled with thoughts of a limit to duration, of inevitable
decay, of dispossession. Again, the supreme and colourless abstraction of
those divine forms, which is the secret of their repose, is also a premonition
of the fleshless, consumptive refinements of the pale medieval artists. That
high indifference to the outward, that impassivity, has already a touch of the
corpse in it; we see already Angelico and the Master of the Passion in the
artistic future. The crushing of the sensuous, the shutting of the door upon
it, the ascetic interest, is already traceable. Those abstracted gods, "ready to
melt out their essence fine into the winds," who can fold up their flesh as a
garment, and still remain themselves, seem already to feel that bleak air, in
which, like Helen of Troy, they wander as the spectres of the middle age.

Gradually, as the world came into the church, an artistic interest, native
in the human soul, reasserted its claims. But Christian art was still
dependent on pagan examples, building the shafts of pagan temples into its
churches, perpetuating the form of the basilica, in later times working the
disused amphitheatres as quarries. The sensuous expression of conceptions
which unreservedly discredit the world of sense, was the delicate problem
which Christian art had before it. If we think of medieval painting, as it
ranges from the early German schools, still with something of the air of the
charnel-house about them, to the clear loveliness of Perugino, we shall see
how that problem was solved. Even in the worship of sorrow the native
blitheness of art asserted itself; the religious spirit, as Hegel says, "smiled
through its tears." So perfectly did the young Raffaelle infuse that

Heiterkeit, that pagan blitheness, into religious works, that his picture of
Saint Agatha at Bologna became to Goethe a step in the evolution of
Iphigenie.* But in proportion as this power of smiling was found again,
there came also an aspiration towards that lost antique art, some relics of
which Christian art had buried in itself, ready to work wonders when their
day came.
*Italiaenische Reise. Bologna, 19 Oct. 1776.

The history of art has suffered as much as any history by trenchant and
absolute divisions. Pagan and Christian art are sometimes harshly opposed,
and the Renaissance is represented as a fashion which set in at a definite
period. That is the superficial view: the deeper view is that which preserves
the identity of European culture. The two are really continuous; and there is
a sense in which it may be said that the Renaissance was an uninterrupted
effort of the middle age, that it was ever taking place. When the actual relics
of the antique were restored to the world, in the view of the Christian
ascetic it was as if an ancient plague-pit had been opened: all the world took
the contagion of the life of nature and of the senses. And now it was seen
that the medieval spirit too had done something for the destiny of the
antique. By hastening the decline of art, by withdrawing interest from it,
and yet keeping unbroken the thread of its traditions, it had suffered the
human mind to repose that it might awake when day came, with eyes
refreshed, to those antique forms.

The aim of a right criticism is to place Winckelmann in an intellectual
perspective, of which Goethe is the foreground. For, after all, he is infinitely
less than Goethe; it is chiefly because at certain points he comes in contact
with Goethe, that criticism entertains consideration of him. His relation to
modern culture is a peculiar one. He is not of the modern world; nor is he of
the eighteenth century, although so much of his outer life is characteristic of
it. But that note of revolt against the eighteenth century, which we detect in
Goethe, was struck by Winckelmann. Goethe illustrates that union of the
Romantic spirit, in its adventure, its variety, its profound subjectivity of
soul, with Hellenism, in its transparency, its rationality, its desire of Beauty
—that marriage of Faust and Helena—of which the art of the nineteenth
century is the child, the beautiful lad Euphorion, as Goethe conceives him,
on the crags, in the "splendour of battle and in harness as for victory," his

brows bound with light.* Goethe illustrates, too, the preponderance in this
marriage of the Hellenic element; and that element, in its true essence, was
made known to him by Winckelmann.
*Faust, Th. ii. Act. 3.

Breadth, centrality, with blitheness and repose, are the marks of Hellenic
culture. Is that culture a lost art? The local, accidental colouring of its own
age has passed from it; the greatness that is dead looks greater when every
link with what is slight and vulgar has been severed; we can only see it at
all in the reflected, refined light which a high education creates for us. Can
we bring down that ideal into the gaudy, perplexed light of modern life?

Certainly, for us of the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its
entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, so many
preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity with
ourselves, in blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the Greek
within the simple terms of antique life. Yet, not less than ever, the intellect
demands completeness, centrality. It is this which Winckelmann imprints on
the imagination of Goethe, at the beginning of his culture, in its original and
simplest form, as in a fragment of Greek art itself, stranded on that littered,
indeterminate shore of Germany in the eighteenth century. In Winckelmann,
this type comes to him, not as in a book or a theory, but importunately, in a
passionate life or personality. For Goethe, possessing all modern interests,
ready to be lost in the perplexed currents of modern thought, he defines, in
clearest outline, the problem of culture—balance, unity with oneself,
consummate Greek modelling.

It could no longer be solved, as in Phryne ascending naked out of the
water, by perfection of bodily form, or any joyful union with the world
without: the shadows had grown too long, the light too solemn, for that. It
could hardly be solved, as in Pericles or Pheidias, by the direct exercise of
any single talent: amid the manifold claims of modern culture, that could
only have ended in a thin, one-sided growth. Goethe's Hellenism was of
another order, the Allgemeinheit and Heiterkeit, the completeness and
serenity, of a watchful, exigent intellectualism. Im Ganzen, Guten, Wahren,
resolut zu leben—is Goethe's description of his own higher life; and what is
meant by life in the whole—im Ganzen? It means the life of one for whom,

over and over again, what was once precious has become indifferent. Every
one who aims at the life of culture is met by many forms of it, arising out of
the intense, laborious, one-sided development of some special talent. They
are the brightest enthusiasms the world has to show. It is not their part to
weigh the claims which this or that alien form of culture makes upon them.
But the pure instinct of self-culture cares not so much to reap all that these
forms of culture can give, as to find in them its own strength. The demand
of the intellect is to feel itself alive. It must see into the laws, the operation,
the intellectual reward of every divided form of culture; but only that it may
measure the relation between itself and them. It struggles with those forms
till its secret is won from each, and then lets each fall back into its place; in
the supreme, artistic view of life. With a kind of passionate coldness, such
natures rejoice to be away from and past their former selves. Above all, they
are jealous of that abandonment to one special gift which really limits their
capabilities. It would have been easy for Goethe, with the gift of a sensuous
nature, to let it overgrow him. It comes easily and naturally, perhaps, to
certain "other-worldly" natures to be even as the Schoene Seele, that ideal
of gentle pietism, in Wilhelm Meister: but to the large vision of Goethe, that
seemed to be a phase of life that a man might feel all round, and leave
behind him. Again, it is easy to indulge the commonplace metaphysical
instinct. But a taste for metaphysics may be one of those things which we
must renounce, if we mean to mould our lives to artistic perfection.
Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift of absolute or
transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to
detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life.

But Goethe's culture did not remain "behind the veil"; it ever emerged in
the practical functions of art, in actual production. For him the problem
came to be:—Can the blitheness and universality of the antique ideal be
communicated to artistic productions, which shall contain the fulness of the
experience of the modern world? We have seen that the development of the
various forms of art has corresponded to the development of the thoughts of
man concerning himself, to the growing revelation of the mind to itself.
Sculpture corresponds to the unperplexed, emphatic outlines of Hellenic
humanism; painting to the mystic depth and intricacy of the middle age;
music and poetry have their fortune in the modern world. Let us understand
by poetry all literary production which attains the power of giving pleasure

by its form, as distinct from its matter. Only in this varied literary form can
art command that width, variety, delicacy of resources, which will enable it
to deal with the conditions of modern life. What modern art has to do in the
service of culture is so to rearrange the details of modern life, so to reflect
it, that it may satisfy the spirit. And what does the spirit need in the face of
modern life? The sense of freedom. That naive, rough sense of freedom,
which supposes man's will to be limited, if at all, only by a will stronger
than his, he can never have again. The attempt to represent it in art would
have so little verisimilitude that it would be flat and uninteresting. The chief
factor in the thoughts of the modern mind concerning itself is the intricacy,
the universality of natural law, even in the moral order. For us, necessity is
not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we
can do warfare: it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that
magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a
network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces
of the world. Can art represent men and women in these bewildering toils
so as to give the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom?
Certainly, in Goethe's romances, and even more in the romances of Victor
Hugo, there are high examples of modern art dealing thus with modern life,
regarding that life as the modern mind must regard it, yet reflecting upon
blitheness and repose. Natural laws we shall never modify, embarrass us as
they may; but there is still something in the nobler or less noble attitude
with which we watch their fatal combinations. In those romances of Goethe
and Victor Hugo, in some excellent work done after them, this
entanglement, this network of law, becomes the tragic situation, in which
certain groups of noble men and women work out for themselves a supreme
Denouement. Who, if he saw through all, would fret against the chain of
circumstance which endows one at the end with those great experiences?

1867.

CONCLUSION*
*This brief "Conclusion" was omitted in the second edition of this book, as I
conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands
it might fall. On the whole, I have thought it best to reprint it here, with some
slight changes which bring it closer to my original meaning. I have dealt more
fully in Marius the Epicurean with the thoughts suggested by it.

Legei pou Herakleitos hoti panta khorei kai ouden menei.

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or
fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let
us begin with that which is without—our physical life. Fix upon it in one of
its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil
from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in
that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives
their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres,
are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most
remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them—the
passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the
modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of light and sound—
processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces.
Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces
extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us
those elements are broadcast, driven by many forces; and birth and gesture
and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of
ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face
and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them—a design in
a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of
flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment
to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.

Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the
whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. There it
is no longer the gradual darkening of the eye and fading of colour from the
wall,—the movement of the shore-side, where the water flows down
indeed, though in apparent rest,—but the race of the mid-stream, a drift of
momentary acts of sight and passion and thought. At first sight experience
seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a
sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand
forms of action. But when reflexion begins to act upon those objects they
are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like a
trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions—colour,
odour, texture—in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in
thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language
invests them, but of impressions unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which
burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still
further; the whole scope of observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of
the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a swarm of
impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of
personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or
from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of
those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each
mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes
a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual
mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in
perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is
infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual
in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it
may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To such a
tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a single sharp
impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments
gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. It is with this movement,
with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that
analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual
weaving and unweaving of ourselves.

Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren vivificiren. The service
of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse,

to startle it into sharp and eager observation. Every moment some form
grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer
than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is
irresistibly real and attractive for us,—for that moment only. Not the fruit of
experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses
only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them
all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most
swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the
greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is
success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form
habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it
is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things,
situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at
any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a
lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the
senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the
artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment
some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts
some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost
and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our
experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate
effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the
things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously
testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a
facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical
theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to
gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the
microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us
the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest
into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified
with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

One of the most beautiful passages in the writings of Rousseau is that in
the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him
of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had always clung about

him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal
disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the
interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous
life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he
found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all
condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but
with a sort of indefinite reprieve—les hommes sont tous condamnes a mort
avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us
no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the
wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our
one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as
possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened
sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic
activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us.
Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened,
multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of
beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you
professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments
as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

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