The Works of Walter Pater(I)

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Pater, Walter (1839-1894). [The works of Walter Pater]. 1922.

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MACMILLAN AND CO., L)M)T<D

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MACMILLAN AND CO., MMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1925

RENAISSAN

DIES IN ART AND POETRY

8V

WALTER PATER



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DEDICATION

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PREFACE

MANYattempts have been made by writers onart and poetry to donne beauty in the abstract, to

expressit in the most general tcrms, to findsomeuniversal formula for it. The value of these

attempts has most often been in the suggestive

and penetrating things said by thé way. Suchdiscussionshelp us very little to enjoy what hasbeen well donc in art or poctry, to discriminatebetweenwhat is more and what is less excellentin them, or to use words like beauty, excellence,art, poetry, with a more précise meaning than

they would otherwise have. Beauty, like ailother qualities presentedto human experience,i<relative and the definition of it becomes un-

meaningand uselessin proportionto its abstract-ncss. To definebeauty, not in the most abstractbut in the most concrète terms possible, tofind not its universal formula, but thé formulawhich expresses most adequately this or that



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specialmanifestationof it, is the aim of the trucstudent of aesthetics.

"To sec the object as in itself it really is,"bas been justly said to be the aim of all true

criticism whatever and in œstheticcriticismthefirst step towardssceingone'<objcct as it reallyie,ia to know one's own impressionas it really i<,to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. The

objecta with which aesthetic criticism deals-music, poctry, artistic and accomplishedformaof human life-are indeed receptacles of so manypowersor forces they possess,like thc productsof nature, so many virtuesor qualities. What i<this song or picture, this engaging

personalitypresented in life or in a book, to Whateffect does it reaUy produce on me Doe< it

give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degrecof pleasuret How is my nature modified by it<

presence,and under it<influence?i The answersto these questions are the original ~actt withwhich thé aestheticcritic ha< to do and, aa inthe studyof light, of morals,of number, onemustrealise such primary data for one's self, or not

at all. And he who experiencesthese impressionsstrongly,and drives directly at the discriminationand analysis of them, bas no need to troublehimself with the abstract question what beautyis in itself,or what its exact relation to truth or



PREFACE

ix

experience-metaphysical questions,as unprofit-able M metaphysical questions elsewhere. He

may pass them all by M being, answerable or

not,of no interest to him.

The sesthetic critic, then, regards ail the

objectswith which he has to do, ail works of art,and the fairer formaof nature and human life, a<

powcr<or forcesproducingpleasuraMcsensations,each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind.This influencehe feels, and wishes to explain,by analysingandreducing it to its clements. To

him, the picture, the landscape, the engagingpersonalityin life or in a book, La (?MfM< the

hills of Carrara, Pico of Mirandola,are valuablefor their virtues,aswc say, in speakingof a herb,a wine, a gem for the property each ha< ot

aftcctmgone with a <pccia!,a unique, impressionof pleasure. Our education becomes completein proportion as our susceptibility to these im-

pressions increases in depth and variety. Andthe functionof the aestheticcritic is to distinguish,to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the

virtue by which a picture, a landscape,a fairpersonality in life or in a book, produces this

special impression of beauty or pleasure, to in-dicatewhat the source of that impressionis, andunder what conditions it is experienced. Hisend is reached when hc has disengaged that



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virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notea somenatural element, for himself and others andthe rule for those who would reach this end isstatcd with great exactness in the words of a

recent critic of Sainte-Beuve:–D~ ~cr~rfp~ ~r~ f~cj~, ~'Mnourriren~~M <?~ M~<~MWJ~~f0~

What i<important, then, is not that the criticshould possess a correct abstract definition of

beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of

tcmperament, the power of bcing deeply moved

by the presence of beautiful objects. He willremember always that beauty exists in many

fbrms. To himaU

periods, types,schools of

taste, are in themselvcs equal. In alt age<therehave been some excellent workmen, and someexcellent work donc. The question hc aske is

always:–!n whom did the stir, the genius,thesentiment of the period find itseîf? where wasthe receptacleof its refinement,in elevation,itstastc ?t The age$arc all equal," <ay<William

Blake, but genius is alway. above its age."Often it will

require great nicetyto

disengagethis virtue from the commoner clements withwhich it may be found in combination. Fcw

artists, not Goethe or Byron even, work quitecleanly,casting off ail <w, and leaving us onlywhat the heat of their imagination has wholly



PREFACE

xi

fused and transformed. Take, for instance, the

writings of Wordsworth. The heat of his

genius, entering into the substanceof his work,has crystalliseda part, but only a part, of it and

in that great mass of verse there is much whichmight well be forgotten. But scattered up anddownit, sometimesfusingand transformingentire

compositions,like the Stanzas on ~~c/ and

7)M~~w~, or the 0~ on Recollections

Childhood,sometimes,as if at random, depositinga fine crystal here or there, in a matter it doesnot wholly ecarch through and transmute, wetrace the action of his unique, incommunicable

faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a life innatural things, and of man's life as a part of

nature,drawingstrength andcolourand characterfrom local influences,from thé hills and streama,and from natural sights and sounds. Well thatis the virtue,the activeprinciplein Word<worth'$

poetry and then the function of the critic of Wordsworth i<to followup that active principle,to disengage it, to mark the degrec in which it

pénétrâteshis verse.The subjectsof the followingstudiesare takenfrom the history of the R<~<w.M~,and touchwhat ï think the chief points in that complex,many-sidedmovement. hâve explained in thenrst of them what 1 understand by the word,



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giving it a much wider scopethan was intended

by those who originally used it to denotethat revival of classical antiquity in the fiftccnth

century which was only one of many results of

a general excitement and enlightening of thehuman mind, but of which the great aim andachievementsof what, as Christian art, is often

falselyopposedto the Renaissance,were anotherresult. This outbreak of the human spirit maybc traced far into the middle age itself, with itsmotives alreadyclearly pronounced,the care for

physical beauty, the worship of the body, thebreaking downof thoselimits which the religious

Systemof the middle age

imposedon the heart

andthe imagination. 1 havetaken asan exampleof this movement,this earlier Renaissancewithinthe middle age itself, and as an expressionof its

qualities,two little compositionsin early Frenchnot because they constitute the best possibleexpression of them, but bccause they help the

unity of my series,inasmuch as the Renaissanceends alsoin France, in French poetry, in a phaseof which the writings of Joachimdu Bellayarc

in manywaysthe most perfect illustration. TheRenaissance,in truth, put forth in Francean after-math, a wonderful later growth, the products of which have to the full that subtle and delicatesweetnesswhich bclongs to a refinedand comely





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curiousof the thoughts of others. There come,however,from time to time, eras of more favour-able conditions,in which the thoughts of mendraw nearer together than is their wont, and the

many interestsof the intellectual world combinein one complete type of general culture. Thefifteenth century in Italy is one of these happiereras, and what is sometimes said of the age of Perictcsis true of that of Lorenzo:-it is an ageproductive in personalities,many-sided,central-ised, complete. Here, artists and philosopheraand those whom the action of the world haselevatcdand made kcen, do not live in isolation,but breathe a common

air,and catch

light andheat from each other's thoughts. There is aspirit of general elevation and enlightenmentin which ail alike communicate. The unityof this spirit gives unity to all the variousproducts of the Renaissance and it ia to thisintimate alliancewith mind, this participation inthe best thoughts which that age produced, thatthe art of Italy in the fifteenth century owesmuch of its grave dignity and influence.

1 have added an essayon Winckelmann,as notincongruous with the studioswhich precede it,becauseWinckelmann,coming in the eighteenthcentury, really belongs in spirit to an earlier age.By his enthusiasmfor the things of the intellect



PREFACE

XV

and thé imagination for their own sake,by his

Hellenism, his life-long struggle to attain tothé Grcek spirit, he is in sympathy with thehumanistsof a previouscentury. He is the last

fruit of the Renaissance,and explainsin a strik-ing way its motive and tendcnc!cs.

'873.



CONTENTSMM

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES t

PICODELLAM!RANDOLA ;<*

SANDROBOTTtCELLÏ ;o

LUCADELLAROBBtA. 63

THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO.7;

LEONARDODAVtNC!

THE SCHOOL OF G!ORG!ONE !;o

JOACHIM DU BELLAY tji;

WINCKELMANN ~7

CONCLUSION t;}



~Aa/ the w<w~~< <~w.



TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES

t 1

THBhistory of the Renaissanceends in France,and carries us away from Italy to the beautifulcides of the country of thc Loire. But it wasin France also, in a very important sense, thatthe Renaissance had begun. French writers,who are fond of connecting the creations of

Italian genius with a French origin, who tell ushowSaintFrancisof Assisitooknot hisnamconly,but ail thosenotionsof chivalryand romanticlovewhich so deeply penetrated his thoughts, from aFrench source,how Boccaccioborrowedthe out-linesof his storiesfrom the old French fabliaux,and how Dante himself cxpressiv connects theorigin of the art of miniature-pamtingwith thecity of Paris, have often dwelt on this notion of a Renaissancein the end of the twelfth and the

beginningof the thirteenth

century,a Renais-

sancewithin the limits of the middle age itself -a brilliant, but in part abortive effort to do forhumanlife and the human mind what wasafter-wards donc in the fifteenth. The word ~~MM-rance,indeed,is now generally used to denotenot






3

actually disappeared, this outbreak i$ rightlycalleda Renaissance,a revival.

Theories which bring into connexion witheach other modesof thought and feeling,periodsoftaste,formsof artand

poetry,which the narrow-

nessof men's minds constantlytendsto opposetoeach other, havea great stimulusfor the intellect,andarc almost always worth understanding. Itis so with this theory of a Renaissancewithinthe middle age, which seeks to establish a con-tinuity between the most characteristicwork of that period, the sculpture of Chartres, thewindowsof Le Mans, and the work of the laterRenaissance,thework of JeanCousinandGermainPilon, thus healing that rupture between the

middle age and thé Renaissancewhich has sooftenbeen exaggerated. But it is not so muchthe ecclesiastical art of the middle age, itssculpture and painting-work certainly donc ina great measure for pleasure's sake, m whicheven a secular, a rebellious spirit often betraysitself-but rather its profane poctry, the poctryof Provence, and the magnificent after-growthof that poetry in Italy and France,which thoseFrench writers have in view whcn they spcak

of this medieval Renaissance. In that poetry,earthly passion,with its intimacy, its freedom,its variety-the liberty of the heart-makesitself felt and the name of Abelard, thegreat scholar and the great lover, connccts theexpressionof this liberty of heart with thc frec



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play of human intelligence around all subject.presented to it, with the liberty of the intellect,as that age understoodit.

Every one knows the legend of Abelard, alegend hardly less passionate,certainly not less

characteristicof the middle age, than the legendofTannhauser how the famousandcomelyclerk,in whom Wisdom herself,seïf-possessed,pleasant,andd!scteet,seemedto sit enthroned,cameto livein the house of a canon of the church of Notrt-Dame,where dwelt a girt, Heloïse, believed tobe the old priest's orphan nièce how the oldpriest had testifiedhi. love forher by giving heran education then unrivalled, so that rumourassertedthat,through the knowledgeof languages,

enabling her to penetrate ïnto the mysteries of the older world, shehad becomea sorceress,likethe Celtic druidc8sc$ and how as Abelard andHeloïsesattogetherathome there, to refinea littlefurther on the nature of abstract ideas, Lovemadehimself of the party with them." Youcon-ceivethe temptationsof the scholar,who, in suchdreamy tranquillity, amid the bright and busyspectacleof the" Island,"livedin a worldof some-thing like shadows and that foronewho knewsowell how to

assignitsexactvalueto

everyabstract

thought, those restraints which lie on the con-sciencesof othermenhad beenrelaxed. It appearsthat he composcdmanyversesinthe vulgartongue:alreadythe youngmen sangthem onthe quaybe-low the house. Thosc songs,saysM.de Rémusat,





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one who had left so deep a mark on thephilosophyof which Dantewasan cager studcnt,of whom m the Latin Quarter, and from thé lipsof scholaror teacher in the Universityof Pans,during his sojourn among them, he can hardly

have failed to hcar. We can only supposethathe had indced consideredthe story an the man,and abstaincd from passing judgment as to hisplace in the schemeof~cternal justice."

In thé famous legend of Tannhauser, théerring knight makes his way to Rome, to seekabsolution at the centre of Christian religion.

So soon," thought and said the Pope, as thestaff in his hand should bud and blossom, sosoonmight the soul of Tannhauser bc saved,and

no sooner and it came to pass not long afterthat thé dry wood of a staff which the Pope hadcarried in his hand was coveredwith Ieavesandnowers. So, in the cloister of Godstow, apetrified tree was shown of which the nuns toldthat the fair Rosamond, who had died amongthem, had decîared that, the tree being thenalive and green, it would be changed into stoneat the hour of her salvation. When Abelarddied, like Tannhauser, he was on his way toRome. What

mighthave

happenedhad he

reached his journey's end is uncertain and it isin this uncertain twilight that his relation to thegénéral beliefs of his age has always remained.In this, as in other things, he prefigures thecharacter of thc Renaissance,that movement in




7

which, in various ways, the human mind winsfor itselfa new kingdom of feeling and sensationand thought, not opposed to but only beyondand independent of the spiritual system thenactually realised. The opposition into which

Abelard is thrown, which gives its colour to hiscarcer, which breaks his soul to pieces, is a noless subtle opposition than that between themerely professional,omcial, hireling ministersof that system, with their ignorant worship of

Systemfor its own sake, and the truc child of hght, the humanist, with reason and heart andsenses quick, while theirs were almost dead.He reaches out towards, he attains, modes of ideal living, beyond the prescribcdlimits of that

system, thoughm essential

germ,it

may be,containedwithin it. As alwayshappens,the ad-herents of the poorer and narrower culture hadno sympathy with, because no understandingof,a culture richer and more ample than their own.Aftcr the discoveryof wheat they would still liveupon acorns–j~~ /'M~ voulaientencoreM~~ du gland; and would hear of noservice to the bigher needs of humanity withinstrumentsnot of their forging.

But thé human spirit, bold through thosc

needs, was too strong for them. Abelard andHeloïse write their tetters–letters with awonderful outpouring of soul in medievalLatin and Abelard, though he composessongsin the vulgar tongue, writes also in Latin those



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treatises in which he tries to find a ground of rcality below thc abstractions of philosophy, asone bent on trying all things by their congruitywith human experience, who had felt the handof Heloïse, and looked into her eyes, and tested

thé resources of humanity in her great andenergetic nature. Yet it is only a little later,early in the thirteenth century, that French proseromance begins and in one of the prettyvolumesof the BibliothèQueElzeviriennesome of the most striking fragments of it may be found,edited with much intelligence. In one of thesethirteenth-century stories, Li ~w/~x </f ~f, that free play of human affection,of thedaims of which Abelard's story is an assertion,

makes itself felt in the incidents of a greatfriendship, a friendship pure and generous,pushed to a sort of passionate exaltation, andmore than faithful unto death. Such comrade-ship, though instances of it are to bc foundeverywhere, is still especiallya classicalmotive -PChaucerexpressingthe sentimentof it sostronglyin an antique tale, that one knows not whetherthe love of both Palamonand Arcite for Emelya,or of those two for each other, is the chiefer

subjectof thé

Knights7~~–

Mf~~M<~ <~f<Emelyo,~A~~M'M~/ ~/<y~~<?~~fr/<< ~A

~f that ht tf~v Mt/<tht A<r/<.

What reader docs not refer something of the




9

bitterness of that cry to the spoiling, alreadyforeseen,of the fair friendship, which had madethe prisonof the two lads sweet hitherto withits daily offices?l

The friendshipof Amisand Amile is deepened

by the romantic circumstance of an entirepersonal resemblance between the two heroes,through which they passfor eachother again andagain,and thereby into manystrangeadventuresthat curious interest of the Do~~J~r, whichbegins among the starswith the Dioscuri,beingentwinedin and out through all the incidentsof the story, like an outward token of the inwardsimilitude of their souls. With this, again, isconnected,like a secondreflectionof that inward

similitude, the conceit of two marvellouslybeautiful cups, also exactly like each other-children's cups, of wood, but adorned with goldand preciousstones. These two cups, which bytheir resemblance help to bring the friendstogether at critical moments,were given to themby the Pope, when he baptized them at Rome,whither the parents had taken them for thatpurpose,in gratitude for their birth. Thcy crossandrecrossverystrangelyin thé narrative,servingthe two heroesalmostlike

livingthings,

andwiththat well-known effectof a beautiful object,keptconstantlybefore the eye in a story or pocm, of kecping sensation well awake, and giving acertain air of refinement to all the scencs mtowhich it enters. That sense of fate, which



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hangs so much of the shaping of human life ontrivial objects,like Othello's strawberry handker-chief, is thereby heightened, while witness isborne to the enjoymentof beautiful handiworkby primitive people, their simple wonder at it,so that the give it an oddly significantplaceamong thé factorsof a human history.

Amis and Amile, then, are truc to theircomradeshipthrough all trials and in the end itcomes to pas$ that at a moment of great ncedAmis takes thé place of Amile in a tournamentfor life or death. UAfter this it happened that a

leprosy feU upon Amis, so that his wife wouldnot approach him, and wrought to strangle him.He departed therefore from his home, and at last

prayedhis servants to carry him to the house of Amile and it is in what follows that thecurious strength of the pièce showsitself:-

Hisservants,willing todo ashe commanded,carried him to the place where Amile was andthey began to soundtheir rattles before the courtof Amile's house, as lepers are accustomedto do.And when Amile heard the noisehe commandedoneof his servantsto carry meat and breadto the

sick man, and thé cup which was given to himat Rome filled with good wine. And when theservant had donc as he was commanded,he re-turned and said,Sir, if 1 had not thy cup in myhand, 1 should bclieve that the cup which thesick man bas was thine, for they are alike, the




Il

one to the other, in height and fashion. AndAmile said, Go quickly and bring him to me.Andwhen Amis stood before his comradeAmiledcmandedof him who he was, and how he had

gotten that cup. am of Briquain le Chastel,answeredAmis, and the cup was given to me bythe Bishop of Rome, who baptized me. Andwhen Amile heard that, he knew that it washiscomrade Amis, who had delivered him ~romdeath, and won for him the daughter of thé

King of Franceto be his wife. And straightwayhe fell upon him, and began weeping greatly,and kissed him. And when his wife heard that,she ran out with her hair in disarray,weepingand distressedexceedingly, 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 willbe accomplished in thee, for all we have is at

thy service. So he and the two servants abodewith them.

And it came to passone night, when Amisand Amile lay in one chambcr without other

companions,that God sent His angel Raphael toAmis, who said to him, Amis, art thou asieep?1

And hc, supposing that Amile had called him,answeredand said,1am not asleep,fair comrade1And the angel said to him, Thou hast answeredwell, for thou art the comrade of the heavenlycitizens.–1 am Raphael, the angel of our Lord,and am corne to tell thce how thou mayest bc



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healed for thy prayers are heard. Thou shaltbid Amile, thy comrade, that he slay his twochildren and wash thee in their blood, and so

thy body shall bc made whole. And Amis saidto him, Let not this

thingbe, that

mycomrade

should bccome a murderer for my sake. Butthe angel said, It is convenient that hc do this.And thereupon the angel departed.

And Amile also, asif in sleep,heard thosewords and he awoke and said, Who is it, mycomrade, that hath spoken with thce t AndAmis answercd,No man only 1 have prayed toour Lord, as 1 am accustomed. And Amilesaid, Not so1 but some one hath spoken withthec. Then he arose and went to the door of

the chamber and finding it shut he said, Tellme, mybrother, who it was sa!d those wordstothce to-night. AndAmisbegan to weep greatly,and told him that it was Raphael, the angel of the Lord, who had said to him, Amis, our Lordcommandsthec that thou bid Amile slay his twochildren, and wash thee in their blood, and sothou shalt be healedof thy leprosy. And Amilewas greatly disturbed at those words,and said, 1would have given to thec my man-servantsand

my maid-servants and all my goods, and thoufeignestthat an angel hath spokento thee that 1should slaymy two children. And immediatelyAmis began to wccp, and said, 1 know that 1have spoken to thee a terrible thing, but con-strained thereto 1 pray thec cast me not away




u

from the shelter of thy house. And Amileansweredthat what he had covenantcdwith him,that he would perform, unto the hour of hisdeath But conjure thee, said he, by the faithwhich there is between me and thee, and by our

comradeship,and by the baptism we receivedtogether at Rome, that thou tell me whether itwasman or angel said that to thee. And Amisansweredagain,So truly as an angel hath spokento me this night, so may God deliver me frommy infirmity 1

"Then Amile began to weep in secret, andthought within himscÏf If this man was readyto die before the king for me, shall 1 not forhim slay my children? Shall 1 not kccp faith

with him who was faithful to me even untodeath?And Amiletarriedno longer,but departedto the chamber of his wife, and badeher go hearthe Sacred Office. And he took a sword, andwent to the bed where the children were lying,and found them asleep. And he lay down overthem and began to weep bitterly and said, Hathany man yet heard of a father whoof hîs own willslewhis children t Alas,my children1 1 amnolonger your father, but your cruel murderer.

And the children awoke at the tears of theirfather, which fell upon them and they lookedup into his face and began to laugh. And asthe were of the age of about three years, hesaid, Your laughing will be turned into tears,for your innocent blood must now be shed,



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and therewith he cut off their heads. Then helaid them back in the bed, and put the headsupon the bodies, and covered them as thoughthey siept and with the blood which he hadtaken he washed his comrade, and said, LordJesus Christ who hast commanded men tokeep faith on carth, and didst heal the leper byThy word 1cleansenow my comrade,for whoselove 1 have shed the blood of my children.

"Then Amis was cleansed of his leprosy.And Amile clothed his companion in his bestrobes and as they went to the church to givethanks, the bells, by thé will of God, rang of their own accord. And when the people of the

city heard that, they ran together to sec the

marvel. And the wife of Amile, when shesaw Amis and Amile coming, asked which of the twain was her husband, and said, 1 knowwell thé vesture of them both, but 1 know notwhich ofthem is Amile. And Amile saidto her,1 am Amile, and my companion is Amis, who ishealed of his sickness. And she was full of wonder, and desired to know in what mannerhewas healed. Give thanks to our Lord, answeredAmile, but trouble not thyself as to the manner

of the healing.Now neither the father nor the mother hadyet entered where thé children were but thefathcr sighed heavily, because they were dead,and the mother askedfor them, that they mightrejoice together but Amile said, Dame 1 let




t!

the children sleep. And it was alreadythe hourof Tierce. And going in atone to the childrento weep over them, he foundthem at play inthebed only, in the place of the sword-cuts abouttheir throats wasas it were a thrcad of crimson.And he took them in his arms and carried themto his wife and said, Rejoicc greatly, for thychildrenwhom 1 had slain by the commandmentofthe angel are alive,and by their blood is Amishcalcd."

There, as ï said, is the strcngth of the oldFrench story. For the Renaissancehasnot onlythe sweetnesswhich it derives from the classicalworld, but also that curious strength of which

there arc great resourcesin the truc middle âge.And as 1 have illustrated thé early strcngth of the Renaissanceby the story of Amis and Amile,a story which comes from the North, in whicha certain racy Teutonic flavour is perceptible,so 1 shall illustrate that other element, its earlysweetness,a languid excessof sweetnesseven, byanother story printed in the samevolumeof theBibliothèQueE/w, and of about the samedate,a storywhich cornes,characteristically,from

the South, and connectsitself with the literatureof Provence.The central love-poetry of Provence, the

poetry of the 7~<w and the .< of Bernardde Ventadourand Pierre Vidal, is poctry for théfew, for the elect and peculiar people of the



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t<

kingdom of sentiment. But below this intenserpoetry there was probably a wide range of litera-turc, less seriousand elevatcd,reaching,by light-ness of form and comparative homeliness of interest, an audience which 'the concentrated

passion of those higher lyrics left untouched.This literature has long since pcrishcd, or livea

only in later French or Italian versions. Onesuch version,the only representativeof its species,M. Fauriel thought he detccted in the story of ~w<?~~ and Nicolette,written in thé French of the latter half of the thirteenth century, andpreservedin a unique manuscript, in the nationallibrary of Paris and thcre wcrc reasonswhichmade him divine for it a still more ancientt

ancestry,traces in it of an Arabian origin, a$ina îeaf lost out of some carly ~r~ Nighti.1The little book losesnone of its interest throughthe criticism which finds in it only a traditionalsubject, handedon by one peopleto another forafter passingthus from hand to hand, it<outlineis still clear, its surface untarnishcd and, likemany other stories, books, literary and artisticconceptions of the middle age, it has come to

t Recently,drrtauï~ra~dNitekttihasbeeneditedandtranslated

intoEnglish,withmuchgraccfulhtt bceneditedMr.F. W.inteEngtith,w!thmuchgracefu!«hoitrthip,by Mr.F. W.Bourdillon.Stillmoreccccntlywchavehada trtnttxtion–opoet'ttran<!ttion–<romthetn~eniou*andversatilepenof Mr.AndrewLang.Thereadershouldcontu!talsothethtpteron"TheOut-doorPoetry,"inVernonLee'tmostintertttin~F~f/« ~~w M</ Af<~t~/ ~MM/ <worktboundingtn knowteagcandinsightonthetubjetttof whichittreats.





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Or cante(ici on chante) and cach division of proseby the rubric, Or dientet contentet fa6loient(/r/c~ conte). The musical notes of a portion of the songshave been preserved andsomeof thedetails are so descriptive that they suggested to

M. Fauriel the notionthat the wordshad beenac-companiedthroughout by dramaticaction. Thatmixture of simplicityandrefinementwhich hewassurprisedtofindin a compositionof the thirteenthcentury, is shown sometimesin the turn given tosome passing expression or remark thus, theCount de Garins was old and frail, his time wasover "–L/ ~<w Garins de Beaucaire~/p/f vix et

/r~~ avoit tans And then, allis so realised1 One secsthe ancicnt forest,with

its disusedroads grown deep with grass,and theplace where seven roads meet–M a ~c~~vontpar le païs we h carthe light-

hearted country peopÏc calling each other bytheir rustic names, and putting forward,as theirspokesman, one among them who is morecloquent and ready than the rest-li un qui~/M~fu ~~r~f ~~r~ for the little book has itsburlesque clemcnt also, so that one hears théfaint, far-off laughter still. Rough as it is, the

pièce certainly possessesthis

high quality of poetry, that it aims at a purcly artistic effect. Itssubject is a great sorrow, yet it daims to be athing of joy and refrcshment, to be entertainednot for its matter only, but chieflyfor its manner,it is cortoîr,it tells us,et ~~7<w.




ï9

For thé student of manners,and of the oldFrcnch language and literature, it has muchinterest of a purely antiquarian ordcr. To sayof an ancient literary composition that it has an

antiquarian interest,often means that it has no

distinctaesthettCinterest for the reader of to-day.Antiquarianism,by a purely historical effort,byputting its objcct in perspective,and setting thereader in a certain point of view, from whichwhat gave pleasure to the past is pleasurable forhim also,may oftenadd greatly to the charm wereceive from ancient literature. But the firstcondition of such aid must bc a rcal, direct,aestheticcharm in the thing itself. Unlessit hasthat charm, unless some purely artistic qualitywentto its originalmaking,no merelyantiquarianeffortcan ever give it an aestheticvalue, or makeit a proper subject of aestheticcriticism. This

quality, wherever it exista,it i. always pleasantto donne, and discriminate from thé sort of borrowed interest which an old play, or an old

story, may very likely acquire through a true

antiquarianism. The story of Aucassin andNicolette has somcthing of this quality.Aucassin, the only son of Count Garins of

Beaucaire,is passionatelyin love with Nicolette,a beautiful girl of unknown parentage, boughtof the Saracens,whom his father will not permithim to marry. The story turns on thc advcn-tures of these two levers, until at the end of the

picce their mutual fidelity is rewarded. These



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adventures are of the simplest sort, adventureswhich seem to be chosen for the happy occasion

they anord of keeping the eye of thé fancy,perhaps the outward eye, fixed on pleasantobjects,a garden, a ruined tower, the little hut

of flowers which Nicolette constructs in theforest whither she escapes from her enemies,as a token to Aucassin that she has passcd thatway. Ail the charm of the picce i< in it<details, in a turn of peculiar lightness and gracegiven to the situations and traits of sentiment,especiallyin its quaint fragments of early Frenchprose.

Ail through it one feelsthe influenceof thatfaint air of overwrought delicacy, almost of

wantonness,which was so strong a characteristicof thé poctry of the Troubadours. The Trou-badoursthemselveswereoftenmen of great rankthey wrote for an exclusive audience,pcople of much leisure and great refinement, and theycame to value a type of personal beauty whichhas in it but little of the influenceof the openair and sunshine. There is a languid Easterndeliciousncssin the vcry scencry cf the story,the full-blown roses,the chamber painted insome

mysteriousmannerwhere Nicolette isimprisoned,the cool brown marble, the almost namelesscolours, the odour of plucked grass and flowers.Nicolette herself well becomesthis scenery,andis the best illustration of thé quality ï mean-the beautiful, weird, foreign girl, whom the





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9<

and thc towels, and knotted them together likea cord, as far as they would go. Then she tiedthe end to a pillar of the window,and let herself

slip down quite softlyinto the garden,and passedstraight acrossit, to reach the town.

"Her ha!r was yellow in small curls, hersmiling eyes blue-green,her face clear and feat,the little lips very red,the teeth smaltand white;and the daisies which she crushed in passing,holding her skirt high behind and before,lookeddark against her feet the girl was sowhite 1

She came to the garden-gate and openedit,and walked through the streets of Beaucaire,

keeping on the dark side of the way to be out of thé light of thc moon, which shone quietly in

the sky. She walked as fast as she could,until

shecame to the towcr whcrc Aucassinwas. Thetower was set about with pillars, hère and therc.She pressed herself against one of the pillars,wrappedherself closelyin her mande, and puttingher faceto a chink of the tower, which was oldand ruined, she heard Aucassin crving bitterlywithin, and when she had tistened awhile she

began to spcak."

But scatteredup

and downthrough

this

lighter matter, always tinged with humour andoften passing into burlesque, which makes upthe générât substance of thé piece, there aremorsels of a different quality, touches of someintenser sentiment, coming it would seem from




<3

the profoundandenergeticspirit of the Provençalpoetry itself,to which the inspirationof the bookhas been referred. Let me gather up thesemorselsof deeper colour, these expressionsof theideal intensityof love, the motive which really

unites together the fragments of thélittle

com-position. Dante, the perfectflowerof ideal love,has recorded how the tyranny of that Lord of terrible aspect became actually physical, blind-ing his senses,and suspending his bodily forces.In this, Dante is but the central expressionand

type of experiences known well-enough to theinitiated, in that passionate age. Aucassin

representsthis ideal intensity of passion-

~«f<w< /<~.<f, /<~/e~~Li ~t~r, /<a~ar~ ;–

the s!!m, ta!l, debonair,dansellon,as the singersca!t him, with his curled yellow hair, and eyesof vair, who faints with love, as Dante fainted,who rides all day through the forest in searchof Nicolette, while the thorns tear his flesh,sothat one might have traced him by the bloodupon the grass, and who wceps at eventidebecause he has not found hcr, who has themalady of his love, and neglects all knightly

duties. Once he !s inducedto put himselfat thehead of his people, that they, seeing him beforethem, might have more heart to defend them-selves then a song relates how the swect, gravefigure goes forth to battle, in dainty, tight-laced



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armour. It is the very image of the Provençallove-god,no longer a child, but grown to pensiveyouth, as Pierre Vidalmet him, riding on a whitehorse, fair as the morning, his vestment em-broidered with flowers. He rode on throughthe gates into the open plain beyond. But ashe went, that great maladyof his lovecameuponhim. The bridie fell from his hands and likeone who sleeps walking, he was carried on intothe midst of his enemies,and heard them talk-ing together how they might most convenientlykill him.

One of the strongest characteristics of thatoutbreak of the reason and the imagination, of that assertion of the liberty of the heart, in thé

middle age, which 1 have termed a medievalRenaissance,was its antinomianism,its spirit of rébellionandrevoltagainstthe moraland religiousideas of the timc. In their search after the

pleasures of the senses and thé imagination, intheir care for beauty, in their worship of the

body, people were impclled beyond the boundsof the Christian ideal and their love becamesometimes a strange idolatry, a strange rival

religion. It was the return of that ancient

Venus,not dead, but only hidden for a time inthe caves of the Venusberg,of those old pagangods still going to and fro on the earth, under allsorts of disguises. And this clement in themiddle âge, for the most part ignorcd by thosewriters who have treated it pre-eminentlyas the




Age of Faith "-this rebelliousand antinomianelement, the recognitionof which has made thedelineation of the middle age by the writers of the Romanticschool in France, by Victor Hugofor instancein Notre-Damede Paru, so suggestiveand exciting-is found alikc in the history of Abelard and the legend of Tannhauscr. Moreand more, as wc corne to mark changes anddistinctions of temper in what is often in one

all-embracing confusion called the middle age,that rébellion, that sinister claim. for liberty of heart and thought, comes to the surface. The

Albigensian movement, connected so strangelywith the history of Provençal poctry, is deeplytinged with it. A touch of it makes the Fran-

ciscan order, with its poetry, it< mysticism,its"illumination," from the point of view of

religious authority, justly suspect. It influencesthe thoughts of those obscureprophetical writers,like Joachim of Flora, étrange dreamers in aworld of nowery rhetoric of that third and final

dispensationof a spirit of freedom," in whichlaw shall have passed away. Of this spirit~r<wM and Nicolettecontains perhaps the mostfamous expressions it is the answer Aucassin

gives when he is threatened with the pains of hell, if he makes Nicolette his mistress. Acreature wholly of affection and the senses, hesecs on the way to paradise only a fecble andworn-out company of aged priests, clingingday and night to thé chapel altars," barefoot or



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m patched sandals. With or even withoutNicolette, his sweet mistress whom he somuch loves," he, for bis part, Is ready to start onthé way to hell along with the good scholars,"as he says,and thc actors,and the fine horscmcn

dead in battle, and the men of fashion,l andthcfair courteous ladies who had two or threechevaliers apiece beside their own true lords,"all gay with music, in their gold, and si!ver,andbeautiful furs–" the vair and the grey."

But in the ~p~~ ~M~ the saintstoo havetheir place and the student of the Renaissanceha$ this advantageover the student of the eman-cipation of the human mind in thc Reformation,or the French Revolution, that in tracing thé

footsteps of humanity to higher levels, he isnot beset at every turn by the innexibilitiet andantagonismsof somewell-rccognisedcontroversy,with rigidly defined opposites, exhausting theintelligenceand limiting one's sympathies. Theoppositionof the professionaldefendersof a meresystemto that more sincereand generousplay of thé forces of human mind and character, which1 have noted as thé secret of Abelard's struggle,is indeed always powerful. But the incompati-

bility with one another of souls really "fair" isnot essential and within thé enchanted regionof the Renaissance,one needsnot be for ever on

1parage,pee~ge:–whichcameto tignifyttt thattmbitiou)youtht<r<cte<!mostonthéouuideof life,inthatoldworldoftheTroubadours,withwhomthi<termitof fréquentrecurrence.




'7

one's guard. Here there are no fixed parties, noexclusions all breathes of that unity of culturein which "whatsocvcr things are comely" arcreconciÏcd,for thé élévationand adorning of ourspirits. And just in proportion as those who

took part in the Renaissancebecome centrallyrepresentativeof it, just somuch the moreisthiscondition realised in them. The wicked popes,and the !ove!csstyrants,who from time to timebecame its patrons, or mere speculators in itsfortunes, lend themselves easily to disputations,and,fromthis sideor that, the spirit of controversytaysjust hold uponthem. But thé painter of theL~ Supper,with his kindred, lives in t landwhere controversyhas no breathing-place. They

refuseto be classified. In the story of ~<WMand Nicolettt,in the literature which it represents,the note of defiance,of the opposition of onesystemto another, is sometimes harsh. Let meconcludethonwith a morselfromAmisand ~f,in which the harmony of human interests is stillentire. For the story of the great traditionalfriendship,in which, as 1 said, the liberty of theheart makes itself felt, scems,as we have it, tohave been written by a monk-La vie </f~saints

martyrs~WM ~M/ It was not till the end

of the seventeenth century that their nameswere finally excluded from the martyrologyand their story ends with this monkish miracleof earthly comradeship,more than faithful untodeath :–



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la

For, asGod had united them in their livcsin one accord, so they were not divided in theirdeath, falling together s!dc by sîde, with a hostof other brave men, in battle for King Charlesat' Mortara, so called from that great slaughter.And the bishops gave counsel to the king andqueen that they should bury the dead, and builda church in that place and their counselpleasedthe king greatly. And there were built twochurches, the one by commandment of the kingin honour of Saint Oseige, and the other bycommandmentof thé queen in honour of SaintPeter.

"And the king caused the two chests of stoneto bc brought in the which the bodicsof

Amis and Amile lay and Amile was carriedto the church of Saint Peter, and Amis to thechurch of Saint Oseige and the other corpseswere buried, some in one place and some inthe other. But !o 1 next morning, the bodyof Amile in his coffin was found lying in thechurch of Saint Oseige, beside the coffin of Amis his comrade. Behold then this won-drous amity, which by death could not bedissevered1

"This miracle God did, who gave to Hisdisciples power to remove mountains. And byrcason of this miracle thé king and queen re-mained in that place for a spaceof thirty days,and performed the officesof thé dead who wereslain, and honourcdthé said churches with great




gifts. And the bishop ordained many clerks toserve in the church of Saint Oseige, and com-mandedthem that they should guard du!y, withgreat devotion,the bodiesof the two companion<,Amis and Amilc."

t<~





PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA

3'

arise, deeply enough impressedby its beauty and

power to ask themselveswhcther the religion o~Grcece was indeed a rival of the religion of

Christ for the older gods had rehabilitatedthemselves, and mcn's allegiance was divided.

And the fifteenth century was an impassionedage, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of artthat it consecrated everything with which arthad to do as a religious objcct. The restoredGreek literaturc had made It familiar, at leastin Plato, with a style of expression concerningthé earlier gods, which had about it somethingof the warmth and unction of a Christian hymn.It was too familiar with such language to regardmythology as a mère story and it was too

seriousto play with a religion.Let me bricny remind the rcadcr"–say<Heine, in the Godl M Exile,an essayfull of that

strange blending of sentiment which is charac-teristic of the traditions of the middle age con-

cerning the pagan religions–" how the godsof 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. Theynow found themselves

beset by the same troublesome necessities towhich they had once before becn exposedduringthe primitive ages, in that revolutionary epochwhen the Titans brokc out of thé custodyof Orcus, and, piling Pelion on Ossa, scaled



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Olympus. Unfortunate gods1 They had thcnto take night ignominiousîy,and hide themselvesamong us here on earth, under all sorts of dis-guises. The larger number betook themselvesto Egypt, wherefor greatersecuritythey assumed

the forms of animais, as is generally known.Just in the same way, they had to take flightagain, and seek entertainment in remote hiding-places,when those iconoclasticzealots, the blackbrood of monks, brokc down all the temples,and pursued the gods with fire and curses.Many of these unfortunate emigrants, nowentirely deprived of shelter and ambrosia,mustneeds take to vulgar handicrafts,as a means of earning their bread. Under these circumstances,

many whosc sacred groves had been confiscated,let themselves out for hire as wood-cutters inGermany, and were forced to drink beer insteadof nectar. Apollo sccms to have been contentto take service under graziers, and as he hadonce kept the cowsof Admetus, so he lived nowas a shephcrd in Lower Austria. Here, how-ever, having becomesuspcctedon accountof hisbeautiful singing, he was recognisedby a learnedmonk as one of the old pagan gods, and handedover to the

spiritualtribunal. On the rack he

confesscd that he was thc god Apollo andbefore his cxccution hc begged that he mightbe suneredto play once more upon the lyre, andto sing a song. And he played so touchingly,~nd sang with such magic, and was withal so




<D 33

beautiful in form andfeature,that all the women

wept, and many of them were so deeply im-

pressed that they shordy afterwards fell sick.Some time afterwards the people wished to

draghim from the

grave again,that a stakc

might be drïven through his body, in the belief that he had bcen a vampire, and that the sickwomen would by this means recover. But theyfoundthe grave empty."

The Renaissanceof the fifteenth century was,in many things, great rather by what it designedthan by what it achieved. Much which it

aspired to do, and did but imperfectly or mis-

takenly, was accomplished in what is called the~r~ of the eighteenth century, or in our

own génération and what really belongs to therevivalof thc fifteenth century is but the leadinginstinct, the curiosity, the initiatory idea. It isso with this very question of the reconciliationof the religion of antiquity with the religion of Christ. A modern scholar occupied by this

problem might observethat all religionsmay be

regarded as natural products, that, at least intheir origin, their growth, and decay,they havecommon laws,and are not to be isolatedfrom the

other movements of the human mind in theperiodsinwhich they respectivelyprevailed; that

they arise spontaneouslyout of the human mind,asexpressionsof thevaryingphasesofits sentimentconcerning the unseen world that every intel-lectual product must bc judgcd from thc point of



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34

view of the age and the people in which it wasproduced. He might go on to observethat cachhas contributed something to the developmentof the religious sense, and ranging them as somany stages in the gradua! education of the

human mind, justify the existenceof each. Thebasisof thé reconciliationof the religionsof theworld would thus bc the incxhaustible activityand creativcness of the human mind itself, inwhich all religions alike have their root, and inwhich all alike are reconciled just as the fanciesof childhoodand the thoughts of oldage meet andare laid to rest, in the expérienceof theindividual.

Far differentwas thé method followed by thescholars of the fifteenth century. They lacked

the very rudiments of the historic sense,which,by an imaginative act, throws itself back intoa worid unlike onc's own, and estimates everyintellectual creation in its connexion with theage from which it proceeded. They had noideaof development,of the din~ercncesof ages, of theprocessby which our race has been educated."In their attemptsto reconcilethe religionsof theworld, they were thus thrown back upon thequicksand of allegorical interpretation. The

religionsof the worid were to be reconciled,notassuccessivestagesin a regulardevelopmentof thereligioussense,butas subsistingside by side,andsubstantiallyin agreementwith oneanother. Andhere the first necessity was to misrepresent thclanguage, thé conceptions,the sentiments,it was




35

proposcd to compare and reconcile. Plato andHomer must be made to spcak agrecably toMoses. Set side by side, the mere surfacescould never unite in any harmony of design.Therefore one must go below the surface, and

bring up the supposed secondary,or still moreremote meaning,that diviner significationheldin reserve,in r~w~ diviniur~/f~ latent in somestray touch of Homer, or figure of speech in thebooks of Moses.

And yet as a curiosity of the human mind, amadhousc-cel! if you will, into which we may

peep for a moment, and seeit at work weavingstrange fancies, the allegorical interpretation of the fifteenth century has its interest. With its

strange web of imagery, its quaint conceits, itsunexpected combination$and subtle moralising,it isan element in the local colourof a great age.It illustrates also the faith of that age in ailoracles,its desire to hear all voices,its generousbelief that nothing which had ever interestedthehuman mind could wholly lose its vitality. Itit the counterpart, though certainly the feeblercounterpart, of that practical truce and recon-ciliationof thé godsof Greccewith the Christian

religion, which is seen in the art of the time.And it is for his share in this work, and becausehis own story is a sort of analogue or visibleequivalent to the expression of this purpose inhis writings, that something of a general mtereststill belongsto the nameof Pico délia Mirandola.



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whoselife,written by h!s nephew Francis,seemedworthy, for some touch of sweetnessin it, to betranslatedout of theoriginal Latin by SirThomasMore, that great lover of Italian culture, amongwhoseworks the life of Pico, E~r/<

anda great /~</ of Italy, ashe cal!shim, maystillbe read, in its quaint, antiquated English.Marsilio Ficino has told us how Pico came

to Florence. It was the very day-some dayprobablyin the year ~82–on which Ficino hadfinishedhis famoustranslationof Plato into Latin,the work to which he had been dedicated fromchildhood by Cosmo de' Medici, in furtheranceof his desireto resuscitatethe knowledgeof Platoamong his fellow-citizens. Florence indeed, asM. Renan

has pointed out, had always had anaffinityfor the mystic and dreamy philosophy of Plato, while the colder and more practicalphilo-sophy of Aristotle had flourishedin Padua, andother cities of the north and the Florentines,though they knew perhapsvery little about him,had had the name of the great idealist often ontheir lips. To increase this knowledge, Cosmohad foundedthé Platonic academy,with periodi-cal discussionsat the Villa Careggi. The fallof Constantinople in t~~3, and the council in

t~8 for the reconciliation of the Greek andLatin Churches, had brought to Florence manya necdy Greek scholar. And now the work wascompleted,the door of the mystical temple layopen to all who could construe Latin, and the




37

scholar rested from his labour when there wasintroduced into his study, where a lamp burnedcontinually before the bust of Plato, as othcrmen burncd lamps beforetheir favouritesaints,a

youngman fresh from a

journey,of feature and

shape seemïy and beautcous, of stature goodlyand high, of flesh tender and soft, his visagelovely and fair, his colour white, intermingledwith comelyreds,his eyesgrey, andquick oflook,his tceth white and even, his hair yellow andabundant," and trimmed with more than theusual artince of the time.

It isthus that Sir Thomas More translates thewordsofthc biographer of Pico,who,even in out-wardformand appearance,seemsan image ofthat

inward harmony and completeness,of which heis so perfect an example. The word mystichasbeen usually derived from a Grcek word whichsigninesto as if one rhut cw'~ lips broodingon what cannot bc uttered but the Platoniststhemselvesderiveit rather from the act of shatting

< that one may sec the more, inwardly.Perhaps the eyes of thé mystic Ficino, now longpastthe midwayoflife, had cometo bc thus half-closcd but when a young man, not unlike the

archangel Raphael, asthe Florentines of that agedepicted him in his wonderful walk with Tobit,or Mercury,ashe might haveappearedin a paint-ing by Sandro Botticelli or Piero di Cosimo,entered his chamber, he seems to have thoughtthere was something not wholly carthly about



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him at least, he cver aftcrwards believed thatit was not without the co-operationof the starsthat the stranger had arrived on that day. Forit happened that they fell into a conversation,

deeperand more intimate than men

usuallyfall

into at first sight. During this conversationFicino formedthe design of devotinghis remain-

ing years to the translationof Plotinus, that newPlato, in whom the mystical element in thePlatonic philosophy had becn worked out to theutmost limit of vision and ecstasy and it is in

dcdicating this translationto Lorenzo de' Medicithat Ficino has recordedthese incidents.

It was after many wanderings,wanderings of the intellect as well as physical journeys, that

Pico came to rest at Florence. Bom in !~6~,he was then about twenty years old. He wascalled Giovanni at baptism, Pico, like all hisancestors, from Picus, nephew of the EmperorConstantine, from whom they claimcd to bcdescended, and Mirandola from thé place of his birth, a little town afterwards part of the

duchy of Modena, of which small territoryhis family had long been the feudal lords.Pico was thé youngest of the tamily, and his

mother, dclighting in his wonderfui memory,sent him at the age of fourteen to the famousschool of law at Bologna. From the first,indeed, she seems to have had some presenti-ment of his future fame, for, with a faith inomens characteristic of her time, she believed




à

39

that a strange circumstance had happened atthe time of Pico's birth-the appearanceof acircular flame which suddcnly vanished away,on the wall of the chamber where she lay.He remained two ycars at Bologna and then,

with an inexhaustible, unrivalled thirst forknowledge,thc strange,confused,uncriticallearn-ing of that age, passed through the principalschools of Italy and France, penctrating, as hethought, into the secretsof ail ancient philoso-phies, and many Eastern languages. And withthis floodof erudition camethe generous hope,sooften disabused,of reconciling the philosopherswith one another, and all alikewith the Church.At last he came to Rome. There, like some

knight-errant of philosophy,he offeredto defendnine hundred bold paradoxes,drawn from thcmost opposite sources,against all comers. Butthe pontifical court was led to suspect theorthodoxy of some of these propositions, andeven the reading of the book which containedthem was forbidden by thé Pope. It was notuntil ï~o~ that Pico was finally absolved,by abrief of Alexanderthe Sixth. Ten years beforethat date he had arrived at Florence an earlyinstance of those

who,after

followingthe vain

hopc of an impossiblereconciliationfrom systemto system, have at last fallen back unsatisned onthe simplicitiesof their childhood's belief.

The oration which Pico composed for theopcning of this philosophical tournament stiU



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40

remains its subject is the dignity of humannature, the greatnessof man. ïn commonwithnearly all mcdicval speculation,much of Pico'twriting has this for its drift and in commonalso with it, Pico's theory of that dignity is

founded on a misconceptionof the place in natureboth of the earth and of man. For Pico theearth is the centre of the universe and aroundit, as a fixed and motionless point, the sun andmoon and stars revolve,likc diligent servantsorministers. And in the midst of all is placedman, noduset vinculummundi,the bond or copulaof the world, and the interpreter of naturethat famous expressionof Bacon's really belongsto Pico. 7V~~ ~p/M, he says,~j~ hominemMMpr~

~<in

~~0mixtumex ~/f<

corpuiet ~~M c~ plantarum anima ~f brutorum~Mj~ ratio et angelica mentet DeiMw7~~ f~r ;–" It is a commonplaceof the schools that man is a little world, in whichwe may discern a body mingled of earthyelements,and ethereal breath, and the vegetablelifeof plants,and the sensesof the lower animais,and reason, and the intelligence of angels, anda likenessto God."

A commonplaceof the schools1 Butperhapsit had somenew significanceand authority, when

men heard one like Pico reiterate it and,falseas its basiswas, the theory had its use. For thishigh dignity of man,thus bringing the dust underhis fcet into sensible communion with the




4'

thoughts andaffectionsof the angels, wassupposedto belong to him, not as renewed by a religioussystem,but by h!s own natural right. The pro-clamationof it was a counterpoiseto the increas-ing tendency of medieval religion to depreciate

man's nature, to sacrificethis or that clement init, to makeit ashamedofitself, tokeep the degrad-ing or painful accidentsof it alwaysin view. Ithelped manonward to that reassertionof himself,that rehabilitation of human nature, the body,the senses,the heart, the intelligence, which theRenaissancefulfils. And yet to reada pageof oneof Pico's forgottenbooks is likea glance into oneof those ancient sepulchrcs,upon which thé wan-dcrer in classicallands has sometimesstumbled,with the old disused

ornamentsand furniture of

a world wholly unlike ours still fresh in them.That whole conceptionof nature is so differentfrom our own. For Pico the world is a limitedplace, bounded by actual crystal walls, and amaterial firmament it is likea painted toy, likethat map or system of the world, held, as a greattarget or shield,in the handsof the creative Logof,by whom the Father made all things, in one of the earlier frescoes of the C<~c Santo at Pisa.How different from this childish dream îs our

own conception of nature, with its unlimitedspace,its innumerable suns, and the earth but amote in the beam how different the strangenew awe, or superstition,with which it fillsourminds1 Thé silence of those înfinite spaces,"



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saysPascal, contemplatinga starlight night, *'thcsilenceof those infinite spaces terrifies me :–L<* de w infinis~/<~r~

He was already almost wearied out when hecame to Florence. He had loved much andbeen beloved by women, wandering over thecrooked hills of delicious pleasure but theirreign over him was over, and long beforeSavonarola's famous bonfire of vanities," hehad destroyed those love-songs in the vulgartongue, which would have been so great a relief to us, after the scholastic prolixity of his Latinwritings. It was in another spirit that he com-

posed a Platonic commentary,the only work of his in Italian which has come down to us, on

the Song of Divine Love"–w<w~ menteedopinionedei JP~/c~/–"according to the mindand opinion of the Platonists," by his friendHieronymo Beniveni, in which, with an am-bitious array of every sort of learning, and aprofusion of imagery borrowed indifferendyfrom the astrologers, the Cabala, and Homer,and Scripture, and Dionysius the Areopagitc, hcattempts to define the stages by which thé soulpasses from the earthly to the unseeh beauty.

A change indeed had passed over him, asif thechilling touch of the abstract and disembodiedbeauty Platonists profess to long for werealready upon him. Some senseof this, perhaps,coupled with that over-brightncsswhich in thepopular imagination always betokens an early





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tion, he did not become a monk only hebecame gentle and patient in disputation re-taining somewhat of the old plenty, in daintyviand and silver vessel,"he gave over the greaterpart of his property to his friend, the mystical

poet Beniveni,to bc spent by him in works of charity, chiefly in the sweet charity of pro-vîding marriage-dowries for the peasantgirls of Florence. His end came in 1494, when, amidthe prayers and sacraments of Savonarola,hedied of fever, on the very day on which Charlesthe Eighth entered Florence, the seventeenthof November,yet in the time of lilies-the lilies of the shield of France, asthe people now said, re-memberingCamilla's prophecy. He was buriedin the conventual church of

Saint Mark,in

thehood and white frock of the Dominicanorder.It is bccausc the life of Pico, thua lying

down to rest in the Dominican habit, yet amidthoughts of the older gods, himself like one of those comely divinities, reconciled indeed to thenew religion, but still with a tendernessfor theearlicr life, and desirous literally to "bind theages each to each by natural piety"–it i<because this life is so perfect a parallel to the

attemptmade in his

writings8 to reconcile

Christianity with the ideas of paganism, thatPico, in spite of the scholastic character of those writings, is really interesting. Thus, inthe .Hi~A~/M-f,or Dw~f~ on the ~?'w~D~

Creation, he endeavours to reconcile thé




45

accounts which pagan philosophy had givcnof the origin of thc world with the accountgiven in the books of Moses-the 7tM~M of Plato with the book of C~w. The ~M<is dedicated to Lorenzo the Magnificent,whose

interest, the preface tells us,in

thc secretwisdom of Moses is well known. If Mosesscems in his writings simple and even popular,rather than eithcr a philosopher or a theologian,that is because it was an institution with theancient philosophers, either not to speak of divine things at all, or to speak of them dis-semblingly hence their doctrines were called

mysteries. Taught by them, Pythagoras be-camc so great a master of silence," and wrotealmost nothing, thus hiding the words of Godin his heart, and speaking wisdom only amongthe perfect. In explaining thé harmony be-tween Plato and Moses, Pico lays hold on everysort of figure and analogy,on the double mean-ings of words, the symbolsof the Jewish ritual,the secondarymeanings of obscure storiesin thelater Greek mythologists. Everywhere there isan unbroken system of correspondences. Everyobject in the terrestrial world is an analogue,a

symbol or countcrpart, of some higher reality in

thé starry heavens,and this again of somelaw of the angelic lifc in the world beyond the stars.There is the element of fire in the materialworld the sun is the fire of heaven and inthe supcr-ceïestiaï world there is thc fire of



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the scraphic intelligence. "But behold howthey difïer 1 The elementary fire burns, théhcavenly fire vivifies, thc super-celestial fireloves." In this way, every natural object,every combination of natural forces,every acci-

dent in the lives of men, is filled with highermeanings. Omens, prophecies,supernatural co-incidcnces,accompany Pico himself all throughlife. There are oracles in every trec and moun-tain-top, and a significance in every accidentalcombinationof the eventsof life.

This constant tendency to symbolism andimagery gives Pico's work a figured style, bywhich it has some real resemblanceto PÏato's,and he diners from other mystical writers of his

time by a genuine desire to know his authoritiesat nrst hand. He readsPlato in Greek, MosesinHcbrcw, and by this his work really belongatothe higher culture. Above all, we have a con-stant sense in reading him, that his thoughts,howevcr little their positive value may bc, areconnectedwith springsbeneaththem of deep andpassionateemotion and when he explains thegradesor stepsby which the soul passesfrom theloveof a physical object to the love of unseen

beauty, andunfolds thé

analogies between thisprocessand other movements upward of humanthought, there is a glow and vehemence in hiswords which remind oneof the mannerin whichhis own brief existenceflameditself away.

said that the Renaissanceof the fifteenth




47

century was, in many things, great rather bywhat it designcd or aspired to do, than by whatit actually achieved. ît remainedfor a later ageto conceive the truc method of effecting ascientific reconciliation of Christian sentiment

with the imagery,the legends,the theories aboutthe world, of paganpoetry and philosophy. Forthat age the only possible reconciliationwas animaginative one, and resulted from the effortsof artists, trained in Christian schools, to handlepagan subjects and of this artistic reconciliationwork like Pico's wasbut the feeblercounterpart.Whatever philosophershad to say on one side orthe other, whether they were successfulor notin their attempts to reconcilethe old to the new,

and to justify the expenditure of so much careand thought on the dreams of a dead faith, theimagery of the Greek religion, the direct charmof its story, were by artists valuedand cultivatedfor their own sake. Hence a new sort of

mythology, with a tone and qualities of its own.When the ship-loadof sacredearth from the soi!of Jérusalem was mingledwith the commonclayin the CampoSantoat Pisa,a new flowergrew upfrom it, unlike any flower men had seen before,

the anemonewith its concentricringsof strangelyblended colour, still to be found by thosc whosearch long enough for it, in the long grass of the Maremma. Just such a strange flowerwasthat mythologyofthe Italian Renaissance,whichgrew up from thé mixture of two traditions, two



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sentiments,the sacredand the profane. Classical

story was regarded as so much imaginativematerial to be received and assimilated. It didnot come into men's minds to ask curiously of science, concerning the origin of such story,

its primary form and import, its meaning forthose who projected it. The thing sank intotheir minds, to issue forth again with all thetangle about it of medieval sentiment andideas. In the Doni Madonna in the Tribuneof the ~7, Michelangeloactuallybrings the paganreligion, and with it the unveiled human form,the sicepy-lookingfaunsof a Dionysiacrevel,intothe presenceof the Madonna,as simpler paintershad introduced there other products of the

earth,birds or

flowers,whi!e he has

givento that

Madonnaherselfmuch of the uncouth energy of the older and more primitive Mighty Mother."b

This picturesqueunion of contrasts,belongingproperly to the art of the close of the fifteenth

century, pervades, in Pico della Mirandola, anactual person, and that is why the figure of Pico is so attractive. He wdl not let onego he wins one on, in spite of one's self, toturn again to the pages of his forgotten books,

althoughweknow

alreadythat the actualsolution

proposed in them will satisfy us as little asperhaps it satisfied him. It is said that in hiseagerness for mysterious learning he once paida great sum for a collectionof cabalisticmanu-scripts, which turned out to be forgeries and




49

the story might well standas a parable of ail hcever seemed to gain in the way of actual know-ledge. He had sought knowledge, and passedfrom system to system,and hazarded much butless for the sake of positive knowledge than

because he believed there was a spirit of orderand beauty in knowledge, which would comedown and unite what men's ignorance haddivided, and renew what time had made dim.And so, while his actual work has passed away,yet his own qualities arc still active, and him-self remains, as one alive in the grave, f<ww

vigiliburoculis,as his biographer describeshim,and with that sanguine,clear skin, ~c~M~~r~, aswith the light of morning upon itand hc has a truc

placein that

groupof

greatItalians who fill the end of the fifteenth centurywith their names, he is a true ~M/w/. Forthe essenceof humanism is that belief of whichhe seems never to have doubted, that nothingwhich has ever interestcdliving men and womencan wholly lose its vitality-no language theyhave spoken, nor oracle besidewhich they havehushed their voices, no dream which has oncebeen entertained by actual human minds,nothingabout which they have ever been passionate,or

'cxpendedtime and zeat.tS/t.



SANDRO BOTTICELLI

so

ÏN Leonardo's treatise on painting only onc con-temporary is mcntioncd by name SandroBotticelli. This pre-eminence may be due tochance only, but to some will rather appear aresult of deliberate judgment for pcople havebegun to find out the charm of Botticelli'swork,and his name, little known in the last century, is

quietly becoming important. In the middle of the fifteenth century he had already anticipatedmuch of that mcditative subtlety,which is some.times supposedpeculiar to the great imaginativeworkmen of its close. Leaving the simplereligion which had occupied the followers of Giotto for a century, and the simple naturalismwhich had grown out of it, a thing of birds andflowers only, he sought inspiration in what tohim were works of the modern world, thewritings of Dante and Boccaccio,and in newreadingsof his own of classicalstories or, if hepainted religious incidents,painted them with anunder-current of original sentiment, whichtouches you as the real matter of the picturethrough the veil of its ostensiblesubject. What



SANDRO BOTTICELLI

5'

is the peculiar sensation,what is thé peculiatquality of pleasure,which his work has the pro-perty of exciting in us, and which we cannot getelsewhere? For this, especiallywhen he has tospeakof acomparativelyunknownartist, is alwaysthe chief questionwhich a critic has to answer.In an age when the lives of artists werefull of adventure, his life is almost coïour!ess.Criticism indeed has cleared away much of thegossip which Vasari accumulated, has touchedthe legend of Lippo and Lucrezia, and rehabili-tated the characterof AndreadelCastagno. Butin Botticelli's casethere isno legend to dissipate.Hc did not even go by his truc namc Sandrois a nickname, and his true name is Filipepi,

Botticelli being only the name of the goldsmithwho first taught him art. Oniy two thingshappened to him, two things whlch he sharedwith other artists :-he was invited to Rome topaint in thé Sistine Chapel, and he feUin laterlife under the influence of Savonarola,passingapparently almost out of men's sight in a sort of religiousmelancholy,which lasted till his deathin i~ï~ according to the receiveddate. Vasarisays that he plunged into the study of Dante,and evenwrote a comment on the

D~tw~Comedy.Butit seemsstrange that he should have lived oninactive so long and one almost wishes thatsomc document might come to light, which,fixing the date of his death earlier, might relieveone, in thinking of him, of his dejectedold age.



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He is before ail things a poetical painter,blending the charm of story and sentiment, themedium 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, theblank spaces,left at the beginning of every cantofor the hand of the illuminator, have been filled,as far as the nineteenth canto of the Inferno,with impressions of engraved plates, seeminglyby way of experiment, for in the copy in theBodleianLibrary, one of the threc impressionsitcontainshas bcen printcd upsidedown,and muchawry, in thc midst of the luxurious printed page.Giotto, and thé followers of Giotto, with theiralmost childish

religious aim,had not learned

toput that weight of meaninginto outward things,light, colour, everydaygesture,which the poetryof thé Divine Comedyinvolves, and before thefifteenth century Dante could hardly have foundan illustrator. Botticelli's illustrations arccrowded with incident, blending, with a naïvecarelessnessof pictorial propriety, three phasesof the same scene into one plate. Thegrotesques, so often a stumbling-block to

painters,who

forgetthat the words of a

poet,which only feebly present an image to themind, must be lowered in key when translatedinto visible form, make one regret that he hasnot rather chosen for illustration the moresubduedimagery of the Purgatorio. Yet in the



SANDRO BO'ITICELLI

53

sceneof those who go downquick into hell,"there is an inventive force about the fire takinghold on the upturned soles of the feet, whichprovesthat the design is no mere translationof Dantc's words,but a truc painter's vision whi!c

the scene of the Centaurs wins one at once, for,forgetful of the actual circumstancesof their

appearance,Botticelli has gone off with delighton the thought of the Centaurs themselves,bright, small creatures of the woodland, witharch babyfaces and mignon forms,drawing tinybows.

Botticelli lived in a generation of naturalists,and hc might have bcen a mere naturalistamongthem. There are traces enough in his work of that alcrt senseof outward

things, which,in the

pictures of that period, fills the lawns withdélicate living creatures, and the hillsides withpools of water, and the pools of water withflowering reeds. But this was not enough forhim he is a visionarypainter, and in his vision-ariness he resembles Dante. Giotto, thé tried

companion of Dante, Masaccio, Ghirlandajoeven, do but transcribe, with more or less

rcfining,the outward image they arc dramatic,not visionarypainters they arealmost impassivespectators of the action before them. But thegenius of which Botticelliis the type usurps thedata before it as the exponent of ideas,moods,visionsof its own in this interest it plays fastand loose with those data, rejecting some and



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isolating others, and always combining thcmanew. To him, as to Dante, the scène, thecolour, the outward image or gesture, comeswith all its incisiveandimportunate reality butawakes in him, moreover,

bysome subtle law

of his own structure, a moodwhich it awakesinno one e!se,of which it is the double or repeti-tion, and which it clothes, that all may share it,with visiblecircumstance.

But he is far enough from accepting theconventional orthodoxy of Dante which, refer-ring ail human action to the simple formula of

purgatory, heaven and hell, leaves an insolubleelement of prose in the depths of Dante's poetry.One picture of his, with the portrait of the

donor, Matteo Palmieri, below, had the creditor discreditof attracting someshadow of ecclesi-astical censure. This Matteo Palmieri, (twodim figures move under that name in contem-

porary history,) was the reputed author of a

pocm, still unedited, J~ Città D~ whichrepresented the human race as an incarnationofthose angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer,were neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies,a fantasy of that carlier Alexandrian philosophy

about which the Florentine intellect in thatcentury was so curious. Botticelli's picture mayhave been only one of those familiar composi-tions in which religious reverie has recorded its

impressions of the various forms of beatifiedextstence–G/<?r~, as they were called, like that



SANDRO BOTTICELLI

55

in which Giotto painted the portrait of Dantebut somehowit was suspectedof embodying ina picture the wayward dream of Palmieri, andthe chapel where it hung was closed. Artists soentire as Botticelli are usually careless about

philosophical theories, even when the philo-sopher is a Florentine of the fifteenth century,and his work a poem in terza rima. But Botti-celli, who wrote a commentary on Dante, andbecamethe disciple of Savonarola,may well havelet such theoriescome and go acrosshim. Trueor false,the story interprets much of the peculiarsentiment with which hc infuseshis profane andsacredpersons,comely,and in a certain sense like

angels,but with a sense of displacementor loss

about them-the wistfulness of exiles,consciousof a passionand energy greater than any knownissue of them explains,which runs through allhis varied work with a sentiment of ineffable

melanchoty.So just what Dante scornsas unworthy alike

of heavenand hell, Botticelli accepts,that middleworld in which men take no side in great con-flicts,and decideno great causes,and make greatrefusais. He thus sets for himself the limits

within which art, undisturbed by any moralambition, does its most sincère and surestwork.His interest is neither in the untempered good-nessof Angelico'ssaints,nor the untemperedevilof Orcagna'sInferno; but with men and women,in their mixed and uncertain condition, alway<



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attractive, clothed sometimes by passionwith acharacter of lovelinessand energy, but saddened

perpctually by thé shadow upon them of the

great things from which they shrink. His

morality is all sympathy and it is this

sympathy, conveying mto his work somewhatmore than is usual of thé true complexionof humanity, which makes him, visionary ashe is, so forciblea realist.

It is this which gives to his Madonnas their

unique expression and charm. He has workedout in them a distinct and peculiar type, definite

enough in his own mind, for he has painted itover and over again, sometimesone might thinkalmost mechanically, as a pastime during that

dark period when his thoughtswere

so heavyupon him. Hardlyanycollectionof noteiswith-out one of these circular pictures, into which theattendant angels depress their heads so naïvcly.Perhaps you have sometimes wondered whythose peevish-looking Madonnas, conformed tono acknowledged or obvious type of beauty,attract you more and more, and often come backto you when the Sistine Madonnaand the Virginsof Fra Angelicoare forgotten. At first,contrast-

ingthem with

those, you mayhave

thoughtthat there was something in them meanor abjecteven, for the abstract linesof the face have littlenoblenes&,and the colour is wan. For withBotticelli she too, though she holds in her handsthé Désire of all nations," is one of those who



SANDRO BOTTICELLI

!7

arc neither for Jehovah nor for His cnemiesand her choice is on her face. The white lighton it is cast up hard and cheerlessfrom below,as when snow lies upon the ground, and thechildren look up with surprise at the strange

whitenessof the ceiling. Her trouble is in thévery caressof the mysteriouschild, whose gazeis alwaysfar from her, and who has already thatsweet look of devotion which men have neverbeen able altogether to love, and which stillmakes the born saint an objcct almost of sus-picion to his earthly brethren. Once, indeed,he guides her hand to transcribe in a book thewords of her exaltation, the ~w, and theMagnt;fcat,and the Gaude~M, and the young

angels,gladto rouscher for a moment from her

dejection,arc cager to hold the inkhorn and tosupport the book. But the pen almost dropsfrom her hand, and the high cold words have nomeaningfor her, and her true children are thoseothers, among whom, in her rude home, theintolérable honour came to her, with that lookof wistful inquiry on their irregular faceswhichyou sce in startled animals-gipsy children, suchasthose who, in Apenninevillages,still hold outtheir long brown arms to beg of you, but on

Sundays bccome enfants <~ c~~r, with theirthick black hair nicelycombed, and fair whitelinen on their sunburnt throats.

What is strangest is that he carries thissentimentinto classicalsubjects,ils mostcomplète













LUCA DELLA ROBBIA

63

THE Italian sculptors of thé earlier half of thefifteenth century are more than mere fbrerunnersof the great masters of its close, and often reachperfection,within the narrow limits which theychoseto impose on their work. Their scutpturesharcs with the paintings of Botticelli and thechurches of Brunelleschi that profound express-iveness, that intimate impress of an indwellingsoul, which is the peculiar fasc!nationof thé artof Italy in that century. Their works havebeen much neglected, and often almost hiddenaway amid the frippery of modern decoration,and we come with some surprise on the placeswherc their fire still smoulders. One longs topenetrate into the lives of the men who havegiven expression to so much power and sweet-ness. But it is part of the reserve, the austere

dignity and simplicity of their existence, thattheir histories are for the most part lost, or toldbut briefiy. From their lives, as from theirwork, all tumult of sound and colour has passedaway. Mino, the Raphael of sculpture, Masodel Rodario,whose works add a further grace to



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the church of Como, Donatelloeven,-one asktin vain for more than a shadowyoutline of theiractual days.

Something more remains of Luca délia

Robbia something more of a history, of out-ward changesand fortunes, is expressedthroughhis work. 1 suppose nothing brings thé realair of a Tuscan town so vividly to mind as thosepieces of pale blue and white earthenware, bywhich he is best known, like fragments of themilky sky itself, fallen into the cool streets,andbreaking into the darkened churches. And nowork is less imitable like Tuscan wine, it losesits savour when moved from its birthplace, fromthe

crumblingwalls where it was nrst

placed.Part of the charm of this work, its grace andpurity and finish of expression,is commonto ailthe Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth centuryfor Luca was first of all a workcr in marble,and his works in terra calta only transfer to adifferentmaterial the principles of his sculpture.

These Tuscansculptorsofthe fifteenthcenturyworked for thé most part in low relief, givingeven to their monumental effigiessomethmg of its depressionof surface, getting into them bythis means a pathetic suggestion of the wastingand etherealisationof death. They are haters of all heavinessand emphasis, of strongly-opposedlight and shade,and seek their meansof delinea-tion among those last refinements of shadow,which are almost invisible except in a strong



LUCA DELLA ROBBIA

F 6~

light, and which the finest pêne!! can hardiyfollow. The whole essence of their work ts

the passing of a smilc over the face01 &child, the ripple of the air on a still dayover the curtain of a window ajar.

What is thé precise value of this system of sculpture, this low relief?t Luca della Robbia,and thé other sculptors of the school to whichhe bclongs, have before them the universal

problem of their art and this system of lowrelief is the means by which they meet andovercomethe special limitation of sculpture.

That limitation results from the material andother necessaryconditionsof all sculptured work,and consists sn thé tendency of such work to

a hard realism,a one-sidedpresentmentof mereform, that solid material frame which onlymotion can relieve, a thing of heavy shadows,and an individuality of expression pushed tocaricature. Against this tendency to thé hard

presentment of mereform trying vainly to com-

pote with the reality of nature itself, ail noble

sculptureconstantlystruggles each great systemof sculpture resistingit in itsown way, etheréalis-

ing, spiritualising,relievingits stinhess,its heavi-

ness,and dcath. The use of colour in sculptureis but an unskilful contrivance to effect, byborrowing from another art, what thé nobler

sculpture enects by strictly appropriate means.To get not colour, but the equivalcnt of colourto securethe expressionand the play of life to



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<"066

expand the too firmly fixed individuality of pure, unrelieved, uncoloured form :-this is theproblem which the thrce great stylesin sculpturehave solvedin three differentways.

~M~–breadth,generality,universality,-is thé word chosenby Winckelmann,and afterhim by Goethe and many German critics, toexpress that law of the most excellent Greeksculptors, of Pheidias and his pupils, whichprompted them constantly to seek the type inthe individual,to abstractand expressonly whatis structural and permanent,to purge from theindividual all that bclongs only to him, all theaccidents,the feelings and actions of the specialmoment, all that (because in its own nature itenduresbut for a moment) is apt to look like afrozen thing if onc arrests it.

In this way their works came to be like somesubtle extract or essence, or almost like purethoughts or ideas and hence thé breadth of humanity in them, that detachment from theconditionsof a particular place or people, whichhas carried their influence far beyond the agewhich produced them, and insured them uni-versal acceptance.

That was thé Greek way of relieving thehardness and unspirituality of pure form. Butit involved to a certain degrce the sacrifice of what we cal! ~ww~ and a systemof abstrac-tion which aimed always at the broad andgénéral type, at the purging away from the







LUCA DELLA ROBBIA

69

thc senseof a yielding and flexiblelife he getsnot vitality mercly, but a wonderfui force of

expression.Midway between these two Systems–thé

system of the Greek sculptorsand the systemof

Michelangelo-comes the system of Luca dellaRobbia and the other Tuscan sculptors of thefifteenthcentury,partaking both of the ~w-heitof the Greeks,their way of extracting certainselect elements only of pure form and sacrific-

ing ail the rest, and the studied incompletenessof Michelangelo, relieving that sense of in-

tensity, passion, energy, which might other-wise have stiffened into caricature. Like

Michelangelo, these sculptors fill the!r works

with intenseandindividuaîisedexpression. Theirnoblestworkeare the careful sepulchral portraitsof particular persons-the monument of Conte

Ugo in the &~ of Florence, of the youthfulMedeaColleoni,with the wonderful,long throat,in the chapel on the cool north sidc of theChurch of Santa Maria M~~ at Bergamo-monuments such as abound in the churches of Rome, inexhaustible in suggestionsof repose,of a subdued Sabbatic joy, a kind of sacred graceand refinement. And these elements of tran-

quillity, of repose,they unite to an intense andindividualexpressionby a system of convcntion-alism as skilfut and subtleas that of the Greeks,repressingail such curves as indicate solid form,and throwing the whole into low relief.



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The lifeof Luca,a lifeof labour and frugality,with no adventureand noexcitcmcntexcept what

belongs to the trial of ncw artistic processes,the

struggle with new artistic difficulties,the solu-tion of purely artistic problems, fills the first

seventy years of the fifteenth century. Afterproducingmanyworks in marble for the Duomoand the Campanileof Florence,which place himamong the toremost masters of the sculpture of his age, he became desirous to realise the spiritand manner of that sculpture, in a humblermaterial, to unite its science,its exquisite andexpressivesystem of low relief, to the homely artof pottery, to introduce those high qualities intocommonthings,to adornandcultivatcdailyhouse-

hold life. In this he is profoundlycharacteristicof the Florenceof that century,of that in it whichlay below its superficial vanity and caprice, acertain old-world modcsty and seriousnessandsimplicity. Pcople had not yct begun to thinkthat what was good art for churches was notso good, or less fitted, for their own houses.Luca's new work was in plain white earthen-ware at first, a mere rough imitation of thecostly, laboriously wrought marble, finished ina few hours. But on this humble

pathhe

found his way to a fresh success, to anotherartistic grace. The fame of the oriental pottery,with its strangc,bright colours-colours of art,colours not to be attaincd in thc natural stone–mingled with thc tradition of thc old Roman





in art, rarest of all in the abstract art of sculpture yet essentially, perhaps, it is thequality which aîone makes work in the ima-ginative order really worth having at all. ït iabecausethe works of the artists of the fifteenth

century possessthis

qualityin an

unmistakableway that one is anxious to know all that can beknown about them and explain to one's self thesecret of their charm.

t8~~

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THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO

CRïïtcs of Michelangelo have sometimesspokenas if the only characteristicofhis genius were awonderful strength, verging, as in the things of thé imagination great strength always does, onwhat is singular or strange. A certain strange-ness, something of the blossoming of the aloe,i. indeed an element in aU true works of artthat

theyshall excite or

surpriseus is

indispen-sable. Butthat they shall givepleasureandexerta charm over us i< indispensabletoo and thisstrangenessmust be sweet also-a lovelystrange-ness. And to the true admirersof Michelangelothis is the truc type of the Michelangelesque–sweetness and strength, pleasurc with surprise,an cnergy of conception which seems at everymoment about to break through all the con-ditions of comely form, recovering, touch bytouch, a loveliness found

usually only

in thesimplest natural things–o~/ <<

In this way he sums up for them the wholecharacter of medieval art itself in that whichdistinguishesit most clearly from classicalwork,the présence of a convulsive energy in !t, be-



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coming in lower hands merely monstrous 01forbidding, and felt, even in its most gracefulproducts,as a subdued qua!ntness or grote$quc.Yet those who feel this grace or sweetness inMichelangelo might at the first moment bc

puzzled if they were asked wherein preciselysuchquality resided. Men of inventivetempera-ment-Victor Hugo, for instance, in whom, asin Michelangelo,people have for the most partbeen attracted or repelled by the strength, whilefew have understood his sweetness-have some-times relieved conceptions of merely moral orspiritual greatness, but with little aestheticcharm of their own, by lovely accidents oraccessories,like the butterfly which alights on

thé bïood-stained barricade in Z~r Afif~or those sea-birds for whom thc monstrou8Gilliatt comes to be as some wild natural

thing, so that they are no longer afraid of him, in Z~ Travailleurs de la ~i'r. But theaustere genius of Michelangelo will not dependfor its sweetness on any mere accessorieslikethese. The world of natural things has almostno existence for him When one speaks of him," says Grimm, "woods, clouds, seas, and

mountains disappear, and only what is formedby the spirit of man remains behind and he

quotes a few slight words from a letter of histo Vasari as the single expression in all he hasleft of a feeling for nature. He has traced nonowcrs, like those with which Leonardo stars



over his gloomiest rocks nothing like the fret-work of wings andflamesin which Bîakcframeshis moststartlingconceptions. No forest-scenerylike Titian's fillshis backgrounds,but onlyblankrangesof rock, and dim vegetable formsas blank

as they, as in a world beforethe creation of thefirstfivedays.

Of the whole story of the creation he haspainted only the creation of the nrst man andwoman,and, for him at least, feebly,the creationof light. It belongsto the quality of his geniusthus to concernitself almostexclusivelywith themaking of man. For him it is not, as in the

ttory itself, the last and crowning act of a sériesof dcvelopments, but thc first and unique act,

thé creation of life itself in its supreme form,of~hand and immediately,in the cold and Hfeïessstone. With him the beginning of life has allthe characteristicsof résurrection it is like therecoveryof suspendedhealth or animation,withits gratitude, its effusion,and eloquence. Fairas the young men of the Elgin marbles, theAdam of the Sistine Chapel is unlike them in atotal absence of that balance and completenesswhich express so well the sentiment of a self-

contained, independent life. In that languidfigure there is something rude and satyr-like,something akin to the rugged hillside on whichit lies. His whole form is gathered into anexpression of mere expectancy and réceptionhe has hardly strength enough to lift his nnger

7;

THE POETRY OF MÏCHELANGELO



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to touch the finger of the creator yet a touchof the finger-tipswill suffice.

This creation of life-life coming always asreliefor recovery,and always in strong contrastwith the rough-hewnmassin which it is kindled

-is in variousways the motive of all his work,whether its immediate subject be Pagan orChristian, legend or allegory and this, althoughat least one-halfof his work was designedfor theadornment of tombs-the tomb ofjulius, thetombs of the Medici. Not the Judgment butthe Resurrection is the real subject of his lastwork in the Sistine Chapel and his favourite

Pagansubject is the legend of Leda, the delightof thc world breaking from the egg of a bird.

As 1 have already pointed out, he secures thatideality of expressionwhich in Greek sculpturedépends on a delicate system of abstraction,andin early Italian sculpture on lowness of relief,by an incompleteness,which is surely not alwaysundesigned,and which, as 1 think, noone regrets,and trusts to the spectator to complete the half-

emergent form. And as his personshave some-thing of thc unwrought stone about them, so,as if to realise the expression by which the old

Florentine records describea

sculptor-master //W ~<~–with him the very rocks seem tohave life. They have but to cast away the dustand scurf that thcy may rise and stand on theirfeet. He loved the very quarries

of Carrara,those strange grey peaks which even at mid-day




77

convey into any scene from which they arevisible something of the solemnity and stdinessof evening, sometimes wandering among themmonth after month, till at last thcir pale ashencolours scem to have passed into his painting

and on the crown of the head of the David therestill remainsa morselof uncut stone,as if by onetouch to maintain its connexionwith the placefrom which it was hewn.

And it is in th!<penetrative suggestionof lifethat the secret of that sweetnessof his i< to befound. He gives us indeed no tovety naturalobjects like Leonardo or Titian, but only thecoldest, most clementary shadowing of rock ortree no lovely draperiesand comely gesturesof life, but

onlythe austeretruths of human nature;

"simple persons"–as he replied in his roughway to the querulous criticism of Julius théSecond,that there was no gold on thé figuresof the SistineChape!–" simple persons,who woreno gold on their garments but he penetratesus with a feeling of that power which weassociatewith ail the warmth and fulnessof theworld, the sense of which brings into one's

thoughts aswarmof birdsandflowersand 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 mid-

night journey in March, at a place in the neigh-bourhood of Arezzo, the thin, clear air of whichwas then thought to be favourable to the



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birth of children of great parts. He came of arace of grave and dignified men, who, claimingkinship with the family of Canossa,and somecolour of imperial blood in their veins, had,generation after generation,received honourable

employment under the governmentof Florence.His mother, a girl of nineteen years, put himout to nurse at a country house among the hillsof Settignano,where every other inhabitant is aworker in the marble quarries, and the childearly became familiar with that strange firststage in thc sculptor's art. To this succcededthe influence of thé swectest and most placidmaster Florence had yet scen, Domenico Ghir-landajo. At fifteen he was at work among the

curiositiesof the garden of the Medici, copyingand restoring antiques, winning the condcsccnd-ing noticeof the great Lorenzo. He knew toohow to excite strong hatreds and it wasat thi.time that in a quarrel with a fellow-student hereceiveda blow on the face which dcprivcd himfor ever of the come!incssof outward form.

It was'through an accident that he came to

study those works of the early Italian sculptorswhich suggestedmuch of his own grandestwork,

and impresscdit

with so deepa

sweetness. Hebelievedin dreamsandomens. One ofhis friendsdreamed twice that Lorenzo, then lately dead,appeared to him in grey and dusty apparel. ToMichelangelo this dream seemedto portend thetroubles which afterwards really came, and with




79

the suddenness which was characteristic of allhis movements, he left Florence. Havingoccasionto pass through Bologna,he neglectedto procure the little seal of red wax which thestranger entering Bologna must carry on the

thumb of his right hand. Hc had no moncyto pay the fine, and would have bccn throwninto prisonhad not one of the magistrates inter-posed. He remained in this man's house awhole year, rewarding his hospitality by readingsfromthc Italian poetswhom he loved. Bologna,with its endlesscolonnadesand fantastic leaningtowers,can never have bcen one of the loveliercities of Italy. But about the portais of its vastunfinished churches and its dark shrinee, half

hidden by votive flowersand candies,lie someof the sweetestworks of the early Tuscansculptors,Giovannida Pisaand Jacopodella Quercia,thingsas winsome as flowers and the year whichMichelangelospent in copying these works wasnot a lost year. It was now, on returning toFlorence, that he put forth that unique present-ment of Bacchus,which expresses,not the mirth-fulnessof the god of wine,but his sleepyserious-ncss, his enthusiasm, his capacity for profound

dreaming.No onc ever

expressedmore

trulythan Michelangelothe notionof inspiredsleep,of facescharged with dreams. A vast fragment of marble had long lainbelowthe Loggiaof Orcagna,and many a sculptor had had his thoughts of adesignwhich should just fill this famousblock of



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stone,cutting the diamond,as it were, withoutloss. Under Michelangelo'shand it becametheDavid which stood till lately on the steps of thePalazzo ~ff~, when it was replacedbelow theLoggia. Michelangelo wasnow thirty years old,and his

reputationwas established. Three

greatworks fill the remainderof his life-three worksoften interrupted, carried on through a thousandhesitations,a thousand disappointments,quarrelswith his patrons,quarrelswith his family,quarrelsperhaps most of ail with himself-the SistineChapel, the Mausoleum of Julius the Second,and thé Sacristyof San Lorenzo.

In the storyof Michelangelo'slifethe strength,often turning to bitterness,is not farto seek. Adiscordantnotesoundsthroughout it which almost

spoils the music. He "treats the Pope as theKing of France himself would not dare to treathim he goesalong the streets of Rome"likean executioner,"Raphael says of him. Once heseemsto have shut himself up with the intentionof starving himself to death. As we corne, inreadinghis life,onits harsh,untemperedincidents,thé thought again and again arisesthat he is oneof those who incur the judgment of Dante, ashaving "wUfuUy lived in sadncss." Even his

tenderness and pity are embittered by theirstrength. What passionate weeping tn thatmysteriousfigurewhich, in the Greationof Adam,crouches below the image of the Almighty, ashe comeswith the formsof things to bc, woman




o%i

<t0 8g

and her progeny, in thé fold of his garment 1What a sense of wrong in those two captiveyouths, who feel the chains likc scalding wateron their proud and delicate flesh1 The idealistwho became a reformer with Savonarola,and a

republican superintending the fortification of Florence-the nest where he was born, <7nidoc~ ~<~< as he calls it once,in a sudden throbof affection-in its last struggle for liberty, yetbelieved always that he had impcrial blood inhis vcin$ and wa< of thé kindred of the greatMatilda, had within the depths of hi$ naturesomesecretsp-ringof indignationor sorrow. Weknow little of his youth, but ail tends to makeone believe in the véhémence of its passions.Beneath the Platonic calm of the $onnetsthereis latent a deep delight in carnalform andcolour.There, and still more in the madrigals,hc oftenfallsinto the language of less tranquil affectionswhile someof themhavethe colour of penitence,as from a wanderer returning home. He whoepoke so deci$ively of the supremacy in theimaginative world of thé unveiled human formhad not bcen always,wc may think, a merePlatonic lover. Vague and wayward his loves

mayhave been but

they partookof the

strengthof his nature, and sometimes,it may be, wouldby no means become music,so that the comelyorder of his day<was quite put out par<rc ognimiodolceio rtnta.

But his genius is in harmonywith itself and



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just al in the productsof hisart we find resourcesof sweetnesswithin their exceeding strength, soin his own story also, bitter as the ordinarysenseof it may be, there arc selectpagesshut in amongthe rest-pages one might easily turn over too

lightly, but which yet sweetenthe wholevolume.The mterest of Michelangelo's poems is thatthey make us spectators of this struggle thestruggle of a strong nature to adorn and attuneitself the struggle of adcsoÏatingpassion,whichyearns to be resignedand sweet and pensive, asDante'swas. It isa consequenceof theoccasionaland informâtcharacterofhis poetry, that it bringsus nearer to himself, his own mind and temper,than any work donc only to support a literary

reputation could possibly do. His letters tell uslittle that is worth knowing about him-a fewpoor quarrels about money and commissions.But it is quite otherwisc with these songs andsonnets, written down at odd moments, some-times on the margins of his sketches~themselvesoften unfinishedsketches, arresting some salientfeeling or unpremeditatedideaasit passed. Andit happensthat a truc study of these has bccomewithm the lastfewyearsfor the firsttime possible.

A few of the sonnets circulated wideïy in manu-script, and becamealmost within Michelangelo',own lifetime a subject of academicaldiscourses.But they were firstcoUcctedin avolumein 1623by the great-nephew of Michelangelo, Michel-angelo Buonarroti the younger. He omitted





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had reached her, seventeenyears before, that herhusband,the youthful and princcly Marquessof Pescara,laydeadof the woundshe had receivedinthe battle of Pavia, wasthen no longer an objectof

great passion.In a

dialoguewritten

bythe

painter, Francescod' Ollanda,we catch a glimpscof them together in an cmpty church at Rome,one Sundav afternoon, dtcussing indeed thecharacteristicsof various schoolsof art, but stillmore the writin of Saint Paul, already follow-ing the waysand tasting the sunlesspleasurcsof weary people, whose care for external things isslackening. In a letter still extant he regretsthat when he visited her after death he hadkissedher hands only. He made,or set to work

to make, a crucifixfor her use,andtwo drawings,pcrhaps in preparation for it, arc now in Oxford.From allusions in the sonnets, we may divinethat when they first approached each other hehad debated much with himself whether thislast passionwould be the most unsoftening,themost desolatingof all-un dolceamaro,«~miM~p~ Is it carnalaffection,or, delruoJtato(of Plato's ante-natal state) il raggioardentePThe older, conventional criticism, dealing with

the text of ïôz~, had lightly assumedthat all ornearly all the sonnets were actually addressedtoVittoria herself but Signor Guasti finds onlyfour, or at most five, which can bc so attributcdon genuine authority. Still, there are rcasonswhich make him assignthe majority of them to













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Church has often exerted over spirits too inde-pendent to bc its subjects, yet brought withinthe neighbourhood of its action consoled andtranquillised,as a traveller might be, resting forone evening in a strange city, by its statelyaspect and the sentiment of its many fortunes,

just bccausc with those fortunes he has nothingto do. So he lingers on a reunant, as theFrench say, a ghost out of another age, in aworld too coarse to touch h!s faint sensibilitiesvery closely dreaming, in a worn-out society,thcatrical in its life, theatrical in its art, theatricalevenin its devotion,onthe morning of the world'shistory, on the primitive form of man, on theimages under which that primitive world had

conceivedof spiritual forces.1 have dwelt on thé thought of Michelangelo

as thus lingering beyond his time in a world nothis own, bccause, tf one is to distinguish thepeculiar savour of his work, he must be ap-proached,not through his followers,but throughhis predecessors not through the marbles of Saint P~ but through the work of thesculptorsof the fifteenth century over the tombsand altars of

Tuscany.He is thé last of the

Florentines, of those on whom the peculiarsentiment of the Florence of Dante and Giottodescended he is the consummatereprésentativeof the form that sentiment took in the fifteenthcentury with men like Luca Signorelli and Mino




"0.9'

da Fiesole. Up to him the tradition of senti-ment is unbroken, the progress towards surerand more mature methods of expressing thatsentimentcontinuous. Buthis professeddisciplesdid not share this

temper theyare in love with

hil strength only, and seem not to feel his graveand temperate sweetness. Theatricality i$ theirchief characteristic and that is a qualityas littleattributable to Michelangeloas to Mino or LucaSignorelli. With him, al with them, all i<serious,passionate,impulsive.

This discipleship of Michelangelo, this de-

pendenceof his on the tradition of theFlorentineschoola,is nowhere seen more clearly than in histreatment of the Creadon. The Crtation~'J~~had haunted the mind of the middle age like adream and weaving it into a hundred carvedornaments of capital or doorway, the Italiansculptorshad early impressedupon it that preg-nancy of expressionwhich seemsto give it manyveiled meanings. As with other artistic con-

ceptions of the middle age, its treatment becamealmost conventional, handed on from artist toartist, with slight changes, till it came to havealmostan independentand abstractexistenceofit<

own. It wascharacteristicof the medievalmindthus to give an independent traditionalexistenceto a special pictorial conception,or to a legend,like that of 7r/~r<~ or T~~J~r, or even tothe very thoughts and substanceof a book, likethe Imitation,so that no single workman could



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daim it as h!s own, and thc book, the image, thelegend, had itself a legend, and its fortunes,anda pcrsonat history and it is a sign of themedievalism of Michelangelo, that he thus re-çoivesfrom tradition his central conception,and

does but add the last touches, in transferringitto the frescoesof the Sistine Chapel.But therewasanother traditionof thoseearlier,

more serious Florentines,of which Michelangelois the inheritor, to which he gives the finalexpression,and which centres in the sacristyof San Lorenzo, as the tradition of the Creationcentres in the Sistine Chapel. It has been saidthat all the great Florentines were preoccupiedwith death. 0<Aw~/ 0~v-–i< the

burden of their thoughts, from Dante to Savona-rola. Even the gay and licentious Boccacciogivcsakeencredge to his storicsby putting themin the mouthsof a party of peoplewho had takenrefuge in a country-house from thé danger of death by plague. ît wasto this inherited senti-ment, this practical decision that to bc pre-occupied with the thought of death was in itself digmfying, and a note of high quality, that theseriousnessof the great Florentinesoftnenfteenth

century was partly due and it was reinforcedinthem by the actualsorrowsof their times. Howoften, and in what various ways, had they seenlife stricken down, in their streets and housesLa Simonettadics in early youth, and itborne to the grave with uncovered face. The








95

of his thoughts, than any merely symbolicalcon.ceptions could possibly have been. They con-centrate and express, less by way of definiteconceptionsthan by the touches, the promptingsof a pièce of music, all those vague &ncies,

misgivings,presentiments,whîch shift and mixand are defined and fade again, whenever thethoughts try to fix themselves with sincerityon the conditions and surroundings of the dis-embodied spirit. 1 supposeno onc would cometo the sacristy of San Lorenzo for consolationfor seriousness,for solemnity,for dignity of im-pression,perhaps,but not for consolation. It is a

placeneither of consolingnor of terriblethoughts,but of vague and wistful spéculation. Hère,

again, Michelangelo is the disciplenot so muchof Dante as of thé Platonists. Dantc's belief inimmortality is forma!, precise and firm, almostas much so as that of a child, who thinks thedeadwill hear if you cry loud cnough. But inMichelangelo you have maturity, thé mind of the grown man,dealingcautiouslyand dispassion-ately with seriousthings andwhat hope he hasis basedon the consciousnessof ignorance–ignor-ance of man, ignorance of the nature of themind, its origin and

capacitics.MichciangcÏo

is so ignorant of the spiritual world, of thé newbody and its laws, that he docs not surely knowwhether the consecrated Host may not bc thebody of Christ. And of ail that range of senti-ment hc is the poet, a poet still ahve, and in



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possessionof our inmostthoughts--dumb inquiryover thé relapse after death into the fbrmiessnesswhich prccedcdlife, the change, the revoit fromthat change, then the correcting,hallowing,con-soling rush of pity at last, far off, thin and

vague, yet not more vague than the most definitethoughts mon have had through thrce centurieson a matter that has bcen so near their hearts,the new body-a passinglight, a mère intangible,externat e<ïcct, over those too rigid, or toofbrmicssfaces a dream that lingers a moment,retreating in the dawn,incomplete,aimless,help-less a thing with faint hearing, faint memory,faint power of touch a breath, a flame in thedoorway,a feather in thé wind.

Thc qualities of thé grcat mastcrs in art orliterature, thé combinationof thosc qualities, thelaws by which they moderate, support, relieveeach other, are not peculiar to them but mostoften typical standards,or revealing instances of the laws by which certain zsthetic effects areproduced. The old masters indeed are simplertheir characteristics arc written larger, and arccasierto read, than thé analoguesof them in allthe mixed, confusedproductions of thc modern

mind. But when once we have succeededin de-fining for ourselvesthose characteristics,and thelaw of their combination, we have acquired astandardor measurewhich helps us to put in it<right place many a vagrant genius, many an un-classifiedtalent, many preciousthough imperfect~<<




97

products of art. It is so with the componentsof the truc character of Michelangelo. That

strange interfusion of sweetnessand strength isnot to bc found in those who claîmed to bc hi.followers but it is found in many of those who

worked before him, and in many others down toour own time, in William Blake, for instance,and Victor Hugo, who, though not of his school,and unaware, arc his truc sons, and help us tounderstand him, as hetnturn interprets and

justifies them. Perhapx~tm)~ the chief use in

studying old masters.f 'w

'~7'' V~



LEONARDO DA VINCI

98

HOMOMINISTERET INTERPRESNATURE

INVasari's life of Leonardo da Vinci as we nowread it there are somevariations from the firstedition. There, the painter who has fixed theoutward type of Christ for succecdingcenturieswas a bold spcculator,holding lightly by other

men's beliefs, setting philosophy above Chris-tianity. Words of his, trenchant enough to justify this impression, arc not rccordcd, andwould have been out of keeping with a geniusof which one characteristic is the tendency tolose itself in a refined and graceful mystery.The suspicionwas but the time-honourcd modein which the world stampsits appreciationof onewho has thoughts for himself a!onc, his highindifference,his intoléranceof the commonformaof

thingsand in the secondedition the

imagewas changed into something fainter and moreconvcntional. But it isstill by a certainmysteryin his work, and something enigmatical beyondthe usualmeasureof great men, that he fascinates,or perhaps half repels. His life is one of sudden

o



LEONARDO DA VINCI

99

revolts,with intcrvals in which he works not atall, or apart from the main scopeof his work.By a strange fortune the pictures on which hismore popular fame rested disappcarcdearly fromthe world, like the B~~ Standard or aremixedobscurelywiththe productof meanerhands,like the L<~ Supper. His type of beauty is soexotic that it fascinatesa larger number than itdelights, and seemsmore than that of any otherartist to reflect ideasand views and someschemeof the world within so that he secmedto hiscontemporaries to bc the possessorof some un-sanctifiedand secretwisdom as to Michelet andothers to have anticipated modern ideas. Hetrifleswith his genius, and crowdsall his chief

work into a few tormented yearsof later lifeyet he is sopossessedby his genius that he passesunmoved through the most tragic events, over-whelming his country and friends,like one whocomes across them by chance on some secreterrand.

Hit legend,asthe French say,with the anec-dotes which every one remembers, is one of themost brilliant chapters of Vasari. Later writersmerely copied it, until, in 804., Carlo Amoretti

applied to it a criticism which left hardly a datefixed,and not one of those anecdotesuntouched.The variousquestionsthus raised have since thattime become,oneafter another, subjcctsof specialstudy, andmereantiquarianismhasinthisdirectionlittle moretodo. For othcrsremainthe editingof





LEONARDO DA VINCI

<0<

child, took him to thé workshop of Andrea de!Verrocchio, then the most famous artist inFlorence. Beautiful objects lay about there-reliquaries, pyxes, silver images for the pope's

chapelat

Rome, strange fancy-workof the

middle age,keeping oddcompanywith fragmentsofantiquity, then but lately discovered. Anotherstudent Leonardo may have scen there-a ladinto whosesoul the level light andaërialillusionsof Italian sunsetshad passed,in after daysfamousas Perugino. Verrocchio was an artist of theearlier Florentine type, carver, painter, andworkcr in metals, in one designer, not of

pictures only, but of all things for sacred orhousehold use, drinking-vessels,ambries, instru-

ments of music, making them all fair to lookupon, n!Ïing the common ways of life with thereflexionof some far-off brightncss and yearsof patience had refined his hand till his workwas now sought after from distant places.

It happenedthat Verrocchiowasemployedbythe brethren of Vallombrosato paint thé Baptismof Christ, and Leonardowas allowed to finishanangel in the left-hand corner. It was one of those moments in which the progressof a greatthing'-here, that of the art of Italy–presseshard on the happinessof an individual, throughwhose discouragement and decrease, humanity,in more fortunate persons,comes a step nearerto its final success.

For beneaththe cheerfulexterior of the mère



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well-paid craftsman, chasing brooches for thecopesof Santa~M Novella,or twisting metalscreens for the tombs of the Medici, lay theambitious dcs!rc to expand the destiny of Italian art

bya

larger knowledgeand insight

into things, a purposein art not unlike Leonardo'ssstill unconscious purpose and often, in themodelling of drapery, or of a lifted arm, or of hair cast back from the face, there came to himsomething of the freer manner and richer

humanity of a later age. But in this 2~thé pupït had surpassed the master and Ver-rocchîo turncd away as one stunned, and as if his sweet earlier work must thereafter be dis-tasteful to him, from the bright animated angelof Leonardo'shand.The angel may still be seen in Florence, a

space of sunlight in the cold, laboured old

picture but thc legendis truc only in sentiment,for painting had always bccn the art by whichVerrocchioset least store. And as in a sensehe

anticipates Leonardo, so to the last LeonardorecaHsthe studio of Verrocchio,in the love of beautiful toys, such as the vessel of water fora mirror, and lovely needle-work about the

implicated hands in the Afc~/y and Fanity,andof reliefs, like thosecameoswhich in the Yirginof the J3~w~ hang ail round the girdle of SaintMichael, and of bright variegated stones,such asthe agates in the Saint and in a hieratic

precisenessand grâce,as of a sanctuaryswept and



LEONARDO DA VINCI

Ï03

gamished. Amid ail the cunningand intricacyof his Lombard mannerthis never left him. Muchof it therc must have been in that lost picture of P~M~, which he prepared as a cartoon for

tapestry,to bc woven in thé looms of Flanders.

It was the perfection of the older Florentinestyle of miniature-painting,with patient puttingo~each leaf upon thé trees and each nowcr in thegrass, wherc the first man and woman werestanding.

And because it was thé perfection of that

style, it awokc in Leonardo some sced of dis-content which lay in the secret places of hisnature. For the way to perfection is through aseries of disgusts and this picture-all that he

had donc so far in his life at Florence–wasafter all in the old slight manner. His art, if itwas to be something in the world, must beweighted with more of the meaning of natureand purpose of humanity. Nature was "thétrue mistress of higher intelligences." He

plunged, then, into the study of nature. Andtn doing this he followed the manner of theolder students he brooded over the hiddenvirtues of plants and crystals,the lines traced by

the stars as they moved in the sky, over thecorrespondenceswhich existbetweenthe differentorders of living things, through which, to eyesopened, they interpret cach other and for yearshe scemedto those about him as one listening toa voice, silcnt for other men.



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He learned here the art of going dcep, of tracking the sourcesof expressionto their subtlestretreats, thé power of an intimate presencein thethings he handled. He did not at once orentirely desert his art only hc was no longerthe cheerful, objective painter, through whosesoul, as through clear glass,the bright figuresof Florentine life, only madc a little mellowcr andmore pensive by the transit, passed on to thewhite wall. He wasted many days in curioustricks of design,seeming to lose himself in thespinning of intricate devices of line and colour.He was smitten with a love of the impossible-the perforation of mountains, changing thecourse of rivers, raising great buildings, such as

the church of San Giovanni,in the air ail thosefeatsfor the performanceof which natural magicprofessedto havethe key. Later writers, indeed,see in these efforts an anticipation of modernmechanics in him they were rather dreams,thrown off by the overwrought and labouringbrain. Two ideas were especiallyconfirmed inhim, as reflexes of things that had touched hisbrain in childhood beyond the depth of otherimpressions-the smihng of women and themotion of

greatwaters.

And in such studios some interfusionof theextremes of beauty and terror shaped itself, as animage that might bc scen and touched, in thémind of this graciousyouth, sofixedthat for therest of his life it never left him. As if catching



LEONARDO DA VINCI

t0$

gHmpsesof it in the strange eyes or hair of chance people, he would follow such about thestreets of Florence tin the sun went down, of whom many sketches of his remain. Some of these are full of a curious

beauty,that

remotebcauty which may be apprehended only bythosewho have sought it carefully who, start-ing with acknowledged types of beauty, haverefined as far upon thèse, as these refine uponthe world of common forms. But mingledinextricably with this there is an élément of mockeryalso so that, whether în sorrow orscorn, he caricatures Dante even. Legions of grotesques sweep under his hand for has notnature too her grotesques-the rent rock, thedistorting lights of evening on lonel roads, theunveiled structure of man in the embryo, or theskeleton?1

AU these swarming fancies unite in theAfr<~M of the M! Vasari's story of aneartier Medusa, pamted on a wooden shield, is

perhaps an invention and yet, properly told,has more of thc air of truth about it than any-thing else in the whole legend. For its realsubject is not the serious work of a man, but

the experiment of a child. The lizards andglow-worms and other strange small creatureswhich haunt an Italian vineyard bring beforeone the whole picture of a child's life in aTuscan dwelling--half castle, half farm--andare as truc to nature as the pretcnded astonish-

w~<





LEONARDO DA VINCI

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accordance with the restlessnessof his char-acter and if we think of him as the merereasoner who subjects design to anatomy, and

composition to mathematical rules, we shall

hardlyhave that impressionwhich those around

Lconardo received from him. Poring overhis crucibles, making experiments with colour,trying, by a strange variationof the alchemist'$dream, to discover the secret, not of anclixir to make man's natural life immortal,but of giving immortality to the subtlestand most delicate effectsof painting, he seemedto them rather the sorcerer or the magician,possessedof curious secretsand a hidden know-ledge, living in a world of which he alone

possessedthe key. What his philosophyscem:to have been most like is that of ParacelsusorCardan; and much of the spirit of the older

alchemy still hangs about it, with its confidencein short cuts and odd byways to knowledge.To him philosophywas to bc something givingstrange swiftncssand double sight, divining thesourcesof springsbeneaththe earth or of expres-sionbeneath the human countenance,clairvoyantof occult gifts in common or uncommonthings,

in the reed at the brook-side,or the star whichdraws near to us but once in a century. How,in this way, the clear purpose was overclouded,thc fine chaser's handpcrplexed, wc but dimlysee thé mystery which at no point quite liftsfrom Leonardo'slife is deepest here. But it h



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certain that at one period of his life he hadalmostceasedto bc an artist.

The year ï~S~–thé year of the birth of

Raphael 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 toLudovico Sforza, and offers to tell him, for a

pricc, strange secretsin the art of war. It wasthat Sforzawho murdered his young nephew byslow poison, yet was so susceptible of religiousimpressionsthat he blended mere earthly passionwith a sort of religious sentimentalism,and whotook for his device the mulberry-tree–symbol,in its long delay and sudden yielding of nowersandfruit together, of a wisdomwhich économisesail forcesfor an

opportunityof sudden and sure

enect. The fame of Leonardo had gone beforehim, and he was to model a colossal statue of Francesco, the first Duke of Milan. As forLeonardohimself, he came not as an artist at all,or careful of the fame of one but as a playeron the harp, a strange harp of silver of his ownconstruction,shaped in some curious likenesstoa horse'sskull. The capriciousspirit of Ludovicowas susceptible also to the power of music, andLeonardo's nature had a kind of spell in it.

Fascination is always the word descriptive of him. No portrait of his youth remains butall tendsto makc us believe that up to this timcsome charm of voice and aspect,strong cnoughto balance the disadvantage of his birth, had







LEONARDO DA VINCI

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solernneffectsof movingwater. Youmayfollowit springing from its distant source among therocksonthe heath of the Madonna ~/<passing,as a little fall, into the treacherouscalmof the Madonna Lake, as a goodly river

next,belowthe cti~s of the Madonna~A* Rocks,washing the white walls of its distant villages,sitealingout in a network of divided streams inLa Giocondato the seashoreof the Saint ~w–that delicate place, whcrc thc wind passes likcthe hand of some fine etcher over the surface,and the untorn shells are lying thick upon thcsand, and the tops of the rocks, to which thewavcs never rise, arc grcen with grass, grownfineas hair. It is the îandscapc,not of drcamsor of fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and

hours selected from a thousand with a miracleof~w<. Through Leonardo's strange veil of sight things reach him so in no ordinary nightor day, but as in faint light of éclipse,or m somebrief interval of falling rain at daybrcak, orthrough dccp water.

And not into nature only but he plungedalso into human pcrsonality, and became aboveall a painter of portraits facesof a modellingmore skilful than has beenseen beforeor since,

embodiedwith a reality which almost amountsto illusion,on thé dark air. To take a characteras it was, and delicatelysound its stops, suitedonc so curious in observation,curious in inven-tion. He paintedthus the portraits of Ludovico's



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tta

mistresses,Lucretia Crivelli and Cecilia Galeranithe poctess,of Ludovicohimself,and thc DuchessBeatrice. The portrait of Cecilia Galcrani islost, but that of Lucretia Crivelli has beenidentificdwith La ~rp~~ of the Louvre,

and Ludovico'spale, anxious facestill remainsinthe Ambrosianlibrary. Opposite is the portraitof Beatrice d'Este, in whom Leonardo seems tohave caught some presentiment of early death,painting her precise and grave, full of therefinement of the dead, in sad carth-cotouredraiment, set with pale stones.

Sometimesthis curiositycame in connictwiththe desire of beauty it tended to make him gotoo far below that outsideof things in which art

really beginsandends. This strugglebetweenthereason andits ideas, and thc senses,thé 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 heteave unfinished,how much recommence1 Hisproblem was the transmutation of ideas intoimages. What he had attained so far had beenthe mastery of that earîier Florentine style, withits naïve and limitcd sensuousness. Now he

was toentertain in this narrow medium those

divinations of a humanity too wide for it, thatlarger vision of the openingworld, which is onlynot too much for the gréât, irregular art of Shakespeare andeverywherethe effortis visiblein the work of his hands. This agitation, this









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dainty oval of the face disengaged,they arc notof the Christian family, or of Raphael's. Thcyare the clairvoyants,through whom, as throughdelicate instruments,one becomes aware of thesubtler forcesof nature, and the modes of their

action, all that is magnetic in it, all those finerconditions whercin material things rise to that

subtlety of opération which constitutes them

spiritual, where only the final nerve and thekeener touch can follow. It is as if in certain

significantexampleswc actually saw those forcesat their work on human flesh. Nervous,electric,faint always with some inexplicable faintness,these people seem to be subject to exceptionalconditions,to feel powersat work in the common

air unfelt by others, to become, as it were, thereceptacle of them, and pass them on to us in achain of secret influences.

But among the more youthful hcadsthere honc at Florence which Love chooses for its own-the head of a young man, which may well bethe likencssof Andrea Salaino,belovedof Leon-ardo for his curled and waving hair–< capellirw/ e inanellati-and afterwards his favouritepupil and servant. Of all the interests in living

men and women which may have filled his lifeat Milan, this attachment alone is rccorded. Andin return Salaino identined himself so entirelywith Leonardo,that the picture of&?w/ ~w, inthe Louvre, has been attributed to him. Itillustrates Lconardo'susual choicc of pupils, mcn



LEONARDO DA VINCI

~7

of some natural charm of person or intercoursclikc Salaino,or men of birth and princely habitsof life like Francesco Meizî–men with justenough genius to be capableof initiation into hissecret, for the sake of which they were ready to

efface their own individuality. Among them,retiring oftcnto the villa of the Mcizi at Canonica

Yaprio, he worked at his fugitive manuscriptsand sketches,working for the present hoùr, andfor a few only, perhaps chiefly for himself.Other artists have bcen as carclessof present orfuture applause, in self-forgetfulness,or because

they set moral or political endsabovethe ends of art but in him this solitary culture of beautyseemsto have hung upon a kind of self-love,and

a carelessncssin the work of art of all but artitself. Out of the secret places of a uniquetemperament he brought strange blossoms andfruits hitherto unknown and for h!m, the novel

impressionconveycd,the exquisite effect wovcn,counted as an end in itself-a perfect end.

And these pupils of his acquired his mannerso thoroughly, that though the number of Leon-ardo's authentic works is very small indeed,there is a multitude of other men's pictures

through which we undoubtedly sec him, andcorne very near to his genius. Sometimes,as inthé little picture of the Madonnaof the .S~~w,in which, from the bosomof His mother, Christweighsthe pebbles of the brook against the sinsof men, we have a hand, rough enough by





LEONARDO DA VINCI

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train of sentiment,subtle and vague as a piece of music. No one ever ruled over the merein hand more entirely than Leonardo,or bent itmore dexterouslyto purely artisticends. And soit cornes to pass that though he handlessacred

subjects continually, he is the most profane of painters the given person or subject,SaintJohnm the Desert,or the Virgin on the kneesof SaintAnne, is often merely the pretext for a kind of work which carries one altogether beyond therange of its conventionalassociations.

About the 7~~ Supper,its decay and restora-tions, a whole literature has risen up, Goethe'spensivesketch of its sad fortunes being perhapsthe best. The death inchildbirth of the Duchess

Beatrice was followed in Ludovico by one of those paroxysms of religious feeling which inhim were constitutional. The low, gloomyDominican church of Saint Mary of the Gr~f~had been the favouriteoratory of Beatrice. Shehad spent her last days there, full of sinisterpresentiments at last it had been almostnecessaryto remove her from it by force and now it washere that masswas said a hundred times a dayfor her repose. On the damp wall of the re-

fectory, oozingwith mineral

salts,Leonardo

paintedthe Z~&r. Effectiveanecdotesweretold about it, his retouchingsand delays. Theyshow him refusingto work except at the momentof invention, scornful of any one who supposedthat art couldbe a work of mereindustryandru!c,







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motto Infelix Sum is woven in and out, it isperhaps not too fanciful to sec the fruit of awistful after-dreaming over Leonardo's sundryexperiments on the armcd figure of the great

duke,which had

occupiedthe two

somuch

during the days of their good fortune atMilan.

The remaining years of Leonardo's life aremore or less years of wandering. From hisbrilliant life at court he had saved nothing, andhe returned to Florence a poor man. Perhapsnecessitykept his spirit excited the next fouryears arc one prolonged rapture or ecstasyof in-vention. He paintcd now the pictures of theLouvre, his most authentic works, which came

there straight from the cabinet of Francis theFirst, at Fontainebleau. One picture of his,the Saint~~–not the Saint of the Louvre,but a simple cartoon, now in London-revivedfora moment a sortof appreciationmorecommonin an earlier time, when good pictures had stillseemed miraculous. For two days a crowd of

people of all qualities passedin naïve excitement

through the chamber where it hung, and gaveLeonardoa taste of the U

triumph of Cimabue.

But his work was less with the saints than withthe living women of Florence. For he livedstill in the polishedsocietythat he loved, and inthe houses of Florence, left perhaps a little

subject to light thoughts by the death of Savonarola-the latest gossip (1860) is of an







LEONARDO DA VINCI

m

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 ex-

quisite passions. Set it for a moment besideoneof those whîte Greek

goddessesor beautiful

womcn of antiquity, and how would thcy betroubled by this beauty,into which the soul withall its maladies has passed1 Ail the thoughtsand experience of thé world have etched andmouldedthere, in that which they haveof powerto refineand make expressivethe outward form,the animalismof Greece, thc lust of Rome, the

mysticism of the middle 'age with its spiritualambition and imaginative loves, the return of thé Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She

is older than the rocks among which she sitslike the vampire, she has been dead many times,and learned the secrets of the grave and hasbeen a diver in deep seas,and keeps their fallen

day about her and trafficked for strange webswith Eastern merchants and, as Leda, was themother of Helen of Troy, and,asSaint Anne,themother of Mary and all this has been tô her butasthe soundof lyresandnutes.and livesonlyinthe

delicacywith which it has mouldedthe changing

lineaments,and tinged the eyelidsand the hands.The fancy of a perpétuai li~, sweepingtogetherten thousand expériences, is an old onc andmodern philosophy has conceived the idea of

humanity as wrought upon by, and summingup in itself, ail modesof thought and life. Cer-



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tainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodi-ment of the old fancy,the symbol of the modernidea.

During these years at Florence Lconardo'shistory is the history of his art for himself, he

is lostin the bright cloud of it. The outwardhistory begins again in 1502,with a wild journeythrough central Italy, which hc makes as thechiefengincer ofCeesarBorgia. Thé biographer,putting together the stray jottings of his manu-scripts, may follow him through every day of it, up the strange tower of Siena, elastic like abent bow, down to the seashore at Piombino,each place appearing as fitfully as in a feverdream.

One other great work was left for him to do,a work all trace of which soon vanished, 7~Standard,in which he had Michel-

angelo for his rival. The citizens of Florence,desiring to decorate the walls of the greatcouncil-chamber,had o~eredthe work for com-petition, and any subject might be chosen fromthe Florentine wars of the fifteenth century.Michelangelo chose for his cartoon an incidentof the war with Pisa, in which the Florentine

soldiers,bathing in the Arno, are surprised bythe sound of trumpets, and run to arms. Hisdesign has reachedus only in an old engraving,which helps us less perhaps than our remem-brance of the background of his M~ .F~ inthe ~XM to imagine in what superhumanform,



LEONARDO DA VINCI

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such as might have beguiled the heart of anearlier world, those figures ascended out of the water. Leonardochosean incident from thebattle of Anghiari, in which two parties of soldiers fight for a standard. Like Michel-

angelo's, his cartoon is lost, and has corne tous only in sketches, and in a fragment of Rubens. Through the accounts given wcmay discern some lust of terrible things in it,so that even the horses tore cach other withtheir tecth. And yet one fragment of it, ina drawing of his at Florence, is far différent-a waving field of lovely armour, the chasededgings running like lincs of sunlight fromside to side. Michelangelo was twenty-scven

years old Lconardo more than fifty andRaphael, then nineteen years of age, visitingFlorence for the first time, came and watchedthem as they worked.

Wc catch a glimpse of Lconardo again, atRome in t~ï~, surrounded by his mirrors andviala and furnaces, making strange toys thatscemed alive of wax and quicksilver. Thehesitation which had haunted him all throughlife, and made him like one under a spell, was

upon him now with double force. No one hadever carried political indifferentism farther ithad always been his philosophy to "ny beforethe storm he is for the Sforzas, or againstthem, as thé tide of their fortune turns. Yetnow, in the political society of Rome, he came



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to bc suspected of secret French sympathies.It paralysedhim to find himselfamong enemiesand he turned wholly to France, which hadlong courted him.

France was about to become an Italy more

Italian than Italy itself. Francis the First, likeLewis the Twelfth before him, was attracted bythc~w~ of Leonardo's work La Giocondawasalreadyin his cabinet, and he offered Leonardothe little C~M~ Clou,with its vineyardsandmeadows, in the pleasant valley of the Masse,

just outside thé walls of the town of Amboise,where, especiallyin the hunting season,the courtthen frequently resided. A Monmur Lyonard,peinteur du Roypour ~–so the letter of

Francisthe First isheaded. It opens a prospect,one of the most interesting in the history of art,where, in a peculiarly blent atmosphere, Italianart dies away as a French exotic.

Two questions remain, after much busy anti-quarianism, concerning Leonardo's death-thequestionof the exact form of his religion,and thequestion whether Francis the First was presentat the time. They are of about equally littleimportance in thé estimate of Leonardo'sgenius.The directionsin his will

concerningthe

thirtymasses and the great candles for the church of Saint Florentin are things of course, their realpurposebeingimmediateand practical; andonnotheory of religioncould these hurried officesbe of much conséquence. We forget them in specu-



LEONARDO DA VINCI

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lating how one who had becn always so desirousof beauty, but desircd it always in such precise anddefinite forms, as hands or flowers or hair, lookedforward now into the vague land, and experiencedthe last curiosity.

t869.



THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE

uo

IT is the mistake of much popular criticism toregard poetry, music, and painting all thevarious products of art-as but translations intodînèrent languages of one and the samc fixedquantity of imaginative thought, supplementedby certain technical qualities of colour, in paint-

ingof

sound,in

musicof

rhythmical words,in

poetry. In this way, the sensuous clement inart, and with it almost everything in art that isessentiallyartistic, is made a matter of indiffer-ence and a clear apprehension of the oppositeprinciple–that the sensuousmaterial of each artbrings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of anyother, an order of impressionsdistinct in kind-is the beginning of all truc aestheticcriticism.For, as art addressesnot pure sense,still less the

pure intellect, but the "imaginative reason"through the senses,there arc din~rencesof kindin ïesthetic beauty, correspondingto the différ-ences in kind of the gifts of sense themselves.Each art, therefore, having its own peculiar anduntranslatable sensuous charm, has its own




ï~t

special mode of reaching the imagination, itsown specialresponsibilitiesto its material. Oneof thé functionsof aestheticcriticism is to definethese limitations; to estimate the degrec in

which a given work of art fulfils its responsi-bilities to its special material to note in a

picture that true pictorial charm, which i<neither a mère poctical thought or sentiment,on the one hand, nor a mere result of com-municable technical skill in colour or design,on the other; to define in a poem that true

pocticalquality, which is neither descriptivenormeditative merely, but comes of an inventive

handling of rhythmical language, the elementof

songin the

singingto note in music the

musical charm, that essential music, whichpresents no words, no matter of sentiment or

thought, separable from the special form inwhich it is conveyedto us.

To such a philosophyof the variationsof thebeautiful, Lessing's analysis of the sphères of

sculpture and poetry, in thé Laocoon,was an im-

portant contribution. But a true appreciationof these things is possibleonly in thé light of awhole

systemof such art-casuistries. Now paint-

ing is the art in thé criticismot which this truthmost needs enforcing,for it is in popular judg-ments on pictures that the false generalisationof aUart into formsof poetry is most prevalent.To suppose that all is mere technical acquire-ment in delineation or touch, working through







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condition of some other art, by what Germancritics term an ~< j-–a partial alienationfrom its own limitations,through which the artsare able, not indced to supply the place of each

other, but reciprocally to lend each other newforces.Thus someof the most delightful musicseems

to be always approaching to figure, to pictorialdefinition. Architecture, again, though it hasits own laws-laws esoteric enough, as the truearchitect knows only too well-yet sometimesaims at fulfilling thc conditions of a picture, asin the ~r~<ï chapel or of sculpture, as in theflawlessunity of Giotto's tower at Florence andoften finds a true poetry, as in those strangelytwisted staircasesof the ~<~M~ of the countryof the Loire, as if it were intended that amongtheir oddturnings the actorsin a theatrical modeof life might passeach other unscen thcrc beinga poetry alsoof memoryandof thé mere effectof time, by which architecture often profitsgreatly.Thus, again, sculpture aspires out of the hardlimitation of pure form towards colour, or itsequivalent; poetry also, in many ways, findingguidancefrom the other arts, the analogybetween

a Greek tragedy and a work of Greek sculpture,between a sonnet and a relief, of French poetrygencrallywith the art of engraving,being morethan mere figuresof speech and all the arts incommon aspiringtowardsthe principleof musicmusic being the typical, or ideally consummate




135v

art, the object of the great ~M~-j~~ of allart, of all that is artistic, or partakcs of artisticqualities.

art constantlyaspires~ow<~r</f theconditionof music. For while in all other kinds of art it ispossibleto distinguish the matter from the form,and the understanding can always make this dis-tinction, yet ît is the constant effort of art toobliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem,for instance,its subject,namely,its given incidentsor situation-that the mere matter of a picture,the actual circumstancesof an event, the actual

topography of a landscape-should be nothingwtthout thé form, the spirit, of the handling,that this form, this mode of

handling,should

become an end in itself, should penetrate everypart of the matter this is what ail art constantlystrives after, and achievesin differentdegrees.

This abstract language becomesclear enough,if we think of actual examples. In an actuallandscapewe sec a long white road,lost suddenlyon the hill-verge. That is the matter of one orthe etchingsof M.AlphonseLegros only,in thisetching, it is informedby an indwellingsolemnityof expression,seenupon it or half-seen,within the

limits of an exceptionalmoment, or caught fromhis own mood perhaps, but which he maintainsasthe very essence ot the thing, throughout hiswork. Sometimesa momentary tint of stormylight may invcst a homely or too familiar scenewith a character which might well have been



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drawn from the deep places of the imagination.Then we might say that this particular effectof light, this sudden inweaving of gold threadthrough the texture of the haystack, and the

poplars,and

thé grass, givesthé scene artistic

qualities, that it is like a picture. And suchtricks of circumstance are commonest in land-scape which has little salient character of itsown because,in such scenery,all the materialdetails arc so casily absorbed by that informingexpressionof passinglight, andelevated,through-out their whole extent, to a ncw and delightfuleffect by it. And hence the superiority, formost conditions of thé picturesque, of a river-side in France to a Swiss

valley,because,on the

French river-side, mere topography, the simplemateria!, counts for so little, and, all being verypure, untouched, and tranquil in itself, merelight and shade have such easywork in modulat-ing it to one dominant tone. Thé Venetianlandscape,on the other hand, has in its materialconditionsmuch which is hard,or harshlydefinite;but the masters of the Venetian school haveshown themselves little burdencd by them. Of its Alpine background they retain certain ab-

stracted elements only, of cool colour and tran-quillising line and they use its actual details,thé brown windy turrets, the straw-colouredfields,the forest arabesques,but as the notes of a music which duly accompanies the presenceof their men and women, presenting us with the





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play seems to pass for a moment into an actualstrain of music.

And this principle holds good of ail thingsthat partake m any degree of artistic qualities,

of the furniture of our houses,and of dress,forinstance,of life itself, of gcsture and speech,andthe details of daily intercourse these also, forthe wise, being susceptible of a suavity andcharm, caught from the way in which they arcdonc, which gives them a worth in themselvee.Herein, again, lies what is valuable and justlyattractive, in what is calledthe fashionof a time,which elevates the trivialities of speech, andmanner,and dress,into "ends in themselves,"and

givesthem a

mysterious graceand attractiveness

in thc doing of them.Art, then, is thus always striving to be inde-

pendent of the mere intelligence, to become amatter of pure perception, to get rid of itsresponsibilitiesto its subjcct or material theideal examplesof poetry and painting being thosein which the constituent elements of the com-positionare sowelded together, that the materialor subjcct no longer strikes the intellect onlynor the form, the

eye

or the car

only

but form

and matter, in their union or identity, presentone single effect to thé "imaginative reason,"that complex faculty for which every thoughtand feeling is twin-born with its sensible ana-logue or symbol.

ït is the art of music which most completely








~4'

between. At last, with final mastery of ail thetechnical secrets of his art, and with somewhatmore than a spark of the divine fire to hisshare, comesGiorgione. He is the inventor of

genre, of those easily movable pictures whichserve neither for uses of devotion, nor of

allegorical or historic teaching-little groups of real men and women, amid congruous furmtureor landscape-morsels of actuallife, conversationor music or play, but refined upon or idealised,tiH they come to seemlike glimpsesof life fromafar. Those spaces of more cunningly blentcolour,obediently filling their places,hitherto, ina mere architectural scheme, Giorgione detaches

from the wall. He frames them bythe hands

of some skilful carver, so that people ma movethem readily and takc with them where they go,as one might a poemin manuscript, or a musicalinstrument, to ce used, at will, as a means of self-education,stimulus or solace,coming like ananimated presence, into one's cabinet, to enrichthe air as with somc choice aroma, and, like

persons,live with us, for a day or a lifetime. Of ail art such as this, art which bas played so largea

partin men'sculture sincethat time, Giorgione

isthe initiator. Yet in him too that old Venetianclearness or justice,

in the apprehension of theessential limitations of the pictorial art, is stillundisturbed. While he interfuses his paintedwork with a high-strung sort of poetry, caughtdirectly from a singularlyrich and high-strung







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Vasari," thc great traditional reputation, wovenwith so profuse demand on men's admiration,bas been scrutinisedthread by thread and whatremains of the most vivid and stimulating of

Vcnetian masters,a live

name, as it seemed,in

those old shadowytimes, bas bcen reducedalmostto a namc by his most recent critics.

Yetenough remainsto explainwhy the legendgrew up abovethe name,why the name attacheditself, in many instances,to the bravest work of other men. thé Concertin the Pitti Palace, inwhich a monk, with cowl and tonsure,touchesthe keys of a harpsichord,while a clerk, placedbehind him, graspsthé handle of the viol, and athird, with cap and plume, seems to wait uponthé true interval for beginning to sing, is un-doubtedly Giorgione's. The outlineof thc liftcdfinger, the trace of thé plume, the very threadsof the fine linen, which fastenthemselveson thememory, in the moment before they arc lostaltogether in that calm unearthly glow, the skillwhich bas caught thé wavesof wandering sound,and fixed them for ever on thc lips and hands--thèse are indecd the master's own and thecriticism which, while dismissing so much

hitherto believed to bc Giorgione's, bas estab-lished thc claims of this one picture, bas left itamong the most precious things in the worldof art.

It is noticeable that the distinction of thisC~oweandC)nr<)c*!<!)e~M~ /'«A~ ot




L t4S

Concert,its sustainedevennessof perfection, alikein design, in execution,and in choice of personaltype, becomesfor the new Vasari the standard

of Giorgione's genuine work. Finding hère

suflicient to explain his influence,and the trueseat of mastery, its authors assign to Pellegrinoda San Daniele the Holy Familyin the Louvre,in considerationof certain points where it comesshort of this standard.. Such shortcoming,how-ever, will hardiy diminish the spectator's enjoy-ment of a singular charm of liquid air, withwhich the whole picture seems instinct, fillingthe eyes and lips, the very garments, of itssacred personages, with some wind-searchcd

brightness and energy of which fine air theblue peak, clearly definedin the distance,is, asit wcre, the visible pledge. Similarly, anotherfavourite picture in the Louvre, the subjectof a

delightful sonnet by a poct 1 whoseown paintedwork often comes to mind as one pondersoverthese precious things-the jF~ C~~v, is

assignedto an imitator of Sebastiandel Piomboand the 7~ in the Academy at Venice,to Paris Bordone,or perhaps to some advanced

craftsmanof the sixteenth century." From thegallery at Dresden,the Knight<w~fM~ a Lady,where the knight's broken gauntlets seem tomark some well-known pause in a story wewould willingly hear the rest of, is concededto"a Brescianhand," and y~c~ ~A~ Rachelto

DanteGabrielRossetti.



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'46

a pupil of Palma. And then, whatever theircharm, we are called on to give up the Ordeal,andthe Finding with its jewel-likepoolsof water, perhaps to Bellini.

Nor bas thé criticism, which thus so freelydiminishes the number of his authentic works,added anything important to the well-knownoutline of the life and personalityof the manonly, it hM fixed oneor two dates, one or twocircumstances,a little more exactly. Giorgionewas born before the ycar 1~77, and spcnt hischildhood at Castelfranco,where the last cragsof the Venetian Alps break down romantically,with something of parklike grace, to the plain.

A natural child of the family of the Barbarelliby a peasant-girl of Vedelago,he finds his wayearly into the circle of notable persons-peopleof courtesy. He is initiated into those dif-ferences ot personal type, manner, and even of dress, which are best understood there-that

distinction of the Concertof the Pitti Palace.Not far from hishome livesCatherine ofCornara,formerly Qucen of Cyprus and, up in thetowcrs which still remain, Tuzio Costanzo,the

famous ~–a picturesqueremnant of

mcdieval manners, amid a civilisation rapidlychanging. Giorgione paints their portraits andwhcn Tuzio's son, Mattco, d!csin early youth,adornsin his memory a chapel in the church of Castelfranco,painting on this occasion,perhaps,thé altar-piece, foremost among his authentic




'47

works, still to be seen there, with the figure of the warrior-saint,Liberale, of which the originallittle study in oil, with the delicatelygleaming,silver-greyarmour, is oneof the greater treasures

of the National Gallery. In that figure, as insomeother knightly personagesattributed to him,people have supposedthclikeness of the paintcr'sown presumablygracious presence. Thither, atlast, he is himself brought home from Venice,earlydead,but celebrated. It happened,abouthis

thirty-fourth year, that in one of those partiesat which he entertained his friendswith music,he met a certain lady of whomhe became

grcatlyenamoured, and "thcy rejoiced greatly, says

Vasari,the one and the

other,in their loves."

And two quite different legends concerning itagrée in this, that it was through this lady hecame by his dcath Ridolfi relating that, beingrobbed 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 visitsto her as usual, Giorgione tookthe sicknessfrom her mortally, along with herkisses,and so brieflydeparted.

But, although the number of Giorgione'sextant works bas been thus limited by recentcriticism, ail is not donc when thé real and thetraditional elements in what concernshim havebeen discriminatcd for, in what is connectedwith a great name, much that is not real isoften very stimulating. For the aestheticphilo-



THE RENAISSANCE

V·9·W 1V ~V

!4~

sopher, therefore, over and above the real

Giorgioneand his authentic extant works, thereremains the GM~w/w~ also-an influence, a

spirit or type in art, active in men so differentasthose to whom

manyof his

supposedworks are

really assignable. A veritable school, in fact,grew together out of all those fascinatingworks

rightly or wrongly attributed to him out of

many copies from, or variationson him, by un-known or uncertain workmen, whose drawingsanddesignswere,forvariousreasons,prizedashis;out of the immediate impression he made uponhis contemporaries,and with which he continuedin men'smmds out of manytraditionsof subjectand treatment, which really descend from him

to our own time, and by retracing which we fillout thé original image. Giorgione thus be-comes a sort of impcrsonation of Venice itself,its projected reflex or ideal, all that was intenseor desirable in it crystallisingabout the memoryof this wonderful young man.

And now, finally, let me illustrate some of the characteristics of this &~op/ of Giorgione,aswe may call it, which, for most of us, notwith-

standing all that negative criticism of the newVasari,' will still identifyitself with those famous

pictures at Florence, at Dresden and Paris. Acertain artistic idéal is there definedfor us--the

conceptionof a peculiaraimand procédure in art,which we may understand as thé G~



THE SCHOOL OF GIORGÏONh

'49

wherever we find it, whether in Venetian workgenerally, or in work of our own time. Of thisthe Concert,that undoubted workof Giorgione inthe Pitti Palace, is the typical instance,and a

pledgeauthenticatingthe connexionof the school,and the spirit of the school, with the master.1 have spokenof a certain interpenetration of

the matter or subject of a work of art with theform of it, a conditionrealiscdabsolutelyonly inmusic, as the condition to which every form of art is pcrpetuallyaspiring. In thé art ofpainting,the attainmentof this idealcondition,this pcrfcctinterpénétration of the subjectwith the eïementaofcoÏour and design,dépends,of course,in gréât

measure,on dexterous choice of that

subject,or

phase of subject and such choice is onc of thé secrets of Giorgione's school. It is theschool of JM~, and employs itself mainly with

painted idylls," but, in thé production of thispictorial poetry,exercisesa wonderful tact in theselecting of such matter as lends itself mostreadilyandentirely to pictorial form,to completeexpressionbydrawing and colour. For althoughits productions are painted poems, thcy belongto a sort of poetry which tells itself without an

articulated story. The master is pre-eminentfor thé resolution,the case and quickness,withwhich he reproduces instantaneousmotion-thelacing-on of armour, with the head bent backso stately-the faintinglady-the embrace,rapidasthe ktss, caught with death itself from dytng



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lips-some momentaryconjunctionof mirrorsandpolishedarmour and still water, by which all thesides of a solid image arc exhibited at once,solving that casuisticalquestionwhether painting

can present an object as completely as sculpture.The sudden act, the rapid transition of thought,the passingexpression-this he arrests with thatvivacity which Vasari has attributed to him,il

fuocoG/c~w~p, as he terms it. Now it is partof thé ideality of the highest sort of dramaticpoctry, that it presents us with a kind of pro-foundly significant and animatedinstants, a meregesture, a look,a smile, perhaps-some brief andwholly concrete moment-into which, however,

all the motives,all the interestsand effectsof along history, have condensed themselves, andwhich seem to absorb past and future in anintense consciousnessof the present. Such idealinstants the school of Giorgione selects,with itsadmirable tact, from that feverish, tumultuouslycoloured world of the old citizens of Venice-exquisitepausesin time, in which, arrested thus,we seem to be spectators of all the fulness of existence,and which arc like some consummateextract or

quintessenceof life.

It is to the law or condition of music, as1 said, that all art like this is really aspiringand, in the school of Giorgione, the perfectmoments of music itself, the making or hearingof music, song or its accompaniment,are them-selves prominent as subjects. On that back-




ground of the silenceof Venice,so impressivetothe modern visitor, thé world of Italian musicwas then forming. In choice of subject, asin all besides,thé Concertof the Pitti Palace is

typicalof

everythingthat

Giorgione,himself

an admirable musician, touched with his influ-ence. In sketch or finished picture, in variouscollections, wc may follow it through manyintricate variations-men fainting at musicmusic at the pool-side while people nsh, ormingled with the sound of the pitcher in thewell, or heard across running water, or amongthe flocks thc tuning of instruments peoplewith intent faces, as if listening, like thosedescribed by Plato in an ingenious passage of

the ~<~M~ to detect the smallest interval of musicarsound, thé smallestundulation in the air,or feeling for music in thought on a stringlessinstrument, car and finger refining themselvesinfinitely,in the appetite for swect sound amomentary touch of an instrument in thetwilight, as one passesthrough some unfamiliarroom, in a chancecompany.

In these then, the favourite incidents of Giorgione'sschool,musicor the musicalintervals

in our existence,life itself is conceivedas a sortof listening-listening to music,to the readingof Bandello'snovels,to the sound of water, to timeas it flies. Often such moments are really ourmoments of play, and we are surpriscd at théunexpected blessednessof what may scem our






'S:

it, and literally empyrean, all impurities beingburnt out of it, and no taint, no floating particleof anything but its own proper elementsallowedto subsistwithin it.

Itsscencry

is such M inEngland

wc call"park sccncry," with some elusive refinementfelt about the rustic buildings, the choice grass,the groupcd treee, the undulations dcftiy ccono-miscd for graceful effect. Only, in Italy allnatural things are as it were wovcn throughand through with gold thrcad, even the cypressrevealing it among the folds of its blackness.And it is with gold dust, or gold thread, thatthese Venetian painters seem to work, spinningits fine filaments, through thé solemn human

flesh,away into the white pîastercdwalls of thcthatched huts. The harsher details of themountains recede to a harmonious distance, theone peakof richblue abovcthé horizonremainingbut as the sensiblewarrant of that due coolnesswhich is all we necd ask hère of the Alps, withtheir dark rains and streams. Yet what real,airy space,as the eye passesfrom level to level,through the long-drawn valley in which Jacobembraces Rachel among the nocks1 Nowhere

is there a truer instance of that balance, thatmodulatcd unison of landscape and persons-of the human image and its accessories–aireadynoticed as characteristicof the Venetian school,so that, in it, neither personage nor scencry isever a mère pretext for the other.



THE RENAISSANCE

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Something like this seems to me to be the~r/ about Giorgione, if 1 may adopt a

serviceable expression, by which the Frenchrecognise those more liberal and durable im-pressionswhich, in

respectof

any reallycon-

siderable person or subject, anything that hasat all intricately occupied men's attention, liebeyond, and must supplement, the narrowerrange of thc strictly ascertained facts about it.In this, Giorgione is but an illustration of avaluable general caution we may abide by inail criticism. As regards Giorgionehimself,wchave indeed to take note of ail those négationsand exceptions,by which, at first sight, a newVasari" seems merely to have confused our

apprehension of a delightful object, to haveexplained away in our inheritance from pasttime what seemcd of high value there. Yet itis not with a full understanding even of thoseexceptions that one can leave off just at thisooint. Properly qualified, such exceptions arebut a salt of genuineness in our knowledgeand beyond ail those strictly ascertained facts,we must take note of that indirect influence bywhich 'one like Giorgione, for instance,enlarges

his permanent efficacyand really makes himself felt in our culture. In a just impression of that, is the essential truth, thc Tvw~t~r~ con-cerning him.

'~77.



JOACHIM DU BELLAY

IH

IN the middle of the sixteenth century, whenthe spirit of thc Renaissancewas everywhere,and people had begun to look back with distasteon the works of thé middle age, the old Gothicmanner had still one chance more, in borrowingsomcthing from the rival which was about to

supplantit. In this

waythere was

produced,chiefly in France, a new and peculiar phase of taste with qualitics and a charm of its own,blendingthe somewhatattenuatedgrace ofItalianornament with the général outlines of Northerndesign. It created the Chdttau <~ Gaillon,as

you may still see it in the delicate engravingsof Israël Silvestre--a Gothic donjon veiled faintlyby a surfaceof dainty Italian tracerics–Chenon-ceaux, Blois,Chambord,and the church of Brou.In

painting,there came from Italy workmen

like J~~ Rouxand thé mastersof the schoolof Fontainebleau, to have their later Italian

voluptuousness attempered by the naïve and

silveryqualities of the native style and it wascharacteristic of these painters that they weremost successful in painting on glass, an art so





JOACHIM DU BELLAY

their resistanceto Italian influences,there is asilverinessof colour and a clearnessof expressionwhich distinguish them very dennite!y fromtheir Flemish neighbours,Hemling or thé Van

Eycks. And this nicety is not less characteristicot old French poetry. A light, aërial delicacy,a simple etegancc–'MW ~W/ r~/M~Mf

these are essential characteristicsalike of Villon's poetry,andof the Houri ~wof Brittany. Thcy are characteristic too of ahundred French Gothic carvings and tracer!es.AHkcin the old Gothic cathedraîs, andin theircounterpart, the old Gothic f~wc~ <~ j~, therough and ponderous mass becomes, as if bypassingfor a moment into happier conditions,or

through a more graciousstratum of air, gracefuland refined, like the carved ferneries on thegranité church at Folgoat, or the lines whichdescribe the fair priestly hands of ArchbishopTurpin, in the song of Roland; althoughbcïow both alike there is a fund of mere Gothicstrength, or heaviness.'

Now Villon'ssongsand Ciouet's painting arclike 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 gestureor expression,the turn of a wrist, the taperingof a finger. In Ronsard's time that rougher

Thepuretyortittic«pe<t<ofthissubjecthavebeenint<fpf<t«!,Inworkof~rettt«Mandtearnin~,byMrs.MarkPtttiton:–7~<W/M~<v infr~





JOACHIM DU BELLAY

'S9

lies written on the page, carries the eye lightlyonwards,and of which this is a goodinstance:–

~A/r~,fr~f~, rMD, ~rM,

~~<r M~M<f~A~< 1

/~r/~ &~<!f/!<~ <«jr,~<, f~jv,

/r <~ plaint 1

C*~ ftwr~M ~<~.~J, <fw/

~~<~ f~ ~~M~r~,ai ~r~f/~ fM~

~M~M~DM~nx~M~ /M<Mw<~w.

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 inhis literary revolution,-this Remy Belleau,Antoine de Baif, Pontus de Tyard, ÉtienneJodelle, Jean Daurat, and lastly Joachim duBellay and with that strange love of emblemswhich ischaracteristicof the time, which coveredall the works of Francis the First with thesalamander,and ail the works of Henry theSecond with the double crescent, and ail theworks of Anne of Brittany with the knotted

cord, they calledthemselvesthe Pleiad seveninail, although, as happonswith the celestial Pleiad,if you scrutinisethis constellationof poets more

carefully you may find there a grcat number of minor stars.

The first note of this literary revolution was





JOACHIM DU BELLAY

M t6<

is perfectly transparent, flexible, and chaste. Inmany ways it is a more characteristicexample of the culture of the P/w</ than any of its verseandthosewholovethe wholemovementofwhichthe P/w</ isa

part,for a weird

foreigngracein it,

and may be looking about for a true spécimenof it, cannot have a better than Joachim du Bellayand this little treatise of his.

Du Bellay's object is to adjust the existingFrench culture to the rediscovered classicalculture and in discussing this problem, and

developing the theories of the Pleiad, he haslighted upon many principlesof permanent truthandapplicability. Therewere somcwhodespairedof the French languagcaltogether, who thoughtit naturally incapableof the fulnessand eleganceof Greek and Latin–< ~f<' f~ y~

langueGrM~ ~p~<?~–that sciencecouldbc adequatelydiscussed,and poetry noblywritten,only in the dead languages. Those who speakthus," says Du Bellay, make me think of thérelics which one may only see through a littlepane of glass, and must not touch with one'shands. That is what these people do with allbranches of culture, which they keep shut up

in Greek and Latin books, not permitting one tosee them otherwise, or transport them out of deadwords into those which arc alive, and

wingtheir way daily through the mouths of men. e

Languages,"he says again,Uare not born like

plantsand trees,tome naturallyfeebleand sickly,



THE RENAISSANCE

t6~

others healthy and strong and apter to bear theweight of men's conceptions,but all their virtueis generated in the world of choice and men'sfreewill concerning them. Therefore, 1 cannotblame too strongly the rashncss of some of our

countrymen, who being anything rather thanGreek$or Latins,depreciate and reject with morethan stoicaldisdaineverythingwritten in Frenchnor can 1 expressmy surprise at the odd opinionof some learned men who think that our vulgartongue is wholly incapableof crudition and goodliterature."

It was an âge of translations. Du Bellayhimself translated two books of the /E~< andother poetry, old and new, and there were somewho

thoughtthat the translation of the classical

literature was the true means of innoblingtheFrench languagc:-strangers are ever favouriteswith us-nous fawrisons toujourslet ~r~~r~.Du Bellay moderates their expectations. 1 donot believe that one can learn thc right use of them "-he is speaking of figures and ornamentin language–"from translations, because it isimpossible to reproduce thcm with thc samegrace with which the original author uscd them.For each language has 1 know not what

peculi-arity of its own and if you force yourself toexpressthe naturalness (/f /~) of this in anotherlanguage, observing the law of translation,-not to expatiate beyond the limits of thcauthor himself,your words will be constrained,





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<64

not to despairof it he secsit alreadypertect inall eleganceand beauty of word$–~A/ toute

/~jw~ t~ <~~rc~.Du Bellay was born in the disastrous year

t~, theyear

of the battle of Pavia, and thecaptivity of Francis the First. His parentsdied early, and to him, as the younger son, hismother's little cstate, f< L~ the belovedplace of his birth, descended. He was broughtup by a brother only a little older than himself;and left to themselves,the two boyspasscd theirlives in day-dreams of military glory. Theireducation was neglected; Tne time of myyouth," saysDu Bellay,"was lost, like the flowerwhich no showerwaters,and no hand cultivates."

He was just twenty years old when the elderbrother dicd, leavingJoachim to be the guardianof his child. It was with regret, with a shrink-ing sense of incapacity, that he took uponhimthé burden of this responsibility. Hitherto hehad lookcd forward to the professionof a soldier,hereditary in his family. But at this time asicknessattacked him which brought him cruelsufferings,and seemed likely to be mortal. Itwas then for the first time that he read the

Greek and Latin poets. These studioscame toolate to make him what he so much desired tobc, a trifter in Greek and Latin verse, like somany others of his time now forgotten instead,thcy made him a lover of his own homely nativetongue, that poor starveling stock of the French





THE RENAISSANCE

ct66166

circumstancethat it was once poetry à la mode,that it is part of the manner of a time-a timewhich made much of manner, and carried it toa high degrec of perfection. It is one of thedecorationsof an

agewhich threw a

large partof

its energy into the work of decoration. We fée!a pensivepleasurein gazing on thesefadedadorn-ments, and observinghow a group of actual menand womenpleased themselveslong ago. Ronsard'tpoemsarea kind of epitomeof hisage. Of onesideof that age, it is true, of the strenuous,the pro-gressive,the seriousmovement,which was thengoing on, there is little but of the catholic side,thc losingside, the forlorn hope, hardly a figureis absent. The Queen of Scots,at whose desire

Ronsard published his odes, reading him in hernorthern prison, felt that he was bringing backto her the truc flavour of her early days in thccourt of Catherine at the Louvre, with its exoticItalian gaieties. Those who dislikedthat poetry,disliked it because they found that age itseîf distasteful. The poetry of Malherbe came,withits sustained style and weighty sentiment, butwith nothing that set people singing and thelevers of such poetry saw in the poetry of the

Pleiad only the latest trumpery of the middleage. But the time arrived when thc schoolof Malherbe alsohad had its day and the Romanti-f/f~, who in their eagerness for excitement, forstrange music and imagery, went back to theworks of the middle age, acceptedthe Pleiad too



JOACHIM DU BELLAY

t6/

with the rest andinthat newmiddle âge whichthcir genius has evokcd, the poetry of the Pleiadhas found its place. At first, with Malherbe,youmaythink it, likethe architecture, the whole

mode of life, the very dressesof that time, fan-tastic,faded,r~c<'c. But if you look long enoughto understand it, to conceive its sentiment, youwill find that those wanton lines have a spiritguiding their caprices. For there is stylethercone temper has shaped the whole and every-thing that has style, that has been donc as noother man or age could have donc it, as it couldnever, for ail our trying, be donc again, has itstrue value and interest. Let us dwell upon itfor a moment, and

tryto

gatherfrom it that

special nower, ~i'~r particulier,which Ronsardhimselftells us every garden has.

It is poetry not for the pcople, but for a con-finedcircle, for courtiers, great lordsand cruditepersons,people who desire to bc humoured, to

gratify a certain refined voluptuousness theyhave in them. Ronsard loves, or dreams thathe loves,a rare and peculiar type of beauty, la

~c~ Angevine,with golden hair and dark

eyes. But he has thc ambitionnot only of being

a courtier and a lover, but a great scholar alsohe is anxious about orthography, about theletter C~w~, the true spelling of Latin namesin French writing, and the restoration of theletter i toits primitive libcrty–~r/ ~f M sa

première /~r~. Hispoetry is full of quaint,



THE RENAISSANCE

!68

remote learning. He is just a little pedantic,truc always to his own expressjudgment, thatto bc natural is not enough for one who in

poetry desires to produce work worthy of im-

mortality.And therewithal a certain number

of Greck words, which charmed Ronsard andhis circle by their gaiety and daintiness, and acertain air of foreign eleganceabout them, creptinto the French language as there were other

strange words which the pocts of the Pleiad

forged for themselves, and which had only an

ephemeral existence.With this was united the desire to taste a

more exquisite and various music than that of the older French verse, or of the classicalpocts.The music of the measured, scanned verse of Latin and Greek poetry is one thing the musicof the rhymed, unscanned verse of Villon andthe old French pocts, la ~M' chantée,is another.To combine these two kinds of music in anew school of French poetry, to make versewhich should scanand rhyme as well, to searchout and harmonisethé measureof every syllable,and unite it to the swift, flitting, swallow-likemotion of rhyme, to penetrate their poetry with

a double music-this was the ambition of theP/ They are insatiable of music, theycannot have enough of it they désire a musicof greater compass perhaps than words can pos-siblyyield, to drainout the last dropsof sweetnesswhtcn a certain note or accentcontains.



JOACHIM DU BELLAY

t69

It was Goudimel, the serious and protestantGoudimel, who set Ronsard's songs to musicbut cxcept in this eagernessfor music thé poetsof the Pleiad seem ncver quite in earnest.

The old Greek and Roman mythology, whichthe great Italians had found a motive so weightyand severe, becomes with them a mere toy.That "Lord of terrible aspect," ~cr, hasbccomc Love the boy, or the babe. Theyare full of fine railleries thcy delight indiminutives, o/MM~e~ ~f~, C~drette. Their loves are only half real, a vaineffort to prolong the imaginative loves of themiddle âge beyond their naturallifetime. Theywrite

love-poemsfor hire. Like that

partvof people who tell the tales in BoccacciosaDecaf1liron,they form a circle which in an âgeof gréât troubles, losses, anxieties, can amuseitself with art, poetry, intrigue. But theyamuse themselves with wonderful elegance.And sometimes their gaiety becomes satiric,for, as they play, real passionsinsinuate them-selves,and at least the reality of death. Their

dejection at the thought of leaving this fairabode of our common

daylight-le

6eau Jejourdu commun jour-is expressed by them withalmost wearisome reiteration. But with thissentiment too they arc able to trifle. The

imagery of death serves for delicate ornament,and they weave into the airy nothingness of their verses their trite renections on the vanity



THE RENAISSANCE

t7o

of life. Just so thc grotesque details of thecharnel-house nest themselves, together withbirds and flowers and the fancies of the paganmythology, in the traccries of the architectureof that time, which wantons in its gracefularabesques with thc images of old age anddeath.

Ronsard became deaf at sixteen and it wasthis circumstancewhich finally determined himto be a man of letters instead of a diplomatist,significantly,one might fancy, of a certain pre-mature agedness,and of the tranquil, temperatesweetnessappropriate to that, in the school of poetry which he founded. Its charm is that of a thing not vigorousor original, but full of the

grace which cornesof long study and reiteratedrefinements,and many steps rcpeatcd, and manyangles worn down, with an exquisite faintness,M~r ~~w, a certain tenuity and caducity,as ~or those who can bear nothing véhément orstrong for princes weary of love, like Francisthe First, or of pleasure, like Henry the Third,or of action, like Henry the Fourth. Its meritsare those of the old,-grace and finish, perfectin minute detail. For these pcople are a little

jadcd, and have a constant desire for a cubduedand delicate excitement, to warm their creepingfancy a little. They love a constant change of rhyme in poetry, and in their housesthat strange,fantastic interweaving of thin, reed-like lines,which arc a kind of rhetoric in architecture.



JOACHIM DU BELLAY

'7'

But the poetry of the Pleiad is true not onlyto thé physiognomy of its âge, but also to itscountry-ce payr du ~!w<~<w–thé namcs andsceneryof which so often recur in it :-the great

Loire,with its

long spacesof

white sand thelittle river Loir; the heathy, upland country,with its scatteredpools of water and waste road-sides, and retired manors, with their crazy oldfeudaldefenceshalf fallen into decay La Beauce,where the vast rolling fieldsseem to anticipatethe great western sea itself. It is full of thetraits of that country. We see Du Bellay andRonsard gardening,or hunting with their dogs,or watch the pastim~sof a rainy day and withall this i< connected a domesticity,a homeliness

and simple goodness, by which the Northerncountry gains upon the South. They have thelove of the agcd for warmth, and undcrstandthe poetry of winter for they are not farfrom the Atlantic, and the west wind whichcornes up from it, turning the poplars white,spares not this new Italy in France. So thefircside often appcars, with the pleasures of the frosty season, about the vast emblazonedchimneys of the time, and with a A~o~ as of

little children, or old pcople.It is in Du Bellay's Olive, a collection of sonnetsin praise of a half-imaginarylady, Sonnetza la louange<0/r!v, that these characteristicsarcmost abundant. Here is a perfectlycrystallisedexample :–



THE RENAISSANCE

'7'

D'<tM<«r,<<w, haultt valeurLet feux</<w<~~~t~ MM~z lesf/t~M~ v~~«z< manteau~r~K.<f

raiz er~<~ <~</<~r~fw~r7~ de ~M«~, bonheur,

La <wr~r<j«<f,

f«~~f<!fMMAf,~Maw~ Mt<t~Mf f~ bat

.9M/ pillédu MM<~~«~ /<t~W.~/r~r«~ wt ~M-vlyz ~AMfA/M<w,

~M fA{/'<~ ~t deux~fr~ r<ZM,M/ M~jf~<~r~/a~</wa~~

«~<tt /&~~r<~ ~M~~M~f/~w,

n~M!da Dieux ~n~ rimmortaliti.

That he is thus a characteristic specimen of the poctical taste of that age, is indeed Du

Bellay'schief interest, But if his work is to

have the highest sort of interest, if it is to dosomething more than satisfy curiosity, if it i<to have an aestheticas distinct from an historicalvalue, it i<not enough for a poet to have beenthe true child of his age, to have conformedtoit< esthetic conditions,and by so conformingtohave charmed and stimulated that age it ianecessarythat there should bc perceptible in hiswork something individual, inventive, unique,the impress there of the writer's own temperand personality. This impress M. Sainte-Beuvethought he found in thé ~f de ~p~ andthe ~<yr~ which he ranks as what has beencalled /~M' intime,that intenseîy modern sort of poetry in which the writer has for his aim theportraiture of his own most intimate moods,and



JOACHIM DU BELLAY

'73

to take the reader into his confidence. Thatage had other instances of this intimacy of sentiment Montaignc's Essays are full of it,the carvingsof the church of Brou are full of it.

M. Sainte-Beuve has perhaps exaggerated theinfluenceof this quality in Du Bellay's ~r~but thc very namc of the book has a touch of Rousseauabout it, and reminds one of a wholegenerationof self-pityingpocts in modern times.1 was in the atmosphère of Rome, to him sostrange and mournful, that thèse paîe floweragrew up. For that journey to Italy, which hcdeplored as the greatest misfortunc of his life,put him in full possessionof his talent, and

broughtout all its

originality.And in effect

you dofind intimacy, intimité,here. The troubleof his life is analysed,and the sentiment of itconvcycd dircctly to our minds not a greatsorrow or passion,but only the senseof loss inpassing days,the M~/ of a dreamer who mustplunge into the world's affairs, the oppositionbetween actual life and the ideal, a longing forrest,nostalgia,home-sickness-that pre-eminentlychildish, but so suggestive sorrow, as significantof thé final

regretof all human creaturesfor thé

familiar earth and limited sky.The feeling for landscapcis often describedas

a modern one still more so is that for antiquity,the sentimentof ruins. Du Bellayhas this senti-ment. The duration of the hard, sharp outlinesof things is a grief to him, and passinghis weari-



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somedaysamongthe ruinsof ancient Rome, he iaconsoled by the thought that ail must one dayend, by the sentimentof the grandeurof nothing-ness-la grandeurdu rien. With a strangetouchof far-off

mysticism,he thinks that the

gréâtwhole–c~–into which all other thingspassand lose themselves,ought itself sometimesto perish and pass away. Nothing less canrelieve his weanness. From the stately aspectsof Rome his thoughts went back continualîy toFrance, to the smoking chimneys of his htt!e

village, the longer twilight of the North, thesoft climate of Anjou-la douceur yetnot so much to the real France, we may be sure,with its dark streets and roofs of rough-hewnslate, as to that other country, with slenderertowers, and more winding rivers, and trees likeflowers, and with softer sunshine on more

gracefully-proportionedfields and ways, whichthe fancy of the exile, and thé pilgrim, and of the schoolboyfar from home, and of those keptat home unwillingly, everywhere builds upbeforeor bchind them.

He came home at last, through thé Gr/fc~,by slow journeys and there, in the cooler air of

his own country, under its skiesof milkier blue,the sweetest flower of his genius sprang up.Therc have been pocts whose whole fame basrested on one poem, as Gray's on the Elegyina CountryChurchyard, or Ronsard's, as manycritics have thoucht, on the eighteen lines of



JOACHIM DU BELLAY

'7!

one famous ode. Du Bellay has almost beenthe poct of one poem and this one poem of his is an Italian product transplanted into that

green country of Anjou out of the Latin verses

of Andrea Navagero, into French. But it is acomposition in which the matter is almostnothing, and the form almost everything andthe form of the poem as it stands,written in oldFrench, i< all Du Bellay's own. It is a songwhich the winnowers are supposed to sing asthey winnow the corn, and they invoke thewindsto lie lightly on the grain.

D'UN~AWFM DE ~~E ~r ~A~

.dfw~~< A~~J~M<d'ailepassagirlPar /!f~M~ fc/fz,Et <«~ ~< murmure~'e~~r~~M ~r</«r~DtM/MMM<~~f<!«/~a!.

y~r~ f~ ~M~~ /M f~/MM~

Et f~ f<w«y,Cf~wr~ r~w

~TMfA</?! ~f/M~,Et f~ < aussi.

*A graceful translationof chis and someother poemsof theP~M may be found in ~<~ < Old ~rM~, byMr.AndrewLang.



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D, fM~ </t«~ ~~<«~V~~Z <~<<M~~f~y~z ~~r iCf ~< ~MF'<A<t~

<nMM y~ f~ft~Z~fA~&Mr~< /««'.

That has, in the highest degree, the qualities,the value, of the whole Pleiad schoolof poetry,of the whole phase of taste from which thatschool dérives–a certain silvery grace of fancy,nearlyall thc pleasureof which is in the surpriseat the happy and dexterous way in which a thingslight in itself is handled. The sweetnessof itis by no means to be got at by crushing, as youcrush wild herbs to get at their perfume. ône

seems to hear the measured motion of the fans,with a child's pleasure on coming across theincident for the first time, in one of those greatbarns of Du Bellay's own country, La jSM~v,thé granary of France. A sudden light trans-figuressometrivial thing, a weather-vane,a wind-milî, a winnowing fan,the dust in the barn door.A moment-and the thing has vanished,becauseit waspure effect but it leavesa relish behind it,a long mgthat the accident may happen again.

<8~.



WINCKELMANN

BT EGO !N ARCADIA FUI

M t77

GoBTHB'$fragments of art-criticism contain afew pagesof strange pregnancy on the characterof Winckelmann. He speaksof the teacher whohad made his career possible,but whom he hadnever

seen,as of an abstract

typeof

culture,consummate, tranquil, withdrawn already intothe region of ideals, yet retaining colour fromthe incidents of a passionate intellectual life.He classes him with certain works of art,possessingan inexhaustible gift of suggestion,to which criticism may return again and againwith renewed freshness. Hegel, in his lectureson the Philorophy estimating the work of his predecessors,hasalsopasseda remarkablejudg-ment on Winckelmann's

writings:–" Winckel-

mann,by contemplationof the idealworks of theancients, receivcd a sort of inspiration,throughwhich he opened a new sense for the study of art. He is to bc rcgardedas one of those who,in the sphere of art, have known how to initiatea ncw organ for the human spirit." That it has



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given a new sense,that it has laid open a neworgan, is the highest that can be said of anycritical effort. It is interesting then to ask whatkind of man it was who thus laid open a neworgan. Under what conditionswas that efrccted?t

Johann Joachim Winckelmann was born atStendal,in Brandenburg,in the year ï~iy. Thechild of a poor tradesman, he passed throughmany 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 Romanprospect, he writes–" One gets spoiled herebut God owed me this in my youth 1 sufferedtoo much." Destined to assertand interpret the

charm of the Hellenic spirit, he servcd first apainfulapprenticeshipin the tarnishcdintellectualworld of Germany in the carlier half of theeighteenth century. Passingout of that into the

happy light of thé antiouc, he had a sense of exhllaration almost physical. We find him as achild in the dusky precinctsof a German school,hungrily feeding on a few colourlessbooks. Themasterof this school growsblind Winckelmannbecomeshis~~«/MA The old man would have

had him study theology. Winckelmann, free of thé master's library, chooses rather to becomefamiliar with thé Grcck classics. HerodotusandHomer win, with their voweUed Greck, hiswarmest enthusiasm whole nights of fever aredevoted to them disturbing dreams of an



WINCKELMANN

-1

Odysscyof his own come to him. He felt in

himself, says Madame de Staël, "an ardentattraction towards the south. In Germanimaginations even now traces are often to bc

foundof that love of the sun, that wearinessof thé North (f< du nord),which carriedthe northern peoples away into the countriesof the South. A fine sky brings to birth senti-mentsnot unlike the love of one's Fatherland."

To most of us, after all our steps towards it,the antique world, in spite of its intenseoutlines,its own perfect self-expression,still remainsfaintand remote. To him, closely limited except onthe sideof the ideal,building for his dark poverty

a house not made with hands," itearly

cameto scem more real than the present. ln thefantastic plans of foreign travel continuallypassingthrough his mind, to Egypt, for instance,and to France, there scemsalwaysto bc rather awistful sense of something lost to be regained,than the desire of discovcring anything new.Goethe bas told us how, in his eagernessactuallyto handle the antique, he became interested inthe insignificantvestiges of it which the neigh-bourhood of

Strasburg

afforded. So we hear

of Winckelmann'sboyishantiquarianwanderingsamong the ugly Brandenburg sandhills. Sucha conformity between himself and Winckel-mann, Goethe would have gladly noted.

At twenty-one he enters the University of Halle, to study theology, as his friends désire



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instead,he becomesthe enthusiastictranslator of Herodotus. The condition of Greek learningin German schools and universities had fallen,and there were no professorsat Halle who could

satisfy his sharp, intellectual craving. Of hi.professional education he always speaks withscorn, claiming to have been his own teacherfrom first to last. His appointed teachers didnot perceive that a new source of culture waswithin their hands. HomoM~w MfM/ -one of them pedanticallyreports of the future

pilgrim to Rome, unaware on which side his

ironywaswhetted. When professionaleducationcon~rs nothing but irritation on a Schiller, noone

oughtto be

surprisedfor Schiller,andsuch

as he, arc primarily spiritual adventurers. Butthat Winckelmann,the votary of the gravest of intellectual traditions,should get nothing but an

attempt at suppression from the professionalguardians of learning, is what may well surpriseus.

In 1743 he became master of a school atSeehausen. This wasthe mostwearisomeperiodof his Hfe. Notwithstanding a successin dealingwith children,which seemsto testifyto somethingsimple and primeval in his nature, he found thework of teaching very depressing. Engaged inthis work, he writes that he still has within hima longing desire to attain to the knowledge of

beauty–M w~w~~ zur ~fw~w ~~Mz~ gelangen. He had to shorten his nights,



WINCKELMANN

t8t

sleepingonlyfour hours, to gain time for reading.And here Winckelmann made a step forwardin culture. He multiplied his intellectual forceby detaching from it ail flaccid interests. He

renounced mathematics and law, in which hisreading had been considerable,-all but theliteratureof the arts. Nothing was to enter intohis life unpenctrated by its central enthusiasm.At this time he undergocsthe charm of Voltaire.Voltaire belongs to that flimsier,more artificial,classicaltradition, which Winckelmann was oneday to supplant,by the clear ring, the cternaloutline, of the genuine antique. But it provesthe authority of such a gift as Voltaire'sthat itallures and wins

even thoseborn

to supplant it.Voltaire'simpressionon Winckelmann wasnevereffaced and it gave him a consideration forFrench literature which contrasts with hiscontempt for the literary products of Germany.German literature transformed, siderealised, aswe see it in Goethe, reckons Winckelmannamong its initiators. But Germany at thattime presented nothing in which he couldhave anticipated .w, and the formation of an effective classical tradition in Germanliterature.

Under this purely literary influence,Winckelmann protests against Christian Wol<f and the philosophers. Goethe, in speaking of this protest, alludes to his own obligations toEmmanuel Kant. Kant's influence over the



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culture of Goethe, which he tells us could nothave been resistedby him without loss,consistedin a severelimitationtothe concrete. Buthe adds,that in born antiquaries, like Winckelmann, a

constant handling of the antique, with its eternaloutline, maintains that limitation as effectuallyas a critical philosophy. Plato, however,savedso often for his redeeming literary manner, i.excepted from Winckelmann's proscription of the philosophers. The modern student mostoften mcets Plato on that side which seemstopassbeyond Plato into a world no longer pagan,basedupon the conceptionof a spirituallife. Butthe element of affinity which he presents toWinckelmann is that which is

wholly Greck,and alicn from thé Christian world, representedby that group of brilliant youths in the Z~w,still uninfected by any spiritual sickness,findingthe end of all endeavour in the aspects of thehuman form, thé continuai stir and motion of acomely human life.

This new-found interest in Plato's dialoguescould not fail to increase his desire to visit thecountries of the classical tradition. It is mymisfortunc,"he writes, that 1 was not born to

great place,wherein 1might havehadcultivation,and thé opportunity of followingmy instinct andforming myself." A visit to Rome probablywas already designed,and he silently preparingfor it. Count BUnau,thé author of a historicalwork then of note, had collected at Nothenitz a



WINCKELMANN

valuable library, now part of the library of Dresden. In t~.8 Winckelmann wrote toBünauin halting French :-He is emboldened,he says, by Bunau's indulgence for needy men

of letters. Hc desiresonly to devote himselftostudy,having neverallowedhimselfto bc dazzledby favourableprospectsin the Church. He hintsat his doubtful position "in a metaphysicalage,by which humane literature is trampled underfoot. At présent," he goes on, "Utde value isset on Greek literature, to which 1 have devotedmyself so far as 1 could penctrate, when goodbooksarc so scarceand expensivc." FinaUy,hedesiresa place in some corner of Bünau's library.

Perhaps,at some future time, 1 shall become

more useful to the public, if, drawn fromobscurity in whatever way, 1 can find means tomaintain myself in the capital."

Soon afterwardswe find Winckelmann in thelibrary at Nothenitz. Thence he made manyvisitsto the collection of antiquities at Dresden.He bccamc acquaintedwith many artists, abovcall with Ocser,Goethe'sfuture friendand master,who, uniting a high culture with the practicalknowledge of art, was fitted to minister to

Winckelmann'sculture. And now a new channelof communion with the Grcek life was openedfor him. Hitherto he had handled the wordsonly of Greek poctry, stirred indeed and rousedby them, yet divining beyond the words someunexpressedpulsationof sensuouslife. Suddenly



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he is in contact with that life, still ferventin thereliesof plastic art. Filled asour culture is withthe classical spirit, we can hardly imagine howdeeply the human mind was moved, when, at

the Renaissance,in the midst of a frozen world,the buried nre of ancient art rose up from underthe soil. Winckelmann here reproduces for usthe earlier sentiment of the Renaissance. On asudden the imagination feels itself free. Howfacile and direct, it scems to say, is this life of the sensesand the understanding,when oncewchaveapprehendedit 1 Here, surely,is that moreliberal modeof life we havebeen seekingso long,so near to us all the while. How mistaken androundabout have been our efforts to reach it bymystic passion,and monastic rêverie how theyhave denoweredthe nesh how little have theyreally emancipated us r Hermione melts fromher stony posture, and the lost proportionsof liferight themselves. Here, then, m vividrealisationwe see the native tendency of Winckelmann toescape from abstract theory to intuition, to theexercise of sight and touch. Lessing, in theLaocoon,has theorised nnely on the relation of

poctry to sculpture andphilosophymay give us

theoretical reasonswhy not poctry but sculptureshouldbe the most sincereandexactexpressionof the Greek ideal. By a happy, unperplexeddex-terity,Winckelmannsolvesthequestioninthecon-crete. It is what Goethe calls his Gevahrwerden<~r~r~w~M Kunrt, hts/w of Greek art.





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Mme character. If evcr there was a strikinginstanceof that union, it is in the countenancebefore us." A lowly childhood," saysGoethe,"insumcient instruction in youth, broken, dis-

tracted studiesin carly manhood, thé burden of school-keeping1 He wasthirty years oÏd beforehe enjoyed a single favour of fortune but sosoonas he had attained to an adequateconditionof freedom, he appears before us consummateand entire, complète in the ancicnt sense."

But his hair is turning grey, and he has not

yet reached the south. The Saxon court hadbecome Roman Catholic, and the way to favourat Dresden was through Roman ecclesiastics.

Probablythe

thoughtof a

professionof the

papal religion was not new to Winckelmann.At one time he had thought of begging his wayto Rome, from cloister to cloister, under the

pretence of a dispositionto change hi<faith. In

ï~i, the papal nuncio,Archinto, was one of thevisitors at Nothenitz. He suggested Rome asthe fitting stage for Winckelmann's accomplish.ments, and held out the hope of a place in the

Pope's library. Cardinal Passionei, charmedwith Winckelmann's beautiful Greek

writing,was ready to play the part of Maecenas,if the indispensablechange were made. Winckel-mann accepted the bribe, and visited the w~KWat Dresden. Unquiet still at the word ~pro-fession," not without a struggle, he joined theRoman Church, July thé nth, t~.





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chance in the life of the spirit and the intellect.There have been instances of culture developedby every high motive in turn, and yet intense atevery point and the aim of our culture shouldbc

toattain

not only as intense but as complètea life as possible. But often the higher life isonly possibleat all, on conditionof the selectionof that inwhich one'smotiveis native andstrong;and this selectioninvolvesthe renunciation of acrown reserved for others. Which is better ?–to lay open a new sense,to initiate a new organfor the human spirit, or to cultivate many typesof perfection up to a point which lcavesus stillbeyond the range of their transformingpower tSavonarolais one type of success Winckelmann

is another criticism can reject neither, becauseeach is truc to itself. Winckelmann himself explainsthe motive of his life when he says, Itwill be my highest reward, if posterity acknow-ledges that 1 have written worthily."

For a time he remained at Dresden. Therehis nrst book appeared, Thoughtion Imitation

Gr~ ~p~ P<?M~ <!?</ ~r~.Full of obscurities as it was,obscuritics whichFull of obscurities as it was, obscurities whichbaffled but did not offendGoethe when he nrst

turned to art-criticism, its purpose was direct-an appeal from the artificial classicism of theday to the study of the antique. The book waswcll rcccivcd, and a pension supplicd throughthe king's confessor. In September 1755 hestarted for Rome, in the company of a young





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dons, the still barbarous literature of Germany,are afar off; before him are adequate conditionsof culture, the sacred soi! itself, thé first tokensof the advent of the new German literature,with its broad

horizons,its boundlessintellectual

promise. Dante, passing from the darkness of the 7~w, is filledwith a sharp and joyful senseof light, which makes him deal with it, in the

openingof the P~y~/c~o, in a wonderfullytouch-

ing and penetrative way. Hellenism, which isthe principle pre-eminently of intellectual light(our modern culture may have more colour, themedieval spirit greater heat and profundity, butHellenism is pre-eminent for light), has alway.been most

enectivclyconceived by those who

have crept into it out of an intellectual world inwhich the sombre éléments predominatc. So ithad been in the ages of the Renaissance. This

repression,removed at last, gave forceand glowto Winckelmann'snative affinityto the Hellenic

spirit. "There had been known bcfore him,"saysMadame de Staël, learned men who mightbcconsultedlike books; but no one had,if 1maysay 60,made himself a pagan for the purpose of

penetrating antiquity." One is alwaysa poorexecutant of conceptions not one's own."–0~< mal <'<'y~'p~ n'a confu ~–arc true in their measure of every genuineenthusiasm. Enthusiasm,-that, in the broadPlatonicsenseof the .P~M~w, wasthé secret of

Word*ofChtrtotteCordayb<<orethtC~f~~t~.





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your culture proved that my hope was notgroundless and 1 found in a beautiful body asoul created for nobleness,gifted with the senseof beauty. My parting from you was thereforeoneof the most painful in

mylife and that this

feeling continues our common friend is witness,for your separationfrom me Ïeavesme no hopeof secing you again. Let this essay be amemorial of our friendship,which, on my side,is free from every selfish motive, and ever re-mains subject and dedicateto yourself alone."

The fbUowingpassageis characteristic-"As it is confessedlythe beautyof manwhich

is to be conceived under one general idea, so 1have noticcd that those who are observant of

beauty only in womcn, and are moved little ornot at all by the beauty of men, seldom have anImpartia!,vital, inborn instinct for beauty in art.To such persons thé beauty of Greck art willever seem wanting, because its supreme beautyis rather malethan fematc. Butthé beautyof artdemands a higher sensibility than the beautyof nature, because the beauty of art, like tearsshed at a play, gives no pain, is without life, andmust be awakened and rcpaired by culture.

Now, as the spirit of culture ismuch more ardentin youth than in manhood, thé instinct of whicham speaking must be exercisedand directed to

what is beautiful, before that age is reached,atwhich one would bc afraid to confessthat onchad no tastc for it."



WINCKELMANN

0 !p3

Certainly,of that beautyof living formwhichregulated Winckelmann's friendships, it couldnot be said that it gave no pain. One notablefriendship, the fortune of which we may tracethrough his letters, begins with an

antiaue,chivalrousletter in French, and ends noisily in aburst of angry fire. Far from reaching thequictism, the bland indifference of art, suchattachments are nevertheless more susceptiblethan any others of equal strength of a purelyintellectual culture. Of passion, of physicalexcitement, they contain only just so much asstimulatesthe eye to thé ~nestdelicaciesof colourand form. These friendships,often the capricesof a moment, make Winckelmann's letters, with

their troubledcolouring,an instructivebut bizarreadditionto the .H~/cr~of Art, that shrine of graveand mellow light around the mute Olympianfamily. The impressionwhich Winckelmann'tliterary life conveyed to those about him wasthat of excitement, intuition, inspiration, ratherthan the contemplative evolution of généralprinciples. The quick, susceptible enthusiast,betraying his temperament even in appearance,by his olivecomplexion,his deep-seated,piercingeyes, his rapid movements,

apprchcndcdthé

subtlest principles of the Hellenic manner, notthrough the undcrstanding, but by instinct ortouch. A German biographer of Winckelmannhas compared him to Coîumbus. That is notthe aptest of comparisons but it reminds one of



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a passage in which Edgar Quinet describesthegreat discoverer's famous voyage. His sciencewas often at fault but he had a way of esti-mating at once the slightest indication of land,in a

oatingweed or

passing birdhe seemed

actually to come nearer to nature than othermen. And that world in which others hadmoved with so much embarrassment, seems tocall out in Winckelmann new senses fitted todeal with it. He is in touch with it itpenetrates him, and becomespart of his tempera-ment. He remodels his writings with constantrenewal of insight he catchesthe thread of awhole sequenceof laws in some hollowing of thehand, or dividing of thé hair he secms to

realise that fancy of the réminiscence of aforgotten knowledge hidden for a time in themind itself; as if the mind of one, lover andphilosopher at once in some phase of pré-existence–~tX<wo~~e?~T< ~~Tc~–Malienmtoa new cycle, were beginning its intellectualcareer over again, yet with a certain power of anticipating its results. So comes thé truth of Goethe's tudgmcnts on his works they arc alife, a livmg thing, designed for those who are

alive–~ Z~M~ dit Lebendigengerchrieben,LebenIn 1758 Cardinal Albani, who had formed in

his Roman villa a preciouscollectionof antiqui-tics, became Winckelmann's patron. Pompeiihad just opened its treasures Winckelmann





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of Winckelmann's murder arrived. A!! hiswearinessof the North" had revived with

double force. He left Vienna, intending tohasten back to Rome, and at Trieste a delay of a few

daysoccurred. With characteristic

open-ness,Winckelmann had confided his plans to afellow-traveller,a man namedArcangeli,and hadshown him the gold medalsreceived at Vienna.Arcangeli's avarice was aroused. One morninghe entered Winckcimann's room, under pretenceof taking leave. Winckelmannwasthen writing"mcmoranda for thé future editor of the History~~r/ still seeking the perfection of his greatwork. Arcangeli begged to secthe medals oncemore. As Winckelmann stooped down to take

them from the chest, a cord was thrown roundhis neck. Some time afterwards, a child withwhosecompanionshipWinckelmannhad beguiledhis delay, knocked at the door, and receivingno answer, gave thé alarm. Winckelmann wasfound

dangcrousiywounded,anddied a few hourslater, after receiving the last sacraments. Itseemedasif the gods, in reward for his devotionto them, had given him a death which, for itsswiftness and its opportunity, he might well

have desired. ~He has," says Goethe, "théadvantageof nguring in the memoryof posterity,as one eternally able and strong for the imagein which one leavesthe world Is that in whichone moves among the shadows." Yet, perhaps,it i< not fanciful to regret that his proposed



WINCKELMANN

'97

meeting with Goethe nevertook place. Goethe,then in all the pregnancyof his wonderfulyouth,still unrumed by thé press and storm of hisearlier manhood, was awaiting Winckelmannwith a

curiosityof the worthiest kind. As

it was, Winckelmann became to him somethinglike what Virgil was to Dante. And Winckel-mann, with his fiery friendships, had reachedthat age and that period of culture at whichemotions hitherto fitful, sometimes concentratethemselves in a vital, unchangeable relation-ship. Gcrman literary history seems to havelost the chance of one of those famous friend-ships, the very tradition of which becomes astimulusto culture, and exercisesan imperishableinfluence.

In one of the frescoesof the Vatican,Raphaelhas commemoratedthe tradition of the Catholicreligion. Against a spaceof tranquil sky, brokenin upon by the beatinc vision, are ranged thegreat personagesof Christian history, with theSacrament in the midst. Another fresco of Raphael in the samc apartment presents a verydifferent company, Dante alone appearing in

both. Surrounded by the muses of Greekmythology, under a thicket of laurel, sitsApollo, with the sourcesof Castaliaat his feet.On either side are grouped those on whom thespirit of Apollo descendcd, the classical andRenaissancepoets,to whom the watcrs of Castalia



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come down,a river making glad this other cityof God." In this fresco it is thé classicaltra-dition, the orthodoxy of taste, that Raphaelcommemorates. inckelmann's intellectual

history authenticatesthe daims of this traditionin human culture. In the countries where thattradition arose, where it still lurked about itsown artistic relies, and changes of language hadnot broken its continuity, national pride mightsometimes light up anew an enthusiasm forit. Aliens might tmitate that enthusiasm,andclassicismbecome from time to time an intel-lectual fashion. But Winckelmann was notfurther removed by language, than by localaspects and associations,from those

vestigesof

the classicalspirit and hc lived at a time when,in Germany, classicalstudieswere out of favour.Yet, remote in time and place, he feels after theHellenic world, divinesthose channelsof ancientart, inwhichits lifestill circulates,and,like Scyles,thé half-barbarous yet Hellenising king, in the

beautifulstoryofHerodotus,is irresistiblyattractedby it. This testimony to the authonty of theHellenic tradition, its fitnessto satisfysome vitalrequirementof the intellect, which Winckelmann

contributes as a solitary man of genius, is offeredalso by the general history of the mind. Théspiritual forcesof the past,which have promptcdand informedthe cultureof a succeedingage, live,indeed,within that culture, but with an absorbed,underground life. The Hellenic element alonc











WINCKELMANN

M3

of refinement,of ascension,with the promise ôf an endless destiny. While the, ritual remains

unchanged,the aestheticelement,onlyaccidentallyconnectedwith it, expandswith the freedomand

mobility of the things of the intellect. Always,the fixedelement isthe religiousobservance thénuid, unfixed element is the myth, the religiousconception. This religion is itself pagan,and hasin any broad view of it the pagan sadness. Itdocsnot at once,andfor the majority,becomethe

higher Hellenic religion. The country people,of course,cherish the unlovelyidols of an earliertime, such as those which Pausaniasfound still

devoutly preserved in Arcadia. Athenaeustells

the story of one who, coming to a temple of Latona, had expected to find some worthy prc-sentment of the mother of Apollo, and laughedon seeing only a shapelesswooden figure. Thewilder people havewilder gods,which, however,in Athens, or Corinth, or Lacedaemon,changingever with the worshippersin whom they live andmove and have their being, borrow something of the lordiincss and distinction of human naturethere. Greck religion too has its mendicants,its

purifications,its antinomian

mysticism,its

garments offered to the gods, its statues wornwith kissing, its exaggeratedsuperstitionsfor the

vulgar only, its worship of sorrow, its addolorata,its mournful mysteries. Scarcely a wild or

melancholynote of the medievalchurch but was

anticipated byGreek polytheism1 What should



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we have thought of the vertiginous prophètes:at the very centre of Greek religion?l Thesupreme Hellenic culture is a sharp edge of light acrossthis gloom. The fiery, stupefyingwine becomes in a

happierclimate clear and

exhilarating. The Dorian worship of Apollo,rational,chastened,debonair,with his unbrokendaylight, always opposed to the sad Chthoniandivinities, is the aspiring élément, by force andspring of which Greek religion sublimes itself.Out of Greek religion, under happy conditions,arisesGreek art, to minister to human culture.It was the privilege of Greek religion to be ableto transform itself into an artistic ideal.

For the thoughts of the Greeks about them-

selves,and their relation to the world generally,were ever in the happiest readinessto be trans-formed into objectsfor the senses. In this liesthe main distinction between Greek art and themystical art of the Christian middle age, whichis alwaysstruggling to express thoughts beyonditself Take, for instance,a characteristic workof thé middle age, Angelico's Coronationof Yirgin,in the cloister of SaintMark'.rat Florence.In some strange halo of a moon Jesus and the

Virgin Mother are seated,clad in mystical whiteraiment, half shroud, half priestly linen. Jesus,with rosynimbusandthe long palehair-tanquamlana alba tanquam~M*–of the figure in theApocalypse, with slender nnger-tips is settinga crown of pearl on the head of Mary, who,







WINCKELMANN

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some supreme good luck, to the perfect animalnature of the Greeks. Here are thé two condi-tions of an artistic ideal. The influenceswhichperfectedthe animalnature of the Greeksarc partof the

processbywhich the ideal wasevolved.

Those "Mothers" who, in the second part of FtM~,mould and remould the typical formsthatappearin human history,preside,at the beginningof Greek culture, over such a concourseof happyphysical conditions as ever generates by naturallaws some rare type of intellectual or spirituallife. That delicate air, "nimbly and sweetlyrecommending itself" to the senses, the fineraspects of nature, the finer lime and clay of thehuman form, and modelling of the dainty frame-

work of the human countenance:-these are thegood luck of the Greek when he enters uponlife. Beauty becomes a distinction, like genius,or noble place.

By no people," says Winckelmann, hasbeautybeen so highly esteemedas by the Greeks.Thc priests of a youthfulJupiter at ~Egae,of theIsmenianApollo, and the priest who at Tanagraled the processionof Mercury, bearing a lambupon his shoulders,were alwaysyouths to whom

the prize of beauty had been awarded. Thecitizens of Egesta erected a monument to acertain Philip, who was not their fellow-citizen,but of Croton, for his distinguished beautyand the people made offerings at it. In anancient song, ascribed to Simonidesor Epichar-



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mus, of four wishes, the first was health, thesecond beauty. And as beauty was so longedfor and prized by the Greeks, every beautifulperson sought to become known to the whole

pcople bythis

distinction,and above ail to

approve himself to the artists, becausc theyawarded the prizc and this was for thc artistsan occasion for having supreme beauty everbefore their eyes. Beautyeven gave a nght tofame and we find in Greek histories the mostbeautiful people distinguished. Some werefamousfor the beauty of one single part of theirform as Demetrius Phalercus, for his beautiful

eyebrows,was called C~~r~o-~A~p~. It scemseven to have been

thoughtthat the

procreationof beautiful children might be promoted byprizes. This isshownby the existenceofcontestafor beauty, which in ancient times were estab-lished by Cypselus,King of Arcadia,by the riverAlpheus and, at the feastof Apollo of Philse,a

prize was otfered to the youths for the deftestkiss. This was decided by an umpire as alsoat Megara, by the grave of Diodes. At Sparta,and at Lesbos,in the temple ofjuno, and amongthe Parrhasii, there were contests for beautyamong women. The general esteem for beautywent so far, that the Spartan women set up intheir bedchambers a Nireus, a Narcissus, or aHyacinth, that they might bcar beautifulchildren."

So, from a few stray antiquarianisms,t few



WINCKELMANN

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faces cast up sharplyfrom the waves,Winckel-mann, as his manner was, divinesthe tempera-ment of the antique world, and that in which ithad delight. It haspassedawaywith that distant

age, and we may venture to dwell upon it.What sharpnessand reality it has is the sharpnessand reality of suddenlyarrcstcdlife. The Greeksystem of gymnastics originated as part of areligiousritual. The worshipper was to recom-mend himself to the gods by becoming ncetandfair,white and red, like them. The beautyof the palaeitra,and the beauty of the artist's work-shop, reactedon one another. The youth triedto rival his gods andhis increasedbeautypassedbackinto them.–" 1 take the

gods to witness,1had rather have a fair body than a king's crown'–~0/tt~/M?r~T<t?~<c~ ~\«r~<MAyT~/9o<yt\~m?~~f <M Top«e~ <Ïwt.–that isthe form in which oneâge of the worldchosethe higher life.-A perfectworld, if the godscouldhave seemedfor everonlyneet and fair, white and red 1 Let us not regretthat this unperplexcdyouth of humanity, satisnedwith the visionofitself,passed,at the due moment,into a mournful maturity for already the deep

joy was in store for the spirit, of nnding thc idéal

of that youth still red with life in the grave.It followed that the Greek ideal expressed

itself pre-eminently in sculpture. AUart has ascnsuouselement,colour, form, sound-in poctrya dexterousrecalling of these, together with theprofound,joyfulsensuousnessof motion,and cach





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cancecommunicableto it alone. The art of Egypt,with its supreme architectural effects,is, accord-ing to Hegel's beautiful comparison,a Memnonwaiting for the

day,the

dayof the Greek

spirit,the humanisticspirit, with its power of speech.Again, painting, music, andpoetry, with their

endlesspower of complexity,are the specialartsof the romantic and modern âges. Into these,with the utmost atténuation of detail, may betranslatedevery delicacy of thought and feeling,incidental to a consciousness brooding withdelight over itself. Through their gradationsof shade, their exquisite intervals, they project inan external form that which is most inward in

passionor sentiment. Between architecture andthoseromanticarts of painting,music,and poctry,cornessculpture,which, unlike architecture,deals

immediately with man, while it contrasts withthe romantic arts,becauseit is not self-analyticalIt has to do more exclusivelythan any other artwith the human form,itself oneentiremediumof

spiritualexpression,trembling, blushing, meltinginto dew, with inwardexcitement. That spiritu-ality which only lurks about architecture as a

volatile effect, in sculpture takes up the wholegiven material,and penetrates it with an imagin-ative motive andat firstsight sculpture,with its

solidityof form,seemsa thing more real and fullthan the faint,abstractworldofpoetry or painting.Still the fact is the reverse. Dtscourseand actionshow man as he is, moredirectly than thé play of



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the muscles and the moulding of the nesh; andoverthese poetry hascommand. Painting,by thenushingof colourin the faceanddilatationof lightin the eye-music, by its subtle range of tones-

can renne most delicately upon a single momentof passion,unravelling its subtlest threads.But why should sculpture thus limit itself

to pure formt Because,by this limitation, itbecomesa perfect medium of expressionfor onepeculiar motive of the imaginative intellect. Ittherefore renounces all those attributes of itsmaterial which do not forward that motive.It has had,indeed, fromthe beginning an unfixedclaim to colour but this element of colour in it

has always been more or less conventional,withno melting or modulationof tones,never pcrmit-ting more than a very limited rcalism. It wasmaintained chiefly as a religious tradition. Inproportion as the art of sculpture ceased to bemerely décorative,andsubordinatetoarchitecture,it threw itself uponpure form. It renouncesthepower of expressionby loweror heightened tones.!n it, no member of the human form is moresignificant than the rest the eye is wide, andwithout

pupilthe

lipsand brow are

hardlyless

signincantthan hands,and breasts,and fect. Butthé limitation of its resourcesis part of its prideit has no backgrounds,no sky or atmosphere,tosuggest and interpret a train of feeling a littleof suggestedmotion, and much of pure light onits gleamingsurfaces,with pure form-only these.



WINCKELMANN

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And it gains more than it losesby this limitationto its own distinguishingmotives it unveilsmanin the repose of his unchanging characteristics.That white light, purged from the angry, blood-

like stainsof action and passion,reveals,not whatisaccidentalin man, but the tranquil godship inhim, as opposedto the restlessaccidents of life.Thé art of scuipturerecordsthe firstnaïve,unper.plexedrécognitionof man by himself; and it is aproofof thc high artistic capacity of the Grccks,that they apprehendedand remained true to theseexquisite hmitations, yet, in spite of thcm, gaveto their creationsa mobile, a vital, individuality.

~f~~–blithcncss or repose,and ~M-

~~–generalityor

breadth,arc,then,thé

supremecharacteristicsof the Hellenic ideal. But thatgenerality or breadth has nothing in commonwith the lax observation,the unlearnedthought,the flaccid execution, which have sometimesclaimed superiority in art, on thc plea of bcing

broad or general." Hellenic breadth andgenerality come of a culture minute, severe,constantlyrenewed,rectifying and concentratingits impressionsinto certain pregnant types.

The basisof all artisticgenius

liesinthepowctofconceivinghumanity in a newandstriking way,

of putting a happy world of its own creation mplaceof the meaner world of our commondays,generating around itself an atmosphere with anovelpowerof refraction,selecting,transforming,recombiningthe images it transmits,accordingto



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the choiceof the imaginativeintellect. In exer-cising this power, painting and poetry have avariety of subject almost unlimited. The rangeof charactersor personsopento them is as various

as life itself; no character, however trivial, mis-shapen,or unlovely,can resisttheir magic. Thatis becausethosearts canaccomplishtheir functionin the choice and development of some specialsituation, which lifts or glorifies a character, initself not poctical. To realise this situation, todefine,in achill and empty atmosphere,the focuswhere rays,in themselvespale andimpotent,unitéand begin to burn, the artist may have, indecd,toemploy the most cunning detail, to complicateand renne

upon thoughtand

passiona thousand-

fold. Let us take a brilliant examplefrom thepoems of Robert Browning. His poetry ispre-eminently the poetry of situations. Thecharacters themselves are always of secondaryimportance often they are characters in them-selves of little interest they seem to corne tohim by strange accidentsfrom the ends of theworld. His gift is shown by thé way in whichhe acceptssuch a character,throws it into somesituation,or

apprehends

it in somedelicate

pauseof life, in which for a moment it becomesideal.!n the pocm entitled Le Byronde yc~rj, inhis D/'<?~ Perconae,wc have a singlemomentof passionthrown into relief after this exquisitefashion. Those twojadedParisiansarenotintrinsic-ally interesting they begin to interest us only



WINCKELMANN

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when thrown into a choice situation. But todiscriminatethat moment,to make it appreciableby us, that we may nnd it, what a cobwebof allusions, what double and treble reflexions of the mind upon itself, what an artificial light is

constructedand brokenoverthe chosensituationon how nne a needle'spoint that little world of passionisbalanced1 Yet,in spiteofthis intricacy,thé pocm has the clear ring of a central motive.We receive from it the impression of oneimaginative tonc, of a single creativeact.

To produce such effectsat all requires all theresourccsof painting, with its power of indirectexpression,of subordinate but significantdetail,its atmosphere,its foregroundsand backgrounds.

To produce them in a re-eminent degreerequires all the resourcesof poetry, language inits most purged form, its remote associationsandsuggestions,its double and treble lights. Theseappliances sculpture cannot command. In it,therefbrc, not the specialsituation, but thé type,the general character of the subject to bedelineated, is ail-important. In poetry and

painting, the situation predominates over thecharacter in sculpture, thé character over thesituation. Excluded

bythe

properlimitation of

its material from the development of exquisitesituations,it has to choose from a select numberof types intrinsically interesting-interesting,that is, independently of any special situationinto which they may be thrown. Sculpture



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nnds the secret of its power in presenting thesetypes, in their broad, central, incisive lines.This it effectsnot by accumulation of detail, butby abstracting from it. All that is accidental,all that distractsthe

simpleetfect

uponus of the

supreme types of humanity, ail traces in them of the commonnessof the world, it graduallypurgesaway.

Works of art produced under this law, andonly these, are really characterised by Hellenicgenerality or breadth. In

every direction it is alaw of restraint. It keeps passionalwaysbelowthat degrec of intensity at which it mustnecessarilybe transitory, never winding up thefeatures to one note of anger, or desire, or

surprise. In some of the feebler allegoricaldesigns of the middle âge, we find isolatedqualities portrayed as by so many masks itsreligious art bas familiarised us with facesfixedimmovably into blank types of placid reverie.Men andwomen,again, in the hurry of life, oftenwear the sharp impressof one absorbing motive,from which tt is said death sets their featuresfree. AU such instances may be ranged underthé and the Hellemcidealhas nothing

in commonwith the grotesque. It allowspassionto play lightly over the surfaceof the indtvidua!form, losing thereby nothing of its centralimpassivity, its depth and repose. To all butthe highest culture, the reservedfacesof the godswill ever have something-of insipidity.



WINCKELMANN

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Again, in the best Greeksculpture, the archaicimmobility has been stirred, its forms are inmotion but it is a motion ever kept in reserve,and very seldom committed to any definiteaction. Endless as are the attitudes of Greeksculpture, exquisite as is the invention of theGreeks in this direction,the actionsor situationsit permits are simple and few. There is noGreek Madonna the goddesses are alwayschildless. The actions selectedare those whichwould bc without significance,exceptin a divinepcrson–binding on a sandalor preparing for thebath. When a more complex and significantaction is permitted, it is most often representedas just nnished, so that eager expectancy is

excluded,as in the image of Apollojust aftcr theslaughter of the Python, or of Venus with theapple of Paris alreadyin her hand. The Laocoon,with ail that patient science through which ithas triumphed over an almost unmanageablesubject,marks a period in which sculpture hasbegun to aim at effects legitimate, becausedelightful, only in painting.

The hair, so rich a source of expression in

painting,because,relativelyto the eye or thé Hp,

it is mère drapery, is withdrawn from attentionits texture, as well as its colour, is lost, itsarrangement but faintly and severely indicated,with no broken or enmeshedlight. The eyesarewide and directionÏess,not nxing anything withtheir gaze, nor riveting the brain to any special





WINCKELMANN

:!9

taking no colour from any one-sidedexperience.He is characterless,so far as character involvessubjectionto the accidentalinfluencesof life.

This sense," says Hegel, for the consum-mate modelling of divine and human forms was

pre-cmincntlyat home in Greece. In its poetsand orators, its historians and philosophers,Greececannot be conceivedfrom a central point,unlessone brings, as a key to the understandingofit, aninsight into the idealforms of sculpture,and regards the images of statesmen andphilosophers,aswell asepic and dramatic herocs,from the artistic point of view. For thosewhoact, as well as those who create and think, have,in those beautiful days of Greece, this plastic

character. They are great and frec, and hâvegrown up on the soi! of their own individuality,creating themselves out of themselves, andmoulding themselves to what they were, andwilled to be. The age of Pericleswasrich insuch characters Pericles himself, Pheidias,Plato, above all Sophocles, Thucydides also,Xenophon and Socrates,each in his own order,the perfectionof one remaining undiminishedbythat of the others. They are ideal artists of

themselves,cast each in one flawless

mould,works of art, which stand before us as animmortal presentment of the gods. Of thismodellingalsoare those bodily works of art, thevictors in the Olympic games yes and evenPhryne, who, as the most beautiful of women,





WINCKELMANN

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Hcre therc is a moral sexlessness,a kind of ineffectualwholenessof nature, yet with a truebeauty and significanceof its own.

One result of this temperament is aserenity–~f~–wh!ch characterisesWinckelmanns

handling of the sensuous side of Greek art.This serenity is, perhaps, in great measure, anegative quality it is the absenceof any senseof want, or corruption, or shame. With thesensuouselement in Greek art he deals m thepagan manncr and what is implied in that TIt has been sometimessaid that art is a meansof

escape from "thé tyranny of the senses." Itmay be so for the spectator he may find thatthe spectacleof supreme worksof art takesfrom

the life of the senses something of its turbidfever. But this is possiblefor the spectatoronlybecausethe artist, in producing those works, hasgradually sunk his intellectual and spiritual ideasin sensuousform. He may live, as Keats lived,a pure life but his soul,like that of P!ato'<falseastronomer, becomes more and more immersedin sense,until nothing which lacks the appeal tosensehas interest for him. How could such anoneever again endure the greyness of the idéalor

spiritualworld1 The

spiritualistis satisfied

as he watchesthe escapeof thé sensuousélémentsfrom his conceptions his interest grows, as thedyedgarmentbleachesin the keener air. But theartist steeps his thought again and again into thefireof colour. To thé Greek this immersionin



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thc sensuouswas, religiously,at least,ïndin~erent.Greek sensuousness,therefore, doesnot fever theconscience it is shameless and childlike.Christianasceticism,on the other hand, discredit-ing the slightest touch of sense,hasfrom time to

time provokedinto strong emphasisthe contrastor antagonismto itself,of the artisticlife, with itsinevitable sensuousness.-I did but taite a littlehoneywiththeendof the rodthat w~~Mminehand,<~<<?/ 7~–It has sometimesseemedhardto pursuethat life without somethingof consciousdisavowalof a spiritual world and this impartsto genuineartistic interestsa kindof intoxication.From this intoxicationWinckelmann is free hefingersthose paganmarbleswith unsingedhands,

with no senseof shame or loss. That is to dealwith the sensuoussideof 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 outwardworld, the more we may bc inclined to regretthat he should ever have passed beyond it, tocontend for a perfection that makes the bloodturbid, and frets thé flesh, and discredits theactual world about us. But if he was to bcsaved from the ennuiwhich ever attaches itself to realisation,even the realisation of the perfectlife, it was necessarythat a conflictshould corne,that some sharper note should grieve the exist-ing harmony, and the spirit chafed by it beatout at last only a larger and profounder music.



WINCKELMANN

!t~

In Greek tragedy this conflict has begun manfinds himself face to face with rival claims.Greek tragedy showshow sucha conflictmay betreated with serenity,how the evolutionof it maybe aspectacleof the dignity, notof the impotence,

of the humanspirit. But it isnotonly in tragedythat the Greek spirit showeditself capableof thusbringing joy out of matter in itself full of dis-couragements. Theocritus too strikes often anote of romanticsadness. But what a blithe and

steady poise, above these discouragements,in aclear and sunny stratum of the air 1

Into this stageof Greek achievementWinckel-mann did not enter. Supreme as he is wherehis true interest lay, his insight into the tvpical

unityand

reposeof the

highestsort of

sculptureseems to have involvcd limitation in anotherdirection. His conception of art excludes thatbolder type of it which deals confidently andserenely with life, conflict, evil. Living in aworld of exquisite but abstract and colourlessform, he could hardly have conceived of thesubtle and penetrative, yet somewhat grotesqueart of the modern worid. What would he have

thought of Gilliatt, in Victor Hugo's Travailleursla Mer, or of the bleeding mouth of Fantine

in the first part of 7~ Misérables,penetrated asthose booksare with a sense of beauty, as livelyand transparentasthat of a Greek?t Nay, a sortof preparationfor the romantic temper is notice-ableevenwithin the limitsof theGreekidealitself,



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which for his part Winckelmann failed to sec.For Greek religion has not merely its mournful

mystericsof Adonis,of Hyacinthtis, of Demeter,but it is consciousalsoof the fallof earlier divine

dynasties. Hyperion gives way to Apollo,Occanus to Poseidon. Around the feet of thattranquil Olympian family still crowd the wearyshadowsof anearlier, moreformless,divineworld.Thé placid minds even of Olympian gods aretroubled with thoughts of a limit to duration, of inevitable dccay, of dispossession. Again, the

supreme andcolourlessabstractionof thosedivineforms,which is the secret of their repose, is alsoa premonitionof the ncshiess,consumptiverefine-ments of the pale, medieval artists. That high

indifferenceto the outward, that impassivity,hasalreadya touch of the corpsein it we secalreadyAngelico and the A~~A- P~ in theartistic future. The suppressionof the sensuous,the shutting of thedooruponit,the asceticinterest,maybeevennowforescen. Thoseabstractedgods,"ready to melt out their essence fine into thewinds," who can fold up their nesh asa garment,and still remain themselves,scem already to feelthat bleak air, in which like Helen of Troy,they

wander as the spectresof the middle

age.Gradually, asthc worldcame into the church,

an artistic interest, native in the human soul,reassertedits claims. But Christian art was still

dependent on pagan examples, building the



WINCKELMANN

Q 225

shafts of pagan temples into its churches,perpetuating the form of the A~~?, in latertimes working the disuscdamphithéâtresasstonequarrics. The sensuous expression of ideaswhich unreservedlydiscreditthe world of sense,

was the delicate problem which Christian arthad before it. If we think of medievalpainting,as it rangesfrom the carly German schools,stillwith something of the air of the charnel-houseabout them, to the clear lovelinessof Perugino,we shaH sec how that problem was solved.In the very worship ot sorrow the nativeblitheness of art asserted itself. The religiousspirit, as Hegel says,

u smi!ed through its tears."So perfcctiy did the young Raphael infuse that

Hi'~r~, that pagan blitheness, into religiousworks, that his picture of Saint Agatha atBolognabecameto Goethe a step in the evolutionof Iphîgenie.1 But in proportion as the gift of

smiling wasfound once more, therc came alsoanaspiration towards that lost antique art, somerelies of which Christian art had buried in itself,ready to work wonderswhen their day came.

The history of art has suft'eredas much a$any history by trenchant and absolute divisions.

Pagan and Christian art are sometimes harshiyopposed,and the Renaissanceis represented as a~ashionwhich set in at a definite period. Thatis the superficialview the deeper view is thatwhich preservesthe identity of Europeanculture.

//<A<w//<~M~. ~A~, t~ o~. t~<.







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Goethe, at the beginning of life, in its originaland simplest form, as in a fragment of Greek artitself, stranded on that littered, indeterminateshoreof Germanyin thc eighteenth century. In

Winckelmann, this type comes to him, notas

in a book or a thcory, but more importunately,becausein a passionatelife, in a personality. ForGoethe, possessing ail modern interests, readyto be lost in thé perplexed currents of modernthought, he defines, in clearest outline, theeternal problem of culture-balance, unity witbone'. self, consummateGreek modelling.

It could no longer be solved, as in Phryneascendingnaked out of the water, by perfectionof

bodilyform, or

any joyfulunion with the

external world the shadowshad grown too long,the light too solemn,for that. It couldhardty besolved, as in Pericles or Pheidias, by the directexerciseof any single talent amid the manifoldclaimsof our modern intellectuallife, that couldonly have ended in a thin, one-sided growth.Goethe's Hellenism was of another order, the~M~ and R< the completenessandserenity, of a watchful, exigent intellectualism.Im G<?~?~ Guten,Wahren,resolutx~ leben~–M

Goethe't descriptionof his own higher life andwhat is meant by lifein the who!c–~ G<?~It meansthe life of one for whom, over and overagain, what was once prccious has bccomeindinerent. Every onc who aims at the life 01culture is met by many forms of it, arising out



WINCKELMANN

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of the intense, laborious,one-sided developmentof some special talent. They are the brightestenthusiasmsthe world has to show and it is nottheir part to weigh the claimswhich this or thatalien form of

geniusmakes

uponthem. But the

proper instinct of self-culturecares not so muchto reap all that those variousforms of genius can

give, as to find in them its ownstrength. Thedemandof the intellect is to feel itself alive. Itmust <ee into the laws, the opération, theintellectual reward of every divided form of culture but only that it may measure therelation bctween itself and them. It struggleswith those formstill 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 passionatecoldness, such natures rejoice to be

away fromand past their former selves,andaboveail, 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 scnsuousnature, to let it overgrow him. ît corneseasilyand naturally, pcrhaps, to certain

other-worldly natures to be even asthethat ideal of gentle pictism, in Wf~/M

A~M/~ but to the large vision of Goethe, thisseemed to be a phase of life that a man mightfeel all round, and leave bchind him. Again, itis easyto indulge the commonplacemetaphysicalinstinct. But a tastefor mctaphysicsmay bc oncof those things which we must renouncc,if we





WINCKELMANN

a~t

And what does the spirit nced in the face of modern lifet The sense of freedom. Thatnaïve, rough sense of frecdom, which supposesman'swill to be limited, if at ail, only by a will

stronger than his, he can never have again.The attempt to represent it in art would havesolittle veristmilitude that it would be Aat anduninteresting. The chief factor in the thoughtsof thc modern mind concerning itself is the

intricacy, the universalityof natural law, even inthe moral order. For us, necessityis not, as of old, a sort of mythologicalpersonagewithout us,with whom we can do warfare. It is rather amagic web woven through and through us, likethat magnetic system of which modern science

speaks, pcnetraung us with a network, subtlerthan our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it thecentral forcesofthe worid. Can art representmenandwomenin these bewilderingtoils soasto givethe spiritatleastanequivalentforthe senseof free-dom Certainly, in Goethe's romances,and evenmore in the romancesof Victor Hugo, we have

high examplesof modern art dealing thus withmodernlife,regardingthat lifeasthe modernmindmust regard it, yet renccting upon it blitheness

and repose. Natural lawswe shaUnever

modify,embarrass us as they may but there is stillsomething in the nobler or less noble attitudewith which we watch their fatal combinations.In thosc romances of Goethe and Victor Hugo,in some excellent work donc afttr them, this



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'f

entanglement,this network of law, becomesthetragic situation, in which certain groups of noblemen and women work out for themselves a

supreme D~p~~w~. Who, if he saw through

all,would fret

againstthe chain of circumstance

which endows one at the end with those greatexpcriencet?1

~6y.



CONCLUSION'1

Atyctww'H~tA<ttw<<Tt<r~w X"P*~

To regard all things and principleeof things asinconstantmodesor fashionshas more and morebecome the tendency of modern thought. Letus begin with that which i$ without-our

physical life. Fix upon !t in one of it$ more

exquishe intervals, the moment, for instance,of deltcious recoil from the flood of water insummer heat. What is the whole physical lifeIn that moment but a combination of naturalelements to which science give< their namesf But those elements, phosphorus and lime anddélicate fibrcs, are present not in the human

body alone we detect them in places mostremote from it. Our physicallife i<a perpétuaimotion of them-the passageof the blood, the

waste and repairing of the lenses of the eye,Th!tbrief"Condation"wasomittedinthe<e<on<tedition

efthitbook,saï conceiveditmightpottiMym!e*dtomeof tho<eyoun~menintowhoseh<nd<it mightM). Onthewhole,1havethoughtit b<*ttoreprintithere,withtomettightch~n~e*whichbrin~it<!oMf totnyoriginalmetnin~.1havedet!tmore<uUyiaJtf<<r/~~«' withthethou~htttUM<'Mdbyit.



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the modificationof the tissuesof the brain under

every ray of light and sound–processes whichscience reduces to simpler and more elementaryforces. Like the cléments of which we are

composed, the action of these forces extends

beyond us it rusts iron and ripens corn. Farout on every side of us those clements arebroadcast,drivenin manycurrents andbirth and

gesture and death and the springing of violetsfrom the grave arc but a few out of ten thousandresultant combinations. That clear, perpétuaioutline of face and limb is but an image of ours,underwhich we group them-a designin a web,the actual threads of which pass out beyond it.This at least of flamelikeour life has, that it is

but the concurrence,renewed from moment tomoment, of forcesparting sooneror later on their

ways.Or if we begin with the inward world of

thought and feeling, the whirlpool i8 still more

rapid, the flame more eager and devouring.There it is no longer the graduai darkening of the eye, the graduaifadingof colourfrom the wall-movements of the shore-side,where the waterflowsdown indeed,though in apparent rest-but

the race of the mid-stream, a drift of momentaryacts of sight and passionand thought. At first

sight experience scemsto bury us under a floodof externalobjects,pressing upon us with a sharpand importunatereality,calling usout ofourselvesin a thousand forms of action. But when



CONCLUSION

reflexionbegins to play upon those objectstheyare dissipated under its influence the cohesiveforcescemssuspendedlike some trick of magieeach objcct is loosed into a group of impressions-colour, odour, texture-in the mind of the

observer. And if we continue to dwell inthought on this world, not of objects in the

solidity with which language investi them, butof impressions,unstable, flickering, inconsistent,which burn and arc extinguished with ourconsciousnessof them, it contracts still furtherthe whole scope of observation is dwarfed intothe narrow chamber of the individual mind.

Expérience, already reduced to a group of

impressions,is ringed round for each one of us

by that thick wall of personalitythrough whichno real voice has ever pierced on ils way to us,or from us to that which we can only conjectureto bc without. Every one of those impressionsisthé impressionof thé individualin his isolation,each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its owndreamof a world Analysisgocs a step fartherstill, and assuresus that those impressionsof theindividual mind to which, for each one of us,experience dwindles down, arc in perpétuai

flight that each of them is limited by time,and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitelydivisiblealso all that is actualin it being a single moment, gone while we tryto apprehend it, of which it may ever be more

truly said that it has ceasedto bc than that it is.



THE RENAISSANCE

~6

To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-formingitself on the stream, to a single sharp impression,with a sensein it, a relie more or les$neeting,of such moments gone by, what is real in our life

fines itself down. It is with this movement,with the passageand dissolutionof impressions,images, sensations,that analysisleaves o<F–thatcontinua!vanishingaway, that strange,perpétua!weaving and unweavingof ourse!ves.

Philorophiren,says Novalis, ~ar~~~f~rM. The service of hilosophy, of

speculativeculture, towards the human spirit, isto rouse,to startle it to alife of constantand eagerobservation. Every moment some form grows

perfectin hand or face some tone on the hills

or the sea is choicer than the rest some moodof passionor insight or intellectual excitementis

irresistibly real and attractive to us,–for thatmoment only. Not thc fruit of experience,butexperienceitself, is the end. A counted numberof pulses only is given to us of a variegated,dramatic life. How may we see in them allthat is to bc sccn in thcm by the fincst sensés?1How shall we pass most swiftly from point topoint, and bc present alwaysat the focuswhere

the greatest number of vital forcesunite in theirpurest energy t

To burn alwayswith this hard, gemlike flame,to maintain this ccstasy,is successin life. In asenseit might cven be said that our failure is toform habits for, after all, habit is relative to <



CONCLUSION

2J1

ttereotyped world, and meantime it is only theroughnessof the eye that makesanytwo persons,things, situations, seem alike. While au meltsunderour fect,we may well graspat anyexquisitepassion,or any contribution to knowlcdge that

<eemsby a lifted horizon to set the spirit tree fora moment, or any stirring of the 6en$es,strangedyes, strange colours, and curious odours, orwork of the artist's hands, or the face of one',friend. Not to discriminate every momentsomepassionateattitude in those about us, and inthe very brilliancyof their giftssometragic divid-ing of forceson their ways, is, on this short dayof frost and sun, to sleep before evening. Witbthis senseof thé splendourof our experienceandof its awful

brevity, gatheringallwc are into one

desperateeffortto sec and touch, we shall hardlyhave time to make theories about the things wesee and touch. What we have to do is to be forever curiousîy testing new opinionsand courtingnew impressions, never acquiescing in a facileorthodoxy of Comte,or of Hegel, or of our own.Philosophicaltheories or ideas,as points of view,instruments of criticism, may help us to gatherup what might otherwise pass unregarded

byus.

Philosophyis thé

microscopeof

thought." The theory or idea or systemwhich

requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience,in considerationof some interestinto which we cannot enter, or some abstracttheory we have not identified with ourselves,





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The Works of Walter Pater(I)