m 
 
 ij 
 
 HI 
 
 
 ill 
 
 
 III 
 
 
 
 
THE MODERN LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE WORLD'S BEST BOOKS 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
Turn to the end of this volume 
 for a complete list of titles 
 in the Modern Library 
 
THE 
 RENAISSANCE 
 
 WALTER PATER 
 
 Introduction by ARTHUR SYMONS 
 
 THE MODERN LIBRARY 
 
 PUBLISHERS : NEW YORK 
 
Manufactured in the United States of America 
 Bound for the modern library by H. Wolff 
 
DEDICATION 
 
 TO 
 
 C L. 
 February 1873 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Two Early French Stories i 
 
 Pico Della Mirandola 24 
 
 Sandro Botticelli 41 
 
 Luc a Della Robbia 52 
 
 The Poetry of Michelangelo 60 
 
 Leonardo Da Vinci 81 
 
 The School of Giorgione 107 
 
 Joachim Du Bellay 128 
 
 WlNCKELMANN 147 
 
 Conclusion 194 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 By Arthur Symons 
 
 Writing about Botticelli, in that essay which first in- 
 terpreted Botticelli to the modern world, Pater said, after 
 naming the supreme artists, Michelangelo or Leonardo : 
 
 But, besides these great men, there is a certain number 
 of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own by 
 which they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure 
 which we cannot get elsewhere ; and these, too, have their 
 place in general culture, and must be interpreted to it by 
 those who have felt their charm strongly, and are often 
 the objects of a special diligence and a consideration 
 wholly affectionate, just because there is not about them 
 the stress of a great name and authority. 
 
 It is among these rare artists, so much more interest- 
 ing, to many, than the very greatest, that Pater be- 
 longs ; and he can only be properly understood, loved, or 
 even measured by those to whom it is "the delicacies of 
 fine literature" that chiefly appeal. There have been 
 greater prose writers in our language, even in our time ; 
 but he was, as Mallarme called him, "le prosateur ouvrage 
 par excellence de ce temps." For strangeness and subt- 
 lety of temperament, for rarity and delicacy of form, for 
 something incredibly attractive to those who felt his at- 
 traction, he was as unique in our age as Botticelli in the 
 great age of Raphael. And he, too, above all to those 
 
xii 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 who knew him, can scarcely fail to become, not only "the 
 object of a special diligence/' but also of "a considera- 
 tion wholly affectionate," not lessened by the slowly in- 
 creasing "stress of authority" which is coming to be 
 laid, almost by the world in general, on his name. 
 
 In the work of Pater, thought moves to music, and 
 does all its hard work as if in play. And Pater seems 
 to listen for his thought, and to overhear it, as the poet 
 overhears his song in the air. It is like music, and -has 
 something of the character of poetry, yet, above all, it is 
 precise, individual thought filtered through a tempera- 
 ment; and it comes to us as it does because the style 
 which clothes and fits it is a style in which, to use some of 
 his own words, "the writer succeeds in saying what he 
 wills/' 
 
 The style of Pater has been praised and blamed for its 
 particular qualities of color, harmony, weaving; but it has 
 not always, or often, been realised that what is most won- 
 derful in the style is precisely its adaptability to every 
 shade of meaning or intention, its extraordinary closeness 
 in following the turns of thought, the waves of sensation, 
 in the man himself. Everything in Pater was in har- 
 mony, when you got accustomed to its particular forms 
 of expression: the heavy frame, so slow and deliberate 
 in movement, so settled in repose; the timid and yet 
 scrutinizing eyes; the mannered, yet so personal, voice; 
 the precise, pausing speech, with its urbanity, its almost 
 painful conscientiousness of utterance; the whole outer 
 mask, in short, worn for protection and out of courtesy, 
 yet molded upon the inner truth of nature like a mask 
 molded upon the features which it covers. And the 
 books are the man, literally the man in many accents, 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 xiii 
 
 turns of phrase ; and, far more than that, the man him- 
 self, whom one felt through his few, friendly, intimate, 
 serious words : the inner life of his soul coming close to 
 us, in a slow and gradual revelation. 
 
 He has said, in the first essay of his which we have : 
 
 The artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of 
 art desires only to be shown to the world as he really is ; 
 as he comes nearer and nearer to perfection, the veil of 
 an outer life, not simply expressive of the inward, be- 
 comes thinner and thinner. 
 
 And Pater seemed to draw up into himself every form 
 of earthly beauty, or of the beauty made by men, and 
 many forms of knowledge and wisdom, and a sense of 
 human things which was neither that of the lover nor of 
 the priest, but partly of both; and his work was the 
 giving out of all this again, with a certain labor to give 
 it wholly. It is all, the criticism, and the stories, and 
 the writing about pictures and places, a confession, the 
 vraie verite (as he was fond of saying) about the world 
 in which he lived. That world he thought was open to 
 all ; he was sure that it was the real blue and green earth, 
 and that he caught the tangible moments as they passed. 
 
 It was a world into which we can only look, not enter, 
 for none of us have his secret. But part of his secret 
 was in the gift and cultivation of a passionate temperance, 
 an unrelaxing attentiveness to whatever was rarest and 
 most delightful in passing things. 
 
 In Pater logic is of the nature of ecstasy, and ecstasy 
 never soars wholly beyond the reach of logic. Pater is 
 keen in pointing out the liberal and spendthrift weakness 
 of Coleridge in his thirst for the absolute, his "hunger 
 
xiv 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 for eternity," and for his part he is content to set all his 
 happiness, and all his mental energies, on a relative basis, 
 on a valuation of the things of eternity under the form 
 of time. He asks for no "larger flowers" than the best 
 growth of the earth ; but he would choose them flower by 
 flower, and for himself. He finds life worth just living, 
 a thing satisfying in essence, moment by moment, not in 
 any calculated "hedonism," even of the mind, but in a 
 quiet discriminating acceptance of whatever is beautiful, 
 active, or illuminating in every moment. As he grew 
 older he added something more like a Stoic sense of 
 "duty" to the old, properly and severely Epicurean doc- 
 trine of "pleasure." Pleasure was never, for Pater, less 
 than the essence of all knowledge, all experience, and not 
 merely all that is rarest in sensation ; it was religious 
 from the first, and had always to be served with a strict 
 ritual. "Only be sure it is passion," he said of that 
 spirit of divine motion to which he appealed for the 
 quickening of our sense of life, our sense of ourselves; 
 be sure, he said, "that it does yield you this fruit of a 
 quickened, multiplied consciousness." What he cared most 
 for at all times was that which could give "the highest 
 quality to our moments as they pass"; he differed only, 
 to a certain extent, in his estimation of what that was. 
 "The herb, the wine, the gem" of the preface to the 
 "Renaissance" tended more and more to become, under 
 less outward symbols of perfection, "the discovery, the 
 new faculty, the privileged apprehension" by which "the 
 imaginative regeneration of the world" should be brought 
 about, or even, at times, a brooding over "what the soul 
 passes, and must pass, through, aux abois with nothing- 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 xv 
 
 ness, or with those offended mysterious powers that may 
 really occupy it." 
 
 When I first met Pater he was nearly fifty. I did not 
 meet him for about two years after he had been writing 
 to me, and his first letter reached me when I was just 
 over twenty-one. I had been writing verse all my life, 
 and what Browning was to me in verse Pater, from 
 about the age of seventeen, had been to me in prose. 
 Meredith made the third; but his form of art was not, 
 I knew never could be, mine. Verse, I suppose, requires 
 no teaching, but it was from reading Pater's "Studies in 
 the History of the Renaissance," in its first edition on 
 ribbed paper (I have the feel of it still in my fingers),' 
 that I realized that prose also could be a fine art. That 
 book opened a new world to me, or, rather, gave me the 
 key or secret of the world in which I was living. It 
 taught me that there was a beauty besides the beauty of 
 what one calls inspiration, and comes and goes, and can- 
 not be caught or followed; that life (which had seemed 
 to me of so little moment) could be itself a work of 
 art; from that book I realized for the first time that 
 there was anything interesting or vital in the world be- 
 sides poetry and music. I caught from it an unlimited 
 curiosity, or, at least, the direction of curiosity into defi- 
 nite channels. 
 
 The knowledge that there was such a person as Pater 
 in the world, an occasional letter from him, an occa- 
 sional meeting, and gradually, the definite encouragement 
 of my work in which, for some years, he was unfailingly 
 generous and attentive, meant more to me, at that time, 
 than I can well indicate, or even realize, now. It was 
 through him that my first volume of verse was published; 
 
xvi 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 and it was through his influence and counsels that I 
 trained myself to be infinitely careful in all matters of 
 literature. Influence and counsel were always in the di- 
 rection of sanity, restraint, precision. 
 
 I remember a beautiful phrase which he once made up, 
 in his delaying way, with "wells" and "no doubts" in it, 
 to describe, and to describe supremely a person whom 
 I had seemed to him to be disparaging. "He does," he 
 said meditatively, "remind me of, well, of a steam-engine 
 stuck in the mud. But he is so enthusiastic." Pater 
 liked people to be enthusiastic, but, with him, enthusiasm 
 was an ardent quietude, guarded by the wary humor that 
 protects the sensitive. He looked upon undue earnest- 
 ness, even in outward manner, in a world through which 
 the artist is bound to go on a wholly "secret errand," as 
 bad form, which shocked him as much in persons as bad 
 style did in books. He hated every form of extravagance, 
 noise, mental or physical, with a temperamental hatred : he 
 suffered from it, in his nerves and in his mind. And he 
 had no less dislike of whatever seemed to him either 
 -morbid or sordid, two words which he often used to ex- 
 press his distaste for things and people. He never would 
 have appreciated writers like Verlaine, because of what 
 seemed to him perhaps unnecessarily "sordid" in their 
 lives. It pained him, as it pains some people, perhaps 
 only because they are more acutely sensitive than others, 
 to walk through mean streets, where people are poor, 
 miserable, and hopeless. 
 
 And since I have mentioned Verlaine, I may say that 
 what Pater most liked in poetry was the very opposite 
 of such work as that of Verlaine, which he might have 
 been supposed likely to like. I do not think it was actu- 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 xvii 
 
 ally one of Verlaine's poems, but something done after 
 his manner in English, that some reviewer once quoted, 
 saying : "That, to our mind, would be Mr. Pater's ideal 
 of poetry." Pater said to me, with a sad wonder, "I 
 simply don't know what he meant." What he liked in 
 poetry was something even more definite than can be got 
 in prose; and he valued poets like Dante and like Ros- 
 setti for their "delight in concrete definition," not even 
 quite seeing the ultimate magic of such things as Kubla 
 Khan, which he omitted in a brief selection from the 
 poetry of Coleridge. In the most interesting letter which 
 I ever had from him, the only letter which went to six 
 pages, he says: 
 
 12 Earl's Terrace, 
 
 Kensington, W. 
 
 Jan. 8, 1888. 
 
 My dear Mr. Symons, — I feel much flattered at your 
 choosing me as an arbiter in the matter of your literary 
 work, and thank you for the pleasure I have had in read- 
 ing carefully the two poems you have sent me. I don't 
 use the word "arbiter" loosely for "critic" ; but suppose 
 a real controversy, on the question whether you shall 
 spend your best energies in writing verse, between your 
 poetic aspirations on the one side, and prudence (calcu- 
 lating results) on the other. Well! judging by these two 
 pieces, I should say that you have a poetic talent re- 
 markable, especially at the present day, for precise and 
 intellectual grasp on the matter it deals with. Rossetti, 
 I believe, said that the value of every artistic product 
 was in direct proportion to the amount of purely intel- 
 lectual force that went to the initial conception of it: 
 and it is just this intellectual conception which seems to 
 me to be so conspicuously wanting in what, in some 
 ways, is the most characteristic verse of our time, espe- 
 cially that of our secondary poets. In your own pieces, 
 particularly in your MS. "A Revenge," I find Rossetti's 
 
xviii 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 requirement fulfilled, and should anticipate great things 
 from one who has the talent of conceiving his motive 
 with so much firmness and tangibility — with that close 
 logic, if I may say so, which is an element in any genu- 
 inely imaginative process. It is clear to me that you aim 
 at this, and it is what gives your verses, to my mind, great 
 interest. Otherwise, I think the two pieces of unequal 
 excellence, greatly preferring "A Revenge" to "Bell in 
 Camp." Reserving some doubt whether the watch, as the 
 lover's gift, is not a little bourgeois, I think this piece 
 worthy of any 'poet. It has that aim of concentration and 
 organic unity which I value greatly both in prose and 
 verse. "Bell in Camp" pleases me less, for the same 
 reason which makes me put Rossetti's "Jenny," and some 
 of Browning's pathetic-satiric pieces, below the rank 
 which many assign them. In no one of the poems I am 
 thinking of, is the inherent sordidness of everything in 
 the persons supposed, except the one poetic trait then un- 
 der treatment, quite forgotten. Otherwise, I feel the 
 pathos, the humor, of the piece (in the full sense of the 
 word humor) and the skill with which you have worked 
 out your motive therein. I think the present age an un- 
 favorable one to poets, at least in England. The young 
 poet comes into a generation which has produced a large 
 amount of first-rate poetry, and an enormous amount of 
 good secondary poetry. You know I give a high place 
 to the literature of prose as a fine art, and therefore hope 
 you won't think me brutal in saying that the admirable 
 qualities of your verse are those also of imaginative 
 prose ; as I think is the case also with much of Brown- 
 ing's finest verse. I should say, make prose your prin- 
 cipal metier, as a man of letters, and publish your verse 
 as a more intimate gift for those who already value you 
 for your pedestrian work in literature. I should think 
 you ought to find no difficulty in finding a publisher for 
 poems such as those you have sent to me. 
 
 I am more than ever anxious to meet you. Letters are 
 such poor means of communication. Don't come to Lon- 
 
INTRODUCTION xix 
 
 don without making an appointment to come and see me 
 here. Very sincerely yours, 
 
 Walter Pater. 
 
 "Browning, one of my best-loved writers/' is a phrase 
 I find in his first letter to me, in December, 1886, thank- 
 ing me for a little book on Browning which I had just 
 published. There is, I think, no mention of any other 
 writer except Shakespeare (besides the reference to Ros- 
 setti which I have just quoted) in any of the fifty or sixty 
 letters which I have from him. Everything that is said 
 about books is a direct matter of business : work which 
 he was doing, of which he tells me, or which I was doing, 
 about which he advises and encourages me. 
 
 In practical things Pater was wholly vague, troubled 
 by their persistence when they pressed upon him. To 
 wrap up a book to send by post was an almost intolerable 
 effort, and he had another reason for hesitating. "I take 
 your copy of Shakespeare's sonnets with me," he writes 
 in June, 1889, "hoping to be able to restore it to you 
 there lest it should get bruised by transit through the 
 post." He wrote letters with distaste, never really well, 
 and almost always with excuses or regrets in them : "Am 
 so overburdened (my time, I mean) just now with pupils, 
 lectures, and the making thereof"; or, with hopes for a 
 meeting: "Letters are such poor means of communica- 
 tion : when are we to meet ?" or, as a sort of hasty make- 
 shift : "I send this prompt answer, for I know by experi- 
 ence that when I delay my delays are apt to be lengthy." 
 A review took him sometimes a year to get through and 
 remained in the end, like his letters, a little cramped, 
 never finished to the point of ease, like his published 
 
XX 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 writings. To lecture was a great trial to him. Two of 
 the three lectures which I have heard in my life were 
 given by Pater, one on Merimee, at the London Institu- 
 tion, in November, 1890, and the other on Raphael, at 
 Toynbee Hall, in 1892. I never saw a man suffer a 
 severer humiliation. The act of reading his written lec- 
 ture was an agony which communicated itself to the main 
 part of the audience. Before going into the hall at White- 
 chapel he had gone into a church to compose his mind a 
 little, between the discomfort of the underground rail- 
 way and the distress of the lecture-hall. 
 
 In a room, if he was not among very intimate friends, 
 Pater was rarely quite at his ease, but he liked being 
 among people, and he made the greater satisfaction over- 
 come the lesser reluctance. He was particularly fond of 
 cats, and I remember one evening, when I had been din- 
 ing with him in London, the quaint, solemn, and perfectly 
 natural way in which he took up the great black Per- 
 sian, kissed it, and set it down carefully again on his 
 way upstairs. Once at Oxford he told me that M. Bour- 
 get had sent him the first volume of his Essais de Psy- 
 chologie Contemporaine, and that the cat had got hold of 
 the book and torn up the part containing the essay on 
 Baudelaire, "and as Baudelaire was such a lover of cats 
 I thought she might have spared him!" 
 
 We were talking once about fairs, and I had been say- 
 ing how fond I was of them. He said : "I am fond of 
 them, too. I always go to fairs. I am getting to find they 
 are very similar." Then he began to tell me about the 
 fairs in France, and I remember, as if it were an un- 
 published fragment in one of his stories, the minute, 
 colored impression of the booths, the little white horses 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 xxi 
 
 of the "roundabouts," and the little wild beast shows, in 
 which what had most struck him was the interest of the 
 French peasant in the wolf, a creature he might have 
 seen in his own woods. "An English clown would not 
 have looked at a wolf if he could have seen a tiger." 
 
 I once asked Pater if his family was really connected 
 with that of the painter, Jean-Baptiste Pater. He said: 
 "I think so, I believe so, I always say so." The rela- 
 tionship has never been verified, but one would like to 
 believe it; to find something lineally Dutch in the Eng- 
 lish writer. It was, no doubt, through this kind of 
 family interest that he came to work upon Goncourt's 
 essay and the contemporary Life of Watteau by the 
 Count de Caylus, printed in the first series of L'Art du 
 XVIII Steele, out of which he has made certainly the 
 most living of his Imaginary Portraits, that Prince of 
 Court Painters which is supposed to be the journal of a 
 sister of Jean-Baptiste Pater, whom we see in one of 
 Watteau's portraits in the Louvre. As far back as 1889 1 
 Pater was working towards a second volume of Imagi- 
 nary Portraits of which Hippolytus Veiled was to have 
 been one. He had another subject in Moroni's Portrait 
 of a Tailor in the National Gallery, whom he was going 
 to make a Burgomaster; and another was to have been 
 a study of life in the time of the Albigensian persecution. 
 There was also to be a modern study: could this have 
 been Emerald U thwart? No doubt Apollo in Picardy, 
 
 1 In this same year he intended to follow the Appreciations by 
 a volume of Studies of Greek Remains, in which he then mear,t 
 to include the studies in Platonism, not yet written; and he 
 thought of putting together a volume of "theory," which was to 
 include the essay on Style. In two or three years' time, he 
 thought, Gaston de Latour would be finished. 
 
xxii 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 published in 1893, would have gone into the volume. The 
 Child in the House, which was printed as an Imaginary 
 Portrait, in Macmillan's Magazine in 1878, was really 
 meant to be the first chapter of a romance which was to 
 show "the poetry of modern life/* something, he said, 
 as Aurora Leigh does. There is much personal detail in 
 it, the red hawthorn, for instance, and he used to talk to 
 me of the old house at Tunbridge, where his great-aunt 
 lived, and where he spent much of his time when a child. 
 He remembered the gipsies there, and their caravans, 
 when they came down for the hop-picking; and the old 
 lady in her large cap going out on the lawn to do battle 
 with the surveyors who had come to mark out a rail- 
 way across it; and his terror of the train, and of "the 
 red flag, which meant blood." It was because he always 
 dreamed of going on with it that he did not reprint 
 this imaginary portrait in the book of Imaginary Por- 
 traits, but he did not go on with it because, having begun 
 the long labor of Marius, it was out of his mind for 
 maiiy years, and when, in 1889, he still spoke of finishing 
 it, he was conscious that he could never continue it in the 
 same style, and that it would not be satisfactory to re- 
 write it in his severer, later manner. It remains, per- 
 haps fortunately, a fragment, to which no continuation 
 could ever add a more essential completeness. 
 
 Style, in Pater, varied more than is generally sup- 
 posed, in the course of his development, and, though 
 never thought of as a thing apart from what it expresses, 
 was with him a constant preoccupation. Let writers, he 
 said, "make time to write English more as a learned lan- 
 guage." It has been said that Ruskin, De Quincey, and 
 Flaubert were among the chief "origins" of Pater's style ; 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 xxiii 
 
 it is curiously significant that matter, in Pater, was de- 
 veloped before style, and that in the bare and angular 
 outlines of the earliest fragment, Diaphaneite, there is 
 already the substance which is to be clothed upon by 
 beautiful and appropriate flesh in the Studies in the Re- 
 naissance. Ruskin, I never heard him mention, but I 
 do not doubt that there, to the young man beginning to 
 concern himself with beauty in art and literature, was 
 at least a quickening influence. Of De Quincey he spoke 
 with an admiration which I had difficulty in sharing, 
 and I remember his showing me with pride a set of his 
 works bound in half-parchment, with pale gold letter- 
 ing on the white backs, and with the cinnamon edges 
 which he was so fond of. Of Flaubert we rarely met 
 without speaking. He thought Julien I'Hospitalier as 
 perfect as anything he had done. L'Education Senti- 
 mentale was one of the books which he advised me to 
 read; that, and Le Rouge et le Noir of Stendhal; and 
 he spoke with particular admiration of two episodes in 
 the former, the sickness and the death of the child. Of 
 the Goncourts he spoke with admiration tempered by 
 dislike. Their books often repelled him, yet their way of > 
 doing things seemed to him just the way things should 
 be done ; and done before almost any one else. He often 
 read Madame Gervaisais, and he spoke of Cherie (for all 
 its "immodesty") as an admirable thing, and a model for 
 all such studies. 
 
 Once, as we were walking in Oxford, he pointed to 
 a window and said, with a slow smile : "That is where I 
 get my Zolas." He was always a little on his guard in 
 respect of books ; and, just as he read Flaubert and Gon- 
 court because they were intellectual neighbors, so he 
 
xxiv 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 could read Zola for mere pastime, knowing that there 
 would be nothing there to distract him. I remember 
 telling him about The Story of an African Farm, and of 
 the wonderful human quality in it. He said, repeating his 
 favorite formula: "No doubt you are quite right; but 
 I do not suppose I shall ever read it." And he explained 
 to me that he was always writing something, and that 
 while he was writing he did not allow himself to read 
 anything which might possibly affect him too strongly, 
 by bringing a new current of emotion to bear upon him. 
 He was quite content that his mind should "keep as a 
 solitary prisoner its own dream of a world" ; it was that 
 prisoner's dream of a world that it was his whole busi- 
 ness as a writer to remember, to perpetuate. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Many attempts have been made by writers on art 
 and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it 
 in the most general terms, to find some universal for- 
 mula for it. The value of these attempts has most often 
 been in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the 
 way. Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what 
 has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate be- 
 tween what is more and what is less excellent in them, 
 or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with 
 a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have. 
 Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human ex- 
 perience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes 
 unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. 
 To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the 
 most concrete terms possible, to find not its universal 
 formula, but the formula which expresses most ade- 
 quately this or that special manifestation of it, is the 
 aim of the true student of aesthetics. 
 
 "To see the object as in itself it really is," has been 
 justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; 
 and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing 
 one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impres- 
 sion as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it dis- 
 tinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism 
 deals — music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms 
 of human life — are indeed receptacles of so many 
 
 XXV 
 
xxvi 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 powers or forces: they possess, like the products of 
 nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song 
 or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or 
 in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce 
 on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort 
 or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by 
 its presence, and under its influence? The answers to 
 these questions are the original facts with which the 
 aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light, 
 of morals, of number, one must realise such primary 
 data for one's self, or not at all. And he who experi- 
 ences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at 
 the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to 
 trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty 
 is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experi- 
 ence — metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as meta- 
 physical questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by 
 as being, answerable or not, of no interest to him. 
 
 The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with 
 which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer 
 forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces 
 producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less 
 peculiar or unique kind. This influence he feels, and 
 wishes to explain, by analysing and reducing it to its 
 elements. To him, the picture, the landscape, the en- 
 gaging personality in life or in a book, La Gioconda, 
 the hills of Carrara, Pico of Mirandola, are valuable 
 for their virtues, as we say, in speaking of a herb, 
 a wine, a gem; for the property each has of affecting 
 one with a special, a unique, impression of pleasure. 
 Our education becomes complete in proportion as our 
 susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and 
 
PREFACE 
 
 xxvii 
 
 variety. And the function of the aesthetic critic is to 
 distinguish, to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, 
 the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair per- 
 sonality in life or in a book, produces this special im- 
 pression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the 
 source of that impression is, and under what conditions 
 it is experienced. His end is reached when he has dis- 
 engaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes 
 some natural element, for himself and others; and the 
 rule for those who would reach this end is stated with, 
 great exactness in the words of a recent critic of Sainte- 
 Beuve: — De se homer a connaitre de pres les belles 
 choses, et a s'en nourrir en exquis amateurs, en hu- 
 manistes aceomplis. 
 
 What is important, then, is not that the critic should 
 possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the 
 intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power 
 of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful 
 objects. He will remember always that beauty exists 
 in many forms. To him all periods, types, schools of 
 taste, are in themselves equal. In all ages there have 
 been some excellent workmen, and some excellent work 
 done. The question he asks is always: — In whom did 
 the stir, the genius, the sentiment of the period find 
 itself? where was the receptacle of its refinement, its 
 elevation, its taste? "The ages are all equal," says 
 William Blake, "but genius is always above its age." 
 
 Often it will require great nicety to disengage this 
 virtue from the commoner elements with which it may 
 be found in combination. Few artists, not Goethe or 
 Byron even, work quite cleanly, casting off all debris, 
 and leaving us only what the heat of their imagination 
 
xxviii 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 has wholly fused and transformed. Take, for instance, 
 the writings of Wordsworth. The heat of his genius, 
 entering into the substance of his work, has crystallised 
 a part, but only a part, of it; and in that great mass of 
 verse there is much which might well be forgotten. But 
 scattered up and down it, sometimes fusing and trans- 
 forming entire compositions, like the Stanzas on Resolu- 
 tion and Independence, or the Ode on the Recollections 
 of Childhood, sometimes, as if at random, depositing a 
 fine crystal here or there, in a matter it does not wholly 
 search through and transmute, we trace the action of 
 his unique, incommunicable faculty, that strange, mystic- 
 al sense of a life in natural things, and of man's life 
 as a part of nature, drawing strength and color and 
 character from local influences, from the hills and 
 streams, and from natural sights and sounds. Well! 
 that is the virtue, the active principle in Wordsworth's 
 poetry; and then the function of the critic of Words- 
 worth is to follow up that active principle, to disengage 
 it, to mark the degree in which it penetrates his verse. 
 
 The subjects of the following studies are taken from 
 the history of the Renaissance, and touch what I think 
 tiie chief points in that complex, many-sided movement. 
 I have explained in the first of them what I understand 
 by the word, giving it a much wider scope than was 
 intended by those who originally used it to denote that 
 revival of classical antiquity in the fifteenth century 
 which was only one of many results of a general excite- 
 ment and enlightening of the human mind, but of whicl 
 the great aim and achievements of what, as Christian 
 art, is often falsely opposed to the Renaissance, were 
 another result. This outbreak of the human spirit may 
 
PREFACE 
 
 xxix 
 
 be traced far into the middle age itself, with its motives 
 already clearly pronounced, the care for physical beauty, 
 the worship of the body, the breaking* down of those 
 limits which the religious system of the middle age im- 
 posed on the heart and the imagination. I have taken 
 as an example of this movement, this earlier Renais- 
 sance within the middle age itself, and as an expression 
 of its qualities, two little compositions in early French; 
 not because they constitute the best possible expression 
 of them, but because they help the unity of my series, 
 inasmuch as the Renaissance ends also in France, in 
 French poetry, in a phase of which the writings of 
 Joachim du Bellay are in many ways the most perfect 
 illustration. The Renaissance, in truth, put forth in 
 France an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, the 
 products of which have to the full that subtle and deli- 
 cate sweetness which belongs to a refined and comely 
 decadence, just as its earliest phases have the freshness 
 which belongs to all periods of growth in art, the charm 
 of asdesis, of the austere and serious girding of the 
 loins in youth. 
 
 But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that the 
 interest of the Renaissance mainly lies, — in that solemn 
 fifteenth century which can hardly be studied too much, 
 not merely for its positive results in the things of the 
 intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art, 
 ks special and prominent personalities, with their pro- 
 found aesthetic charm, but for its general spirit and 
 character, for the ethical qualities of which it is a con- 
 summate type. 
 
 The various forms of intellectual activity which to- 
 gether make up the culture of an age, move for the most 
 
XXX 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 part from different starting-points, and by unconnected 
 roads. As products of the same generation they par- 
 take indeed of a common character, and unconsciously 
 illustrate each other; but of the producers themselves, 
 each group is solitary, gaining what advantage or dis- 
 advantage there may be in intellectual isolation. Art 
 and poetry, philosophy and the religious life, and that 
 other life of refined pleasure and action in the conspicu- 
 ous places of the world, are each of them confined to 
 its own circle of ideas, and those who prosecute either 
 of them are generally little curious of the thoughts of 
 others. There come, however, from time to time, eras 
 of more favorable conditions, in which the thoughts of 
 men draw nearer together than is their wont, and the 
 many interests of the intellectual world combine in one 
 complete type of general culture. The fifteenth century 
 in Italy is one of these happier eras, and what is some- 
 times said of the age of Pericles is true of that of 
 Lorenzo: — it is' an age productive in personalities, 
 many-sided, centralised, complete. Here, artists and 
 philosophers and those whom the action of the world 
 has elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but 
 breathe a common air, and catch light and heat from 
 each other's thoughts. There is a spirit of general eleva- 
 tion and enlightenment in which all alike communicate. 
 The unity of this spirit gives unity to all the various 
 products of the Renaissance; and it is to this intimate 
 alliance with mind, this participation in the best thoughts 
 which that age produced, that the art of Italy in the 
 fifteenth century owes much of its grave dignity and 
 influence. 
 
 I have added an essay on Winckelmann, as not in- 
 
PREFACE 
 
 xxxi 
 
 congruous with the studies which precede it, because 
 Winckelmann, coming in the eighteenth century, really 
 belongs in spirit to an earlier age. By his enthusiasm 
 for the things of the intellect and the imagination for 
 their own sake, by his Hellenism, his life-long struggle 
 to attain to the Greek spirit, he is in sympathy with the 
 humanists of a previous century. He is the last fruit 
 of the Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its 
 motive and tendencies. 
 
 1873- 
 
Yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove. 
 
THE RENAISSANCE 
 
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 
 
 The history of the Renaissance ends in France, and 
 carries us away from Italy to the beautiful cities of the 
 country of the Loire. But it was in France also, in a 
 very important sense, that the Renaissance had begun. 
 French writers, who are fond of connecting the crea- 
 tions of Italian genius with a French origin, who tell 
 us how Saint Francis of Assisi took not his name only, 
 but all those notions of chivalry and romantic love 
 which so deeply penetrated his thoughts, from a French 
 source, how Boccaccio borrowed the outlines of his 
 stories from the old French fabliaux, and how Dante 
 himself expressly connects the origin of the art of minia- 
 ture-painting with the city of Paris, have often dwelt 
 on this notion of a Renaissance in the end of the twelfth 
 and the beginning of the thirteenth century, a Renais- 
 sance within the limits of the middle age itself — a bril- 
 liant, but in part abortive effort to do for human life 
 and the human mind what was afterwards done in the 
 fifteenth. The word Renaissance, indeed, is now gener- 
 ally used to denote not merely the revival of classical 
 antiquity which took place in the fifteenth century, and 
 to which the word was first applied, but a whole com- 
 plex movement, of which that revival of classical an- 
 tiquity was but one element or symptom. For us the 
 Renaissance is the name of a many-sided but yet united 
 
2 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 movement, in which the love of the things of the intel- 
 lect and the imagination for their own sake, the desire 
 for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life, 
 make themselves felt, urging those who experience this 
 desire to search out first one and then another means of 
 intellectual or imaginative enjoyment, and directing them 
 not only to the discovery of old and forgotten sources 
 of this enjoyment, but to the divination of fresh sources 
 thereof — new experiences, new subjects of poetry, new 
 forms of art. Of such feeling there was a great out- 
 break in the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the 
 following century. Here and there, under rare and 
 happy conditions, in Pointed architecture, in the doc- 
 trines of romantic love, in the poetry of Provence, the 
 rude strength of the middle age turns to sweetness ; and 
 the taste for sweetness generated there becomes the seed 
 of the classical revival in it, prompting it constantly to 
 seek after the springs of perfect sweetness in the Hel- 
 lenic world. And coming after a long period in which 
 this instinct had been crushed, that true "dark age," in 
 which so many sources of intellectual and imaginative 
 enjoyment had actually disappeared, this outbreak is 
 rightly called a Renaissance, a revival. 
 
 Theories which bring into connection with each other 
 modes of thought and feeling, periods of taste, forms of 
 art and poetry, which the narrowness of men's minds 
 constantly tends to oppose to each other, have a great 
 stimulus for the intellect, and are almost always worth 
 understanding. It is so with this theory of a Renais- 
 sance within the middle age, which seeks to establish a 
 continuity between the most characteristic work of that 
 period, the sculpture of Chartres, the windows of Le 
 
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 3 
 
 Mans, and the work of the later Renaissance, the work 
 of Jean Cousin and Germain Pilon, thus healing that 
 rupture between the middle age and the Renaissance 
 which has so often been exaggerated. But it is not so 
 much the ecclesiastical art of the middle age, its sculp- 
 ture and painting — work certainly done in a great meas- 
 ure for pleasure's sake, in which even a secular, a rebel- 
 lious spirit often betrays itself — but rather its profane 
 poetry, the poetry of Provence, and the magnificent 
 after-growth of that poetry in Italy and France, which 
 those French writers have in view when they speak of 
 this medieval Renaissance. In that poetry, earthly pas- 
 sion, with its intimacy, its freedom, its variety — the lib- 
 erty of the heart — makes itself felt; and the name of 
 Abelard, the great scholar and the great lover, connects 
 the expression of this liberty of heart with the free play 
 of human intelligence around all subjects presented to 
 it, with the liberty of the intellect, as that age under- 
 stood it. 
 
 Every one knows the legend of Abelard, a legend 
 hardly less passionate, certainly not less characteristic 
 of the middle age, than the legend of Tannhauser; how 
 the famous and comely clerk, in whom Wisdom her- 
 self, self-possessed, pleasant, and discreet, seemed to sit 
 enthroned, came to live in the house of a canon of the 
 church of Notre-Dame, where dwelt a girl, Heloise, be- 
 lieved to be the old priest's orphan niece; how the old 
 priest had testified his love for her by giving her an 
 education then unrivalled, so that rumor asserted that, 
 through the knowledge of languages, enabling her to 
 penetrate into the mysteries of the older world, she had 
 become a sorceress, like the Celtic druidesses; and how 
 
4 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 as Abelard and Heloise sat together at home there, to 
 refine a little further on the nature of abstract ideas, 
 "Love made himself of the party with them. ,, You 
 conceive the temptations of the scholar, who, in such 
 dreamy tranquillity, amid the bright and busy spectacle 
 of the "Island," lived in a world of something like 
 shadows; and that for one who knew so well how to 
 assign its exact value to every abstract thought, those 
 restraints which lie on the consciences of other men 
 had been relaxed. It appears that he composed many 
 verses in the vulgar tongue : already the young men sang 
 them on the quay below the house. Those songs, says 
 M. de Remusat, were probably in the taste of the 
 Tronveres, "of whom he was one of the first in date, 
 or, so to speak, the predecessor." It is the same spirit 
 which has molded the famous "letters," written in the 
 quaint Latin of the middle age. 
 
 At the foot of that early Gothic tower, which the 
 next generation raised to grace the precincts of Abe- 
 lard's school, on the "Mountain of Saint Genevieve," 
 the historian Michelet sees in thought "a terrible assem- 
 bly; not the hearers of Abelard alone, fifty bishops, 
 twenty cardinals, two popes, the whole body of scho- 
 lastic philosophy; not only the learned Heloise, the 
 teaching of languages, and the Renaissance ; but Arnold 
 of Brescia — that is to say, the revolution." And so from 
 the rooms of this shadowy house by the Seine side we 
 see that spirit going abroad, with its qualities already 
 well defined, its intimacy, its languid sweetness, its re- 
 bellion, its subtle skill in dividing the elements of human 
 passion, its care for physical beauty, its worship of the 
 
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 5 
 
 body, which penetrated the early literature of Italy, and 
 finds an echo even in Dante. 
 
 That Abelard is not mentioned in the Divine Comedy 
 may appear a singular omission to the reader of Dante, 
 who seems to have inwoven into the texture of his work 
 whatever had impressed him as either effective in color 
 or spiritually significant among the recorded incidents 
 of actual life. Nowhere in his great poem do we find 
 the name, nor so much as an allusion to the story of 
 one who had left so deep a mark on the philosophy of 
 which Dante was an eager student, of whom in the 
 Latin Quarter, and from the lips of scholar or teacher 
 in the University of Paris, during his sojourn among 
 them, he can hardly have failed to hear. We can only 
 suppose that he had indeed considered the story and the 
 man, and abstained from passing judgment as to his 
 place in the scheme of "eternal justice." v 
 
 In the famous legend of Tannhauser, the erring 
 knight makes his way to Rome, to seek absolution at 
 the centre of Christian religion. "So soon," thought and 
 said the Pope, "as the staff in his hand should bud and 
 blossom, so soon might the soul of Tannhauser be saved fc 
 and no sooner" ; and it came to pass not long after that 
 the dry wood of a staff which the Pope had carried in 
 his hand was covered with leaves and flowers. So, in 
 the cloister of Godstow, a petrified tree was shown of 
 which the nuns told that the fair Rosamond, who had 
 died among them, had declared that, the tree being then 
 alive and green, it would be changed into stone at the 
 hour of her salvation. When Abelard died, like Tann- 
 hauser, he was on his way to Rome. What might have 
 happened had he reached his journey's end is uncertain; 
 
6 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 and it is in this uncertain twilight that his relation to 
 the general beliefs of his age has always remained. In 
 this, as in other things, he prefigures the character of 
 the Renaissance, that movement in which, in various 
 ways, the human mind wins for itself a new kingdom 
 of feeling and sensation and thought, not opposed to 
 but only beyond and independent of the spiritual sys- 
 tem then actually realised. The opposition into which 
 Abelard is thrown, which gives its color to his career, 
 which breaks his soul to pieces, is a no less subtle op- 
 position than that between the merely professional, offi- 
 cial, hireling ministers of that system, with their ig- 
 norant worship of system for its own sake, and the true 
 child of light, the humanist, with reason and heart and 
 senses quick, while theirs were almost dead. He reaches 
 out towards, he attains, modes of ideal living, beyond 
 the prescribed limits of that system, though in essential 
 germ, it may be, contained within it. As always hap- 
 pens, the adherents of the poorer and narrower culture 
 had no sympathy with, because no understanding of, a 
 culture richer and more ample than their own. After 
 the discovery of wheat they would still live upon acorns 
 — apres V invention du ble voulaient encore vivre du 
 gland; and would hear of no service to the higher needs 
 of humanity with instruments not of their forging. 
 
 But the human spirit, bold through those needs, was 
 too strong for them. Abelard and Heloise write their 
 letters — letters with a wonderful outpouring of soul — 
 in medieval Latin; and Abelard, though he composes 
 songs in the vulgar tongue, writes also in Latin those 
 treatises in which he tries to find a ground of reality 
 below the abstractions of philosophy, as one bent on 
 
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 7 
 
 trying all things by their congruity with human experi- 
 ence, who had felt the hand of Helo'ise, and looked into 
 her eyes, and tested the resources of humanity in her 
 great and energetic nature. Yet it is only a little later, 
 early in the thirteenth century, that French prose ro- 
 mance begins; and in one of the pretty volumes of the 
 Bibliotheque Elzevirienne some of the most striking 
 fragments of it may be found, edited with much intelli- 
 gence. In one of these thirteenth-century stories, Li 
 Amitiez de Ami et Amile, that free play of human af- 
 fection, of the claims of which Abelard's story is an 
 assertion, makes itself felt in the incidents of a great 
 friendship, a friendship pure and generous, pushed to a 
 sort of passionate exaltation, and more than faithful 
 unto death. Such comradeship, though instances of it 
 are to be found everywhere, is still especially a classical 
 motive; Chaucer expressing the sentiment of it so 
 strongly in an antique tale, that one knows not whether 
 the love of both Palamon and Arcite for Emelya, or of 
 those two for each other, is the chief er subject of the 
 Knight's Tale — 
 
 He cast his eyen upon Emelya, 
 
 And therewithal he bleynte and cried, ah! 
 
 As that he stongen were unto the herte. 
 
 What reader does not refer something of the bitterness 
 of that cry to the spoiling, already foreseen, of the fair 
 friendship, which had made the prison of the two lads 
 sweet hitherto with its daily offices? 
 
 The friendship of Amis and Amile is deepened by 
 the romantic circumstance of an entire personal resem- 
 blance between the two heroes, through which they pass 
 
8 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 for each other again and again, and thereby into many 
 strange adventures; that curious interest of the Doppel- 
 ganger, which begins among the stars with the Dioscuri, 
 being entwined in and out through all the incidents of 
 the story, like an outward token of the inward similitude 
 of their souls. With this, again, is connected, like a 
 second reflection of that inward similitude, the conceit 
 of two marvelously beautiful cups, also exactly like each 
 other — children's cups, of wood, but adorned with gold 
 and precious stones. These two cups, which by their 
 resemblance help to bring the friends together at critical 
 moments, were given to them by the Pope, when he 
 baptised them at Rome, whither the parents had taken 
 them for that purpose, in gratitude for their birth. They 
 cross and recross very strangely in the narrative, serving 
 the two heroes almost like living things, and with that 
 well-known effect of a beautiful object, kept constantly 
 before the eye in a story or poem, of keeping sensation 
 well awake, and giving a certain air of refinement to all 
 the scenes into which it enters. That sense of fate, 
 which hangs so much of the shaping of human life on 
 trivial objects, like Othello's strawberry handkerchief, 
 is thereby heightened, while witness is borne to the en- 
 joyment of beautiful handiwork by primitive people, 
 their simple wonder at it, so that they give it an oddly 
 significant place among the factors of a human history. 
 
 Amis and Amile, then, are true to their comradeship 
 through all trials; and in the end it comes to pass that 
 at a moment of great need Amis takes the place of Amile 
 in a tournament for life or death. "After this it hap- 
 pened that a leprosy fell upon Amis, so that his wife 
 would not approach him, and wrought to strangle him. 
 
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 
 
 He departed therefore from his home, and at last prayed 
 his servants to carry him to the house of Amile" ; and 
 it is in what follows that the curious strength of the • 
 piece shows itself : — 
 
 "His servants, willing to do as he commanded, car- 
 ried him to the place where Amile was ; and they began 
 to sound their rattles before the court of Amile's house, 
 as lepers are accustomed to do. And when Amile heard 
 the noise he commanded one of his servants to carry 
 meat and bread to the sick man, and the cup which was 
 given to him at Rome filled with good wine. And when 
 the servant had done as he was commanded, he returned 
 and said, Sir, if I had not thy cup in my hand, I should 
 believe that the cup which the sick man has was thine, 
 for they are alike, the one to the other, in height and 
 fashion. And Amile said, Go quickly and bring him to 
 me. And when Amis stood before his comrade Amile 
 demanded of him who he was, and how he had gotten 
 that cup. I am of Briquain le Chastel, answered Amis, 
 and the cup was given to me by the Bishop of Rome, 
 who baptised me. And when Amile heard that, he knew 
 that it was his comrade Amis, who had delivered him 
 from death, and won for him the daughter of the King 
 of France to be his wife. And straightway he fell upon 
 him, and began weeping greatly, and kissed him. And 
 when his wife heard that, she ran out with her hair in 
 disarray, weeping and distressed exceedingly, for she 
 remembered that it was he who had slain the false 
 Ardres. And thereupon they placed him in a fair bed, 
 and said to him, Abide with us until God's will be ac- 
 complished in thee, for all we have is at thy service. So 
 he and the two servants abode with them. 
 
 "And it came to pass one night, when Amis and Amile 
 lay in one chamber without other companions, that God 
 sent His angel Raphael to Amis, who said to him, Amis, 
 art thou asleep? And he, supposing that Amile had 
 
IO 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 called him, answered and said, I am not asleep, fair 
 comrade! And the angel said to him, Thou hast an- 
 . swered well, for thou art the comrade of the heavenly 
 citizens. — I am Raphael, the angel of our Lord, and am 
 come to tell thee how thou mayest be healed; for thy 
 prayers are heard. Thou shalt bid Amile, thy comrade, 
 that he slay his two children and wash thee in their 
 blood, and so thy body shall be made whole. And Amis 
 said to him, Let not this thing be, that my comrade 
 should become a murderer for my sake. But the angel 
 said, It is convenient that he do this. And thereupon 
 the angel departed. 
 
 "And Amile also, as if in sleep, heard those words; 
 and he awoke and said, Who is it, my comrade, that 
 hath spoken with thee? And Amis answered, No man; 
 only I have prayed to our Lord, as I am accustomed. 
 And Amile said, Not so ! but some one hath spoken with 
 thee. Then he arose and went to the door of the cham- 
 ber; and finding it shut he said, Tell me, my brother, 
 who it was said those words to thee to-night. And 
 Amis began to weep greatly, and told him that it was 
 Raphael, the angel of the Lord, who had said to him, 
 Amis, our Lord commands thee that thou bid Amile 
 slay his two children, and wash thee in their blood, and 
 so thou shalt be healed of thy leprosy. And Amile was 
 greatly disturbed at those words, and said, I would have 
 given to thee my man-servants and my maid-servants 
 and all my goods, and thou feignest that an angel hath 
 spoken to thee that I should slay my two children. And 
 immediately Amis began to weep, and said, I know that 
 I have spoken to thee a terrible thing, but constrained 
 thereto ; I pray thee cast me not away from the shelter 
 of thy house. And Amile answered that what he had 
 covenanted with him, that he would perform, unto the 
 hour of his death : But I conjure thee, said he, by the 
 faith which there is between me and thee, and by our 
 comradeship, and by the baptism we received together 
 at Rome, that thou tell me whether it was man or angel 
 
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES ir 
 
 said that to thee. And Amis answered again, So truly 
 as an angel hath spoken to me this night, so may God 
 deliver me from my infirmity! 
 
 "Then Amile began to weep in secret, and thought 
 within himself : If this man was ready to die before 
 the king for me, shall I not for him slay my children? 
 Shall I not keep faith with him who was faithful to me 
 even unto death? And Amile tarried no longer, but 
 departed to the chamber of his wife, and bade her go 
 hear the Sacred Office. And he took a sword, and went 
 to the bed where the children were lying, and found 
 them asleep. And he lay down over them and began to 
 weep bitterly and said, Hath any man yet heard of a 
 father who of his own will slew his children ? Alas, my 
 children! I am no longer your father, but your cruel 
 murderer. 
 
 "And the children awoke at the tears of their father, 
 which fell upon them; and they looked up into his face 
 and began to laugh, And as they were of the age of 
 about three years, he said, Your laughing will be turned 
 into tears, for your innocent blood must now be shed, 
 and therewith he cut off their heads. Then he laid them 
 back in the bed, and put the heads upon the bodies, and 
 covered them as though they slept: and with the blood 
 which he had taken he washed his comrade, and said, 
 Lord Jesus Christ! who hast commanded men to keep 
 faith on earth, and didst heal the leper by Thy word! 
 cleanse now my comrade, for whose love I have shed 
 the blood of my children. 
 
 "Then Amis was cleansed of his leprosy. And Amile 
 clothed his companion in his best robes; and as they 
 went to the church to give thanks, the bells, by the will 
 of God, rang of their own accord. And when the peo- 
 ple of the city heard that, they ran together to see the 
 marvel. And the wife of Amile, when she saw Amis and 
 Amile coming, asked which of the twain was her hus- 
 band, and said, I know well the vesture of them both, 
 but I know not which of them is Amile. And Amile 
 
12 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 said to her, I am Amile, and my companion is Amis, 
 who is healed of his sickness. And she was full of won- 
 der, and desired to know in what manner he was healed. 
 Give thanks to our Lord, answered Amile, but trouble not 
 thyself as to the manner of the healing. 
 
 "Now neither the father nor the mother had yet en- 
 tered where the children were; but the father sighed 
 heavily, because they were dead, and the mother asked 
 for them, that they might rejoice together; but Amile 
 said, Dame! let the children sleep. And it was already 
 the hour of Tierce. And going in alone to the children 
 to weep over them, he found them at play in the bed; 
 only, in the place of the sword-cuts about their throats 
 was as it were a thread of crimson. And he took them 
 in his arms and carried them to his wife and said, Re- 
 joice greatly, for thy children whom I had slain by the 
 commandment of the angel are alive, and by their blood 
 is Amis healed." 
 
 There, as I said, is the strength of the old French 
 story. For the Renaissance has not only the sweetness 
 which it derives from the classical world, but also that 
 curious strength of which there are great resources in 
 the true middle age. And as I have illustrated the early 
 strength of the Renaissance by the story of Amis and 
 Amile, a story which comes from the North, in which 
 a certain racy Teutonic flavor is perceptible, so I shall 
 illustrate that other element, its early sweetness, a lan- 
 guid excess of sweetness even, by another story printed 
 in the same volume of the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne , and 
 of about the same date, a story which comes, character- 
 istically, from the South, and connects itself with the 
 literature of Provence. 
 
 The central love-poetry of Provence, the poetry of the 
 Tens on and the Aubade, of Bernard de Ventadour and 
 
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 13 
 
 Pierre Vidal, is poetry for the few, for the elect and 
 peculiar people of the kingdom of sentiment. But below 
 this intenser poetry there was probably a wide range of 
 literature, less serious and elevated, reaching, by 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 perished, or lives only in later French or Italian 
 versions. One such version, the only representative of 
 its species, M. Fauriel thought he detected in the story 
 of Aucassin and Nicolette, written in the French of the 
 latter half of the thirteenth century, and preserved in a 
 unique manuscript, in the national library of Paris ; and 
 there were reasons which made him divine for it a still 
 more ancient ancestry, traces in it of an Arabian origin, 
 as in a leaf lost out of some early Arabian Nights. 1 The 
 little book loses none of its interest through the criticism 
 which finds in it only a traditional subject, handed on by 
 one people to another; for after passing thus from hand 
 to hand, its outline is still clear, its surface untarnished; 
 and, like many other stories, books, literary and artistic 
 conceptions of the middle age, it has come to have in this 
 way a sort of personal history, almost as full of risk and 
 adventure as that of its own heroes. The writer himself 
 
 1 Recently, Aucassin and Nicolette has been edited and 
 translated into English, with much graceful scholarship, by 
 Mr. F. W. Bourdillon. Still more recently we have had a 
 translation — a poet's translation — from the ingenious and 
 versatile pen of Mr. Andrew Lang. The reader should con- 
 sult also the chapter on "The Out-door Poetry/' in Ver- 
 non Lee's most interesting Euphorion; being Studies of 
 the Antique and Mediaeval in the Renaissance, a work 
 abounding in knowledge and insight on the subjects of 
 which it treats. 
 
14 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 calls the piece a cantefable, a tale told in prose, but witH 
 its incidents and sentiment helped forward by songs, in- 
 serted at irregular intervals. In the junctions of the 
 story itself there are signs of roughness and want of 
 skill, which make one suspect that the prose was only 
 put together to connect a series of songs — a series of 
 songs so moving and attractive that people wished to 
 heighten and dignify their effect by a regular framework 
 or setting. Yet the songs themselves are of the simplest 
 kind, not rhymed even, but only imperfectly assonant, 
 stanzas of twenty or thirty lines apiece, all ending witli 
 a similar vowel sound. And here, as elsewhere in that 
 early poetry, much of the interest lies in the spectacle 
 of the formation of a new artistic sense. A novel art 
 is arising, the music of rhymed poetry, and in the songs 
 of Aucassin and Nicolette, which seem always on the 
 point of passing into true rhyme, but which halt some- 
 how, and can never quite take flight, you see people just 
 growing aware of the elements of a new music in their 
 possession, and anticipating how pleasant such music 
 might become. 
 
 The piece was probably intended to be recited by a 
 company of trained performers, many of whom, at least 
 for the lesser parts, were probably children. The songs 
 are introduced by the rubric, Or se cante (ici on chante) ; 
 and each division of prose by the rubric, Or dient et con- 
 tent et fabloient {ici on conte). The musical notes of 
 a portion of the songs have been preserved ; and some of 
 the details are so descriptive that they suggested to M. 
 Fauriel the notion that the words had been accompanied 
 throughout by dramatic action. That mixture of sim- 
 plicity and refinement which he was surprised to find in 
 
 / 
 
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 15 
 
 a composition of the thirteenth century, is shown some- 
 times in the turn given to some passing expression or 
 remark; thus, "the Count de Garins was old and frail, 
 his time was over" — Li quens Garins de Beaucaire estoit 
 vix et frales; si avoit son tans trespasse. And then, all 
 is so realised! One sees the ancient forest, with its dis- 
 used roads grown deep with grass, and the place where 
 seven roads meet — u a forkeut set cemin qui s y en vont 
 par le pais; we hear the light-hearted country people 
 calling each other by their rustic names, and putting for- 
 ward, as their spokesman, one among them who is more 
 eloquent and ready than the rest — li un qui plus fu en* 
 paries des autres; for the little book has its burlesque 
 element also, so that one hears the faint, far-off laughter 
 still. Rough as it is, the piece certainly possesses this 
 high quality of poetry, that it aims at a purely artistic 
 effect. Its subject is a great sorrow, yet it claims to be 
 a thing of joy and refreshment, to be entertained not 
 for its matter only, but chiefly for its manner, it is 
 cortois, it tells us, et bien assis. 
 
 For the student of manners, and of the old French 
 language and literature, it has much interest of a purely 
 antiquarian order. To say of an ancient literary com- 
 position that it has an antiquarian interest, often means 
 that it has no distinct aesthetic interest for the reader of 
 to-day. Antiquarianism, by a purely historical effort, by 
 putting its object in perspective, and setting the reader 
 in a certain point of view, from which what gave pleas- 
 ure to the past is pleasurable for him also, may ofterj 
 add greatly to the charm we receive from ancient litera- 
 ture. But the first condition of such aid must be a real, 
 direct, aesthetic charm in the thing itself. Unless it has 
 
i6 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 that charm, unless some purely artistic quality went to 
 its original making, no merely antiquarian effort can 
 ever give it an aesthetic value, or make it a proper sub- 
 ject of aesthetic criticism. This quality, wherever it ex- 
 ists, it is always pleasant to define, and discriminate 
 from the sort of borrowed interest which an old play, 
 or an old story, may very likely acquire through a true 
 antiquarianism. The story of Aucassin and Nicolette 
 has something of this quality. Aucassin, the only son of 
 Court Garins of Beaucaire, is passionately in love with 
 Nicolette, a beautiful girl of unknown parentage, bought 
 of the Saracens, whom his father will not permit him to 
 marry. The story turns on the adventures of these two 
 lovers, until at the end of the piece their mutual fidelity 
 is rewarded. These adventures are of the simplest sort, 
 adventures which seem to be chosen for the happy oc- 
 casion they afford of keeping the eye of the fancy, per- 
 haps the outward eye, fixed on pleasant objects, a gar- 
 den, a ruined tower, the little hut of flowers which Nico- 
 lette constructs in the forest whither she escapes from 
 her enemies, as a token to Aucassin that she has passed 
 that way. All the charm of the piece is in its details, in 
 a turn of peculiar lightness and grace given to the situa- 
 tions and traits of sentiment, especially in its quaint 
 fragments of early French prose. 
 
 All through it one feels the influence of that faint air 
 of overwrought delicacy, almost of wantonness, which 
 was so strong a characteristic of the poetry of the Trou- 
 badours. The Troubadours themselves were often men 
 of great rank; they wrote for an exclusive audience, 
 people of much leisure and great refinement, and they 
 came to value a type of personal beauty which has in it 
 
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 17 
 
 but little of the influence of the open air and sunshine. 
 There is a languid Eastern deliciousness in the very 
 scenery of the story, the full-blown roses, the chamber 
 painted in some mysterious manner where Nicolette is 
 imprisoned, the cool brown marble, the almost nameless 
 colors, the odors of plucked grass and flowers. Nico- 
 lette herself well becomes this scenery, and is the best 
 illustration of the quality I mean — the beautiful, weird, 
 foreign girl, whom the shepherds take for a fay, who has 
 the knowledge of simples, the healing and beautifying 
 qualities of leaves and flowers, whose skilful touch heals 
 Aucassin's sprained shoulder, so that he suddenly leaps 
 from the ground; the mere sight of whose white flesh, 
 as she passed the place where he lay, healed a pilgrim 
 stricken with sore disease, so that he rose up, and re- 
 turned to his own country. With this girl Aucassin is 
 so deeply in love that he forgets all knightly duties. At 
 last Nicolette is shut up to get her out of his way, and 
 perhaps the prettiest passage in the whole piece is the 
 fragment of prose which describes her escape: — 
 
 "Aucassin was put in prison, as you have heard, and 
 Nicolette remained shut up in her chamber. It was 
 summer-time, in the month of May, when the days are 
 warm and long and clear, and the nights coy and serene. 
 
 "One night Nicolette, lying on her bed, saw the moon 
 shine clear through the little window, and heard the 
 nightingale sing in the garden, and then came the mem- 
 ory of Aucassin, whom she so much loved. She thought 
 of the Count Garins of Beaucaire, who mortally hated 
 her, and, to be rid of her, might at any moment cause 
 her to be burned or drowned. She perceived that the 
 old woman who kept her company was asleep ; she rose 
 and put on the fairest gown she had ; she took the bed- 
 
i8 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 clothes and the towels, and knotted them together like 
 a cord, as far as they would go. Then she tied the end 
 to a pillar of the window, and let herself slip down quite 
 softly into the garden, and passed straight across it, to 
 reach the town. 
 
 "Her hair was yellow in small curls, her smiling eyes 
 blue-green, her face clear and feat, the little lips very 
 red, the teeth small and white ; and the daisies which she 
 crushed in passing, holding her skirt high behind and 
 before, looked dark against her feet; the girl was so 
 white ! 
 
 "She came to the garden-gate and opened it, and 
 walked through the streets of Beaucaire, keeping on the 
 dark side of the way to be out of the light of the moon, 
 which shone quietly in the sky. She walked as fast as 
 she could, until she came to the tower where Aucassin 
 was. The tower was set about with pillars, here and 
 there. She pressed herself against one of the pillars, 
 wrapped herself closely in her mantle, and putting her 
 face to a chink of the tower, which was old and ruined, 
 she heard Aucassin crying bitterly within, and when 
 she had listened awhile she began to speak." 
 
 But scattered up and down through this lighter matter, 
 always tinged with humor and often passing into bur- 
 lesque, which makes up the general substance of the 
 piece, there are morsels of a different quality, touches 
 of some intenser sentiment, coming it would seem from 
 the profound and energetic spirit of the Provengal 
 poetry itself, to which the inspiration of the book has 
 been referred. Let me gather up these morsels of 
 deeper color, these expressions of the ideal intensity of 
 love, the motive which really unites together the frag- 
 ments of the little composition. Dante, the perfect 
 flower of ideal love, has recorded how the tyranny of 
 that "Lord of terrible aspect" became actually physical, 
 
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 19 
 
 blinding his senses, and suspending his bodily forces. In 
 this, Dante is but the central expression and type of ex- 
 periences known well enough to the initiated, in thai 
 passionate age. Aucassin represents this ideal intensity 
 of passion — 
 
 Aucassin, li biax, li blons, 
 Li gentix, li amorous; — 
 
 the slim, tall, debonair, dansellon, as the singers call 
 him, with his curled yellow hair, and eyes of voir, who 
 faints with love, as Dante fainted, who rides all day 
 through the forest in search of Nicolette, while the 
 thorns tear his flesh, so that one might have traced him 
 by the blood upon the grass, and who weeps at eventide 
 because he has not found her, who has the malady of 
 his love, and neglects all knightly duties. Once he is 
 induced to put himself at the head of his people, that 
 they, seeing him before them, might have more heart 
 to defend themselves ; then a song relates how the sweet, 
 grave figure goes forth to battle, in dainty, tight-laced 
 armor. It is the very image of the Provengal lorve-god, 
 no longer a child, but grown to pensive youth, as Pierre 
 Vidal met him, riding on a white horse, fair as the 
 morning, his vestment embroidered with flowers. He 
 rode on through the gates into the open plain beyond. 
 But as he went, that great malady of his love came upon 
 him. The bridle fell from his hands ; and like one who 
 sleeps walking, he was carried on into the midst of his 
 enemies, and heard them talking together how they 
 might most conveniently kill him. 
 
 One of the strongest characteristics of that outbreak 
 of the reason and the imagination, of that assertion of 
 
20 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 the liberty of the heart, in the middle age, which I have 
 termed a medieval Renaissance, was its antinomianism, 
 its spirit of rebellion and revolt against the moral and 
 religious ideas of the time. In their search after the 
 pleasures of the senses and the imagination, in their 
 care for beauty, in their worship of the body, people 
 were impelled beyond the bounds of the Christian ideal; 
 and* their love became sometimes a strange idolatry, a 
 strange rival religion. It was the return of that ancient 
 Venus, not dead, but only hidden for a time in the 
 caves of the Venusberg, of those old pagan gods still 
 going to and fro on the earth, under all sorts of dis- 
 guises. And this element in the middle age, for the 
 most part ignored by those writers who have treated 
 it pre-eminently as the "Age of Faith" — this rebellious 
 and antinomian element, the recognition of which has 
 made the delineation of the middle age by the writers of 
 the Romantic school in France, by Victor Hugo for in- 
 stance in Notre-Dame de Paris, so suggestive and ex- 
 citing — is found alike in the history of Abelard and the 
 legend of Tannhauser. More and more, as we come to 
 mark changes and distinctions of temper in what is often 
 in one all-embracing confusion called the middle age, 
 that rebellion, that sinister claim for liberty of heart and 
 thought, comes to the surface. The Albigensian move- 
 ment, connected so strangely with the history of Pro- 
 vencal poetry, is deeply tinged with it. A touch of it 
 makes the Franciscan order, with its poetry, its mysti- 
 cism, its "illumination," from the point of view of re- 
 ligious authority, justly suspect. It influences the 
 thoughts of those obscure prophetical writers, like Joa- 
 chim of Flora, strange dreamers in a world of flowery 
 
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 21 
 
 rhetoric of that third and final dispensation of a "spiri£ 
 of freedom/' in which law shall have passed away. Of 
 this spirit Aucassin and Nicolette contains perhaps the 
 most famous expression : it is the answer Aucassin gives 
 when he is threatened with the pains of hell, if he makes 
 Nicolette his mistress. A creature wholly of affection 
 and the senses, he sees on the way to paradise only a 
 feeble and worn-out company of aged priests, "clinging 
 day and night to the chapel altars/' barefoot or in 
 patched sandals. With or even without Nicolette, "his 
 sweet mistress whom he so much loves/' he, for his part, 
 is ready to start on the way to hell, along with "the good 
 scholars," as he says, and the actors, and the fine horse- 
 men dead in battle, and the men of fashion, 1 and "the 
 fair courteous ladies who had two or three chevaliers 
 apiece beside their own true lords," all gay with music, 
 in their gold, and silver, and beautiful furs — "the vair 
 and the grey." 
 
 But in the House Beautiful the saints, too, have their 
 place; and the student of the Renaissance has this ad- 
 vantage over the student of the emancipation of the 
 human mind in the Reformation, or the French Revolu- 
 tion, that in tracing the footsteps of humanity to higher 
 levels, he is not beset at every turn by the inflexibilities 
 and antagonisms of some well-recognised controversy, 
 with rigidly defined opposites, exhausting the intelli- 
 gence and limiting one's sympathies. The opposition 
 of the professional defenders of a mere system to that 
 
 x Parage, peerage: — which came to signify all that am- 
 bitious youth affected most on the outside of life, in that 
 old world of the Troubadours, with whom this term is of 
 frequent recurrence. 
 
£2 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 more sincere and generous play of the forces of human 
 mind and character, which I have noted as the secret 
 of Abelard's struggle, is, indeed, always powerful. But 
 the incompatibility with one another of souls really 
 "fair** is not essential; and within the enchanted region 
 of the Renaissance one needs not be for ever on one's 
 guard. Here there are no fixed parties, no exclusions: 
 all- breathes of that unity of culture in which "whatso- 
 ever things are comely" are reconciled, for the elevation 
 and adorning of our spirits. And just in proportion as 
 those who took part in the Renaissance become cen- 
 trally representative of it, just so much the more is this 
 condition realised in them. The wicked popes, and the 
 loveless tyrants, who from time to time became its 
 patrons, or mere speculators in its fortunes, lend them- 
 selves easily to disputations, and, from this side or that, 
 the spirit of controversy lays just hold upon them. But 
 the painter of the Last Supper, with his kindred, lives 
 in a land where controversy has no breathing-place. 
 They refuse to be classified. In the story of Aucassin 
 and Nicolette, in the literature which it represents, the 
 note of defiance, of the opposition of one system to an- 
 other, is sometimes harsh. Let me conclude then with 
 a morsel from Amis and Amile, in which the harmony 
 of human interests is still entire. For the story of the 
 great traditional friendship, in which, as I said, the lib- 
 erty of the heart makes itself felt, seems, as we have it, 
 to have been written by a monk — La vie des saints mar- 
 tyrs Amis et Amile. It was not till the end of the seven- 
 teenth century that their names were finally excluded 
 from the martyrology ; and their story ends with this 
 
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES 23 
 
 monkish miracle of earthly comradeship, more than 
 faithful unto death: — 
 
 ''For, as God had united them in their lives in one ac- 
 cord, so they were not divided in their death, falling 
 together side by side, with a host of other brave men, 
 in battle for King Charles at Mortara, so called from 
 that great slaughter. And the bishops gave counsel to 
 the king and queen that they should bury the dead, and 
 build a church in that place; and their counsel pleased 
 the king greatly. And there were built two churches, 
 the one by commandment of the king in honor of Saint 
 Oseige, and the other by commandment of the queen in 
 honor of Saint Peter. 
 
 "And the king caused the two chests of stone to be 
 brought in the which the bodies of Amis and Amile lay ; 
 and Amile was carried to the church of Saint Peter, and 
 Amis to the church of Saint Oseige; and the other 
 corpses were buried, some in one place and some in the 
 other. But lo ! next morning, the body of Amile in his 
 coffin was found lying in the church of Saint Oseige, 
 beside the coffin of Amis his comrade. Behold then this 
 wondrous amity, which by death could not be dissevered ! 
 
 "This miracle God did, who gave to His disciples 
 power to remove mountains. And by reason of this 
 miracle the king and queen remained in that place for a 
 space of thirty days, and performed the offices of the 
 dead who were slain, and honored the said churches 
 with great gifts. And the bishop ordained many clerks 
 to serve in the church of Saint Oseige, and commanded 
 them that they should guard duly, with great devotion, 
 the bodies of the two companions, Amis and Amile." 
 
 1872. 
 
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA 
 
 No account of the Renaissance can be complete with- 
 out some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian 
 scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity 
 with the religion of ancient Greece. To reconcile forms 
 of sentiment which at first sight seem incompatible, to 
 adjust the various products of the human mind to one 
 another in one many-sided type of intellectual culture, 
 to give humanity, for heart and imagination to feed 
 upon, as much as it could possibly receive, belonged to 
 the generous instincts of that age. An earlier and sim- 
 pler generation had seen in the gods of Greece so many 
 malignant spirits, the defeated but still living centers of 
 the religion of darkness, struggling, not always in vain, 
 against the kingdom of light. Little by little, as the 
 natural charm of pagan story reasserted itself over minds 
 emerging out of barbarism, the religious significance 
 which had once belonged to it was lost sight of, and it 
 came to be regarded as the subject of a purely artistic 
 or poetical treatment. But it was inevitable that from 
 time to time minds should arise, deeply enough im- 
 pressed by its beauty and power to ask themselves 
 whether the religion of Greece was indeed a rival of the 
 religion of Christ; for the older gods had rehabilitated 
 themselves, and men's allegiance was divided. And the 
 fifteenth century was an impassioned age, so ardent and 
 serious in its pursuit of art that it consecrated every- 
 
 24 
 
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA 25 
 
 thing with which art had to do as a religious object. 
 The restored Greek literature had made it familiar, at 
 least in Plato, with a style of expression concerning the 
 earlier gods, which had about it something of the warmth 
 and unction of a Christian hymn. It was too familiar 
 with such language to regard mythology as a mere story ; 
 and it was too serious to play with a religion. 
 
 "Let me briefly remind the reader" — says Heine, in 
 the "Gods in Exile," an essay full of that strange blend- 
 ing of sentiment which is characteristic of the traditions 
 of the middle age concerning the pagan religions — "how 
 the gods of the older world, at the time of the definite 
 triumph of Christianity, that is, in the third century, 
 fell into painful embarrassments, which greatly resem- 
 bled certain tragical situations of their earlier life. They 
 now found themselves beset by the same troublesome 
 necessities to which they had once before been exposed 
 during the primitive ages, in that revolutionary epoch 
 when the Titans broke out of the custody of Orcus, and, 
 piling Pelion on Ossa, scaled Olympus. Unfortunate, 
 gods! They had then to take flight ignominiously, and 
 hide themselves among us here on earth, under all sorts 
 of disguises. The larger number betook themselves to 
 Egypt, where for greater security they assumed the 
 forms of animals, as is generally known. Just in the 
 same way, they had to take flight again, and seek enter- 
 tainment in remote hiding-places, when those iconoclas- 
 tic zealots, the black brood of monks, broke down all 
 the temples, and pursued the gods with fire and curses. 
 Many of these unfortunate emigrants, now entirely de- 
 prived of shelter and ambrosia, must needs take to vul- 
 gar handicrafts, as a means of earning their bread. Un- 
 
26 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 der these circumstances, many whose sacred groves had 
 been confiscated, let themselves out for hire as wood- 
 cutters in Germany, and were forced to drink beer in- 
 stead of nectar. Apollo seems to have been content to 
 take service under graziers, and as he had once kept the 
 cows of Admetus, so he lived now as a shepherd in 
 Lower Austria. Here, however, having become sus- 
 pected on account of his beautiful singing, he was recog- 
 nised by a learned monk as one of the old pagan gods, 
 and handed over to the spiritual tribunal. On the rack 
 he confessed that he was the god Apollo ; and before his 
 execution he begged that he might be suffered to play 
 once more upon the lyre, and to sing a song. And he 
 played so touchingly, and sang with such magic, and was 
 withal so beautiful in form and feature, that all the 
 women wept, and many of them were so deeply im- 
 pressed that they shortly afterwards fell sick. Some 
 time afterwards the people wished to drag him from 
 the grave again, that a stake might be driven through 
 his body, in the belief that he had been a vampire, and 
 that the sick women would by this means recover. But 
 they found the grave empty/' 
 
 The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many 
 things, great rather by what it designed than by what it 
 achieved. Much which it aspired to do, and did but 
 imperfectly or mistakenly, was accomplished in what is 
 called the eclaircissement of the eighteenth century, or 
 in our own generation; and what really belongs to the 
 revival of the fifteenth century is but the leading in- 
 stinct, the curiosity, the initiatory idea. It is so with 
 this very question of the reconciliation of the religion of 
 antiquity with the religion of Christ. A modern scholar 
 
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA 27 
 
 occupied by this problem might observe that all religions 
 may be regarded as natural products, that, at least in 
 their origin, their growth, and decay, they have common 
 laws, and are not to be isolated from the other move- 
 ments of the human mind in the periods in which they 
 respectively prevailed ; that they arise spontaneously out 
 of the human mind, as expressions of the varying phases 
 of its sentiment concerning the unseen world ; that every 
 intellectual product must be judged from the point of 
 view of the age and the people in which it was produced. 
 He might go on to observe that each has contributed 
 something to the development of the religious sense, and 
 ranging them as so many stages in the gradual educa- 
 tion of the human mind, justify the existence of each. 
 The basis of the reconciliation of the religions of the 
 world would thus be the inexhaustible activity and crea- 
 tiveness of the human mind itself, in which all religions 
 alike have their root, and In which all alike are recon- 
 ciled; just as the fancies of childhood and the thoughts 
 of old age meet and are laid to rest, in the experience of 
 the individual. 
 
 Far different was the method followed by the scholars 
 of the fifteenth century. They lacked the very rudi* 
 ments of the historic sense, which, by an imaginative 
 act, throws itself back into a world unlike one's own, 
 and estimates every intellectual creation in its connection 
 with the age from which it proceeded. They had no 
 idea of development, of the differences of ages, of the 
 process by which our race has been "educated." In their 
 attempts to reconcile the religions of the world, they 
 were thus thrown back upon the quicksand of allegorical 
 interpretation. The religions of the world were to be 
 
28 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 reconciled, not as successive stages in a regular develop- 
 ment of the religious sense, but as subsisting side by 
 side, and substantially in agreement with one another. 
 And here the first necessity was to misrepresent the lan- 
 guage, the conceptions, the sentiments, it was proposed 
 to compare and reconcile. Plato and Homer must be 
 made to speak agreeably to Moses. Set side by side, 
 the mere surfaces could never unite in any harmony of 
 design. Therefore one must go below the surface, and 
 bring up the supposed secondary, or still more remote 
 meaning, — that diviner signification held in reserve, in 
 recessu divinius aliquid, latent in some stray touch of 
 Homer, or figure of speech in the book of Moses. 
 
 And yet as a curiosity of the human mind, a "mad- 
 house-cell," if you will, into which we may peep for a 
 moment, and see it at work weaving strange fancies, 
 the allegorical interpretation of the fifteenth century 
 has its interest. With its strange web of imagery, its 
 quaint conceits, its unexpected combinations and subtle 
 moralising, it is an element in the local color of a great 
 age. It illustrates also the faith of that age in all oracles, 
 its desire to hear all voices, its generous belief that noth- 
 ing which had ever interested the human mind could 
 wholly lose its vitality. It is the counterpart, though 
 certainly the feebler counterpart, of that practical truce 
 and reconciliation of the gods of Greece with the Chris- 
 tian religion, which is seen in the art of the time. And 
 it is for his share in this work, and because his own story 
 is a sort of analogue or visible equivalent to the expres- 
 sion of this purpose in his writings, that something of a 
 general interest still belongs to the name of Pico della 
 Mirandola, whose life, written by his nephew Francis, 
 
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA 29 
 
 seemed worthy, for some touch of sweetness in it, to be 
 translated out of the original Latin by Sir Thomas More, 
 that great lover of Italian culture, among whose works 
 the life of Pico, Earl of Mirandola, and a great lord of 
 Italy, as he calls him, may still be read, in its quaint, 
 antiquated English. 
 
 Marsilio Ficino has told us how Pico came to Florence. 
 It was the very day — some day probably in the year 1482 
 — on which Ficino had finished his famous translation 
 of Plato into Latin, the work to which he had been dedi- 
 cated from childhood by Cosmo de' Medici, in further- 
 ance of his desire to resuscitate the knowledge of Plato 
 among his fellow-citizens. Florence indeed, as M. 
 Renan has pointed out, had always had an affinity for 
 the mystic and dreamy philosophy of Plato, while the 
 colder and more practical philosophy of Aristotle had 
 flourished in Padua, and other cities of the north; and 
 the Florentines, though they knew perhaps very little 
 about him, had had the name of the great idealist often 
 on their lips. To increase this knowledge, Cosmo had 
 founded the Platonic academy, with periodical discus- 
 sions at the Villa Careggi. The fall of Constantinople 
 in 1453, and the council in 1438 for the reconciliation of 
 the Greek and Latin Churches, had brought to Florence 
 many a needy Greek scholar. And now the work was 
 completed, the door of the mystical temple lay open to 
 all who could construe Latin, and the scholar rested from 
 his labor; when there was introduced into his study, 
 where a lamp burned continually before the bust of 
 Plato, as other men burned lamps before their favorite 
 saints, a young man fresh from a journey, "of feature 
 and shape seemly and beauteous, of stature goodly and 
 
30 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 high, of flesh tender and soft, his visage lovely and fair, 
 his color white, intermingled with comely reds, his eyes 
 grey, and quick of look, his teeth white and even, his 
 hair yellow and abundant," and trimmed with more than 
 the usual artifice of the time. 
 
 It is thus that Sir Thomas More translates the words 
 of the biographer of Pico, who, even in outward form 
 and appearance, seems an image of that inward har- 
 mony and completeness, of which he is so perfect an 
 example. The word mystic has been usually derived 
 from a Greek word which signifies to shut, as if one shut 
 one's lips brooding on what cannot be uttered; but the 
 Platonists themselves derive it rather from the act of 
 shutting the eyes, that one may see the more, inwardly. 
 Perhaps the eyes of the mystic Ficino, now long past 
 the midway of life, had come to be thus half-closed; 
 but when a young man, not unlike the archangel Raphael, 
 as the Florentines of that age depicted him in his won- 
 derful walk with Tobit, or Mercury, as he might have 
 appeared in a painting by Sandro Botticelli or Piero di 
 Cosimo, entered his chamber, he seems to have thought 
 there was something not wholly earthly about him; at 
 least, he ever afterwards believed that it was not with- 
 out the cooperation of the stars that the stranger had 
 arrived on that day. For it happened that they fell into 
 a conversation, deeper and more intimate than men 
 usually fall into at first sight. During this conversation 
 Ficino formed the design of devoting his remaining 
 years to the translation of Plotinus, that new Plato, in 
 whom the mystical element in the Platonic philosophy 
 had been v/orked out to the utmost limit of vision and 
 ecstasy; and it is in dedicating this translation to Lo- 
 
PICO BELLA MIRANDOLA 31 
 
 renzo de' Medici that Ficino has recorded these inci- 
 dents. 
 
 It was after many wanderings, wanderings of the in- 
 tellect as well as physical journeys, that Pico came to 
 rest at Florence. Born in 1463, he was then about 
 twenty years old. He was called Giovanni at baptism, 
 Pico, like all his ancestors, from Picus, nephew of the 
 Emperor Constantine, from whom they claimed to be 
 descended, and Mirandola from the place of his birth, 
 a little town afterwards part of the duchy of Modena, 
 of which small territory his family had long been the 
 feudal lords. Pico was the youngest of the family, and 
 his mother, delighting in his wonderful memory, sent 
 him at the age of fourteen to the famous school of law 
 at Bologna. From the first, indeed, she seems to have 
 had some presentiment of his future fame, for, with a 
 faith in omens characteristic of her time, she believed 
 that a strange circumstance had happened at the time of 
 Pico's birth — the appearance of a circular flame which 
 suddenly vanished away, on the wall of the chamber 
 where she lay. He remained two years at Bologna ; and 
 then, with an inexhaustible, unrivalled thirst for knowl- 
 edge, the strange, confused, uncritical learning of that 
 age, passed through the principal schools of Italy and 
 France, penetrating, as he thought, into the secrets of 
 all ancient philosophies, and many Eastern languages. 
 And with this flood of erudition came the generous hope, 
 so often disabused, of reconciling the philosophers with 
 one another, and all alike with the Church. At last he 
 came to Rome. There, like some knight-errant of phi- 
 losophy, he offered to defend nine hundred bold para- 
 doxes, drawn from the most opposite sources, against 
 
3* 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 all comers. But the pontifical court was led to suspect 
 the orthodoxy of some of these propositions, and even 
 the reading of the book which contained them was for- 
 bidden by the Pope. It was not until 1493 that Pico 
 was finally absolved, by a brief of Alexander the Sixth. 
 Ten years before that date he had arrived at Florence; 
 an early instance of those who, after following the vain 
 hope of an impossible reconciliation from system to sys- 
 tem, have at last fallen back unsatisfied on the simplici- 
 ties of their childhood's belief. 
 
 The oration which Pico composed for the opening of 
 this philosophical tournament still remains; its subject is 
 the dignity of human nature, the greatness of man. In 
 common with nearly all medieval speculation, much of 
 Pico's writing has this for its drift; and in common 
 also with it, Pico's theory of that dignity is founded on 
 a misconception of the place in nature both of the earth 
 and of man. For Pico the earth is the center of the 
 universe : and around it, as a fixed and motionless point, 
 the sun and moon and stars revolve, like diligent serv- 
 ants or ministers. And in the midst of all is placed 
 man, nodus et vinculum mundi, the bond or copula of 
 the world, and the "interpreter of nature" : that famous 
 expression of Bacon's really belongs to Pico. Tritum 
 est in scholis, he says, esse hominem minorem mundum, 
 in quo mixtum ex elementis corpus et spiritus coelestis 
 et plantarum anima vegetalis et brutorum sensus et ratio 
 et angelica mens et Dei similitudo conspicitur — "It is a 
 commonplace of the schools that man is a little world, 
 in which we may discern a body mingled of earthly ele- 
 ments, and ethereal breath, and the vegetable life of 
 plants, and the senses of the lower animals, and reason, 
 
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA 
 
 2nd the intelligence of angels, and a likeness to God." 
 
 A commonplace of the schools! But perhaps it had 
 some new significance and authority, when men heard 
 jme like Pico reiterate it ; and, false as its basis was, the 
 theory had its use. For this high dignity of man, thus 
 [bringing the dust under his feet into sensible communion 
 with the thoughts and affections of the angels, was sup- 
 posed to belong to him, not as renewed by a religious 
 system, but by his own natural right. The proclamation 
 of it was a counterpoise to the increasing tendency of 
 medieval religion to depreciate man's nature, to sacrifice 
 this or that element in it, to make it ashamed of itself, 
 to keep the degrading or painful accidents of it always 
 in view. It helped man onward to that reassertion of 
 himself, that rehabilitation of human nature, the body, 
 the senses, the heart, the intelligence, which the Renais- 
 sance fulfils. And yet to read a page of one of Pico's 
 forgotten books is like a glance into one of those ancient 
 sepulchres, upon which the wanderer in classical lands 
 has sometimes stumbled, with the old disused ornaments 
 and furniture of a world wholly unlike ours still fresh 
 in them. That whole conception of nature is so different 
 from our own. For Pico the world is a limited place, 
 bounded by actual crystal walls, and a material firma- 
 ment; it is like a painted toy, like that map or system of 
 the world, held, as a great target or shield, in the hands 
 of the creative Logos, by whom the Father made all 
 things, in one of the earlier frescoes of the Campo Santo 
 at Pisa. How different from this childish dream is our 
 own conception of nature, with its unlimited space, its 
 innumerable suns, and the earth but a mote in the beam ; 
 how different the strange new awe, or superstition, witfr 
 
34 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 which it fills our minds! 'The silence of those infinite 
 spaces," says Pascal, contemplating a starlight night, "the 
 silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me" : — he silence 
 eternel de ces es paces infinis m'effraie. 
 
 He was already almost wearied out when he came to 
 Florence. He had loved much and been beloved by 
 women, "wandering over the crooked hills of delicious 
 pleasure"; but their reign over him was over, and long 
 before Savonarola's famous "bonfire of vanities/' he 
 had destroyed those love-songs in the vulgar tongue, 
 which would have been so great a relief to us, after the 
 scholastic prolixity of his Latin writings. It was in an- 
 other spirit that he composed a Platonic commentary, 
 the only work of his in Italian which has come down to 
 us, on the "Song of Divine Love" — secondo la mente ed 
 opinione dei Platonici — "according to the mind and 
 opinion of the Platonists," by his friend Hieronymo 
 Beniveni, in which, with an ambitious array of every 
 sort of learning, and a profusion of imagery borrowed 
 indifferently from the astrologers, the Cabala, and 
 Homer, and Scripture, and Dionysius the Areopagite, 
 he attempts to define the stages by which the soul passes 
 from the earthly to the unseen beauty. A change, in- 
 deed, had passed over him, as if the chilling touch of the 
 abstract and disembodied beauty Platonists profess to 
 long for were already upon him. Some sense of this, 
 perhaps, coupled with that over-brightness which in the 
 popular imagination always betokens an early death, 
 made Camilla Rucellai, one of those prophetic women 
 whom the preaching of Savonarola had raised up in 
 Florence, declare, seeing him for the first time, that he 
 would depart in the time of lilies — prematurely, that is, 
 
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA 35 
 
 like the field-flowers which are withered by the scorch- 
 ing sun almost as soon as they are sprung up. He now 
 wrote down those thoughts on the religious life which 
 Sir Thomas More turned into English, and which an- 
 other English translator thought worthy to be added to 
 the books of the Imitation. "It is not hard to know 
 God, provided one will not force one's self to define 
 Him" : — has been thought a great saying of Joubert's. 
 "Love God," Pico writes to Angelo Politian, "we rather 
 may, than either know Him, or by speech utter Him. 
 And yet had men liefer by knowledge never find that 
 which they seek, than by love possess that thing, which 
 also without love were in vain found." 
 
 Yet he who had this fine touch for spiritual things did 
 not — and in this is the enduring interest of his story — 
 even after his conversion, forget the old gods. He is 
 one of the last who seriously and sincerely entertained 
 the claim on men's faith of the pagan religions; he is 
 anxious to ascertain the true significance of the obscurest 
 legend, the lightest tradition concerning them. WitH 
 many thoughts and many influences which led him in 
 that direction, he did not become a monk; only he be- 
 came gentle and patient in disputation ; retaining "some- 
 what of the old plenty, in dainty viand and silver vessel," 
 he gave over the greater part of his property to his 
 friend, the mystical poet Beniveni, to be spent by him 
 in works of charity, chiefly in the sweet charity of pro- 
 viding marriage-dowries for the peasant girls of Flor- 
 ence. His end came in 1494, when, amid the prayers and 
 sacraments of Savonarola, he died of fever, on the very 
 day on which Charles the Eighth entered Florence, the 
 seventeenth of November, yet in the time of lilies — the 
 
36 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 lilies of the shield of France, as the people now said, 
 remembering Camilla's prophecy. He was buried in the 
 conventual church of Saint Mark, in the hood and white 
 frock of the Dominican order. 
 
 It is because the life of Pico, thus lying down to rest 
 in the Dominican habit, yet amid thoughts of the older 
 gods, himself like one of those comely divinities, recon- 
 ciled indeed to the new religion, but still with a tender- 
 ness for the earlier life, and desirous literally to "bind 
 the ages each to each by natural piety" — it is because 
 this life is so perfect a parallel to the attempt made in 
 his writings to reconcile Christianity with the ideas of 
 paganism, that Pico, in spite of the scholastic character 
 of those writings, is really interesting. Thus, in the 
 Heptaplus, or Discourse on the Seven Days of the 
 Creation, he endeavors to reconcile the accounts which 
 pagan philosophy had given of the origin of the world 
 with the account given in the books of Moses — the 
 Timceus of Plato with the book of Genesis. The Hepta- 
 plus is dedicated to Lorenzo the Magnificent, whose in- 
 terest, the preface tells us, in the secret wisdom of Moses 
 is well known. If Moses seems in his writings simple 
 and even popular, rather than either a philosopher or a 
 theologian, that is because it was an institution with the 
 ancient philosophers, either not to speak of divine things 
 at all, or to speak of them dissemblingly : hence their 
 doctrines were called mysteries. Taught by them, Pytha- 
 goras became so great a "master of silence," and wrote 
 almost nothing, thus hiding the words of God in his 
 heart, and speaking wisdom only among the perfect. In 
 explaining the harmony between Plato and Moses, Pico 
 lays hold on every sort of figure and analogy, on the 
 
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA 37 
 
 double meanings of words, the symbols of the Jewish 
 ritual, the secondary meanings of obscure stories in the 
 later Greek mythologists. Everywhere there is an un- 
 broken system of correspondences. Every object in the 
 terrestrial world is an analogue, a symbol or counter- 
 part, of some higher reality in the starry heavens, and 
 this again of some law of the angelic life in the world 
 beyond the stars. There is the element of fire in the 
 material world ; the sun is the fire of heaven ; and in the 
 super-celestial world there is the fire of the seraphic in- 
 telligence. "But behold how they differ! The elemen- 
 tary fire burns, the heavenly fire vivifies, the super-celes- 
 tial fire loves.'' In this way, every natural object, every 
 combination of natural forces, every accident in the lives 
 of men, is filled with higher meanings. Omens, prophe- 
 cies, supernatural coincidences, accompany Pico himself 
 all through life. There are oracles in every tree and 
 mountain-top, and a significance in every accidental com- 
 bination of the events of life. 
 
 This constant tendency to symbolism and imagery 
 gives Pico's work a figured style, by which it has some 
 real resemblance to Plato's, and he differs from other 
 mystical writers of his time by a genuine desire to know 
 his authorities at first hand. He reads Plato in Greek, 
 Moses in Hebrew, and by this his work really belongs 
 to the higher culture. Above all, we have a constant 
 sense in reading him, that his thoughts, however little 
 their positive value may be, are connected with the strings 
 beneath them of deep and passionate emotion ; and when 
 he explains the grades or steps by which the soul passes 
 from the love of a physical object to the love of unseen 
 beauty, and unfolds the analogies between this process 
 
38 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 and other movements upward of human thought, there 
 is a glow and vehemence in his words which remind one 
 of the manner in which his own brief existence flamed 
 itself away. 
 
 I said that the Renaissance of the fifteenth century- 
 was, in many things, great rather by what it designed or 
 aspired to do, than by what it actually achieved. It re- 
 mained for a later age to conceive the true method of 
 effecting a scientific reconciliation of Christian sentiment 
 with the imagery, the legends, the theories about the 
 world, of pagan poetry and philosophy. For that age 
 the only possible reconciliation was an imaginative one, 
 and resulted from the efforts of artists, trained in Chris- 
 tian schools, to handle pagan subjects; and of this artist- 
 ic reconciliation work like Pico's was but the feebler 
 counterpart. Whatever philosophers had to say on one 
 side or the other, whether they were successful or not 
 in their attempts to reconcile the old to the new, and to 
 justify the expenditure of so much care and thought on 
 the dreams of a dead faith, the imagery of the Greek 
 religion, the direct charm of its story, were by artists 
 valued and cultivated for their own sake. Hence a new 
 sort of mythology, with a tone and qualities of its own. 
 When the ship-load of sacred earth from the soil of 
 Jerusalem was mingled with the common clay in the 
 Campo Santo at Pisa, a new flower grew up from it, un- 
 like any flower men had seen before, the anemone with 
 its concentric rings of strangely blended color, still to be 
 found by those who search long enough for it, in the 
 long grass of the Maremma. Just such a strange flower 
 was that mythology of the Italian Renaissance, which 
 grew up from the mixture of two traditions, two senti- 
 
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA 39 
 
 ments, the sacred and the profane. Classical story was 
 regarded as so much imaginative material to be received 
 and assimilated. It did not come into men's minds to 
 ask curiously of science, concerning the origin of such 
 story, its primary form and import, its meaning for those 
 who projected it. The thing sank into their minds, to 
 issue forth again with all the tangle about it of medieval 
 sentiment and ideas. In the Doni Madonna in the 
 Tribune of the Ufiizii, Michelangelo actually brings the 
 pagan religion, and with it the unveiled human form, 
 the sleepy-looking fauns of a Dionysiac revel, into the 
 presence of the Madonna, as simpler painters had intro- 
 duced there other products of the earth, birds or flowers, 
 while he has given to that Madonna herself much of the 
 uncouth energy of the older and more primitive "Mighty 
 Mother." 
 
 This picturesque union of contrasts, belonging prop- 
 erly to the art of the close of the fifteenth century, per- 
 vades, in Pico della Mirandola, an actual person and 
 that is why the figure of Pico is so attractive. He will 
 not let one go ; he wins one on, in spite of one's self, to 
 turn again to the pages of his forgotten books, although 
 we know already that the actual solution proposed in 
 them will satisfy us as little as perhaps it satisfied him. 
 It is said that in his eagerness for mysterious learning 
 he once paid a great sum for a collection of cabalistic 
 manuscripts, which turned out to be forgeries; and the 
 story might well stand as a parable of all he ever seemed 
 to gain in the way of actual knowledge. He had sought 
 knowledge, and passed from system to system, and 
 hazarded much ; but less for the sake of positive knowl- 
 edge than because he believed there was a spirit of order 
 
40 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 and beauty in knowledge, which would come down and 
 unite what men's ignorance had divided, and renew what 
 time had made dim. And so, while his actual work has 
 passed away, yet his own qualities are still active, and 
 himself remains, as one alive in the grave, caesiis et 
 vigilibus oculis, as his biographer describes him, and 
 with that sanguine, clear skin, decenti rubore interspersa, 
 as with the light of morning upon it ; and he has a true 
 place in that group of great Italians who fill the end of 
 the fifteenth century with their names, he is a true 
 humanist. For the essence of humanism is that belief 
 of which he seems never to have doubted, that nothing 
 which has ever interested living men and women can 
 wholly lose its vitality — no language they have spoken, 
 nor oracle beside which they have hushed their voices, 
 no dream which has once been entertained by actual 
 human minds, nothing about which they have ever been 
 passionate, or expended time and zeal. 
 
 1871. 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 In Leonardo's treatise on painting only one contem- 
 porary is mentioned by name — Sandro Botticelli. This 
 preeminence may be due to chance only, but to some will 
 rather appear a result of deliberate judgment; for peo- 
 ple have begun to find out the charm of Botticelli's work, 
 and his name, little known in the last century, is quietly 
 becoming important. In the middle of the fifteenth cen- 
 tury he had already anticipated much of that meditative 
 subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to the 
 great imaginative workmen of its close. Leaving the 
 simple religion which had occupied the followers of 
 Giotto for a century, and the simple naturalism which 
 had grown out of it, a thing of birds and flowers only, 
 he sought inspiration in what to him were works of the 
 modern world, the writings of Dante and Boccaccio, and 
 in new readings of his own of classical stories : or, if he 
 painted religious incidents, painted them with an under- 
 current of original sentiment, which touches you as the 
 real matter of the picture through the veil of its ostensi- 
 ble subject. What is the peculiar sensation, what is the 
 peculiar quality of pleasure, which his work has the 
 property of exciting in us, and which we cannot get 
 elsewhere? For this, especially when he has to speak 
 of a comparatively unknown artist, is always the chief 
 question which a critic has to answer. 
 
 In an age when the lives of artists were full of adven- 
 
 4i 
 
42 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 ture, his life is almost colorless. Criticism, indeed, has 
 cleared away much of the gossip which Vasari accumu- 
 lated, has touched the legend of Lippo and Lucrezia, 
 and rehabilitated the character of Andrea del Castagno. 
 But in Botticelli's case there is no legend to dissipate. 
 He did not even go by his true name : Sandro is a nick- 
 name, and his true name is Filipepi, Botticelli being only 
 the name of the goldsmith who first taught him art. 
 Only two things happened to him, two things which he 
 shared with other artists: — he was invited to Rome to 
 paint in the Sistine Chapel, and he fell in later life under 
 the influence of Savonarola, passing apparently almost 
 out of men's sight in a sort of religious melancholy, 
 which lasted till his death in 15 15, according to the re- 
 ceived date. Vasari says that he plunged into the study 
 of Dante, and even wrote a comment on the Divine 
 Comedy. But it seems strange that he should have lived 
 on inactive so long; and one almost wishes that some 
 document might come to light, which, fixing the date of 
 his death earlier, might relieve one, in thinking of him, 
 of his dejected old age. 
 
 He is before all things a poetical painter, blending the 
 charm of story and sentiment, the medium of the art of 
 poetry, with the charm of line and color, the medium 
 of abstract painting. So he becomes the illustrator of 
 Dante. In a few rare examples of the edition of 1481, 
 the blank spaces, left at the beginning of every canto 
 for the hand of the illuminator, have been filled, as far 
 as the nineteenth canto of the Inferno, with impres- 
 sions of engraved plates, seemingly by way of experi- 
 ment, for in the copy in the Bodleian Library, one of the 
 three impressions it contains has been printed upside 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 43 
 
 down, and much awry, in the midst of the luxurious 
 printed page. Giotto, and the followers of Giotto, with 
 their almost childish religious aim, had not learned to 
 put that weight of meaning into outward things, light, 
 color, everyday gesture, which the poetry of the Divine 
 Comedy involves, and before the fifteenth century Dante 
 could hardly have found an illustrator. Botticelli's illus- 
 trations are crowded with incident, blending, with a 
 naive carelessness of pictorial propriety, three phases of 
 the same scene into one plate. The grotesques, so often 
 a stumbling-block to painters, who forget that the words 
 of a poet, which only feebly present an image to the 
 mind, must be lowered in key when translated into visible 
 form, make one regret that he has not rather chosen for 
 illustration the more subdued imagery of the Purgatorio. 
 Yet in the scene of those who "go down quick into hell/* 
 there is an inventive force about the fire taking hold on 
 the upturned soles of the feet, which proves that the 
 design is no mere translation of Dante's words, but a 
 true painter's vision; while the scene of the Centaurs 
 wins one at once, for, forgetful of the actual circum- 
 stances of their appearance, Botticelli has gone off with 
 delight on the thought of the Centaurs themselves, bright, 
 small creatures of the woodland, with arch baby faces 
 and mignon forms, drawing tiny bows. 
 
 Botticelli lived in a generation of naturalists, and he 
 might have been a mere naturalist among them. There 
 are traces enough in his work of that alert sense of out- 
 ward things, which, in the pictures of that period, fills 
 the lawns with delicate living creatures, and the hillsides 
 with pools of water, and the pools of water with flower- 
 ing reeds. But this was not enough for him; he is a 
 
44 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 visionary painter, and in his visionariness he resembles 
 Dante. Giotto, the tried companion of Dante, Masaccio, 
 Ghirlandajo even, do but transcribe, with more or less 
 refining, the outward image; they are dramatic, not 
 visionary painters; they are almost impassive spectators 
 of the action before them. But the genius of which 
 Botticelli is the type usurps the data before it as the 
 exponent of ideas, moods, visions of its own; in this 
 interest it plays fast and loose with those data, rejecting 
 some and isolating others, and always combining them 
 anew. To him, as to Dante, the scene, the color, the out- 
 ward image or gesture, comes with all its incisive and 
 importunate reality; but awakes in him, moreover, by 
 some subtle law of his own structure, a mood which it 
 awakes in no one else, of which it is the double or repeti- 
 tion, and which it clothes, that all may share it, with 
 visible circumstance. 
 
 But he is far enough from accepting the conventional 
 orthodoxy of Dante which, referring all human action 
 to the simple formula of purgatory, heaven and hell, 
 leaves an insoluble element of prose in the depths of 
 Dante's poetry. One picture of his, with the portrait of 
 the donor, Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit or 
 discredit of attracting some shadow of ecclesiastical cen- 
 sure. This Matteo Palmieri (two dim figures move 
 under that name in contemporary history) was the re- 
 puted author of a poem, still unedited, "La Citta Divina," 
 which represented the human race as an incarnation of 
 those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer, were neither 
 for Jehovah nor for His enemies, a fantasy of that earlier 
 Alexandrian philosophy about which the Florentine in- 
 tellect in that century was so curious. Botticelli's pic- 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 45 
 
 ture may have been only one of those familiar composi- 
 tions in which religious reverie has recorded its impres- 
 sions of the various forms of beatified existence — 
 Glorias, as they were called, like that in which Giotto 
 painted the portrait of Dante; but somehow it was sus- 
 pected of embodying in a picture the wayward dream of 
 Palmieri, and the chapel where it hung was closed. 
 Artists so entire as Botticelli are usually careless about 
 philosophical theories, even when the philosopher is a 
 Florentine of the fifteenth century, and his work a poem 
 in terza rima. But Botticelli, who wrote a commentary 
 on Dante, and became the disciple of Savonarola, may 
 well have let such theories come and go across him. 
 True or false, the story interprets much of the peculiar 
 sentiment with which he infuses his profane and sacred 
 persons, comely, and in a certain sense like angels, but 
 with a sense of displacement or loss about them — the 
 wistfulness of exiles, conscious of a passion and energy 
 greater than any known issue of them explains, which 
 runs through all his varied work with a sentiment of 
 ineffable melancholy. 
 
 So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of 
 heaven and hell, Botticelli accepts, that middle world in 
 which men take no side in great conflicts, and decide no 
 great causes, and make great refusals. He thus sets for 
 himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by any 
 moral ambition, does its most sincere and surest work. 
 His interest is neither in the untempered goodness of 
 Angelico's saints, nor the untempered evil of Orcagna's 
 Inferno; but with men and women, in their mixed and 
 uncertain condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes 
 by passion with a character of loveliness and energy, bu* 
 
4 6 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the 
 great things from which they shrink. His morality is 
 all sympathy ; and it is this sympathy, conveying into his 
 work somewhat more than is usual of the true com- 
 plexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he 
 is, so forcible a realist. 
 
 It is this which gives to his Madonnas their unique 
 expression and charm. He has worked out in them a 
 distinct and peculiar type, definite enough in his own 
 mind, for he has painted it over and over again, some- 
 times one might think almost mechanically, as a pastime 
 during that dark period when his thoughts were so heavy 
 upon him. Hardly any collection of note is without one 
 of these circular pictures, into which the attendant an- 
 gels depress their heads so naively. Perhaps you have 
 sometimes wondered why those peevish-looking Ma- 
 donnas, conformed to no acknowledged or obvious type 
 of beauty, attract you more and more, and often come 
 back to you when the Sistine Madonna and the Virgins 
 of Fra Angelico are forgotten. At first, contrasting them 
 with those, you may have thought that there was some- 
 thing in them mean or abject even, for the abstract lines 
 of the face have little nobleness, and the color is wan. 
 For with Botticelli she too, though she holds in her 
 hands the "Desire of all nations/' is one of those who 
 are neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies ; and her 
 choice is on her face. The white light on it is cast up 
 hard and cheerless from below, as when snow lies upon 
 the ground, and the children look up with surprise at 
 the strange whiteness of the ceiling. Her trouble is in 
 the very caress of the mysterious child, whose gaze is 
 always far from her, and who has already that sweet 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 47 
 
 look of devotion which men have never been able alto- 
 gether to love, and which still makes the born saint an 
 object almost of suspicion to his earthly brethren. Once, 
 indeed, he guides her hand to transcribe in a book the 
 words of her exaltation, the Ave, and the Magnificat, 
 and the Gaude Maria, and the young angels, glad to 
 rouse her for a moment from her dejection, are eager 
 to hold the inkhorn and to support the book. But the 
 pen almost drops from her hand, and the high cold words 
 have no meaning for her, and her true children are those 
 others, among whom, in her rude home, the intolerable 
 honor came to her, with that look of wistful inquiry on 
 their irregular faces which you see in startled animals — 1 
 gipsy children, such as those who, in Apennine villages, 
 still hold out their long, brown arms to beg of you, but 
 on Sundays become enfants du chceur, with their thick 
 black hair nicely combed, and fair white linen on their 
 sunburnt throats. 
 
 What is strangest is that he carries this sentiment into 
 classical subjects, its most complete expression being a 
 picture in the UfFizii, of Venus rising from the sea, in 
 which the grotesque emblems of the middle age, and a 
 landscape full of its peculiar feeling, and even its strange 
 draperies, powdered all over in the Gothic manner with 
 a quaint conceit of daisies, frame a figure that reminds 
 you of the faultless nude studies of Ingres. At first, 
 perhaps, you are attracted only by a quaintness of de- 
 sign, which seems to recall all at once whatever you have 
 read of Florence in the fifteenth century; afterwards you 
 may think that this quaintness must be incongruous with 
 the subject, and that the color is cadaverous or at least 
 cold. And yet, the more you come to understand what 
 
*8 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 imaginative coloring really is, that all color is no mere 
 delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon 
 them by which they become expressive to the spirit, the 
 better you will like this peculiar quality of color; and 
 you will find that quaint design of Botticelli's a more 
 direct inlet into the Greek temper than the works of the 
 Greeks themselves even of the finest period. Of the 
 Greeks as they really were, of their difference from our- 
 selves, of the aspects of their outward life, we know far 
 more than Botticelli, or his most learned contemporaries ; 
 but for us long familiarity has taken off the edge of the 
 lesson, and we are hardly conscious of what we owe to 
 the Hellenic spirit. But in pictures like this of Botti- 
 celli's you have a record of the first impression made 
 by it on minds turned back towards it, in almost painful 
 aspiration, from a world in which it had been ignored 
 so long; and in the passion, the energy, the industry of 
 realisation, with which Botticelli carries out his intention, 
 is the exact measure of the legitimate influence over the 
 human mind of the imaginative system of which this is 
 perhaps the central myth. The light is indeed cold — 
 mere sunless dawn; but a later painter would have 
 cloyed you with sunshine; and you can see the better 
 for that quietness in the morning air each long promon- 
 tory, as it slopes down to the water's edge. Men go 
 forth to their labors until the evening; but she is awake 
 before them, and you might think that the sorrow in her 
 face was at the thought of the whole long day of love 
 yet to come. An emblematical figure of the wind blows 
 hard across the grey water, moving forward the dainty- 
 lipped shell on which she sails, the sea "showing his 
 teeth/' as it moves, in thin lines of foam, and sucking in, 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 49 
 
 one by one, the falling roses, each severe in outline, 
 plucked off short at the stalk, but embrowned a little, as 
 Botticelli's flowers always are. Botticelli meant all this 
 imagery to be altogether pleasurable; and it was partly 
 an incompleteness of resources, inseparable from the art 
 of that time, that subdued and chilled it. But this pre- 
 dilection for minor tones counts also; and what is un- 
 mistakable is the sadness with which he has conceived 
 the goddess of pleasure, as the depositary of a great 
 power over the lives of men. 
 
 I have said that the peculiar character of Botticelli is 
 the result of a blending in him of a sympathy for hu- 
 manity in its uncertain condition, its attractiveness, its 
 investiture at rarer moments in a character of loveliness 
 and energy, with his consciousness of the shadow upon 
 it of the great things from which it shrinks, and that 
 this conveys into his work somewhat more than paint- 
 ing usually attains of the true complexion of humanity. 
 He paints the story of the goddess of pleasure in other 
 episodes besides that of her birth from the sea, but 
 never without some shadow of death in the grey flesh 
 and wan flowers. He paints Madonnas, but they shrink 
 from the pressure of the divine child, and plead in un- 
 mistakable undertones for a warmer, lower humanity. 
 The same figure — tradition connects it with Simonetta, 
 the Mistress of Giuliano de' Medici — appears again as 
 Judith, returning home across the hill country, when the 
 great deed is over, and the moment of revulsion come, 
 when the olive branch in her hand is becoming a burthen ; 
 as Justice, sitting on a throne, but with a fixed look of 
 self-hatred which makes the sword in her hand seem 
 
THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 that of a suicide; and again as Veritas, in the allegorical 
 picture of Calumnia, where one may note in passing the 
 suggestiveness of an accident which identifies the image 
 of Truth with the person of Venus. We might trace 
 the same sentiment through his engravings ; but his share 
 in them is doubtful, and the object of this brief study 
 has been attained, if I have defined aright the temper in 
 which he worked. 
 
 But, after all, it may be asked, is a painter like Botti- 
 celli — a secondary painter, a proper subject for general 
 criticism? There are a few great painters, like Michel- 
 angelo or Leonardo, whose work has become a force in 
 general culture, partly for this very reason that they 
 have absorbed into themselves all such workmen as 
 Sandro Botticelli; and, over and above mere technical 
 or antiquarian criticism, general criticism may be very 
 well employed in that sort of interpretation which ad- 
 justs the position of these men to general culture, 
 whereas smaller men can be the proper subjects only of 
 technical or antiquarian treatment. But, besides those 
 great men, there is a certain number of artists who have 
 a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to 
 us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get 
 elsewhere ; and these, too, have their place in general cul- 
 ture, and must be interpreted to it by those who have 
 felt their charm strongly, and are often the object of a 
 special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate, 
 just because there is not about them the stress of a great 
 name and authority. Of this select number Botticelli is 
 one. He has the freshness, the uncertain and diffident 
 promise, which belong to the earlier Renaissance itself, 
 
SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 
 51 
 
 and make it perhaps the most interesting period in the 
 history of the mind. In studying his work one begins to 
 understand to how great a place in human culture th& 
 art of Italy had been called. 
 
 1870. 
 
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA 
 
 The Italian sculptors of the earlier half of the fif- 
 teenth century are more than mere forerunners of the 
 great masters of its close, and often reach perfection, 
 within the narrow limits which they chose to impose on 
 their work. Their sculpture shares with the paintings 
 of Botticelli and the churches of Brunelleschi that pro- 
 found expressiveness, that intimate impress of an in- 
 dwelling soul, which is the peculiar fascination of the 
 art of Italy in that century. Their works have been 
 much neglected, and often almost hidden away amid the 
 frippery of modern decoration, and we come with some 
 surprise on the places where their fire still smolders. 
 One longs to penetrate into the lives of the men who 
 have given expression to so much power and sweetness. 
 But it is part of the reserve, the austere dignity and 
 simplicity of their existence, that their histories are for 
 the most part lost, or told but briefly. From their lives, 
 as from their work, all tumult of sound and color has 
 passed away. Mino, the Raphael of sculpture, Maso del 
 Rodario, whose works add a further grace to the church 
 of Como, Donatello even, — one asks in vain for more 
 than a shadowy outline of their actual days. 
 
 Something more remains of Luca della Robbia ; some- 
 thing more of a history, of outward changes and for- 
 tunes, is expressed through his work. I suppose nothing 
 brings the real air of a Tuscan town so vividly to mind 
 
 52 
 
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA 
 
 S3 
 
 as those pieces of pale blue and white earthenware, by 
 which he is best known, like fragments of the milky sky 
 itself, fallen into the cool streets, and breaking into the 
 darkened churches. And no work is less imitable : like 
 Tuscan wine, it loses its savor when moved from its 
 birthplace, from the crumbling walls where it was first 
 placed. Part of the charm of this work, its grace and 
 purity and finish of expression, is common to all the 
 Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century; for Luca was 
 first of all a worker in marble, and his works in terra 
 cotta only transfer to a different material the principles 
 of his sculpture. 
 
 These Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century worked 
 for the most part in low relief, giving even to their monu- 
 mental effigies something of its depression of surface, 
 getting into them by this means a pathetic suggestion of 
 the wasting and etherealisation of death. They are 
 haters of all heaviness and emphasis, of strongly-opposed 
 light and shade, and seek their means of delineation 
 among those last refinements of shadow, which are al- 
 most invisible except in a strong light, and which the 
 finest pencil can hardly follow. The whole essence of 
 their work is expression, the passing of a smile over the 
 face of a child, the ripple of the air on a still day over 
 the curtain of a window ajar. 
 
 What is the precise value of this system of sculpture, 
 this low relief? Luca della Robbia, and the other 
 sculptors of the school to which he belongs, have before 
 them the universal problem of their art; and this system 
 of low relief is the means by which they meet and over* 
 come the special limitation of sculpture. 
 
 That limitation results from the material and other 
 
54 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 necessary conditions of all sculptured work, and con- 
 sists in the tendency of such work to a hard realism, a 
 one-sided presentment of mere form, that solid material 
 frame which only motion can relieve, a thing of heavy 
 shadows, and an individuality of expression pushed to 
 caricature. Against this tendency to the hard present- 
 ment of mere form trying vainly to compete with the 
 reality of nature itself, all noble sculpture constantly 
 struggles; each great system of sculpture resisting it in 
 its own way, etherealising, spiritualising, relieving its 
 stiffness, its heaviness, and death. The use of color in 
 sculpture is but an unskilful contrivance to effect, by 
 borrowing from another art, what the nobler sculpture 
 effects by strictly appropriate means. To get not color, 
 but the equivalent of color ; to secure the expression and 
 the play of life; to expand the too firmly fixed individ- 
 uality of pure, unrelieved, uncolored form: — this is the 
 problem which the three great styles in sculpture have 
 solved in three different ways. 
 
 Allgemeinheit — breadth, generality, universality, — is 
 the word chosen by Winckelmann, and after him by 
 Goethe and many German critics, to express that law of 
 the most excellent Greek sculptors, of Pheidias and his 
 pupils, which prompted them constantly to seek the type 
 in the individual, to abstract and express only what is 
 structural and permanent, to purge from the individual 
 all that belongs only to him, all the accidents, the feel- 
 ings and actions of the special moment, all that (because 
 in its own nature it endures but for a moment) is apt to 
 look like a frozen thing if one arrests it. 
 
 In this way their works came to be like some subtle 
 extract or essence, or almost like pure thoughts or ideas : 
 
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA 
 
 55 
 
 and hence the breadth of humanity in them, that detach- 
 ment from the conditions of a particular place or people, 
 which has carried their influence far beyond the age 
 which produced them, and insured them universal ac- 
 ceptance. 
 
 That was the Greek way of relieving the hardness and 
 unspirituality of pure form. But it involved to a certain 
 degree the sacrifice of what we call expression; and a 
 system of abstraction which aimed always at the broad 
 and general type, at the purging away from the individ- 
 ual of what belonged only to him, and of the mere acci- 
 dents of a particular time and place, imposed upon the 
 range of effects open to the Greek sculptor limits some- 
 what narrowly defined. When Michelangelo came, 
 therefore, with a genius spiritualised by the reverie of 
 the middle age, penetrated by its spirit of inwardness 
 and introspection, living not a mere outward life like 
 the Greek, but a life full of intimate experiences, sor- 
 rows, consolations, a system which sacrificed so much of 
 what was inward and unseen could not satisfy him. To 
 him, lover and student of Greek sculpture as he was, 
 work which did not bring what was inward to the sur- 
 face, which was not concerned with individual expres- 
 sion, with individual character and feeling, the special 
 history of the special soul, was not worth doing at all. 
 
 And so, in a way quite personal and peculiar to him- 
 self, which often is, and always seems, the effect of 
 accident, he secured for his work individuality and in- 
 tensity of expression, while he avoided a too heavy 
 realism, that tendency to harden into caricature which 
 the representation of feeling in sculpture is apt to dis- 
 play. What time and accident, its centuries of darkness 
 
56 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 under the furrows of the "little Melian farm," have 
 done with singular felicity of touch for the Venus of 
 Melos, fraying its surface and softening its lines, so 
 that some spirit in the thing seems always on the point 
 of breaking out, as though in it classical sculpture had 
 advanced already one step into the mystical Christian 
 age, its expression being in the whole range of ancient 
 work most like that of Michelangelo's own: — this effect 
 Michelangelo gains by leaving nearly all his sculpture in 
 a puzzling sort of incompleteness, which suggests rather 
 than realises actual form. Something of the wasting of 
 that snow-image which he molded at the command of 
 Piero de' Medici, when the snow lay one night in the 
 court of the Pitti palace, almost always lurks about it, 
 as if he had determined to make the quality of a task, 
 exacted from him half in derision, the pride of all his 
 work. Many have wondered at that incompleteness, sus- 
 pecting, however, that Michelangelo himself loved and 
 was loath to change it, and feeling at the same time that 
 they, too, would lose something if the half-realised form 
 ever quite emerged from the stone, so rough-hewn here, 
 so delicately finished there; and they have wished to 
 fathom the charm of this incompleteness. Well! that 
 incompleteness is Michelangelo's equivalent for color in 
 sculpture; it is his way of etherealizing pure form, of 
 relieving its stiff realism, and communicating to it 
 breath, pulsation, the effect of life. It was a character- 
 istic, too, which fell in with his peculiar temper and mode 
 of living, his disappointments and hesitations. And it 
 was in reality perfect finish. In this way he combines 
 the utmost amount of passion and intensity with the 
 
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA 
 
 57 
 
 sense of a yielding and flexible life : he gets not vitality 
 merely, but a wonderful force of expression. 
 
 Midway between these two systems — the system of 
 the Greek sculptors and the system of Michelangelo — 
 comes the system of Luca della Robbia and the other 
 Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century, partaking both 
 of the Allgemeinheit of the Greeks, their way of ex- 
 tracting certain select elements only of pure form and 
 sacrificing all the rest, and the studied incompleteness of 
 Michelangelo, relieving that sense of intensity, passion, 
 energy, which might otherwise have stiffened into cari- 
 cature. Like Michelangelo, these sculptors fill their 
 works with intense and individualised expression. Their 
 noblest works are the careful sepulchral portraits of par- 
 ticular persons — the monument of Conte Ugo in the 
 Badta of Florence, of the youthful Medea Colleoni, with 
 the wonderful, long throat, in the chapel on the cool 
 north side of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore at 
 Bergamo — monuments such as abound in the churches 
 of Rome, inexhaustible in suggestions of repose, of a 
 subdued Sabbatic joy, a kind of sacred grace and refine- 
 ment. And these elements of tranquillity, of repose, they 
 unite to an intense and individual expression by a sys- 
 tem of conventionalism as skilful and subtle as that of 
 the Greeks, repressing all such curves as indicate solid 
 form, and throwing the whole into low relief. 
 
 The life of Luca, a life of labor and frugality, with 
 no adventure and no excitement except what belongs to 
 the trial of new artistic processes, the struggle with new 
 artistic difficulties, the solution of purely artistic prob- 
 lems, fills the first seventy years of the fifteenth century. 
 After producing many works in marble for the Duomo 
 
58 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 and the Campanile of Florence, which place him among 
 the foremost masters of the sculpture of his age, he be- 
 came desirous to realise the spirit and manner of that 
 sculpture, in a humbler material, to unite its science, its 
 exquisite and expressive system of low relief, to the 
 homely art of pottery, to introduce those high qualities 
 into common things, to adorn and cultivate daily house- 
 hold life. In this he is profoundly characteristic of the 
 Florence of that century, of that in it which lay below 
 its superficial vanity and caprice, a certain old-world 
 modesty and seriousness and simplicity. People had not 
 yet begun to think that what was good art for churches 
 was not so good, or less fitted, for their own houses. 
 Luca's new w r ork was in plain white earthenware at first, 
 a mere rough imitation of the costly, laboriously wrought 
 marble, finished in a few hours. But on this humble 
 path he found his way to a fresh success, to another 
 artistic grace. The fame of the oriental pottery, with its 
 strange, bright colors — colors of art, colors not to be 
 attained in the natural stone — mingled with the tradition 
 of the old Roman pottery of the neighborhood. The 
 little red, coral-like jars of Arezzo, dug up in that dis- 
 trict from time to time, are much prized. These colors 
 haunted Luca's fancy. "He still continued seeking some- 
 thing more," his biographer says of him; "and instead 
 of making his figures of baked earth simply white, he 
 added the further invention of giving them color, to the 
 astonishment and delight of all who beheld them" — 
 Cosa singolare, e multo utile per la state! — a curious 
 thing, and very useful for summer-time, full of coolness 
 and repose for hand and eye. Luca loved the forms of 
 various fruits, and wrought them into all sorts of mar- 
 
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA 
 
 59 
 
 velous frames and garlands, giving them their natural 
 colors, only subdued a little, a little paler than nature. 
 
 I said that the art of Luca della Robbia possessed in 
 an unusual measure that special characteristic which be- 
 longs to all the workmen of his school, a characteristic 
 which, even in the absence of much positive information 
 about their actual history, seems to bring those workmen 
 themselves very near to us. They bear the impress of 
 a personal quality, a prr found expressiveness, what the 
 French call intimite, by which is meant some subtler 
 sense of originality — the seal on a man's work of what 
 is most inward and peculiar in his moods, and manner 
 of apprehension: it is what we call expression, carried 
 to its highest intensity of degree. That characteristic 
 is rare in poetry, rarer still in art, rarest of all in the 
 abstract art of sculpture; yet essentially, perhaps, it is 
 the quality which alone makes work in the imaginative 
 order really worth having at all. It is because the works 
 of the artists of the fifteenth century possess this quality 
 in an unmistakable way that one is anxious to know all 
 that can be known about them and explain to one's self 
 the secret of their charm. 
 
 1872. 
 
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 
 
 Critics of Michelangelo have sometimes spoken as if 
 the only characteristic of his genius were a wonderful 
 strength, verging, as in the things of the imagination 
 great strength always does, on what is singular or 
 strange. A certain strangeness, something of the blos- 
 soming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works 
 of art: that they shall excite or surprise us is indispen- 
 sable. But that they shall give pleasure and exert a 
 charm over us is indispensable, too ; and this strangeness 
 must be sweet also — a lovely strangeness. And to the 
 true admirers of Michelangelo this is the true type of 
 the Michelangelesque — sweetness and strength, pleasure 
 with surprise, an energy of conception which seems at 
 every moment about to break through all the conditions 
 of comely form, recovering, touch by touch, a loveliness 
 found usually only in the simplest natural things — ex 
 forti dulcedo. 
 
 In this way he sums up for them the whole character 
 of medieval art itself in that which distinguishes it most 
 clearly from classical work, the presence of a convulsive 
 energy in it, becoming in lower hands merely monstrous 
 or forbidding, and felt, even in its most graceful prod- 
 ucts, as a subdued quaintness or grotesque. Yet those 
 who feel this grace or sweetness in Michelangelo might 
 at the first moment be puzzled if they were asked wherein 
 precisely such quality resided. Men of inventive tem- 
 
 60 
 
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 61 
 
 perament — Victor Hugo, for instance, in whom, as in 
 Michelangelo, people have for the most part been at- 
 tracted or repelled by the strength, while few have under- 
 stood his sweetness — have sometimes relieved concep- 
 tions of merely moral or spiritual greatness, but with 
 little aesthetic charm of their own, by lovely accidents 
 or accessories, like the butterfly which alights on the 
 blood-stained barricade in Les Miserables or those sea- 
 birds for whom the monstrous Gilliatt comes to be as 
 some wild natural thing, so that they are no longer afraid 
 of him, in Les Travailleurs de la Mer. But the austere 
 genius of Michelangelo will not depend for its sweetness 
 on any mere accessories like these. The world of nat- 
 ural things has almost no existence for him ; "When one 
 speaks of him," says Grimm, "woods, clouds, seas, and 
 mountains disappear, and only what is formed by the 
 spirit of man remains behind"; and he quotes a few 
 slight words from a letter of his to Vasari as the single 
 expression in all he has left of a feeling for nature. He 
 has traced no flowers, like those with which Leonardo 
 stars over his gloomiest rocks; nothing like the fret- 
 work of wings and flames in which Blake frames his 
 most startling conceptions. No forest-scenery like 
 Titian's fills his backgrounds, but only blank ranges of 
 rock, and dim vegetable forms as blank as they, as in a 
 world before the creation of the first five days. 
 
 Of the whole story of the creation he has painted only 
 the creation of the first man and woman, and, for him 
 at least, feebly, the creation of light. It belongs to the 
 quality of his genius thus to concern itself almost exclu- 
 sively with the making of man. For him it is not, as in 
 the story itself, the last and crowning act of a series of 
 
62 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 developments, but the first and unique act, the creation 
 of life itself in its supreme form, off-hand and imme- 
 diately, in the cold and lifeless stone. With him the 
 beginning of life has all the characteristics of resurrec- 
 tion ; it is like the recovery of suspended health or anima- 
 tion, with its gratitude, its effusion, and eloquence. Fair 
 as the young men of the Elgin marbles, the Adam of the 
 Sistine Chapel is unlike them in a total absence of that 
 balance and completeness which express so well the senti- 
 ment of a self-contained, independent life. In that lan- 
 guid figure there is something rude and satyr-like, some- 
 thing akin to the rugged hillside on which it lies. His 
 whole form is gathered into an expression of mere ex- 
 pectancy and reception; he has hardly strength enough 
 to lift his finger to touch the finger of the creator; yet a 
 touch of the finger-tips will suffice. 
 
 This creation of life — life coming always as relief or 
 recovery, and always in strong contrast with the rough- 
 hewn mass in which it is kindled — is in various ways 
 the motive of all his work, whether its immediate sub- 
 ject be Pagan or Christian, legend or allegory; and this, 
 although at least one-half of his work was designed for 
 the adornment of tombs — the tomb of Julius, the tombs 
 of the Medici. Not the Judgment but the Resurrection 
 is the real subject of his last work in the Sistine Chapel; 
 and his favorite Pagan subject is the legend of Leda, the 
 delight of the world breaking from the egg of a bird. 
 As I have already pointed out, he secures that ideality 
 of expression which in Greek sculpture depends on a 
 delicate system of abstraction, and in early Italian sculp- 
 ture on lowness of relief, by an incompleteness, which is 
 surely not always undesigned, and which, as I think, no 
 
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 63 
 
 one regrets, and trusts to the spectator to complete the 
 half-emergent form. And as his persons have some- 
 thing of the unwrought stone about them, so, as if to 
 realise the expression by which the old Florentine rec- 
 ords describe a sculptor — master of live stone — with 
 him the very rocks seem to have life. They have but 
 to cast away the dust and scurf that they may rise and 
 stand on their feet. He loved the very quarries of Car- 
 rara, those strange grey peaks which even at mid-day 
 convey into any scene from which they are visible some- 
 thing of the solemnity and stillness of evening, some- 
 times wandering among them month after month, till at 
 last their pale ashen colors seem to have passed into his 
 painting; and on the crown of the head^of the David 
 there still remains a morsel of uncut stone, as if by one 
 touch to maintain its connection with the place from 
 which it was hewn. 
 
 And it is in this penetrative suggestion of life that the 
 secret of that sweetness of his is to be found. He gives 
 us indeed no lovely natural objects like Leonardo or 
 Titian, but only the coldest, most elementary shadowing 
 of rock or tree ; no lovely draperies and comely gestures 
 of life, but only the austere truths of human nature; 
 "simple persons" — as he replied in his rough way to the 
 querulous criticism of Julius the Second, that there was 
 no gold on the figures of the Sistine Chapel — "simple 
 persons, who wore no gold on their garments" ; but he 
 penetrates us with a feeling of that power which we 
 associate with all the warmth and fullness of the world, 
 the sense of which brings into one's thoughts a swarm 
 of birds and flowers and insects. The brooding spirit of 
 
64 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 life itself is there; and the summer may burst out in a 
 moment. 
 
 He was born in an interval of a rapid midnight jour- 
 ney in March, at a place in the neighborhood of Arezzo, 
 the thin, clear air of which was then thought to be favor- 
 able to the birth of children of great parts. He came of 
 a race of grave and dignified men, who, claiming kin- 
 ship with the family of Canossa, and some color of im- 
 perial blood in their veins, had, generation after genera- 
 tion, received honorable employment under the govern- 
 ment of Florence. His mother, a girl of nineteen years, 
 put him out to nurse at a country house among the hills 
 of Settignano, where every other inhabitant is a worker 
 in the marble quarries, and the child early became fa- 
 miliar with that strange first stage in the sculptor's art. 
 To this succeeded the influence of the sweetest and most 
 placid master Florence had yet seen, Domenico Ghir- 
 landajo. At fifteen he was at work among the curiosi- 
 ties of the garden of the Medici, copying and restoring 
 antiques, winning the condescending notice of the great 
 Lorenzo. He knew, too, how to excite strong hatreds; 
 and it was at this time that in a quarrel with a fellow- 
 student he received a blow on the face which deprived 
 him for ever of the comeliness of outward form. 
 
 It was through an accident that he came to study 
 those works of the early Italian sculptors which sug- 
 gested much of his own grandest work, and impressed 
 it with so deep a sweetness. He believed in dreams and 
 omens. One of his friends dreamed twice that Lorenzo, 
 then lately dead, appeared to him in grey and dusty 
 apparel. To Michelangelo this dream seemed to por- 
 tend the troubles which afterwards really came, and with 
 
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 65 
 
 the suddenness which was characteristic of all his move- 
 ments, he left Florence. Having occasion to pass 
 through Bologna, he neglected to procure the little seal 
 of red wax which the stranger entering Bologna must 
 carry on the thumb of his right hand. He had no money 
 to pay the fine, and would have been thrown into prison 
 had not one of the magistrates interposed. He remained 
 in this man's house a whole year, rewarding his hospi- 
 tality by readings from the Italian poets whom he loved. 
 Bologna, with its endless colonnades and fantastic lean- 
 ing towers, can never have been one of the lovelier cities 
 of Italy. But about the portals of its vast unfinished 
 churches and its dark shrines, half hidden by votive 
 flowers and candles, lie some of the sweetest works of 
 the early Tuscan sculptors, Giovanni da Pisa and Jacopo 
 della Quercia, things as winsome as flowers ; and the year 
 which Michelangelo spent in copying these works was 
 not a lost year. It was now, on returning to Florence, 
 that he put forth that unique presentment of Bacchus, 
 which expresses, not the mirthfulness of the god of 
 wine, but his sleepy seriousness, his enthusiasm, his 
 capacity for profound dreaming. No one ever expressed 
 more truly than Michelangelo the notion of inspired 
 sleep, of faces charged with dreams. A vast fragment 
 of marble had long lain below the Loggia of Orcagna, 
 and many a sculptor had had his thoughts of a design 
 which should just fill this famous block of stone, cutting 
 the diamond, as it were, without loss. Under Michel- 
 angelo's hand it became the David which stood till lately 
 on the steps of the Palazzo Vecchio, when it was replaced 
 below the Loggia. Michelangelo was now thirty years 
 old, and his reputation was established. Three great 
 
66 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 works fill the remainder of his life — three works often 
 interrupted, carried on through a thousand hesitations, 
 a thousand disappointments, quarrels with his patrons, 
 quarrels with his family, quarrels perhaps most of all 
 with himself — the Sistine Chapel, the Mausoleum of 
 Julius the Second, and the Sacristy of San Lorenzo, 
 
 In the story of Michelangelo's life the strength, often 
 turning to bitterness, is not far to seek. A discordant 
 note sounds throughout it which almost spoils the music. 
 He "treats the Pope as the King of France himself would 
 not dare to treat him" : he goes along the streets of Rome 
 "like an executioner/' Raphael says of him. Once he 
 seems to have shut himself up with the intention of 
 starving himself to death. As we come, in reading his 
 life, on its harsh, untempered incidents, the thought again 
 and again arises that he is one of those who incur the 
 judgment of Dante, as having "wilfully lived in sadness." 
 Even his tenderness and pity are embittered by their 
 strength. What passionate weeping in that mysterious 
 figure which, in the Creation of Adam, crouches below 
 the image of the Almighty, as he comes with the forms 
 of things to be, woman and her progeny, in the fold of 
 his garment ! What a sense of wrong in those two cap- 
 tive youths, who feel the chains like scalding water on 
 their proud and delicate flesh ! The idealist who became 
 a reformer with Savonarola, and a republican superin- 
 tending the fortification of Florence — the nest where he 
 was born, il nido ove naqqu'io, as he calls it once, in a 
 sudden throb of affection — in its last struggle for liberty, 
 yet believed always that he had imperial blood in his 
 veins and was of the kindred of the great Matilda, had 
 within the depths of his nature some secret spring of 
 
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 67 
 
 indignation or sorrow. We know little of his youth, but 
 all tends to make one believe in the vehemence of its 
 passions. Beneath the Platonic calm of the sonnets 
 there is latent a deep delight in carnal form and color. 
 There, and still more in the madrigals, he often falls into 
 the language of less tranquil affections; while some of 
 them have the color of penitence, as from a wanderer 
 returning home. He who spoke so decisively of the 
 supremacy in the imaginative world of the unveiled hu- 
 man form had not been always, we may think, a mere 
 Platonic lover. Vague and wayward his loves may have 
 been ; but they partook of the strength of his nature, and 
 sometimes, it may be, would by no means become music, 
 so that the comely order of his days was quite put out: 
 par che amaro ogni mio dolce io senta. 
 
 But his genius is in harmony with itself ; and just as 
 in the products of his art we find resources of sweetness 
 within their exceeding strength, so in his own story also, 
 bitter as the ordinary sense of it may be, there are select 
 pages shut in among the rest — pages one might easily 
 turn over too lightly, but which yet sweeten the whole 
 volume. The interest of Michelangelo's poems is that 
 they make us spectators of this struggle ; the struggle of 
 a strong nature to adorn and attune itself ; the struggle 
 of a desolating passion, which yearns to be resigned and 
 sweet and pensive, as Dante's was. It is a consequence 
 of the occasional and informal character of his poetry, 
 that it brings us nearer to himself, his own mind and 
 temper, than any work done only to support a literary 
 reputation could possibly do. His letters tell us little 
 that is worth knowing about him — a few poor quarrels 
 about money and commissions. But it is quite other- 
 
68 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 wise with these songs and sonnets, written down at odd 
 moments, sometimes on the margins of his sketches, 
 themselves often* unfinished sketches, arresting some 
 salient feeling or unpremeditated idea as it passed. And 
 it happens that a true study of these has become within 
 the last few years for the first time possible. A few of 
 the sonnets circulated widely in manuscript, and became 
 almost within Michelangelo's own lifetime a subject of 
 academical discourses. But they were first collected in 
 a volume in 1623 by the great-nephew of Michelangelo, 
 Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger. He omitted much, 
 re-wrote the sonnets in part, and sometimes com- 
 pressed two or more compositions into one, always los- 
 ing something of the force and incisiveness of the origi- 
 nal. So the book remained, neglected even by Italians 
 themselves in the last century, through the influence of 
 that French taste which despised all compositions of 
 the kind, as it despised and neglected Dante. "His repu- 
 tation will ever be on the increase, because he is so little 
 read/' says Voltaire of Dante. — But in 1858 the last of 
 the Buonarroti bequeathed to the municipality of Flor- 
 ence the curiosities of his family. Among them was a 
 precious volume containing the autograph of the son- 
 nets. A learned Italian, Signor Cesare Guasti, under- 
 took to collate this autograph with other manuscripts at 
 the Vatican and elsewhere, and in 1863 published a true 
 version of Michelangelo's poems, with dissertations and 
 a paraphrase. 1 
 
 People have often spoken of these poems as if they 
 were a mere cry of distress, a lover's complaint over 
 
 1 The sonnets have been translated into English, with 
 much skill and poetic taste, by Mr. J. A. Symonds. 
 
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 69 
 
 the obduracy of Vittoria Colonna. But those who speak 
 thus forget that though it is quite possible that Michel- 
 angelo had seen Vittoria, that somewhat shadowy figure, 
 as early as 1537, yet their closer intimacy did not begin 
 till about the year 1542, when Michelangelo was nearly 
 seventy years old. Vittoria herself, an ardent neo-catho- 
 lie, vowed to perpetual widowhood since the news had 
 reached her, seventeen years before, that her husband, 
 the youthful and princely Marquess of Pescara, lay dead 
 of the wounds he had received in the battle of Pavia, was 
 then no longer an object of great passion. In a dialogue 
 written by the painter, Francesco d'Ollanda, we catch a 
 glimpse of them together in an empty church at Rome, 
 one Sunday afternoon, discussing, indeed, the characteris- 
 tics of various schools of art, but still more the writings 
 of Saint Paul, already following the ways and tasting 
 the sunless pleasures of weary people, whose care for 
 external things is slackening. In a letter still extant 
 he regrets that when he visited her after death he had 
 kissed her hands only. He made, or set to work to make, 
 a crucifix for her use, and two drawings, perhaps in 
 preparation for it, are now in Oxford. From allusions 
 in the sonnets, we may divine that when they first ap- 
 proached each other he had debated much with himself 
 whether this last passion would be the most unsoftening, 
 the most desolating of all — un dolce amaro, un si e no 
 mi muovi. Is it carnal affection, or, del suo prestino 
 stato (of Plato's ante-natal state) il raggio ardent e? 
 The older, conventional criticism, dealing with the text 
 of 1623, had lightly assumed that all, or nearly all, the 
 sonnets were actually addressed to Vittoria herself ; but 
 Signor Guasti finds only four, or at most five, which can 
 
7o 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 be so attributed on genuine authority. Still, there are 
 reasons which make him assign the majority of them 
 to the period between 1542 and 1547, and we may regard 
 the volume as a record of this resting-place in Michel- 
 angelo's story. We know how Goethe escaped from the 
 stress of sentiments too strong for him by making a 
 book about them; and for Michelangelo, to write down 
 his passionate thoughts at all, to express them in a 
 sonnet, was already in some measure to command, and 
 have his way with them — 
 
 La vita del mia amor non e il cor mio, 
 CK amor, di quel ch 3 to f amo, e senza core. 
 
 It was just because Vittoria raised no great passion that 
 the space in his life where she reigns has such peculiar 
 suavity ; and the spirit of the sonnets is lost if we once 
 take them out of that dreamy atmosphere in which men 
 have things as they will, because the hold of ail outward 
 things upon them is faint and uncertain. Their prevail- 
 ing tone is a calm and meditative sweetness. The cry 
 of distress is indeed there, but as a mere residue, a trace 
 of bracing chalybeate salt, just discernible in the song 
 which rises like a clear, sweet spring from a charmed 
 space in his life. 
 
 This charmed and temperate space in Michelangelo's 
 life, without which its excessive strength would have 
 been so imperfect, which saves him from the judgment 
 of Dante on those who "wilfully lived in sadness," is 
 then a well-defined period there, reaching from the 
 year 1542 to the year 1547, the year of Vittoria's death. 
 In it the lifelong effort to tranquillise his vehement 
 emotions by withdrawing them into the region of ideal 
 
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 71 
 
 sentiment, becomes successful; and the significance of 
 Vittoria is, that she realises for him a type of affection 
 which even in disappointment may charm and sweeten 
 his spirit. 
 
 In this effort to tranquillise and sweeten life by ideal- 
 ising its vehement sentiments, there were two great tra- 
 ditional types, either of which an Italian of the six- 
 teenth century might have followed. There was Dante, 
 whose little book of the Vita Nuova had early become 
 a pattern of imaginative love, maintained somewhat 
 feebly by the later followers of Petrarch; and, since 
 Plato had become something more than a name in Italy 
 by the publication of the Latin translation of his works 
 by Marsilio Ficino, there was the Platonic tradition also. 
 Dante's belief in the resurrection of the body, through 
 which, even in heaven, Beatrice loses for him no tinge 
 of flesh-color, or fold of raiment even ; and the Platonic 
 dream of the passage of the soul through one form of 
 life after another, with its passionate haste to escape 
 from the burden of bodily form altogether; are, for all 
 effects of art or poetry, principles diametrically opposite. 
 Now it is the Platonic tradition rather than Dante's that 
 has molded Michelangelo's verse. In many ways no 
 sentiment could have been less like Dante's love for 
 Beatrice than Michelangelo's for Vittoria Colonna. 
 Dante's comes in early youth: Beatrice is a child, with 
 the wistful, ambiguous vision of a child, with a char- 
 acter still unaccentuated by the influence of outward cir- 
 cumstances, almost expressionless. Vittoria, on the 
 other hand, is a woman already weary, in advanced age, 
 of grave intellectual qualities. Dante's story is a piece 
 of figured work, inlaid with lovely incidents. In Michel- 
 
72 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 angelo's poems, frost and fire are almost the only im- 
 ages — the refining fire of the goldsmith ; once or twice the 
 phoenix; ice melting at the fire; fire struck from the rock 
 which it afterwards consumes. Except one doubtful 
 allusion to a journey, there are almost no incidents. But 
 there is much of the bright, sharp, unerring skill, with 
 which in boyhood he gave the look of age to the head 
 of a faun by chipping a tooth from its jaw with a single 
 stroke of the hammer. For Dante, the amiable and de- 
 vout materialism of the middle age, sanctifies all that is 
 presented by hand and eye ; while Michelangelo is always 
 pressing forward from the outward beauty — il bel del 
 fuor che agli occhi place, to apprehend the unseen 
 beauty; trascenda nella forma universale — that abstract 
 form of beauty, about which the Platonists reason. 
 And this gives the impression in him of something flit- 
 Sting and unfixed, of the houseless and complaining 
 spirit, almost clairvoyant through the frail and yielding 
 flesh. He accounts for love at first sight by a previous 
 state of existence — la dove to f amai prima. 
 
 And yet there are many points in which he is really 
 like Dante, and comes very near to the original image, 
 beyond those later and feebler followers in the wake of 
 Petrarch. He learns from Dante rather than from 
 Plato, that for lovers, the surfeiting of desire — ove 
 gran desir gran copla affrena, is a state less happy than 
 poverty with abundance of hope — una miseria di spe- 
 ranza plena. He recalls him in the repetition of the 
 words gentile and cortesia, in the personification of 
 Amor, in the tendency to dwell minutely on the physical 
 effects of the presence of a beloved object on the pulses 
 and the heart. Above all, he resembles Dante in the 
 
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 73 
 
 warmth and intensity of his political utterances, for the 
 lady of one of his noblest sonnets was from the first 
 understood to be the city of Florence ; and he avers that 
 all must be asleep in heaven, if she, who was created 
 "of angelic form/' for a thousand lovers, is appropri- 
 ated by one alone, some Piero, or Alessandro de' Medici. 
 Once and again he introduces Love and Death, who 
 dispute concerning him. For, like Dante and all the 
 nobler souls of Italy, he is much occupied with thoughts 
 of the grave, and his true mistress is death — death at 
 first as the worst of all sorrows and disgraces, with a 
 clod of the field for its brain; afterwards, death in its 
 high distinction, its detachment from vulgar needs, the 
 angry stains of life and action escaping fast. 
 
 Some of those whom the gods love die young. This 
 man, because the gods loved him, lingered on to be of 
 immense, patriarchal age, till the sweetness it had taken 
 so long to secrete in him was found at last. Out of the 
 strong came forth sweetness, ex forti dulcedo. The 
 world had changed around him. The "new Catholicism" 
 had taken the place of the Renaissance. The spirit of 
 the Roman Church had changed: in the vast world's 
 cathedral which his skill had helped to raise for it, it 
 looked stronger than ever. Some of the first members 
 of the Oratory were among his intimate associates. 
 They were of a spirit as unlike as possible from that of 
 Lorenzo, or Savonarola even. The opposition of the 
 Reformation to art has been often enlarged upon; far 
 greater was that of the Catholic revival. But in thus 
 fixing itself in a frozen orthodoxy, the Roman Church 
 had passed beyond him, and he was a stranger to it. In 
 earlier days, when its beliefs had been in a fluid state, 
 
74 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 ! 
 
 he too might have been drawn into the controversy. 
 He might have been for spiritualising the papal sover- 
 eignty, like Savonarola; or for adjusting the dreams of 
 Plato and Homer with the words of Christ, like Pico 
 of Mirandola. But things had moved onward, and such 
 adjustments were no longer possible. For himself, he 
 had long since fallen back on that divine ideal, which 
 above the wear and tear of creeds has been forming 
 itself for ages as the possession of nobler souls. And 
 now he began to feel the soothing influence which since 
 that time the Roman Church has often exerted over 
 spirits too independent to be its subjects, yet brought 
 within the neighborhood of its action; consoled and 
 tranquillised, as a traveller might be, resting for one 
 evening in a strange city, by its stately aspect and the 
 sentiment of its many fortunes, just because with those 
 fortunes he has nothing to do. So he lingers on; a 
 revenant, as the French say, a ghost out of another age, 
 in a world too coarse to touch his faint sensibilities very 
 closely; dreaming, in a worn-out society, theatrical in 
 its life, theatrical in its art, theatrical even in its de- 
 votion, on the morning of the world's history, on the 
 primitive form of man, on the images under which that 
 primitive world had conceived of spiritual forces. 
 
 I have dwelt on the thought of Michelangelo as thus 
 lingering beyond his time in a world not his own, be- 
 cause, if one is to distinguish the peculiar savor of his 
 work, he must be approached, not through his followers, 
 but through his predecessors; not through the marbles 
 of Saint Peter's, but through the work of the sculptors 
 of the fifteenth century over the tombs and altars of 
 
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 75 
 
 Tuscany. He is the last of the Florentines, of those 
 on whom the peculiar sentiment of the Florence of 
 Dante and Giotto descended: he is the consummate 
 representative of the form that sentiment took in the 
 fifteenth century with men like Luca Signorelli and 
 Mino da Fiesole. Up to him the tradition of sentiment 
 is unbroken, the progress towards surer and more mature 
 methods of expressing that sentiment continuous. But 
 his professed disciples did not share this temper; they 
 are in love with his strength only, and seem not to feel 
 his grave and temperate sweetness. Theatricality is their 
 chief characteristic ; and that is a quality as little attribut- 
 able to Michelangelo as to Mino or Luca Signorelli. 
 With him, as with them, all is serious, passionate, im- 
 pulsive. 
 
 This discipleship of Michelangelo, this dependence of 
 his on the tradition of the Florentine schools, is nowhere 
 seen more clearly than in his treatment of the Creation. 
 The Creation of Man had haunted the mind of the 
 middle age like a dream ; and weaving it into a hundred 
 carved ornaments of capital or doorway, the Italian 
 sculptors had early impressed upon it that pregnancy of 
 expression which seems to give it many veiled mean- 
 ings. As with other artistic conceptions of the middle 
 age, its treatment became almost conventional, handed 
 on from artist to artist, with slight changes, till it came 
 to have almost an independent and abstract existence of 
 its own. It was characteristic of the medieval mind thus 
 to give an independent traditional existence to a special 
 pictorial conception, or to a legend, like that of Tristram 
 or Tannhauser, or even to the very thoughts and sub- 
 stance of a book; like the Imitation, so that no single 
 
76 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 workman could claim it as his own, and the book, the im- 
 age, the legend, had itself a legend, and its fortunes, and 
 a personal history; and it is a sign of the medievalism 
 of Michelangelo, that he thus receives from tradition 
 his central conception, and does but add the last touches, 
 in transferring it to the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. 
 
 But there was another tradition of those earlier, more 
 serious Florentines, of which Michelangelo is the inherit- 
 or, to which he gives the final expression, and which 
 centres in the sacristy of San Lorenzo, as the tradition 
 of the Creation centres in the Sistine Chapel. It has 
 been said that all the great Florentines were preoccupied 
 with death. Outre-tombe! Outre-tombe! — is the bur- 
 den of their thoughts, from Dante to Savonarola. Even 
 the gay and licentious Boccaccio gives a keener edge to 
 his stories by putting them in the mouths of a party of 
 people who had taken refuge in a country-house from 
 the danger of death by plague. It was to this inherited 
 sentiment, this practical decision that to be preoccupied 
 with the thought of death was in itself dignifying, and 
 a note of high quality, that the seriousness of the great 
 Florentines of the fifteenth century was partly due; and 
 it was reinforced in them by the actual sorrows of their 
 times. How often, and in what various ways, had they 
 seen life stricken down, in their streets .and houses. 
 La bella Simonetta dies in early youth, and is borne 
 to the grave with uncovered face. The young Cardinal 
 Jacopo di Portogallo dies on a visit to Florence — insig- 
 nis forma fui et mirabili modestia — his epitaph dares to 
 say. Antonio Rossellino carves his tomb in the church 
 of San Miniato, with care for the shapely hands and 
 feet, and sacred attire; Luca della Robbia puts his sky- 
 
 7 
 
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 77 
 
 iest works there; and the tomb of the youthful and 
 princely prelate became the strangest and most beautiful 
 thing in that strange and beautiful place. After the 
 execution of the Pazzi conspirators, Botticelli is em- 
 ployed to paint their portraits. This preoccupation with 
 serious thoughts and sad images might easily have re- 
 sulted, as it did, for instance, in the gloomy villages of 
 the Rhine, or in the overcrowded parts of medieval 
 Paris, as it still does in many a village of the Alps, in 
 something merely morbid or grotesque, in the Danse 
 Macabre of many French and German painters, or the 
 grim inventions of Durer. From such a result the Flor- 
 entine masters of the fifteenth century were saved by 
 the nobility of their Italian culture, and still more by 
 their tender pity for the thing itself. They must often 
 have leaned over the lifeless body, when all was at 
 length quiet and smoothed out. After death, it is said, 
 the traces of slighter and more superficial dispositions 
 disappear; the lines become more simple and dignified; 
 only the abstract lines remain, in a great indifference. 
 They came thus to see death in its distinction. Then 
 following it perhaps one stage further, dwelling for a 
 moment on the point where all this transitory dignity 
 must break up, and discerning with no clearness a new 
 body, they paused just in time, and abstained, with a 
 sentiment of profound pity. 
 
 Of all this sentiment Michelangelo is the achievement; 
 and, first of all, of pity. Pieta, pity, the pity of the Vir- 
 gin Mother over the dead body of Christ, expanded into 
 the pity of all mothers over all dead sons, the entomb- 
 ment, with its cruel "hard stones": — this is the subject 
 of his predilection. He has left it in many forms, 
 
78 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 sketches, half-finished designs, finished and unfinished 
 groups of sculpture; but always as a hopeless, rayless, 
 almost heathen sorrow — no divine sorrow, but mere pity 
 and awe at the stiff limbs and colorless lips. There is 
 a drawing of his at Oxford, in which the dead body has 
 sunk to the earth between the mother's feet, with the 
 arms extended over her knees. The tombs in the sacristy 
 of San Lorenzo are memorials, not of any of the nobler 
 and greater Medici, but of Giuliano, and Lorenzo the 
 younger, noticeable chiefly for their somewhat early 
 death. It is mere human nature, therefore, which has 
 prompted the sentiment here. The titles assigned tra- 
 ditionally to the four symbolical figures, Night and Day, 
 The Twilight and The Dawn, are far too definite for 
 them; for these figures come much nearer to the mind 
 and spirit of their author, and are a more direct ex- 
 pression of his thoughts, than any merely symbolical 
 conceptions could possibly have been. They concentrate 
 and express, less by way of definite conceptions than by 
 the touches, the promptings of a piece of music, all those 
 vague fancies, misgivings, presentiments, which shift 
 and mix and are defined and fade again, whenever the 
 thoughts try to fix themselves with sincerity on the con- 
 ditions and surroundings of the disembodied spirit. I 
 suppose no one would come to the sacristy of San Lo- 
 renzo for consolation ; for seriousness, for solemnity, for 
 dignity of impression, perhaps, but not for consolation. 
 It is a place neither of consoling nor of terrible thoughts, 
 but of vague and wistful speculation. Here, again, 
 Michelangelo is the disciple not so much of Dante as 
 of the Platonists. Dante's belief in immortality is for- 
 mal, precise and firm, almost as much so as that of a 
 
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO 79 
 
 child, who thinks the dead will hear if you cry loud 
 enough. But in Michelangelo you have maturity, the 
 mind of the grown man, dealing cautiously and dispas- 
 sionately with serious things, and what hope he has is 
 based on the consciousness of ignorance — ignorance of 
 man, ignorance of the nature of the mind, its origin and 
 capacities. Michelangelo is so ignorant of the spiritual 
 world, of the new body and its laws, that he does not 
 surely know whether the consecrated Host may not be 
 the body of Christ. And of all that range of sentiment 
 he is the poet, a poet still alive, and in possession of our 
 inmost thoughts — dumb inquiry over the relapse after 
 death into the formlessness which preceded life, the 
 change, the revolt from that change, then the correcting, 
 hallowing, consoling rush of pity; at last, far off, thin 
 and vague, yet not more vague than the most definite 
 thoughts men have had through three centuries on a 
 matter that has been so near their hearts, the new body 
 — a passing light, a mere intangible, external effect, over 
 those too rigid, or too formless faces; a dream that 
 lingers a moment, retreating in the dawn, incomplete, 
 aimless, helpless ; a thing with faint hearing, faint mem- 
 ory, faint power of touch ; a breath, a flame in the door- 
 way, a feather in the wind. 
 
 The qualities of the great masters in art or literature, 
 the combination of those qualities, the laws by which 
 they moderate, support, relieve each other, are not pe- 
 culiar to them; but most often typical standards, or re- 
 vealing instances of the laws by which certain aesthetic 
 effects are produced. The old masters indeed are sim- 
 pler; their characteristics are written larger, and are 
 easier to read, than the analogues of them in all th<* 
 
80 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 mixed, confused productions of the modern mind. But 
 when once we have succeeded in defining for ourselves 
 those characteristics, and the law of their combination, 
 we have acquired a standard or measure which helps us 
 to put in its right place many a vagrant genius, many 
 an unclassified talent, many precious though imperfect 
 products of art. It is so with the components of the 
 true character of Michelangelo. That strange interfu- 
 sion of sweetness and strength is not to be found in 
 those who claimed to be his followers; but it is found 
 in many of those who worked before him, and in many 
 others down to our own time, in William Blake, for in- 
 stance, and Victor Hugo, who, though not of his school, 
 and unaware, are his true sons, and help us to understand 
 him as he in turn interprets and justifies them. Per- 
 haps this is the chief use in studying old masters. 
 
 1871. 
 
LEONARDO DA VINCI 
 
 HOMO MINISTER ET INTERPRES NATURE 
 
 In Vasari's life of Leonardo da Vinci as we now 
 read it there are some variations from the first edition. 
 There, the painter who has fixed the outward type of 
 Christ for succeeding centuries was a bold speculator, 
 holding lightly by other men's beliefs, setting philoso- 
 phy above Christianity. Words of his, trenchant enough 
 to justify this impression, are not recorded, and would 
 have been out of keeping with a genius of which one 
 characteristic is the tendency to lose itself in a refined 
 and graceful mystery. The suspicion was but the time- 
 honored mode in which the world stamps its apprecia- 
 tion of one who has thoughts for himself alone, his 
 high indifference, his intolerance of the common forms 
 of things ; and in the second edition the image was 
 changed into something fainter and more conventional. 
 But it is still by a certain mystery in his work, and some- 
 thing enigmatical beyond the usual measure of great 
 men, that he fascinates, or perhaps half repels. His life 
 is one of sudden revolts, with intervals in which he works 
 not at all, or apart from the main scope of his work. 
 By a strange fortune the pictures on which his more 
 popular fame rested disappeared early from the world, 
 like the Battle of the Standard; or are mixed obscurely 
 with the product of meaner hands, like the Last Suppef. 
 
 81 
 
82 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 .His type of beauty is so exotic that it fascinates a larger 
 number than it delights, and seems more than that of 
 •any other artist to reflect ideas and views and some 
 scheme of the world within; so that he seemed to his 
 contemporaries to be the possessor of some unsancti- 
 fied and secret wisdom; as to Michelet and others to 
 have anticipated modern ideas. He trifles with his 
 genius, and crowds all his chief work into a few tor- 
 mented years of later life ; yet he is so possessed by his 
 genius that he passes unmoved through the most tragic 
 events, overwhelming his country and friends, like one 
 who comes across them by chance on some secret er- 
 rand. 
 
 His legend, as the French say, with the anecdotes 
 which every one remembers, is one of the most brilliant 
 chapters of Vasari. Later writers merely copied it, un- 
 til, in 1894, Carlo Amoretti applied to it a criticism 
 which left hardly a date fixed, and not one of those an- 
 ecdotes untouched. The various questions thus raised 
 have since that time become, one after another, subjects 
 of special study, and mere antiquarianism has in this 
 direction little more to do. For others remain the edit- 
 ing of the thirteen books of his manuscripts, and the 
 separation by technical criticism of what in his reputed 
 works is really his, from what is only half his, or the 
 work of his pupils. But a lover of strange souls may 
 still analyse for himself the impression made on him by 
 those works, and try to reach through it a definition of 
 the chief elements of Leonardo's genius. The legend, 
 as corrected and enlarged by its critics, may now and 
 then intervene to support the results of this analysis. 
 
 His life has three divisions — thirty years at Florence, 
 
LEONARDO DA VINCI 
 
 83 
 
 nearly twenty years at Milan, then nineteen years of 
 wandering, till he sinks to rest under the protection of 
 Francis the First at the Chateau de Clou. The dis- 
 honor of illegitimacy hangs over his birth. Piero 
 Antonio, his father, was of a noble Florentine house, of 
 Vinci in the Val d'Arno, and Leonardo, brought up deli- 
 cately among the true children of that house, was the 
 love-child of his youth, wit hthe keen, puissant nature 
 such children often have. We see him in his boyhood 
 fascinating all men by his beauty, improvising music 
 and songs, buying the caged birds and setting them free, 
 as he walked the streets of Florence, fond of odd bright 
 dresses and spirited horses. 
 
 From his earliest years he designed many objects, 
 and constructed models in relief, of which Vasari men- 
 tions some of women smiling. His father, pondering 
 over this promise in the child, took him to the workshop 
 of Andrea del Verrocchio, then the most famous artist 
 in Florence. Beautiful objects lay about there — reli- 
 quaries, pyxes, silver images for the pope's chapel at 
 Rome, strange fancy-work of the middle age, keeping 
 odd company with fragments of antiquity, then but lately 
 discovered. Another student Leonardo may have seen 
 there — a lad into whose soul the level light and aerial 
 illusions of Italian sunsets had passed, in after days fa- 
 mous as Perugino. Verrocchio was an artist of the 
 earlier Florentine type, carver, painter, and worker in 
 metals, in one ; designer, not of pictures only, but of all 
 things for sacred or household use, drinking-vessels, 
 ambries, instruments of music, making them all fair to 
 taok upon, filling the common ways of life with the 
 reflection of some far-off brightness; and years of pa- 
 
8 4 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 tience had refined his hand till his work was now sought 
 after from distant places. 
 
 It happened that Verrocchio was employed by the 
 brethren of Vallombrosa to paint the Baptism of Christ, 
 and Leonardo was allowed to finish an angel in the left- 
 hand corner. It was one of those moments in which the 
 progress of a great thing — here, that of the art of Italy — 
 presses hard on the happiness of an individual, through 
 whose discouragement and decrease, humanity, in more 
 fortunate persons, comes a step nearer to its final suc- 
 cess. 
 
 For beneath the cheerful exterior of the mere well- 
 paid craftsman, chasing brooches for the copes of Santa 
 Maria Novella, or twisting metal screens for the tombs 
 of the Medici, lay the ambitious desire to expand the 
 destiny of Italian art by a larger knowledge and insight 
 into things, a purpose in art not unlike Leonardo's still 
 unconscious purpose; and often, in the modelling of 
 drapery, or of a lifted arm, or of hair cast back from 
 the face, there came to him something of the freer 
 manner and richer humanity of a later age. But in this 
 Baptism the pupil had surpassed the master; and Ver- 
 rocchio turned away as one stunned, and as if his sweet 
 earlier work must thereafter be distasteful to him, from 
 the bright animated angel of Leonardo's hand. 
 
 The angel may still be seen in Florence, a space of 
 sunlight in the cold, labored old picture ; but the legend 
 is true only in sentiment, for painting had always been 
 the art by which Verrocchio set least store. And as in 
 a sense he anticipates Leonardo, so to the last Leonardo 
 recalls the studio of Verrocchio, in the love of beautiful 
 toys, such as the vessel of water for a mirror, and lovely 
 
LEONARDO DA VINCI 
 
 needle-work about the implicated hands in the Modesty 
 and Vanity, and of reliefs, like those cameos which in 
 the Virgin of the Balances hang all round the girdle 
 of Saint Michael, and of bright variegated stones, such 
 as the agates in the Saint Anne, and in a hieratic precise- 
 ness and grace, as of a sanctuary swept and garnished* 
 Amid all the cunning and intricacy of his Lombard man- 
 ner this never left him. Much of it there must have 
 been in that lost picture of Paradise, which he prepared 
 as a cartoon for tapestry, to be woven in the looms of 
 Flanders. It was the perfection of the older Floren-* 
 tine style of miniature-painting, with patient putting of 
 each leaf upon the trees and each flower in the grass,, 
 where the first man and woman were standing. 
 
 And because it was the perfection of that style, it 
 awoke in Leonardo some seed of discontent which lay 
 in the secret places of his nature. For the way to per- 
 fection is through a series of disgusts; and this picture 
 — all that he had done so far in his life at Florence — • 
 was after all in the old slight manner. His art, if it 
 was to be something in the world, must be weighted 
 with more of the meaning of nature and purpose of hu- 
 manity. Nature was "the true mistress of higher intel- 
 ligences. ,, He plunged, then, into the study of nature. 
 And in doing this he followed the manner of the older 
 students; he brooded over the hidden virtues of plants 
 and crystals, the lines traced by the stars as they moved 
 in the sky, over the correspondences which exist between 
 the different orders of living things, through which, to 
 eyes opened, they interpret each other; and for years 
 he seemed to those about him as one listening to a voW\ 
 silent for other men. 
 
86 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 He learned here the art of going deep, of tracking 
 the sources of expression to their subtlest retreats, the 
 power of an intimate presence in the things he handled. 
 He did not at once or entirely desert his art; only he 
 was no longer the cheerful, objective painter, through 
 whose soul, as through clear glass, the bright figures of 
 Florentine life, only made a little mellower and more 
 pensive by the transit, passed on to the white wall. He 
 wasted many days in curious tricks of design, seeming 
 to lose himself in the spinning of intricate devises of 
 line and color. He was smitten with a love of the im- 
 possible — the perforation of mountains, changing the 
 course of rivers, raising great buildings, such as the 
 church of San Giovanni, in the air; all those feats 
 for the performance of which natural magic professed 
 to have the key. Later writers, indeed, see in these ef- 
 forts an anticipation of modern mechanics ; in him they 
 were rather dreams, thrown off by the overwrought and 
 laboring brain. Two ideas were especially confirmed 
 in him, as reflexes of things that had touched his brain 
 in childhood beyond the depth of other impressions — the 
 smiling of women and the motion of great waters. 
 
 And in such studies some interfusion of the extremes 
 of beauty and terror shaped itself, as an image that 
 might be seen and touched, in the mind of this gracious 
 youth, so fixed that for the rest of his life it never left 
 him. As if catching glimpses of it in the strange eyes 
 or hair of chance people, he would follow such about 
 the streets of Florence till the sun went down, of whom 
 many sketches of his remain. Some of these are full 
 of a curious beauty, that remote beauty which may be 
 apprehended only by those who have sought it care- 
 
LEONARDO DA VINCI 
 
 87 
 
 fully; who, starting with acknowledged types of beauty, 
 have refined as far upon these, as these refine upon the 
 world of common forms. But mingled inextricably with 
 this there is an element of mockery also ; so that, whether 
 in sorrow or scorn, he caricatures Dante even. Legions 
 of grotesques sweep under his hand ; for has not nature, 
 too, her grotesques — the rent rock, the distorting lights 
 of evening on lonely roads, the unveiled structure of 
 man in the embryo, or the skeleton ? 
 
 All these swarming fancies unite in the Medusa of 
 the Ufhzii. Vasari's story of an earlier Medusa, painted 
 on a wooden shield, is perhaps an invention; and yet, 
 properly told, has more of the air of truth about it than 
 anything else in the whole legend. For its real subject 
 is not the serious work of a man, but the experiment of 
 a child. The lizards and glow-worms and other strange 
 small creatures which haunt an Italian vineyard bring 
 before one the whole picture of a child's life in a Tus- 
 can dwelling — half castle, half farm — and are as true 
 to nature as the pretended astonishment of the father 
 for whom the boy has prepared a surprise. It was not 
 in play that he painted that other Medusa, the one great 
 picture which he left behind him in Florence. The sub- 
 ject has been treated in various ways; Leonardo alone 
 cuts to its centre; he alone realises it as the head of a 
 corpse, exercising its powers through all the circum- 
 stances of death. What may be called the fascination 
 of corruption penetrates in every touch its exquisitely 
 finished beauty. About the dainty lines of the cheek the 
 bat flits unheeded. The delicate snakes seem literally 
 strangling each other in terrified struggle to escape from 
 the Medusa brain. The hue which violent death always 
 
88 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 brings with it is in the features; features singularly 
 massive and grand, as we catch them inverted, in a dex- 
 terous foreshortening, crown foremost, like a great calm 
 stone against which the wave of serpents breaks. 
 
 The science of that age was all divination, clairvoy- 
 ance, unsubjected to our exact modern formulas, seeking 
 in an instant of vision to concentrate a thousand experi- 
 ences. Later writers, thinking only of the well-ordered 
 treatise on painting which a Frenchman, Raffaelle du 
 Fresne, a hundred years afterwards, compiled from 
 Leonardo's bewildered manuscripts, written strangely, 
 as his manner was, from right to left, have imagined a 
 rigid order in his inquiries. But this rigid order would 
 have been little in accordance with the restlessness of 
 his character ; and if we think of him as the mere rea- 
 soner who subjects design to anatomy, and composition 
 to mathematical rules, we shall hardly have that im- 
 pression which those around Leonardo received from 
 him. Poring over his crucibles, making experiments 
 with color, trying, by a strange variation of the alche- 
 mist's dream, to discover the secret, not of an elixir to 
 make man's natural life immortal, but of giving immor- 
 tality to the subtlest and most delicate effects of paint- 
 ing, he seemed to them rather the sorcerer or the ma- 
 gician, possessed of curious secrets and a hidden knowl- 
 edge, living in a world of which he alone possessed the 
 key. What his philosophy seems to have been most 
 like is that of Paracelsus or Cardan; and much of the 
 spirit of the older alchemy still hangs about it, with 
 its confidence in short cuts and odd byways to knowl- 
 edge. To him philosophy was to be something giving 
 strange swiftness and double sight, divining the sources 
 
LEONARDO DA VINCI 
 
 89 
 
 of springs beneath the earth or of expression beneath 
 the human countenance, clairvoyant of occult gifts in 
 common or uncommon things, in the reed at the brook- 
 side, or the star which draws near to us but once in a 
 century. How, in this way, the clear purpose was over- 
 clouded, the fine chaser's hand perplexed, we but dimly 
 see; the mystery which at no point quite lifts from Leon- 
 ardo's life is deepest here. But it is certain that at one 
 period of his life he had almost ceased to be an artist. 
 
 The year 1483 — the year of the birth of 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 recom- 
 mends himself to Ludovico Sforza, and offers to tell 
 him, for a price, strange secrets in the art of war. It 
 was that Sforza who murdered his young nephew by 
 slow poison, yet was so susceptible of religious impres- 
 sions that he blended mere earthly passion with a sort 
 of religious sentimentalism, and who took for his device 
 the mulberry-tree — symbol, in its long delay and sudden 
 yielding of flowers and fruit together, of a wisdom which 
 economises all forces for an opportunity of sudden and 
 sure effect. The fame of Leonardo had gone before him, 
 and he was to model a colossal statue of Francesco, the 
 first Duke of Milan. As for Leonardo himself, he came 
 not as an artist at all, or careful of the fame of one; but 
 as a player on the harp, a strange harp of silver of his 
 own construction, shaped in some curious likeness to 
 a horse's skull. The capricious spirit of Ludovico was 
 susceptible also to the power of music, and Leonardo's 
 nature had a kind of spell in it. Fascination is always 
 the word descriptive of him. No portrait of his youth 
 remains ; but all tends to make us believe that up to this 
 
9Q 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 time some charm of voice and aspect, strong enough to 
 balance the disadvantage of his birth, had played about 
 him. His physical strength was great; it was said that 
 he could bend a horseshoe like a coil of lead. 
 
 The Duonto, work of artists from beyond the Alps, 
 so fantastic to the eye of a Florentine used to the mel- 
 low, unbroken surfaces of Giotto and Arnolfo, was then 
 in all its freshness; and below, in the streets of Milan, 
 moved a people as fantastic, changeful, and dreamlike. 
 To Leonardo least of all men could there be anything 
 poisonous in the exotic flowers of sentiment which grew 
 there. It was a life of brilliant sins and exquisite amuse- 
 ments: Leonardo became a celebrated designer of pa- 
 geants ; and it suited the quality of his genius, composed, 
 in almost equal parts, of curiosity and the desire of 
 beauty, to take things as they came. 
 
 Curiosity and the desire of beauty — these are the two 
 elementary forces in Leonardo's genius; curiosity, often 
 in conflict with the desire of beauty, but generating, in 
 union with it, a type of subtle and curious grace. 
 
 The movement of the fifteenth century was twofold; 
 partly the Renaissance, partly also the coming of what 
 is called the "modern spirit," with its realism, its ap- 
 peal to experience. It comprehended a return to an- 
 tiquity, and a return to nature. Raphael represents the 
 return to antiquity, and Leonardo the return to nature. In 
 this return to nature, he was seeking to satisfy a bound- 
 less curiosity by her perpetual surprises, a microscopic 
 sense of finish by her finesse, or delicacy of operation, 
 that subtilitas naturae which Bacon notices. So we find 
 him often in intimate relations with men of science, — 
 with Fra Luca Paccioli the mathematician, and the 
 
LEONARDO DA VINCI 
 
 9i 
 
 anatomist Marc Antonio della Torre. His observations 
 and experiments fill thirteen volumes of manuscript; 
 and those who can judge describe him as anticipating 
 long before, by rapid intuition, the later ideas of science. 
 He explained the obscure light of the unilluminated part 
 of the moon, knew that the sea had once covered the 
 mountains which contain shells, and of the gathering of 
 the equatorial waters above the polar. 
 
 He who thus penetrated into the most secret parts of 
 nature preferred always the more to the less remote, 
 what, seeming exceptional, was an instance of law more 
 refined, the construction about things of a peculiar at- 
 mosphere and mixed lights. He paints flowers with such 
 curious felicity that different writers have attributed to 
 him a fondness for particular flowers, as Clement the 
 cyclamen, and Rio the jasmin; while, at Venice, there 
 is a stray leaf from his portfolio dotted all over with 
 studies of violets and the wild rose. In him first appears 
 the taste for what is bizarre or recherche in landscape ; 
 hollow places full of the green shadow of bituminous 
 rocks, ridged reefs of trap-rock which cut the water into 
 quaint sheets of light, — their exact antitype is in our 
 own western seas ; all the solemn effects of moving 
 water. You may follow it springing from its distant 
 source among the rocks on the heath of the Madonna 
 of the Balances, passing, as a little fall, into the treach- 
 erous calm of the Madonna of the Lake, as a goodly 
 river next, below the cliffs of the Madonna of the Rocks, 
 washing the white walls of its distant villages, stealing 
 out in a network of divided streams in La Gioconda to 
 the seashore of the Saint Anne — that delicate place, 
 where the wind passes like the hand of some fine etcher 
 
92 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 over the surface, and the untorn shells are lying thick 
 upon the sand, and the tops of the rocks, to which the 
 waves never rise, are green with grass, grown fine as 
 hair. It is the landscape, not of dreams or of fancy, 
 but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a 
 thousand with a miracle of finesse. Through Leonardo's 
 strange veil of sight things reach him so ; in no ordinary 
 night or day, but as in faint light of eclipse, or in some 
 brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or through 
 deep water. 
 
 And not into nature only; but he plunged also into 
 human personality, and became above all a painter of 
 portraits; faces of a modelling more skilful than has 
 been seen before or since, embodied with a reality which 
 almost amounts to illusion, on the dark air. To take a 
 character as it was, and delicately sound its stops, suited 
 one so curious in observation, curious in invention. He 
 painted thus the portraits of Ludovico's mistresses, Lu- 
 cretia Crivelli and Cecilia Galerani the poetess, of Lu- 
 dovico himself, and the Duchess Beatrice. The portrait 
 of Cecilia Galerani is lost, but that of Lucretia Crivelli 
 has been identified with La Belle Feroniere of the 
 Louvre, and Ludovico's pale, anxious face still remains 
 in the Ambrosian library. Opposite is the portrait of 
 Beatrice d'Este, in whom Leonardo seems to have caught 
 some presentiment of early death, painting her precise 
 and grave, full of the refinement of the dead, in sad 
 earth-colored raiment, set with pale stones. 
 
 Sometimes this curiosity came in conflict with the de- 
 sire of beauty; it tended to make him go too far below 
 that outside of things in which art really begins and ends. 
 This struggle between the reason and its ideas, and the 
 
LEONARDO DA VINCI 
 
 93 
 
 senses, the desire of beauty, is the key to Leonardo's 
 life at Milan — his restlessness, his endless re-touchings, 
 his odd experiments with color. How much must he leave 
 unfinished, how much recommence! His problem was 
 the transmutation of ideas into images. What he had 
 attained so far had been the mastery of that earlier 
 Florentine style, with its naive and limited sensuousness. 
 Now he was to entertain in this narrow medium those 
 divinations of a humanity too wide for it, that larger 
 vision of the opening world, which is only not too much 
 for the great, irregular art of Shakespeare; and every- 
 where the effort is visible in the work of his hands. 
 This agitation, this perpetual delay, give him an air of 
 weariness and ennui. To others he seems to be aiming 
 at an impossible effect, to do something that art, thai 
 painting, can never do. Often the expression of physi- 
 cal beauty at this or that point seems strained and 
 marred in the effort, as in those heavy German fore- 
 heads — too heavy and German for perfect beauty. 
 
 For there was a touch of Germany in that genius 
 which, as Goethe said, had "thought itself weary" — 
 miide sich gedacht. What an anticipation of modern 
 Germany, for instance, in that debate on the question 
 whether sculpture or painting is the nobler art ! 1 But 
 there is this difference between him and the German, 
 that, with all that curious science, the German would 
 have thought nothing more was needed. The name of 
 Goethe himself reminds one how great for the artist 
 may be the danger of over-much science ; how Goethe, 
 
 1 How princely, how characteristic of Leonardo, the answer, 
 uanto piu, un' arte porta seco fatica di corpo, tanto piu e 
 \vile! 
 
94 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 who, m the Elective Affinities and the first part of Faust, 
 does transmute ideas into images, who wrought many 
 such transmutations, did not invariably find the spell- 
 word, and in the second part of Faust presents us with 
 a mass of science which has almost no artistic character 
 at all. But Leonardo will never work till the happy mo- 
 ment comes — that moment of bien-etre, which to imagi- 
 native men is a moment of invention. On this he waits 
 with a perfect patience ; other moments are but a prep- 
 aration, or after-taste of it. Few men distinguish be- 
 tween them as jealously as he. Hence so many flaws 
 even in the choicest work. But for Leonardo the dis- 
 tinction is absolute, and, in the moment of bien-etre, 
 the alchemy complete : the idea is stricken into color and 
 imagery: a cloudy mysticism is refined to a subdued and 
 graceful mystery, and painting pleases the eye while it 
 satisfies the soul. 
 
 This curious beauty is seen above all in his drawings, 
 and in these chiefly in the abstract grace of the bound- 
 ing lines. Let us take some of these drawings, and 
 pause over them awhile; and, first, one of those at 
 Florence — the heads of a woman and a little child, set 
 side by side, but each in its own separate frame. First 
 of all, there is much pathos in the reappearance, in the 
 fuller curves of the face of the child, of the sharper, 
 more chastened lines of the worn and older face, which 
 leaves no doubt that the heads are those of a little child 
 and its mother. A feeling for maternity is indeed al- 
 ways characteristic of Leonardo; and this feeling is 
 further indicated here by the half-humorous pathos of 
 the diminutive, rounded shoulders of the child. You 
 may note a like pathetic power in drawings of a young 
 
LEONARDO DA VINCI 
 
 9S 
 
 man, seated in a stooping posture, his face in his hands, 
 as in sorrow ; of a slave sitting in an uneasy inclined 
 attitude, in some brief interval of rest; of a small Ma- 
 donna and Child, peeping sideways in half-reassured 
 terror, as a mighty griffin with batlike wings, one of 
 Leonardo's finest inventions, descends suddenly from the 
 air to snatch up a great wild beast wandering near them. 
 But note in these, as that which especially belongs to 
 art, the contour of the young man's hair, the poise of 
 the slave's arm above his head, and the curves of the 
 head of the child, following the little skull within, thin 
 and fine as some sea-shell worn by the wind. 
 
 Take again another head, still more full of sentiment, 
 but of a different kind, a little drawing in red chalk 
 which every one will remember who has examined at all 
 carefully the drawings by old masters at the Louvre. It 
 is a face of doubtful sex, set in the shadow of its own 
 hair, the cheek-line in high light against it, with some- 
 thing voluptuous and full in the eye-lids and the lips. 
 Another drawing might pass for the same face in child- 
 hood, with parched and feverish lips, but much sweetness 
 in the loose, short-waisted childish dress, with necklace 
 and bulla, and in the daintily bound hair. We might 
 take the thread of suggestion which these two drawings 
 offer, when thus set side by side, and, following it 
 through the drawings at Florence, Venice, and Milan, 
 construct a sort of series, illustrating better than any- 
 thing else Leonardo's type of womanly beauty. Daugh- 
 ters of Herodias, with their fantastic head-dresses knot- 
 ted and folded so strangely to leave the dainty oval of 
 the face disengaged, they are not of the Christian fam- 
 ily, or of Raphael's. They are the clairvoyants, through 
 
9 6 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 whom, as through delicate instruments, one becomes 
 aware of the subtler forces of nature, and the modes of 
 their action, all that is magnetic in it, all those finer con- 
 ditions wherein material things rise to that subtlety of 
 operation which constitutes them spiritual, where only 
 the final nerve and the keener touch can follow. It is 
 as if in certain significant examples we actually saw 
 those forces at their work on human flesh. Nervous, 
 electric, faint always with some inexplicable faintness, 
 these people seem to be subject to exceptional condi- 
 tions, to feel powers at work in the common air unfelt 
 by others, to become, as it were, the receptacle of them, 
 and pass them on to us in a chain of secret influences. 
 
 But among the more youthful heads there is one at 
 Florence which Love chooses for its own — the head of 
 a young man, which may well be the likeness of Andrea 
 Salaino, beloved of Leonardo for his curled and waving 
 hair — belli capelli ricci e inanellati — and afterwards his 
 favorite pupil and servant. Of all the interests in living 
 men and women which may have filled his life at Milan, 
 this attachment alone is recorded. And in return Salaino 
 identified himself so entirely with Leonardo, that the 
 picture of Saint Anne, in the Louvre, has been attributed 
 to him. It illustrates Leonardo's usual choice of pupils, 
 men of some natural charm of person or intercourse 
 like Salaino, or men of birth and princely habits of life 
 like Francesco Melzi — men with just enough genius to| 
 be capable of initiation into his secret, for the sake of 
 which they were ready to efface their own individuality. 
 Among them, retiring often to the villa of the Melzi at 
 Canonica al Vaprio, he worked at his fugitive manu- 
 scripts and sketches, working for the present hour, an(| 
 
LEONARDO DA VINCI 
 
 97 
 
 for a few only, perhaps chiefly for himself. Other ar- 
 tists have been as careless of present or future applause, 
 in self-forgetfulness, or because they set moral or po- 
 litical ends above the ends of art ; but in him this solitary 
 culture of beauty seems to have hung upon a kind of 
 self-love, and a carelessness in the work of art of all 
 but art itself. Out of the secret places of a unique tem- 
 perament he brought strange blossoms and fruits hith- 
 erto unknown; and for him, the novel impression con- 
 veyed, the exquisite effect woven, counted as an end in 
 itself — a perfect end. 
 
 And these pupils of his acquired his manner so thor- 
 oughly, that though the number of Leonardo's authentic 
 works is very small indeed, there is a multitude of other 
 men's pictures through which we undoubtedly see him, 
 and come very near to his genius. Sometimes, as in 
 the little picture of the Madonna of the Balances, in 
 which, from the bosom of His mother, Christ weighs 
 the pebbles of the brook against the sins of men, we 
 have a hand, rough enough by contrast, working upon 
 some fine hint or sketch of his. Sometimes, as in the sub- 
 jects of the Daughter of Herodias and the Head of John 
 the Baptist, the lost originals have been re-echoed and 
 varied upon again and again by Luini and others. At 
 other times the original remains, but has been a mere 
 theme or motive, a type of which the accessories might 
 be modified or changed; and these variations have but 
 brought out the more the purpose, or expression of the 
 original. It is so with the so-called Saint John the Bap- 
 tist of the Louvre — one of the few naked figures Leon- 
 ardo painted — whose delicate brown flesh and woman's 
 hair no one would go out into the wilderness to seek, 
 
9 8 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 and whose treacherous smile would have us understand 
 something far beyond the outward gesture or circum- 
 stance. But the long, reedlike cross in the hand, which 
 suggests Saint John the Baptist, becomes faint in a 
 copy at the Ambrosian Library, and disappears altogether 
 in another version, in the Palazzo Rosso at Genoa. Re- 
 turning from the latter to the original, we are no longer 
 surprised by Saint John's strange likeness to the Bacchus 
 which hangs near it, and which set Theophile Gautier 
 thinking of Heine's notion of decayed gods, who, to 
 maintain themselves, after the fall of paganism, took 
 employment in the new religion. We recognise one of 
 those symbolical inventions in which the ostensible sub- 
 ject is used, not as matter for definite pictorial realisa- 
 tion, but as the starting-point of a train of sentiment, 
 subtle and vague as a piece of music. No one ever ruled 
 over the mere subject in hand more entirely than Leon- 
 ardo, or bent it more dexterously to purely artistic ends. 
 And so it comes to pass that though he handles sacred 
 subjects continually, he is the most profane of painters; 
 the given person or subject, Saint John in the Desert, 
 or the Virgin on the knees of Saint Anne, is often merely 
 the pretext for a kind of work which carries one alto- 
 gether beyond the range of its conventional associations. 
 
 About the Last Supper, its decay and restorations, 
 a whole literature has risen up, Goethe's pensive sketch 
 of its sad fortunes being perhaps the best. The death 
 in childbirth of the Duchess Beatrice was followed in 
 Ludovico by one of those paroxysms of religious feeling 
 which in him were constitutional. The low, gloomy 
 Dominican church of Saint Mary of the Graces had been 
 the favorite oratory of Beatrice. She had spent her last 
 
LEONARDO DA VINCI 
 
 99 
 
 days there, full of sinister presentiments; at last it had 
 been almost necessary to remove her from it by force; 
 and now it was here that mass was said a hundred times 
 a day for her repose. On the damp wall of the refectory, 
 oozing with mineral salts, Leonardo painted the Last 
 Supper. Effective anecdotes were told about it, his 
 retouchings and delays. They show him refusing to 
 work except at the moment of invention, scornful of any 
 one who supposed that art could be a work of mere in- 
 dustry and rule, often coming the whole length of 
 Milan to give a single touch. He painted it, not in 
 fresco, where all must be impromptu, but in oils, the new 
 method which he had been one of the first to welcome, 
 because it allowed of so many afterthoughts, so refined 
 a working out of perfection. It turned out that on a 
 plastered wall no process could have been less durable. 
 Within fifty years it had fallen into decay. And now 
 we have to turn back to Leonardo's own studies, above 
 all to one drawing of the central head at the Br era, 
 which, in a union of tenderness and severity in the face- 
 lines, reminds one of the monumental work of Mino 
 da Fiesole, to trace it as it was. 
 
 Here was another effort to lift a given subject out of 
 the range of its traditional associations. Strange, after 
 all the mystic developments of the middle age, was the 
 effort to see the Eucharist, not as the pale Host of the 
 altar, but as one taking leave of his friends. Five years 
 afterwards the young Raphael, at Florence, painted it 
 with sweet and solemn effect in the refectory of Saint 
 Onofrio; but still with all the mystical unreality of 
 the school of Perugino. Vasari pretends that the cen- 
 tral head was never finished. But finished or unfinished, 
 
IOO 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 or owing part of its effect to a mellowing decay, the 
 head of Jesus does but consummate the sentiment of 
 the whole company — ghosts through which you see the 
 wall, faint as the shadows of the leaves upon the wall 
 on autumn afternoons. This figure is but the faintest, 
 the most spectral of them all. 
 
 The Last Supper was finished in 1497; in 1498 the 
 French entered Milan, ^nd whether or not the Gascon 
 bowmen used it as a mark for their arrows, the model 
 of Francesco Sforza certainly did not survive. What, in 
 that age, such work was capable of being — of what 
 nobility, amid what racy truthfulness to fact — we may 
 judge from the bronze statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni 
 on horseback, modelled by Leonardo's master, Ver- 
 rocchio (he died of grief, it was said, because, the 
 mold accidentally failing, he was unable to complete 
 it), still standing in the piazza of Saint John and Saint 
 Paul at Venice. Some traces of the thing may remain 
 in certain of Leonardo's drawings, and perhaps also, by 
 a singular circumstance, in a far-off town of France. 
 For Ludovico became a prisoner, and ended his days 
 at Loches in Touraine. After many years of captivity 
 in the dungeons below, where all seems sick with barbar- 
 ous feudal memories, he was allowed at last, it is said, 
 to breathe fresher air for awhile in one of the rooms 
 of the great tower still shown, its walls covered with 
 strange painted arabesques, ascribed by tradition to his 
 hand, amused a little, in this way, through the tedious 
 years. In those vast helmets and human faces and 
 pieces of armor, among which, in great letters, the motto 
 Infelix Sum is woven in and out, it is perhaps not 
 too fanciful to see the fruit of a wistful after-dreaming 
 
LEONARDO DA VINCI 
 
 IOI 
 
 over Leonardo's sundry experiments on the armed figure 
 of the great duke, which had occupied the two so much 
 during the days of their good fortune at Milan. 
 
 The remaining years of Leonardo's life are more or 
 less years of wandering. From his brilliant life at court 
 he had saved nothing, and he returned to Florence a 
 poor man. Perhaps necessity kept his spirit excited : 
 the next four years are one prolonged rapture of ecstasy 
 of invention. He painted now the pictures of the Louvre* 
 his most authentic works, which came there straight from 
 the cabinet of Francis the First, at Fontainebleau. One 
 picture of his, the Saint Anne — not the Saint Anne of 
 the Louvre, but a simple cartoon, now in London — 
 revived for a moment a sort of appreciation more com- 
 mon in an earlier time, when good pictures had still 
 seemed miraculous. For two days a crowd of people 
 of all qualities passed in naive excitement through the 
 chamber where it hung, and gave Leonardo a taste of the 
 "triumph" of Cimabue. But his work was less with the 
 saints than with the living women of Florence. For he 
 lived still in the polished society that he loved, and in 
 the houses of Florence, left perhaps a little subject to 
 light thoughts by the death of Savonarola — the latest 
 gossip (1869) is of an undraped Monna Lisa, found in 
 some out-of-the-way corner of the late Orleans collec- 
 tion — he saw Ginevra di Benci, and Lisa, the young third 
 wife of Francesco del Giocondo. As we have seen him 
 using incidents of sacred story, not for their own sake, 
 nor as mere subjects for pictorial realisation, but as 
 a cryptic language for fancies all his own, so now he 
 found a vent for his thought in taking one of these 
 languid women, and raising her, as Leda or Pomona A 
 
102 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 as Modesty or Vanity, to the seventh heaven of sym-- 
 bolical expression. 
 
 La Gioconda is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's mas- 
 terpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought 
 and work. In suggestiveness, only the Melancholia of 
 Diirer is comparable to it; and no crude symbolism dis- 
 turbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. 
 We all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its 
 marble chair, in that circle of fantastic rocks, as in some 
 faint light under sea. Perhaps of all ancient pictures 
 time has chilled it least. 1 As often happens with works 
 in which invention seems to reach its limit, there is an 
 element in it given to, not invented by, the master. In 
 that intestimable folio of drawings, once in the possession 
 of Vasari, were certain designs by Verrocchio, faces of 
 such impressive beauty that Leonardo in his boyhood 
 copied them many times. It is hard not to connect with 
 these designs of the elder, by-past master, as with its 
 germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with 
 a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all 
 Leonardo's work. Besides, the picture is a portrait. 
 From childhood we see this image defining itself on the 
 fabric of his dreams, and but for express historical testi- 
 mony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady, 
 embodied and beheld at last. What was the relation- 
 ship of a living Florentine to this creature of hisj 
 thought? By what strange affinities had the dream and 
 the person grown up thus apart, and yet so closely to- 
 gether? Present from the first incorporeally in Leon- 
 ardo's brain, dimly traced in the designs of Verrocchio, 
 
 1 Yet for Vasari there was some further magic of crimson 
 in the lips and cheeks, lost for us. 
 
LEONARDO DA VINCI 
 
 she is found present at last in // Giocondo's house. That 
 there is much of mere portraiture in the picture is at- 
 tested by the legend that by artificial means, the presence 
 of mimes and flute-players, that subtle expression was 
 protracted on the face. Again, was it in four years and 
 by renewed labor never really completed, or in four 
 months and as by stroke of magic, that the image was 
 projected? 
 
 The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the 
 waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand 
 years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon 
 which all "the ends of the world are come," and the 
 eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out 
 from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by 
 cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and ex- 
 quisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of 
 those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of an- 
 tiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, 
 into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! 
 All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched 
 and moulded there, in that which they have of power to 
 refine and make expressive the outward form, the ani- 
 malism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of 
 the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imagina- 
 tive loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the 
 Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she 
 sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, 
 and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a 
 diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her ; 
 and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, 
 and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, 
 as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has 
 
104 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and 
 lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded thq 
 changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the 
 hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together 
 ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern 
 philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as 
 wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of 
 thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the 
 embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern 
 idea. 
 
 During these years at Florence Leonardo's history is 
 the history of his art; for himself, he is lost in the 
 bright cloud of it. The outward history begins again in 
 1502, with a wild journey through central Italy, which 
 he makes as the chief engineer of Caesar Borgia. The 
 biographer, putting together the stray jottings of his 
 manuscripts, may follow him through every day of it, 
 up the strange tower of Siena, elastic like a bent bow, 
 down to the seashore at Piombino, each place appearing j 
 as fitfully as in a fever dream. 
 
 One other great work was left for him to do, a work j 
 all trace of which soon vanished, The Battle of the \ 
 Standard, in which he had Michelangelo for his rival. 
 The citizens of Florence, desiring to decorate the walls 
 of the great council-chamber, had offered the work for 
 competition, and any subject might be chosen from the \ 
 Florentine wars of the fifteenth century. Michelangelo 
 chose for his cartoon an incident of the war with Pisa, 
 in which the Florentine soldiers, bathing in the Arno, 
 are surprised by the sound of trumpets, and run to arms. 
 His design has reached us only in an old engraving, 
 which helps us less perhaps than our remembrance of 
 
LEONARDO DA VINCI 105 
 
 the background of his Holy Family in the Ufhzii to im- 
 agine in what superhuman form, such as might have 
 beguiled the heart of an earlier world, those figures as- 
 cended out of the water. Leonardo chose an incident 
 from the battle of Anghiari, in which two parties of 
 soldiers fight for a standard. Like Michelangelo's, his 
 cartoon is lost, and has come to us only in sketches, and 
 in a fragment of Rubens. Through the accounts given 
 we may discern some lust of terrible things in it, so that 
 even the horses tore each other with their teeth. And 
 yet one fragment of it, in a drawing of his at Florence, 
 is far different — a waving field of lovely armour, the 
 chased edgings running like lines of sunlight from side 
 to side. Michelangelo was twenty-seven years old ; Leon- 
 ardo more than fifty; and Raphael, then nineteen years 
 of age, visiting Florence for the first time, came and 
 watched them as they worked. 
 
 We catch a glimpse of Leonardo again, at Rome in 
 15 14, surrounded by his mirrors and vials and furnaces, 
 making strange toys that seemed alive of wax and quick- 
 silver. The hesitation which had haunted him all 
 through life, and made him like one under a spell, was 
 upon him now with double force. No one had ever 
 carried political indifferentism farther; it had always 
 been his philosophy to "fly before the storm'' ; he is for 
 the Sforzas, or against them, as the tide of their fortune 
 turns. Yet now, in the political society of Rome, he 
 came to be suspected of secret French sympathies. It 
 paralysed him to find himself among enemies; and he 
 turned wholly to France, which had long courted him. 
 
 France was about to become an Italy more Italian 
 than Italy itself. Francis the First, like Lewis the 
 
io6 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 Twelfth before him, was attracted by the finesse of 
 Leonardo's work; La Gioconda was already in his cabi- 
 net, and he offered Leonardo the little Chateau de Clou, 
 with its vineyards and meadows, in the pleasant valley 
 of the Masse, just outside the walls of the town of Am- 
 boise, where, especially in the hunting season, the court 
 then frequently resided. A Monsieur Lyonard, peinteuf 
 du Roy pour Amboyse — so the letter of Francis the 
 First is headed. It opens a prospect, one of the most 
 interesting in the history of art, where, in a peculiarly 
 blent atmosphere, Italian art dies away as a French 
 exotic. 
 
 Two questions remain, after much busy antiquarian- 
 ism, concerning Leonardo's death — the question of the 
 exact form of his religion, and the question whether 
 Francis the First was present at the time. They are of 
 about equally little importance in the estimate of Leon- 
 ardo's genius. The directions in his will concerning the 
 thirty masses and the great candles for the church of 
 Saint Florentin are things of course, their real purpose 
 being immediate and practical; and on no theory of re- 
 ligion could these hurried offices be of much consequence. 
 We forget them in speculating how one who had been 
 always so desirous of beauty, but desired it always in 
 such precise and definite forms, as hands or flowers or 
 hair, looked forward now into the vague land, and ex- 
 perienced the last curiosity. 
 
 1869. 
 
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE 
 
 It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard 
 poetry, music, and painting — all the various products 
 of art — as but translations into different languages of one 
 and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, sup- 
 plemented by certain technical qualities of color, in paint- 
 ing; of sound, in music; of rhythmical words, in poetry". 
 In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it al- 
 most everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made 
 a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of 
 the opposite principle — that the sensuous material of 
 each art brings with it a special phase or quality of 
 beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an 
 order of impressions distinct in kind — is the beginning of 
 all true aesthetic criticism. For, as art addresses not 
 pure sense, still less the pure intellect, but the "imagi- 
 native reason" through the senses, there are differences 
 of kind in aesthetic beauty, corresponding to the differ- 
 ences in kind of the gifts of sense themselves. Each 
 art, therefore, having its own peculiar and untranslat- 
 able sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reach- 
 ing the imagination, its own special responsibilities to 
 its material. One of the functions of aesthetic criticism 
 is to define these limitations ; to estimate the degree in 
 which a given work of art fulfils its responsibilities to 
 its special material; to note in a picture that true pic- 
 torial charm, which is neither a mere poetical thought or 
 
 107 
 
io8 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 sentiment, on the one hand, nor a mere result of com- 
 municable technical skill in color or design, on the other ; 
 to define in a poem that true poetical quality, which is 
 neither descriptive nor meditative merely, but comes of 
 an inventive handling of rhythmical language, the ele- 
 ment of song in the singing; to note in music the musi- 
 cal charm, that essential music, which presents no 
 words, no matter of sentiment or thought, separable 
 from the special form in which it is conveyed to us. 
 
 To such a philosophy of the variations of the beau- 
 tiful, Lessing's analysis of the spheres of sculpture and 
 poetry, in the Laocoon, was an important contribution. 
 But a true appreciation of these things is possible only 
 in the light of a whole system of such art-casuistries. 
 Now painting is the art in the criticism of which this 
 truth most needs enforcing, for it is in popular judg- 
 ments on pictures that the false generalisation of all 
 art into forms of poetry is most prevalent. To suppose 
 that all is mere technical acquirement in delineation or 
 touch, working through and addressing itself to the in- 
 telligence, on the one side, or a merely poetical, or what 
 may be called literary interest, addressed also to the 
 pure intelligence on the other: — this is the way of most 
 spectators, and of many critics, who have never caught 
 sight all the time of that true pictorial quality which lies 
 between, unique pledge, as it is, of the possession of 
 the pictorial gift, that inventive or creative handling of 
 pure line and color, which, as almost always in Dutch 
 painting, as often also in the works of Titian or Veron- 
 ese, is quite independent of anything definitely poetical 
 in the subject it accompanies. It is the drazving — the 
 design projected from that peculiar pictorial tempera- 
 
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE 109 
 
 ment or constitution, in which, while it may possibly be 
 ignorant of true anatomical proportions, all things what- 
 ever, all poetry, all ideas however abstract or obscure, 
 float up as visible scene or image : it is the coloring — that 
 weaving of light, as of just perceptible gold threads, 
 through the dress, the flesh, the atmosphere, in Titian's 
 Lace-girl, that staining of the whole fabric of the thing 
 with a new, delightful physical quality. This drawing, 
 then — the arabesque traced in the air by Tintoret's flying 
 figures, by Titian's forest branches; this coloring — the 
 magic conditions of light and hue in the atmosphere of 
 Titian's Lace-girl, or Rubens's Descent from the Cross: 
 — these essential pictorial qualities must first of all de- 
 light the sense, delight it as directly and sensuously as 
 a fragment of Venetian glass; and through this delight 
 alone become the vehicle of whatever poetry or science 
 may lie beyond them in the intention of the composer. 
 In its primary aspect, a great picture has no more definite 
 message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and 
 shadow for a few moments on the wall or floor : is itself, 
 in truth, a space of such fallen light, caught as the colors 
 are in an Eastern carpet, but refined upon, and dealt with 
 more subtly and exquisitely than by nature itself. And 
 this primary and essential condition fulfilled, we may 
 trace the coming of poetry into painting, by fine grada- 
 tions upwards : from Japanese fan-painting, for instance, 
 where we get, first, only abstract color; then, just a 
 little interfused sense of the poetry of flowers; then, 
 sometimes, perfect flower-painting; and so, onwards, 
 until in Titian we have, as his poetry in the Ariadne, so 
 actually a touch of true childlike humor in the diminu- 
 tive, quaint figure with its silk gown, which ascends the 
 
no 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 temple stairs, in his picture of the Presentation of the 
 Virgin, at Venice. 
 
 But although each art has thus its own specific order 
 of impressions, and an untranslatable charm, while a 
 just apprehension of the ultimate differences of the arts 
 is the beginning of aesthetic criticism ; yet it is noticeable 
 that, in its special mode of handling its given material, 
 each art may be observed to pass into the condition of 
 some other art, by what German critics term an Anders- 
 streben — a partial alienation from its own limitations, 
 through which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the 
 place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other 
 new forces. 
 
 Thus some of the most delightful music seems to be 
 always approaching to figure, to pictorial definition. 
 Architecture, again, though it has its own laws — laws 
 esoteric enough, as the true architect knows only too well 
 — yet sometimes aims at fulfilling the conditions of a 
 picture, as in the Arena chapel; or of sculpture, as in 
 the flawless unity of Giotto's tower at Florence; and 
 often finds a true poetry, as in those strangely twisted 
 staircases of the chateaux of the country of the Loire, 
 as if it were intended that among their odd turnings 
 the actors in a theatrical mode of life might pass each 
 other unseen ; there being a poetry also of memory and 
 of the mere effect of time, by which architecture often 
 profits greatly. Thus, again, sculpture aspires out of 
 the hard limitation of pure form towards color, or its 
 equivalent; poetry also, in many ways, finding guidance 
 from the other arts, the analogy between a Greek tragedy 
 and a work of Greek sculpture, between a sonnet and a 
 relief, of French poetry generally with the art of en- 
 
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE in 
 
 graving, being more than mere figures of speech ; and all 
 the arts in common aspiring towards the principle of 
 music; music being the typical, or ideally consummate 
 art, the object of the great Anders-streben of all art, of 
 all that is artistic, or partakes of artistic qualities. 
 
 All art constantly aspires towards the condition of 
 music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible 
 to distinguish the matter from the form, and the under- 
 standing can always make this distinction, yet it is the 
 constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere 
 matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its 
 given incidents or situation — that the mere matter of a 
 picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual 
 topography of a landscape — should be nothing without 
 the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this 
 mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should 
 penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art 
 constantly strives after, and achieves in different de- 
 grees. 
 
 This abstract language becomes clear enough, if we 
 think of actual examples. In an actual landscape we 
 see a long, white road, lost suddenly on the hill-verge. 
 That is the matter of one of the etchings of M. Alphonse 
 Legros: only, in this etching, it is informed by an in- 
 dwelling solemnity of expression, seen upon it or half- 
 seen, within the limits of an exceptional moment, or 
 caught from his own mood perhaps, but which he main- 
 tains as the very essence of the thing, throughout his 
 work. Sometimes a momentary tint of stormy light 
 may invest a homely or too familiar scene with a char- 
 acter which might well have been drawn from the deep 
 places of the imagination. Then we might say that 
 
112 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 i 
 
 this particular effect of light, this sudden inweaving of 
 gold thread through the texture of the haystack, and 
 the poplars, and the grass, gives the scene artistic quali- 
 ties, that it is like a picture. And such tricks of circum- j 
 stance are commonest in landscape which has little sali- 
 ent character of its own ; because, in such scenery, all 
 the material details are so easily absorbed by that in- 
 forming expression of passing light, and elevated, 
 throughout their whole extent, to a new and delightful 
 effect by it. And hence the superiority, for most con- 
 ditions of the picturesque, of a river-side in France to a 
 Swiss valley, because, on the French river-side, mere 
 topography, the simple material, counts for so little, and, 
 all being very pure, untouched, and tranquil in itself, mere 
 light and shade have such easy work in modulating it to 
 one dominant tone. The Venetian landscape, on the ii 
 other hand, has in its material conditions much which is 
 hard, or harshly definite ; but the masters of the Venetian 
 school have shown themselves little burdened by them. 
 Of its Alpine background they retain certain abstracted 
 elements only, of cool color and tranquillising line; and 
 they use its actual details, the brown windy turrets, the 
 straw-colored fields, the forest arabesques, but as the 
 notes of a music which duly accompanies the presence of 
 their men and women, presenting us with the spirit or 
 essence only of a certain sort of landscape — a country of 
 the pure reason or half-imaginative memory. 
 
 Poetry, again, works with words addressed in the 
 first instance to the pure intelligence; and it deals, most 
 often, with a definite subject or situation. Sometimes it 
 may find a noble and quite legitimate function in the con- 
 veyance of moral or political aspiration, as often in the 
 
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE 113 
 
 poetry of Victor Hugo. In such instances it is easy 
 enough for the understanding to distinguish between the 
 matter and the form, however much the matter, the 
 subject, the element which is addressed to the mere in- 
 telligence, has been penetrated by the informing, artistic 
 spirit. But the ideal types of poetry are those in which 
 this distinction is reduced to its minimum; so that lyrical 
 poetry, precisely because in it we are least able to detach 
 the matter from the form, without a deduction of some- 
 thing from that matter itself, is, at least artistically, the 
 highest and most complete form of poetry. And the very 
 perfection of such poetry often appears to depend, in 
 part, on a certain suppression or vagueness of mere sub- 
 ject, so that the meaning reaches us through ways not 
 distinctly traceable by the understanding, as in some 
 of the most imaginative compositions of William Blake, 
 and often in Shakespeare's songs, as pre-eminently in 
 that song of Mariana's page in Measure for Measure, 
 in which the kindling force and poetry of the whole play 
 seems to pass for a moment into an actual strain of 
 music. 
 
 And this principle holds good of all things that par- 
 take in any degree of artistic qualities, of the furniture 
 of our houses, and of dress, for instance, of life itself, 
 of gesture and speech, and the details of daily inter- 
 course; these also, for the wise, being susceptible of a 
 suavity and charm, caught from the way in which they 
 are done, which gives them a worth in themselves. 
 Herein, again, lies what is valuable and justly attractive, 
 in what is called the fashion of a time, which elevates 
 the trivialities of speech, and manner, and dress, into 
 
H4 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 "ends in themselves/' and gives them a mysterious grace 
 and attractiveness in the doing of them. 
 
 Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent 
 of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure 
 perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject 
 or material; the ideal examples of poetry and painting 
 being those in which the constituent elements of the 
 composition are so welded together, that the material or 
 subject no longer strikes the intellect only; nor the form, 
 the eye or the ear only; but form and matter, in their 
 union or identity, present one single effect to the "imagi- 
 native reason," that complex faculty for which every 
 thought and feeling is twin-born with its sensible ana- 
 logue or symbol. 
 
 It is the art of music which most completely realises 
 this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter 
 and form. In its consummate moments, the end is not 
 distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the 
 subject from the expression; they inhere in and com- 
 pletely saturate each other; and to it, therefore, to the 
 condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be 
 supposed constantly to tend and aspire. In music, then, 
 rather than in poetry, is to be found the true type or 
 measure of perfected art. Therefore, although each art 
 has its incommunicable element, its untranslatable order 
 of impressions, its unique mode of reaching the "imagi- 
 native reason," yet the arts may be represented as con- 
 tinually struggling after the law or principle of music, 
 to a condition which music alone completely realises ; and 
 one of the chief functions of aesthetic criticism, dealing 
 with the products of art, new or old, is to estimate the 
 
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE 115 
 
 degree in which each of those products approaches, in 
 this sense, to musical law. 
 
 By no school of painters have the necessary limita- 
 tions of the art of painting been so unerringly though 
 instinctively apprehended, and the essence of what is 
 pictorial in a picture so justly conceived, as by the school 
 of Venice ; and the train of thought suggested in what 
 has been now said is, perhaps, a not unfitting introduc- 
 tion to a few pages about Giorgione, who, though much 
 has been taken by recent criticism from what was reputed 
 to be his work, yet, more entirely than any other painter, 
 sums up, in what we know of himself and his art, the 
 spirit of the Venetian school. 
 
 The beginnings of Venetian painting link themselves to 
 the last, stiff, half-barbaric splendors of Byzantine dec- 
 oration, and are but the introduction into the crust of 
 marble and gold on the walls of the Duomo of Murano, 
 or of Saint Mark's, of a little more of human expression. 
 And throughout the course of its later development, al- 
 ways subordinate to architectural effect, the work of the 
 Venetian school never escaped from the influence of its 
 beginnings. Unassisted, and therefore unperplexed, by 
 naturalism, religious mysticism, philosophical theories, it 
 had no Giotto, no Angelico, no Botticelli. Exempt from 
 the stress of thought and sentiment, which taxed so 
 severely the resources of the generations of Florentine 
 artists, those earlier Venetian painters, down to Carpaccio 
 and the Bellini, seem never for a moment to have been 
 so much as tempted to lose sight of the scope of their 
 art in its strictness, or to forget that painting must be 
 before all things decorative, a thing for the eye, a space 
 
Ii6 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 of color on the wall, only more dexterously blent than 
 the marking of its precious stone or the chance inter- 
 change of sun and shade upon it : — this, to begin and end 
 with ; whatever higher matter of thought, or poetry, or 
 religious reverie might play its part therein, between. At 
 last, with final mastery of all the technical secrets of his 
 art, and with somewhat more than "a spark of the di- 
 vine fire" to his share, comes Giorgione. He is the in- 
 ventor of genre, of those easily movable pictures which 
 serve neither for uses of devotion, nor of allegorical or 
 historic teaching — little groups of real men and women, 
 amid congruous furniture or landscape — morsels of ac- 
 tual life, conversation or music or play, but refined upon 
 or idealised, till they come to seem like glimpses of life 
 from afar. Those spaces of more cunningly blent color, 
 obediently filling their places, hitherto, in a mere archi- 
 tectural scheme, Giorgione detaches from the wall. He 
 frames them by the hands of some skilful carver, so that 
 people may move them readily and take with them where 
 they go, as one might a poem in manuscript, or a musical 
 instrument, to be used, at will, as a means of self-educa- 
 tion, stimulus or solace, coming like an animated pres- 
 ence, into one's cabinet, to enrich the air as with some 
 choice aroma, and, like persons, live with us, for a day or 
 a lifetime. Of all art such as this, art which has played 
 so large a part in men's culture since that time, Giorgione, 
 is the initiator. Yet in him too that old Venetian clear- 
 ness or justice, in the apprehension of the essential limi- 
 tations of the pictorial art, is still undisturbed. While 
 he interfuses his painted work with a high-strung sort 
 of poetry, caught directly from a singularly rich and 
 high-strung sort of life, yet in his selection of subject, 
 
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE uy 
 
 or phase of subject, in the subordination of mere subject 
 to pictorial design, to the main purpose of a picture, he 
 is typical of that aspiration of all the arts towards music, 
 which I have endeavored to explain, — towards the per- 
 fect identification of matter and form. 
 
 Born so near to Titian, though a little before him, 
 that these two companion pupils of the aged Giovanni 
 Bellini may almost be called contemporaries, Giorgione 
 stands to Titian in something like the relationship of 
 Sordello to Dante, in Browning's poem. Titian, when 
 he leaves Bellini, becomes, in turn, the pupil of Giorgione. 
 He lives in constant labor more than sixty years after 
 Giorgione is in his grave; and with such fruit, that 
 hardly one of the greater towns of Europe is without 
 some fragment of his work. But the slightly older man, 
 with his so limited actual product (what remains to us 
 of it seeming, when narrowly explained, to reduce itself 
 to almost one picture, like Sordello's one fragment of 
 lovely verse), yet expresses, in elementary motive and 
 principle, that spirit — itself the final acquisition of all 
 the long endeavors of Venetian art — which Titian 
 spreads over his whole life's activity. 
 
 And, as we might expect, something fabulous and il- ' 
 lusive has always mingled itself in the brilliancy of 
 Giorgione's fame. The exact relationship to him of 
 many works — drawings, portraits, painted idylls — often 
 fascinating enough, which in various collections went by 
 his name, was from the first uncertain. Still, six or 
 eight famous pictures at Dresden, Florence and the 
 Louvre, were with no doubt attributed to him, and in 
 these, if anywhere, something of the splendor of the 
 old Venetian humanity seemed to have been preserved. 
 
n8 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 But of those six or eight famous pictures it is now known 
 that only one is certainly from Giorgione's hand. The ac- 
 complished science of the subject has come at last, and, 
 as in other instances, has not made the past more real for 
 us, but assured us only that we possess less of it than we 
 seemed to possess. Much of the work on which Giorgi- 
 one's immediate fame depended, work done for instan- 
 taneous effect, in all probability passed away almost with- 
 in his own age, like the frescoes on the fagade of the 
 fondaco dei Tedeschi at Venice, some crimson traces of 
 which, however, still give a strange additional touch of 
 splendor to the scene of the Rialto. And then there is a 
 barrier or borderland, a period about the middle of the 
 sixteenth century, in passing through which the tradition 
 miscarries, and the true outlines of Giorgione's work and 
 person are obscured. It became fashionable for wealthy 
 lovers of art, with no critical standard of authenticity, 
 to collect so-called works of Giorgione, and a multitude 
 of imitations came into circulation. And now, in the 
 "new Vasari," 1 the great traditional reputation, woven 
 with so profuse demand on men's admiration, has been 
 scrutinized thread by thread ; and what remains of the 
 most vivid and stimulating of Venetian masters, a live 
 flame, as it seemed, in those old shadowy times, has been 
 reduced almost to a name by his most recent critics. 
 
 Yet enough remains to explain why the legend grew 
 up above the name, why the name attached itself, in 
 many instances, to the bravest work of other men. The 
 Concert in the Pitti Palace, in which a monk, with cowl 
 and tonsure, touches the keys of a harpsichord, while a 
 
 1 Crowe and Cavalcaselle : History of Painting in North 
 Italy. 
 
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE 119 
 
 clerk, placed behind him, grasps the handle of the viol, 
 and a third, with cap and plume, seems to wait upon the 
 true interval for beginning to sing, is undoubtedly 
 Giorgione's. The outline of the lifted finger, the trace 
 of the plume, the very threads of the fine linen, which 
 fasten themselves on the memory, in the moment before 
 they are lost altogether in that calm unearthly glow, the 
 skill which has caught the waves of wandering sound, 
 and fixed them for ever on the lips and hands — these are 
 indeed the master's own; and the criticism which, while 
 dismissing so much hitherto believed to be Giorgione's, 
 has established the claims of this one picture, has left it 
 among the most precious things in the world of art. 
 
 It is noticeable that the "distinction" of this Concert, 
 its sustained evenness of perfection, alike in design, in 
 execution, and in choice of personal type, becomes for 
 the "new Vasari" the standard of Giorgione's genuine 
 work. Finding here sufficient to explain his influence, 
 and the true seal of mastery, its authors assign to Pelle- 
 grino da San Daniele the Holy Family in the Louvre, in 
 consideration of certain points where it comes short of 
 this standard. Such shortcoming, however, will hardly 
 diminish the spectator's enjoyment of a singular charm 
 of liquid air, with which the whole picture seems in- 
 stinct, filling the eyes and lips, the very garments, of its 
 sacred personages, with some wind-searched brightness 
 and energy; of which fine air the blue peak, clearly de- 
 fined in the distance, is, as it were, the visible pledge. 
 Similarly, another favorite picture in the Louvre, the sub- 
 ject of a delightful sonnet by a poet 1 whose own painted 
 work often comes to mind as one ponders over these 
 1 Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 
 
120 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 precious things — the Fete Champetre, is assigned to an 
 imitator of Sebastian del Piombo ; and the Tempest, in 
 the Academy at Venice, to Paris Bordone, or perhaps 
 to "some advanced craftsman of the sixteenth century/ 1 
 From the gallery at Dresden, the Knight embracing a 
 Lady, where the knight's broken gauntlets seem to mark 
 some well-known pause in a story we would willingly 
 hear the rest of, is conceded to "a Brescian hand," and 
 Jacob meeting Rachel to a pupil of Palma. And then, 
 whatever their charm, we are called on to give up the 
 Ordeal, and the Finding of Moses with its jewel-like 
 pools of water, perhaps to Bellini. 
 
 Nor has the criticism, which thus so freely diminishes 
 the number of his authentic works, added anything im- 
 portant to the well-known outline of the life and per- 
 sonality of the man : only, it has fixed one or two dates, 
 one or two circumstances, a little more exactly. Giorgi- 
 one was born before the year 1477, an< ^ spent his child- 
 hood at Castelfranco, where the last crags of the Vene- 
 tian Alps break down romantically, with something of 
 parklike grace, to the plain. A natural child of the 
 family of the Barbarelli by a peasant-girl of Vedelago, 
 he finds his way early into the circle of notable persons — 
 people of courtesy. He is initiated into those differences 
 of personal type, manner, and even of dress, which are 
 best understood there — that "distinction" of the Concert 
 of the Pitti Palace. Not far from his home lives Cather- 
 ine of Cornara, formerly Queen of Cyprus; and, up in 
 the towers which still remain, Tuzio Costanzo, the fa- 
 mous condottiere — a picturesque remnant of medieval 
 manners, amid a civilisation rapidly changing. Giorgi- 
 ane paints their portraits ; and when Tuzio's son, Matteo, 
 
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE 121 
 
 dies in early youth, adorns in his memory a chapel in 
 the church of Castelfranco, painting on this occasion, 
 perhaps, the altar-piece, foremost among his authentic 
 works, still to be seen there, with the figure of the war- 
 rior-saint, Liberale, of which the original little study 
 in oil, with the delicately gleaming, silver-grey armour, 
 is one of the greater treasures of the National Gallery. 
 In that figure, as in some other knightly personages at- 
 tributed to him, people have supposed the likeness of 
 the painter's own presumably gracious presence. Thith- 
 er, at last, he is himself brought home from Venice, early 
 dead, but celebrated. It happened, about his thirty- 
 fourth year, that in one of those parties at which he 
 entertained his friends with music, he met a certain lady 
 of whom he became greatly enamoured, and "they re- 
 joiced greatly," says Vasari, "the one and the other, in 
 their loves. " And two quite different legends concern- 
 ing it agree in this, that it was through this lady he came 
 by his death; Ridolfi relating that, being robbed of 
 her by one of his pupils, he died of grief at the double 
 treason; Vasari, that she being secretly stricken of the 
 plague, and he making his visits to her as usual, Giorgi- 
 one took the sickness from her mortally, along with her 
 kisses, and so briefly departed. 
 
 But, although the number of Giorgione's extant works 
 has been thus limited by recent criticism, all is not done 
 when the real and the traditional elements in what con- 
 cerns him have been discriminated; for, in what is con- 
 nected with a great name, much that is not real is often 
 very stimulating. For the aesthetic philosopher, there- 
 fore, over and above the real Giorgione and his authentic 
 extant works, there remains the Giorgionesque also — an 
 
122 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 influence, a spirit or type in art, active in men so differ- 
 ent as those to whom many of his supposed works are 
 really assignable. A veritable school, in fact, grew to- 
 gether out of all those fascinating works rightly or 
 wrongly attributed to him; out of many copies from, or 
 variations on him, by unknown or uncertain workmen, 
 whose drawings and designs were, for various reasons, 
 prized as his ; out of the immediate impression he made 
 upon his contemporaries, and with which he continued 
 in men's minds; out of many traditions of subject and 
 treatment, which really descend from him to our own 
 time, and by retracing which we fill out the original 
 image. Giorgione thus becomes a sort of impersona- 
 tion of Venice itself, its projected reflex or ideal, all 
 that was intense or desirable in it crystallising about the 
 memory of this wonderful young man. 
 
 And now, finally, let me illustrate some of the char- 
 acteristics of this School of Giorgione, as we may call 
 it, which, for most of us, notwithstanding all that nega- 
 tive criticism of the "new Vasari," will still identify 
 itself with those famous pictures at Florence, at Dres- 
 den and Paris. A certain artistic ideal is there defined 
 for us — the conception of a peculiar aim and procedure 
 in art, which we may understand as the Giorgionesque, 
 wherever we find it, whether in Venetian work generally, 
 or in work of our own time. Of this the Concert, that 
 undoubted work of Giorgione in the Pitti Palace, is the 
 typical instance, and a pledge authenticating the connex- 
 ion of the school, and the spirit of the school, with the 
 master. 
 
 I have spoken of a certain interpenetration of the 
 
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE 123 
 
 matter or subject of a work of art with the form of it, 
 a condition realised absolutely only in music, as the con- 
 dition to which every form of art is perpetually aspir- 
 ing. In the art of painting, the attainment of this ideal 
 condition, this perfect interpenetration of the subject 
 with the elements of colour and design, depends, of 
 course, in great measure, on dexterous choice of that 
 subject, or phase of subject; and such choice is one of 
 the secrets of Giorgione's school. It is the school of 
 genre, and employs itself mainly with "painted idylls/' 
 but, in the production of this pictorial poetry, exercises 
 a wonderful tact in the selecting of such matter as lends 
 itself most readily and entirely to pictorial form, to com- 
 plete expression by drawing and colour. For although its 
 productions are painted poems, they belong to a sort of 
 poetry which tells itself without an articulated story. 
 The master is pre-eminent for the resolution, the case 
 and quickness, with which he reproduces instantaneous 
 motion — the lacing-cn of armour, with the head bent back 
 so stately — the fainting lady — the embrace, rapid as the 
 kiss, caught with death itself from dying lips — some mo- 
 mentary conjunction of mirrors and polished armour and 
 still water, by which all the sides of a solid image are 
 exhibited at once, solving that casuistical question 
 whether painting can present an object as completely as 
 sculpture. The sudden act, the rapid transition of 
 thought, the passing expression — this he arrests with that 
 vivacity which Vasari has attributed to him, il fuoco 
 Giorgionesco, as he terms it. Now it is part of the 
 ideality of the highest sort of dramatic poetry, that it 
 presents us with a kind of profoundly significant and 
 animated instants, a mere gesture, a look, a smile, per- 
 
124 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 haps — some brief and wholly concrete moment — into 
 which, however, all the motives, all the interests and 
 effects of a long history, have condensed themselves, and 
 which seem to absorb past and future in an intense con- 
 sciousness of the present. Such ideal instants the school 
 of Giorgione selects, with its admirable tact, from that 
 feverish, tumultuously coloured world of the old citizens 
 of Venice — exquisite pauses in time, in which, arrested 
 thus, we seem to be spectators of all the fulness of ex- 
 istence, and which are like some consummate extract or 
 quintessence of life. 
 
 It is to the law or condition of music, as I said, that 
 all art like this is really aspiring; and, in the school of 
 Giorgione, the perfect moments of music itself, the mak- 
 ing or hearing of music, song or its accompaniment, are 
 themselves prominent as subjects. On that back-ground 
 of the silence of Venice, so impressive to the modern 
 visitor the world of Italian music was then forming. In 
 choice of subject, as in all besides, the Concert of the 
 Pitti Palace is typical of everything that Giorgione, him- 
 self an admirable musician, touched with his influence. 
 In sketch or finished picture, in various collections, we 
 may follow it through many intricate variations — men 
 fainting at music; music at the pool-side while people 
 fish, or mingled with the sound of the pitcher in the 
 well, or heard across running water, or among the flocks ; 
 the tuning of instruments ; people with intent faces, as if 
 listening, like those described by Plato in an ingenious 
 passage of the Republic, to detect the smallest interval 
 of musical sound, the smallest undulation in the air, or 
 feeling for music in thought on a stringless instrument, 
 ear and finger refining themselves infinitely, in the ap^ 
 
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE 125 
 
 petite for sweet sound; a momentary touch of an in- 
 strument in the twilight, as one passes through some 
 unfamiliar room, in a chance company. 
 
 In these then, the favourite incidents of Giorgione's 
 school, music or the musical intervals in our existence, 
 life itself is conceived as a sort of listening — listening 
 to music, to the reading of Bandello's novels, to the 
 sound of water, to time as it flies. Often such moments 
 are really our moments of play, and we are surprised at 
 the unexpected blessedness of what may seem our least 
 important part of time; not merely because play is in 
 many instances that to which people really apply their 
 own best powers, but also because at such times, the 
 stress of our servile, everyday attentiveness being re- 
 laxed, the happier powers in things without are per- 
 mitted free passage, and have their way with us. And 
 so, from music, the school of Giorgione passes often to 
 the play which is like music; to those masques in which 
 men avowedly do but play at real life, like children 
 "dressing up," disguised in the strange old Italian 
 dresses, particoloured, or fantastic with embroidery and 
 furs, of which the master was so curious a designer, and 
 which, above all the spotless white linen at wrist and 
 throat, he painted so dexterously. 
 
 But when people are happy in this thirsty land water 
 will not be far off ; and in the school of Giorgione, the 
 presence of water — the well, or marble-rimmed pool, 
 the drawing or pouring of water, as the woman pours 
 it from a pitcher with her jewelled hand in the Fete 
 Champetre, listening, perhaps, to the cool sound as it 
 falls, blent with the music of the pipes — is as charac- 
 teristic, and almost as suggestive, as that of music itself. 
 
126 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 And the landscape feels and is glad of it also — a land- 
 scape full of clearness, of the effects of water, of fresh 
 rain newly passed through the air, and collected into the 
 grassy channels. The air, moreover, in the school of 
 Giorgione, seems as vivid as the people who breathe 
 it, and literally empyrean, all impurities being burnt out 
 of it, and no taint, no floating particle of anything but 
 its own proper elements allowed to subsist within it. 
 
 Its scenery is such as in England we call "park scen- 
 ery," with some elusive refinement felt about the rustic 
 buildings, the choice grass, the grouped trees, the undula- 
 tions deftly economised for graceful effect. Only, in 
 Italy all natural things are as it were woven through and 
 through the gold thread, even the cypress revealing it 
 among the folds of its blackness. And it is with gold 
 dust, or gold thread, that these Venetian painters seem 
 to work, spinning its fine filaments, through the solemn 
 human flesh, away into the white plastered walls of the 
 thatched huts. The harsher details of the mountains re- 
 cede to a harmonious distance, the one peak of rich blue 
 above the horizon remaining but as the sensible war- 
 rant of that due coolness which is all we need ask here 
 of the Alps, with their dark rains and streams. Yet what 
 real, airy space, as the eye passes from level to level, 
 through the loog-drawn valley in which Jacob embraces 
 Rachel among the flocks! Nowhere is there a truer 
 instance of that balance, that modulated unison of land- 
 scape and persons — of the human image and its acces- 
 sories — already noticed as characteristic of the Vene- 
 tian school, so that, in it, neither personage nor scenery 
 is ever a mere pretext for the other. 
 
 Something like this seems to me to be the vraie verite 
 
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE 127 
 
 about Giorgione, if I may adopt a serviceable expres- 
 sion, by which the French recognise those more liberal 
 and durable impressions which, in respect of any really 
 considerable person or subject, anything that has at 
 all intricately occupied men's attention, lie beyond, and 
 must supplement, the narrower range of the strictly 
 ascertained facts about it. In this, Giorgione is but an 
 illustration of a valuable general caution we may abide 
 by in all criticism. As regards Giorgione himself, we 
 have indeed to take note of all those negotiations and 
 exceptions, by which, at first sight, a "'new Vasari" 
 seems merely to have confused our apprehension of 
 a delightful object, to have explained away in our 
 inheritance from past time what seemed of high value 
 there. Yet it is not with a full understanding even of 
 those exceptions that one can leave off just at this point. 
 Properly qualified, such exceptions are but a salt of 
 genuineness in our knowledge; and beyond all those 
 strictly ascertained facts, we must take note of that 
 indirect influence by which one like Giorgione, for 
 instance, enlarges his permanent efficacy and really makes 
 himself felt in our culture. In a just impression of 
 that, is the essential truth, the vraie verite, concerning 
 him. 
 
 1877. 
 
JOACHIM DU BELLAY 
 
 In the middle of the sixteenth century, when the 
 spirit of the Renaissance was everywhere, and people 
 had begun to look back with distaste on the works of 
 the middle age, the old Gothic manner had still one 
 chance more, in borrowing something from the rival 
 which was about to supplant it. In this way there was 
 produced, chiefly in France, a new and peculiar phase 
 of taste with qualities and a charm of its own, blending 
 the somewhat attenuated grace of Italian ornament with 
 the general outlines of Northern design. It created the 
 Chateau de Gaillon, as you may still see it in the delicate 
 engravings of Israel Silvestre — a Gothic donjon veiled 
 faintly by a surface of dainty Italian traceries — Chenon- 
 ceaux, Blois, Chambord, and the church of Brou. In 
 painting, there came from Italy workmen like Maitre 
 Roux and the masters of the school of Fontainebleau, 
 to have their later Italian voluptuousness attempered by 
 the naive and silvery qualities of the native style; and 
 it was characteristic of these painters that they were 
 most successful in painting on glass, an art so essentially 
 medieval. Taking it up where the middle age had left 
 it, they found their whole work among the last subtleties 
 of colour and line; and keeping within the true limits 
 of their material, they got quite a new order of effects 
 from it, and felt their way to refinements on colour never 
 dreamed of by those older workmen, the glass-painters 
 
 128 
 
JOACHIM DU BELLAY 
 
 of Chartres or le Mans. What is called the Renais- 
 sance in France is thus not so much the introduction 
 of a wholly new taste ready-made' from Italy, but 
 rather the finest and subtlest phase of the middle age 
 itself, its last fleeting splendour and temperate Saint 
 Martin's summer. In poetry, the Gothic spirit in France 
 had produced a thousand songs ; so in the Renaissance, 
 French poetry, too, did but borrow something to blend 
 with a native growth, and the poems of Ronsard, with 
 their ingenuity, their delicately figured surfaces, their 
 slightness, their fanciful combinations of rhyme, are the 
 correlative of the traceries of the house of Jacques Coeur 
 at Bourges, or the Maison de Justice at Rouen. 
 
 There was indeed something in the native French taste 
 naturally akin to that Italian finesse. The characteristic 
 of -French work had always been a certain nicety, a 
 remarkable daintiness of hand, une nettete remarquable 
 d' execution. In the paintings of Frangois Clouet, for 
 example, or rather of the Clouets — for there was a 
 whole family of them — painters remarkable for their 
 resistance to Italian influences, there is a silveriness of 
 colour and a clearness of expression which distinguish 
 them very definitely from their Flemish neighbours, 
 Hemling or the Van Eycks. And this nicety is not 
 less characteristic of old French poetry. A light, aerial 
 delicacy, a simple elegance — une nettete remarquable 
 d 3 execution: these are essential characteristics alike of 
 Villon's poetry, and of the Hours of Anne of Brittany. 
 They are characteristic, too, of a hundred French Gothic 
 carvings and traceries. Alike in the old Gothic cathe- 
 drals, and in their counterpart, the old Gothic chansons 
 de geste, the rough and ponderous mass becomes as if 
 
THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 by passing for a moment into happier conditions, or 
 through a more gracious stratum of air, graceful and 
 refined, like the carved ferneries on the granite church 
 at Folgoat, or the lines which describe the fair priestly 
 hands of Archbishop Turpin, in the song of Roland; 
 although below both alike there is a fund of mere Gothic 
 strength, or heaviness. 1 
 
 Now, Villon's songs and Clouet's painting are like 
 these. It is the higher touch making itself felt here 
 and there, betraying itself, like nobler blood in a lower 
 stock, by a fine line or gesture or expression, the turn 
 of a wrist, the tapering of a finger. In Ronsard's time 
 that rougher element seemed likely to predominate. No 
 one can turn over the pages of Rabelais without feeling 
 how much need there was of softening, of castigation. 
 To effect this softening is the object of the revolution 
 in poetry which is connected with Ronsard's name. 
 Casting about for the means of thus refining upon and 
 saving the character of French literature, he accepted that 
 influx of Renaissance taste, which, leaving the buildings, 
 the language, the art, the poetry of France, at bottom, 
 what they were, old French Gothic still, gilds their sur- 
 faces with a strange, delightful, foreign aspect passing 
 over all that Northern land, in itself neither deeper nor 
 more permanent than a chance effect of light. He 
 reinforces, he doubles the French daintiness by Italian 
 finesse. Thereupon, nearly all the force and all the seri- 
 ousness of French work disappear; only the elegance, 
 the aerial touch, the perfect manner remain. But this 
 
 1 The purely artistic aspects of this subject have been inter- 
 preted, in a work of great taste and learning, by Mrs. Mark 
 Pattison: — The Renaissance of Art in France. 
 
JOACHIM DU BELLAY 131 
 
 elegance, this manner, this daintiness of execution are 
 consummate, and have an unmistakable aesthetic value. 
 
 So the old French chanson, which, like the old northern 
 Gothic ornament, though it sometimes refined itself into 
 a sort of weird elegance, was often, in its essence, some- 
 thing rude and formless, became in the hands of Ronsard 
 a Pindaric ode. He gave it structure, a sustained system, 
 strophe and antistrophe, and taught it a changefulness 
 and variety of metre which keep the curiosity always 
 excited, so that the very aspect of it, as it lies written 
 on the page, carries the eye lightly onwards, and of 
 which this is a good instance : — 
 
 Avril, la grace, et le ris 
 
 De Cypris, 
 Le Hair et la douce haleine; 
 Avril, le parfum des dieux, 
 
 Qui, des cieux, 
 Sentent fodeur de la plaine; 
 
 Cest toy, courtois et gentil, 
 
 Qui, d'exil 
 Retire ces passageres, 
 Ces arondelles qui vont, 
 
 Et qui sont 
 Du printemps les messageres. 
 
 That is not by Ronsard, but by Remy Belleau, for 
 Ronsard soon came to have a school. Six other poets 
 threw in their lot with him in his literary revolution, — ' 
 this Remy Belleau, Antoine de Baif, Pontus de Tyard s 
 fitienne Jodelle, Jean Daurat, and lastly Joachim du 
 Bellay; and with that strange love of emblems which 
 is characteristic of the time, which covered all the works 
 of Francis the First with the salamander, and all the 
 
132 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 works of Henry the Second with the double crescent, 
 and all the work of Anne of Brittany with the knotted 
 cord, they called themselves the Pleiad; seven in all, 
 although, as happens with the celestial Pleiad, if you 
 scrutinise this constellation of poets more carefully you 
 may find there a great number of minor stars. 
 
 The first note of this literary revolution was struck 
 by Joachim du Bellay in a little tract written at the 
 early age of twenty- four, which coming to us through 
 three centuries seems of yesterday, so full is it of those 
 delicate critical distinctions which are sometimes sup- 
 posed peculiar to modern writers. The piece has for its 
 title La Deffense et Illustration de la Langue Frangoyse; 
 and its problem is how to illustrate or ennoble the French 
 language, to give it lustre. We are accustomed to speak 
 of the varied critical and creative movement of the fif- 
 teenth and sixteenth centuries as the Renaissance, and 
 because we have a single name for it we may sometimes 
 fancy that there was more unity in the thing itself than 
 there really was. Even the Reformation, that other 
 great movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 
 had far less unity, far less of combined action, than 
 is at first sight supposed; and the Renaissance was 
 infinitely less united, less conscious of combined action, 
 than the Reformation. But if anywhere the Renaissance 
 became conscious, as a German philosopher might say, 
 if ever it was understood as a systematic movement by 
 those who took part in it, it is in this little book of 
 Joachim du Bellay's, which it is impossible to read with- 
 out feeling the excitement, the animation, of change, of 
 discovery. "It is a remarkable fact," says M. Sainte- 
 Beuve, "and an inversion of what is true of other lan- 
 
JOACHIM DU BELLAY 
 
 133 
 
 guages, that, in French, prose has always had the pre- 
 cedence over poetry." Du Bellay's prose is perfectly 
 transparent, flexible, and chaste. In many ways it is a 
 more characteristic example of the culture of the Pleiad 
 than any of its verse; and those who love the whole 
 movement of which the Pleiad is a part, for a weird 
 foreign grace in it, and may be looking about for a 
 true specimen of it, cannot have a better than Joachim 
 du Bellay and this little treatise of his. 
 
 Du Bellay's object is to adjust the existing French 
 culture to the rediscovered classical culture ; and in dis- 
 cussing this problem, and developing the theories of the 
 Pleiad, he has lighted upon many principles of perma- 
 nent truth and applicability. There were some who 
 despaired of the French language altogether, who thought 
 it naturally incapable of the fulness and elegance of 
 Greek and Latin — cette elegance et copie qui est en la 
 langue Greque et Romaine — that science could be ade- 
 quately discussed, and poetry nobly written, only in the 
 dead languages. "Those who speak thus," says Du 
 Bellay, "make me think of the relics which one may 
 only see through a little pane of glass, and must not 
 touch with one's hands. That is what these people do 
 with all branches of culture, which they keep shut up 
 in Greek and Latin books, not permitting one to see 
 them otherwise, or transport them out of dead words into 
 those which are alive, and wing their way daily through 
 the mouths of men." "Languages," he says again, "are 
 not born like plants and trees, some naturally feeble and 
 sickly, others healthy and strong and apter to bear 
 the weight of men's conceptions, but all their virtue is 
 generated in the world of choice and men's freewill 
 
134 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 concerning them. Therefore, I cannot blame too strongly 
 the rashness of some of our countrymen, who being 
 anything rather than Greeks or Latins, depreciate and 
 reject with more than stoical disdain everything written 
 in French ; nor can I express my surprise at the odd 
 opinion of some learned men who think that our vulgar 
 tongue is wholly incapable of erudition and good litera- 
 ture." 
 
 It was an age of translations. Du Bellay himself 
 translated two books of the 2Eneid, and other poetry, 
 old and new, and there were some who thought that the 
 translation of the classical literature was the true means 
 bf ennobling the French language: — strangers are ever 
 favourites with us — nous favorisons toujours les Stran- 
 gers. Du Bellay moderates their expectations. "I do 
 not believe that one can learn the right use of them" — 
 he is speaking of figures and ornament in language — - 
 "from translations, because it is impossible to reproduce 
 them with the same grace with which the original author 
 used them. For each language has I know not what 
 peculiarity of its own; and if you force yourself to 
 express the naturalness (le naif) of this in another lan- 
 guage, observing the law of translation, — not to expatiate 
 beyond the limits of the author himself, your words will 
 be constrained, cold and ungraceful. " Then he fixes 
 the test of all good translation: — "To prove this, read 
 me Demosthenes and Homer in Latin, Cicero and Virgil 
 in French, and see whether they produce in you the same 
 affections which you experience in reading those authors 
 in the original." 
 
 In this effort to ennoble the French language, to give 
 it grace, number, perfection, and as painters do to their 
 
JOACHIM DU BELLAY 135 
 
 pictures, that last, so desirable, touch — cette dernih e 
 main que nous desirous — what Du Bellay is really plead- 
 ing for is his mother-tongue, the language, that is, in 
 which one will have the utmost degree of what is mov- 
 ing and passionate. He recognised of what force the 
 music and dignity of languages are, how they enter into 
 the inmost part of things; and in pleading for the cul- 
 tivation of the French language, he is pleading for no 
 merely scholastic interest, but for freedom, impulse, 
 reality, not in literature only, but in daily communion of 
 speech. After all, it was impossible to have this impulse 
 in Greek and Latin, dead languages shut up in books 
 as in reliquaries — peris et mises en reliquaires de livres. 
 By aid of this starveling stock — pauvre plante et vergette 
 — of the French language, he must speak delicately, 
 movingly, if he is ever to speak so at all : that, or none, 
 must be for him the medium of what he calls, in one 
 of his great phrases, le discours fatal des choses mortr 
 daines — that discourse about affairs which decide men's 
 fates. And it is his patriotism not to despair of it; he 
 sees it already perfect in all elegance and beauty of 
 words — parfait en toute elegance et venuste de paroles. 
 
 Du Bellay was born in the disastrous year 1525, the 
 year of the battle of Pavia, and the captivity of Francis 
 the First. His parents died early, and to him, as the 
 younger son, his mother's little estate, ce petit Lire, the 
 beloved place of his birth, descended. He was brought 
 up by a brother only a little older than himself ; and left 
 to themselves, the two boys passed their lives in day^ 
 dreams of military glory. Their education was neglected; 
 "The time of my youth/' says Du Bellay, "was lost, 
 like the flower which no shower waters, and no hand 
 
136 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 cultivates." He was just twenty years old when the 
 elder brother died, leaving Joachim to be the guardian 
 of his child. It was with regret, with a shrinking sense 
 of incapacity, that he took upon him the burden of this 
 responsibility. Hitherto he had looked forward to the 
 profession of a soldier, hereditary in his family. But at 
 this time a sickness attacked him which brought him 
 cruel sufferings, and seemed likely to be mortal. It was 
 then for the first time that he read the Greek and Latin 
 poets. These studies came too late to make him what 
 he so much desired to be, a trifler in Greek and Latin 
 verse, like so many others of his time now forgotten; 
 instead, they made him a lover of his own homely native 
 tongue, that poor starveling stock of the French language. 
 It was through this fortunate shortcoming in his educa- 
 tion that he became national and modern ; and he learned 
 afterwards to look back on that wild garden of his youth 
 with only a half regret. A certain Cardinal du Bellay 
 was the successful member of the family, a man often 
 employed in high official business. To him the thoughts 
 of Joachim turned when it became necessary to choose a 
 profession, and in 1552 he accompanied the Cardinal to 
 Rome. He remained there nearly five years, burdened 
 with the weight of affairs, and languishing with home- 
 sickness. Yet it was under these circumstances that his 
 genius yielded its best fruits. From Rome, so full of 
 pleasurable sensation for men of an imaginative tem- 
 perament such as his, with all the curiosities of the 
 Renaissance still fresh in it, his thoughts went back 
 painfully, longingly, to the country of the Loire, with 
 its wide expanse of waving corn, its homely pointed 
 roofs of grey slate, and its far-off scent of the sea. He 
 
JOACHIM DU BELLAY 
 
 137 
 
 reached home at last, but only to die there, quite sud- 
 denly, one wintry day, at the early age of thirty-five. 
 
 Much of Du Bellay's poetry illustrates rather the age 
 and school to which he belonged than his own temper 
 and genius. As with the writings of Ronsard and the 
 other poets of the Pleiad, its interest depends not so 
 much on the impress of individual genius upon it, as on 
 the circumstance that it was once poetry a la mode, 
 that it is part of the manner of a time — a time which 
 made much of manner, and carried it to a high degree 
 of perfection. It is one of the decorations of an age 
 which threw a large part of its energy into the work 
 of decoration. We feel a pensive pleasure in gazing 
 on these faded adornments, and observing how a group 
 of actual men and women pleased themselves long ago. 
 Ronsard's poems are a kind of epitome of his age. Of 
 one side of that age, it is true, of the strenuous, the 
 progressive, the serious movement, which was then going 
 on, there is little ; but of the catholic side, the losing side, 
 the forlorn hope, hardly a figure is absent. The Queen 
 of Scots, at whose desire Ronsard published his odes, 
 reading him in her northern prison, felt that he was 
 bringing back to her the true flavour of her early days 
 in the court of Catherine at the Louvre, with its exotic 
 Italian gaieties. Those who disliked that poetry, dis- 
 liked it because they found that age itself distasteful. 
 The poetry of Malherbe came, with its sustained style 
 and weighty sentiment, but with nothing that set people 
 singing; and the lovers of such poetry saw in the poetry 
 of the Pleiad only the latest trumpery of the middle age. 
 But the time arrived when the school of Malherbe also 
 had had its day; and the Romanticists, who in their 
 
138 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 eagerness for excitement, for strange music and imagery, 
 went back to the works of the middle age, accepted the 
 Pleiad, too, with the rest; and in that new middle age 
 which their genius has evoked, the poetry of the Pleiad 
 has found its place. At first, with Malherbe, you may 
 think it, like the architecture, the whole mode of life, the 
 very dresses of that time, fantastic, faded, rococo. But 
 if you look long enough to understand it, to conceive its 
 sentiment, you will find that those wanton lines have a 
 spirit guiding their caprices. For there is style there ; 
 one temper has shaped the whole; and everything that 
 has style, that has been done as no other man or age 
 could have done it, as it could never, for all our trying, 
 be done again, has its true value and interest. Let us 
 dwell upon it for a moment, and try to gather from it that 
 special flower, ce Hew particulier, which Ronsard him- 
 self tells us every garden has. 
 
 It is poetry not for the people, but for a confined 
 circle, for courtiers, great lords and erudite persons, 
 people who desire to be humoured, to gratify a certain 
 refined voluptuousness they have in them. Ronsard loves, 
 or dreams that he loves, a rare and peculiar type of 
 beauty, le petite pucelle Angevine, with golden hair and 
 dark eyes. But he has the ambition not only of being 
 a courtier and a lover, but a great scholar also; he is 
 anxious about orthography, about the letter e Grecque, 
 the true spelling of Latin names in French writing, and 
 the restoration of the letter i to its primitive liberty — 
 deV i voyelle en sa premiere liberte. His poetry is full 
 of quaint, remote learning. He is just a little pedantic, 
 true always to his own express judgment, that to be 
 natural is not enough for one who in poetry desires 
 
JOACHIM DU BELLAY 
 
 139 
 
 to produce work worthy of immortality. And there- 
 withal a certain number of Greek words, which charmed 
 Ronsard and his circle by their gaiety and daintiness, 
 and a certain air of foreign elegance about them, crept 
 into the French language; as there were other strange 
 words which the poets of the Pleiad forged for them- 
 selves, 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 old French 
 verse, or of the classical poets. The music of the 
 measured, scanned verse of Latin and Greek poetry is 
 one thing; the music of the rhymed, unscanned verse of 
 Villon and the old French poets, la poesie chantee, is 
 another. To combine these two kinds of music in a new 
 school of French poetry, to make verse which should scan 
 and rhyme as well, to search out and harmonise the 
 measure of every syllable, and unite it to the swift, flit^ 
 ting, swallow-like motion of rhyme, to penetrate their 
 poetry with a double music — this was the ambition of 
 the Pleiad. They are insatiable of music, they cannot 
 have enough of it; they desire a music of greater 
 compass perhaps than words can possibly yield, to drain 
 out the last drops of sweetness which a certain note or 
 accent contains. 
 
 It was Goudimel, the serious and protestant Goudimel v 
 who set Ronsard's songs to music; but except in this 
 eagerness for music the poets of the Pleiad seem never 
 quite in earnest. The old Greek and Roman mythology, 
 which the great Italians had found a motive so weighty 
 and severe, becomes with them a mere toy. That "Lorcf 
 of terrible aspect," Amor, has become Love the boy, or 
 the babe. They are full of fine railleries; they delight 
 
140 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 in diminutives, ondelette, fontelette, doucelette, Cassan- 
 drette. Their loves are only half real, a vain effort 
 to prolong the imaginative loves of the middle age 
 beyond their natural lifetime. They write love-poems 
 for hire. Like that party of people who tell the tales 
 in Boccaccio's Decameron, they form a circle which in 
 an age of great troubles, losses, anxieties, can amuse 
 itself with art, poetry, intrigue. But they amuse 
 themselves with wonderful elegance. And sometimes 
 their gaiety becomes satiric, for, as they play, real 
 passions insinuate themselves, and at least the reality of 
 death. Their dejection at the thought of leaving this 
 fair abode of our common daylight — le beau sejour du 
 commun jour — is expressed by them with almost weari- 
 some reiteration. But with this sentiment, too, they are 
 able to trifle. The imagery of death serves for delicate 
 ornament, and they weave into the airy nothingness of 
 their verses their trite reflections on the vanity of life. 
 Just so the grotesque details of the charnel-house nest 
 themselves, together with birds and flowers and the 
 fancies of the pagan mythology, in the traceries of the 
 architecture of that time, which wantons in its graceful 
 arabesques with the images of old age and death. 
 
 Ronsard became deaf at sixteen; and it was this 
 circumstance which finally determined him to be a man 
 of letters instead of a diplomatist, significantly, one 
 might fancy, of a certain premature agedness, and of 
 the tranquil, temperate sweetness appropriate to that, in 
 the school of poetry which he founded. Its charm is 
 that of a thing not vigorous or original, but full of the 
 grace which comes of long study and reiterated refine- 
 ments, and many steps repeated, and many angles worn 
 
JOACHIM DU BELLAY 
 
 141 
 
 down, with an exquisite faintness, une fadeur exquise, 
 a certain tenuity and caducity, as for those who can bear 
 nothing vehement or strong; for princes weary of love, 
 like Francis the First, or of pleasure, like Henry the 
 Third, or of action, like Henry the Fourth. Its merits 
 are those of the old, — grace and finish, perfect in minute 
 detail. For these people are a little jaded, and have 
 a constant desire for a subdued and delicate excite- 
 ment, to warm their creeping fancy a little. They love 
 a constant change of rhyme in poetry, and in their houses 
 that strange, fantastic interweaving of thin, reed-like 
 lines, which are a kind of rhetoric in architecture. 
 
 But the poetry of the Pleiad is true not only to the 
 physiognomy of its age, but also to its country — ce pays 
 du Vendomois — the names and scenery of which so 
 often recur in it: — the great Loire, with its long spaces 
 of white sand; the little river Loir; the heathy, upland 
 country, with its scattered pools of water and waste 
 roadsides, and retired manors, with their crazy old feudal 
 defences half fallen into decay; La Beauce, where the 
 vast rolling fields seem to anticipate the great western 
 sea itself. It is full of the traits of that country. We 
 see Du Bellay and Ronsard gardening, or hunting with 
 their dogs, or watch the pastimes of a rainy day; and 
 with all this is connected a domesticity, a homeliness 
 and simple goodness, by which the Northern country 
 gains upon the South. They have the love of the aged 
 for warmth, and understand the poetry of winter; for 
 they are not far from the Atlantic, and the west wind 
 which comes up from it, turning the poplars white, spares 
 not this new Italy in France. So the fireside often 
 appears, with the pleasures of the frosty season, about 
 
142 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 the vast emblazoned chimneys of^ the time, and with a 
 bonhomie as of little children, -or old people. 
 
 It is in Du Bellay's Olive, a collection of sonnets in 
 praise of a half-imaginary lady, Sonnet 2 a la louange 
 d'Olive, that these characteristics are most abundant. 
 Here is a perfectly crystallised example : — 
 
 D' amour, de grace, et de haulte valeur 
 
 Les feux divins estoient ceinctz et les cieulx 
 S'estoient vestuz d'un manteau precieux 
 A raiz ardens de diverse couleur: 
 
 Tout estoit plein de beaute, de bonheur, 
 La mer tranquille, et le vent gracieulx, 
 Quand ceile la nasquit en ces bas lieux 
 Qui a pille du monde tout Vhonneur. 
 
 Eir prist son teint des beux lyz blanchissans, 
 Son chef de I' or, ses deux levres des rozes, 
 Et du soleil ses yeux resplandissans: 
 
 Le ciel usant de liberalite, 
 
 Mist en V esprit ses semences encloses, 
 Son nom des Dieux prist I'immortalite. 
 
 That he is thus a characteristic specimen of the poetical 
 taste of that age, is indeed Du Bellay's chief interest. But 
 if his work is to have the highest sort of interest, if it 
 is to do something more than satisfy curiosity, if it is 
 to have an aesthetic as distinct from an historical value, 
 it is not enough for a poet to have been the true child of 
 his age, to have conformed to its aesthetic conditions, 
 and by so conforming to have charmed and stimulated 
 that age ; it is necessary that there should be perceptible 
 in his work something individual, inventive, unique, the 
 impress there of the writer's own temper and personality. 
 This impress M. Sainte-Beuve thought he found in the 
 Antiquites de Rome, and the Regrets, which he ranks 
 
JOACHIM DU BELLAY 
 
 as what has been called poesie intime, that intensely 
 modern sort of poetry in which the writer has for 
 his aim the portraiture of his own most intimate 
 moods, and to take the reader into his confidence. That 
 age had other instances of this intimacy of sentiment: 
 Montaigne's Essays are full of it, the carvings of the 
 church of Brou are full of it. M. Sainte-Beuve has 
 perhaps exaggerated the influence of this quality in Du 
 Bellay's Regrets; but the very name of the book has 
 a touch of Rousseau about it, and reminds one of a 
 whole generation of self-pitying poets in modern times. 
 It was in the atmosphere of Rome, to him so strange 
 and mournful, that these pale flowers grew up. For that 
 journey to Italy, which he deplored as the greatest mis- 
 fortune of his life, put him in full possession of his 
 talent, and brought out all its originality. And in effect 
 you do find intimacy, intimite, here. The trouble of 
 his life is analysed, and the sentiment of it tonveyed. 
 directly to our minds ; not a great sorrow or passion, but 
 only the sense of loss in passing days, the ennui of a 
 dreamer who must plunge into the world's affairs, the 
 opposition between actual life and the ideal, a longing 
 for rest, nostalgia, home-sickness — that pre-eminently 
 childish, but so suggestive sorrow, as significant of the 
 final regret of all human creatures for the familiar earth 
 and limited sky. 
 
 The feeling for landscape is often described as a 
 modern one ; still more so is that for antiquity, the senti- 
 ment of ruins. Du Bellay has this sentiment. The 
 duration of the hard, sharp outlines of things is a grief 
 to him, and passing his wearisome days among the ruins 
 of ancient Rome, he is consoled by the thought that all 
 
144 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 must one day end, by the sentiment of the grandeur of 
 nothingness — la grandeur du rien. With a strange touch 
 of far-off mysticism, he thinks that the great whole — 
 le grand tout — into which all other things pass and lose 
 themselves, ought itself sometimes to perish and pass 
 away. Nothing less can relieve his weariness. From the 
 stately aspects of Rome his thoughts went back con- 
 tinually to France, to the smoking chimneys of his little 
 village, the longer twilight of the North, the soft climate 
 of Anjou — la douceur Angevine; yet not so much to 
 the real France, we may be sure, with its dark streets 
 and roofs of rough-hewn slate, as to that other country, 
 with slenderer towers, and more winding rivers, and trees 
 like flowers, and with softer sunshine on more grace- 
 fully-proportioned fields and ways, which the fancy of 
 the exile, and the pilgrim, and of the schooboy far from 
 home, and of those kept at home unwillingly, everywhere 
 builds up before or behind them. 
 
 He came home at last, through the Grisons, by slow 
 journeys; and there, in the cooler air of his own country, 
 under its skies of milkier blue, the sweetest flower of his 
 genius sprang up. There have been poets whose whole 
 fame has rested on one poem, as Gray's on the Elegy in a 
 Country Churchyard, or Ronsard's, as many critics have 
 thought, on the eighteen lines of one famous ode. Du 
 Bellay has almost been the poet of one poem; and this 
 one poem of his is an Italian product transplanted into 
 that green country of Anjou; out of the Latin verses of 
 Andrea Navagero, into French. But it is a composition 
 in which the matter is almost nothing, and the form 
 almost everything; and the form of the poem as if 
 stands, written in old French, is all Du Bellay's own. 
 
JOACHIM DU BELLAY 
 
 145 
 
 It is a song which the winnowers are supposed to sing 
 a they winnow the corn, and they invoke the winds to 
 lie lightly on the grain. 
 
 D'UN V ANN EUR DE BLE AUX VENTS. 1 
 
 A vous trouppe iecfere 
 Qui d'aile passagere 
 > Par le monde volez, 
 Et d y un sifHant murmur e 
 L' ombrageuse verdure 
 Doulcement esbranlez. 
 
 J'offre ces violettes, 
 
 Ces lis & ces Heurettes, 
 Et ces roses icy, 
 Ces vermeillettes roses 
 Sont freschement ecloses, 
 Et ces celliets aussi. 
 
 De vostre doulce haleine 
 Eventez ceste plaine 
 Eventez ce sejour; 
 Ce pendant que fahanne 
 A mon ble que je vanne 
 A la chaleur du jour. 
 
 That has, in the highest degree, the qualities, the value, 
 of the whole Pleiad school of poetry, of the whole 
 phase of taste from which that school derives — a certain 
 silvery grace of fancy, nearly all the pleasure of which 
 is in the surprise at the happy and dexterous way in 
 which a thing slight in itself is handled. The sweetness 
 
 *A graceful translation of this and some other poems of 
 the Pleiad may be found in Ballads and Lyrics of Old 
 France, by Mr. Andrew Lang. 
 
146 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 of it is by no means to be got at by crushing, as you 
 crush wild herbs to get at their perfume. One seems 
 to hear the measured motion of the fans, with a child's 
 pleasure on coming across the incident for the first 
 time, in one of those great barns of Du Bellay's own 
 country, La Beauce, the granary of France. A sudden 
 light transfigures some trivial thing, a weather-vane, a 
 windmill, a winnowing fan, the dust in the barn door. 
 A moment — and the thing has vanished, because it was 
 pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing 
 that the accident may happen again. 
 
WINCKELMANN 
 
 ET EGO IN ARCADIA FUI 
 
 Goethe's fragments of art-criticism contain a few 
 pages of strange pregnancy on the character of Winckel- 
 mann. He speaks of the teacher who had made his 
 career possible, but whom he had never seen, as of an 
 abstract type of culture, consummate, tranquil, with- 
 drawn already into the region of ideals, yet retaining 
 colour from the incidents of a passionate intellectual life* 
 He classes him with certain works of art, possessing an 
 inexhaustible gift of suggestion, to which criticism may 
 return again and again with renewed freshness. Hegel, 
 in his lectures on the Philosophy of Art, estimating the 
 work of his predecessors, has also passed a remarkable 
 judgment on Winckelmann's writings: — "Winckelmann, 
 by contemplation of the ideal works of the ancients, 
 received a sort of inspiration, through which he opened 
 a new sense for the study of art. He is to be regarded 
 as one of those who, in the sphere of art, have known 
 how to initiate a new organ for the human spirit." That 
 it has given a new sense, that it has laid open a new 
 organ, is the highest that can be said of any critical 
 effort. It is interesting, then, to ask what kind of man 
 it was who thus laid open a new organ. Under what 
 conditions was that effected? 
 
 Johann Joachim Winckelmann was born at Stendal 
 
148 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 in Brandenburg, in the year 1717. The child of a poor 
 tradesman, he passed through many struggles in early 
 youth, the memory of which ever remained in him as 
 a fitful cause of dejection. In 1763, in the full emanci- 
 pation of his spirit, looking over the beautiful Roman 
 prospect, he writes — "One gets spoiled here; but God 
 owed me this; in my youth I suffered too much/ 1 
 Destined to assert and interpret the charm of the 
 Hellenic spirit, he served first a painful apprenticeship in 
 the tarnished intellectual world of Germany in the earlier 
 half of the eighteenth century. Passing out of that 
 into the happy light of the antique, he had a sense of 
 exhilaration almost physical. We find him as a child 
 in the dusky precincts of a German school, hungrily 
 feeding on a few colourless books. The master of this 
 school grows blind; Winckelmann becomes his famulus. 
 The old man would have had him study theology. 
 Winckelmann, free of the master's library, chooses rather 
 to become familiar with the Greek classics. Herodotus 
 and Homer win, with their "vowelled" Greek, his 
 warmest enthusiasm; whole nights of fever are devoted 
 to them; disturbing dreams of an Odyssey of his own 
 come to him. "He felt in himself," says Madame de 
 Stael, "an ardent attraction towards the south. In Ger- 
 man imaginations even now traces are often to be found 
 of that love of the sun, that weariness of the North 
 (cette fatigue du nord), which carried the northern 
 peoples away into the countries of the South. A fine 
 sky brings to birth sentiments not unlike the love of one's 
 Fatherland." 
 
 To most of us, after all our steps towards it, the 
 antique world, in spite of its intense outlines, its own 
 
WINCKELMANN 
 
 149 
 
 perfect self-expression, still remains faint and remote. 
 To him, closely limited except on the side of the ideal, 
 building for his dark poverty "a house not made with 
 hands," it early came to seem more real than the present. 
 In the fantastic plans of foreign travel continually 
 passing through his mind, to Egypt, for instance, and to 
 France, there seems always to be rather a wistful sense 
 of something lost to be regained, than the desire of dis- 
 covering anything new. Goethe has told us how, in 
 his eagerness actually to handle the antique, he became 
 interested in the insignificant vestiges of it which the 
 neighbourhood of Strasburg afforded. So we hear of 
 Winckelmann's boyish antiquarian wanderings among 
 the ugly Brandenburg sandhills. Such a conformity 
 between himself and Winckelmann, Goethe would have 
 gladly noted. 
 
 At twenty-one he enters the University of Halle, to 
 study theology, as his friends desire ; instead, he becomes 
 the enthusiastic translator of Herodotus. The condition 
 of Greek learning in German schools and universities had 
 fallen, and there were no professors at Halle who could 
 satisfy his sharp, intellectual craving. Of his profes- 
 sional education he always speaks with scorn, claiming 
 to have been his own teacher from first to last. His 
 appointed teachers did not perceive that a new source 
 of culture was within their hands. Homo vagus et 
 inconstans! — one of them pedantically reports of the 
 future pilgrim to Rome, unaware on which side his 
 irony was whetted. When professional education confers 
 nothing but irritation on a Schiller, no one ought to be 
 surprised; for Schiller, and such as he, are primarily 
 spiritual adventurers. But that Winckelmann, the votary 
 
*5° 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 of the gravest of intellectual traditions, should get noth- j 
 ing but an attempt at suppression from the professional 1 
 guardians of learning, is what may well surprise us. 
 
 In 1743 he became master of a school at Seehausen. I 
 This was the most wearisome period of his life. Not- j 
 withstanding a success, in dealing with children, which 
 •seems to testify to something simple and primeval in his j 
 nature, he found the work of teaching very depressing. 
 Engaged in this work, he writes that he still has within 
 him a longing desire to attain to the knowledge of i 
 beauty — sehnlich wiinschte zur Kenntniss des Schdnen 
 zu gelangen. He had to shorten his nights, sleeping j 
 only four hours, to gain time for reading. And here 
 Winckelmann made a step forward in culture. He I 
 multiplied his intellectual force by detaching from it all 
 flaccid interests. He renounced mathematics and law, in 
 which his reading had been considerable, — all but the 
 literature of the arts. Nothing was to enter into his 
 life unpenetrated by its central enthusiasm. At this 
 time he undergoes the charm of Voltaire. Voltaire 
 belongs to that flimsier, more artificial, classical tradi- 
 tion, which Winckelmann was one day to supplant, by 
 the clear ring, the eternal outline, of the genuine antique. 
 But it proves the authority of such a gift as Voltaire's 
 that it allures and wins even those born to supplant it. 
 Voltaire's impression on Winckelmann was never effaced ; 
 and it gave him a consideration for French literature 
 which contrasts with his contempt for the literary 
 products of Germany. German literature transformed, 
 siderealised, as we see it in Goethe, reckons Winckel- 
 mann among its initiators. But Germany at that time 
 presented nothing in which he could have anticipated 
 
W1NCKELM ANN 1 5 1 
 
 Iphigenie, and the formation of an effective classical 
 tradition in German literature. 
 
 Under this purely literary influence, Winckelmann 
 protests against Christian Wolff and the philosophers. 
 Goethe, in speaking of this protest, alludes to his own 
 obligations to Emmanuel Kant. Kant's influence over the 
 culture of Goethe, which he tells us could not have been 
 resisted by him without loss, consisted in a severe limita- 
 tion to the concrete. But he adds, that in born anti- 
 quaries, like Winckelmann, a constant handling of the 
 antique, with its eternal outline, maintains that limitation 
 as effiectually as a critical philosophy. Plato, however, 
 saved so often for his redeeming literary manner, is 
 excepted from Winckelmann's proscription of the 
 philosophers. The modern student most often meets 
 Plato on that side which seems to pass beyond Plato 
 into a world no longer pagan, based upon the conception 
 of a spiritual life. But the element of affinity which he 
 presents to Winckelmann is that which is wholly Greek, 
 and alien from the Christian world, represented by that 
 group of brilliant youths in the Lysis, still uninfected by 
 any spiritual sickness, finding the end of all endeavour 
 in the aspects of the human form, the continual stir and 
 motion of a comely human life. 
 
 This new-found interest in Plato's dialogues could 
 not fail to increase his desire to visit the countries of the 
 classical tradition. "It is my misfortune/' he writes, 
 "that I was not born to great place, wherein I might have 
 had cultivation, and the opportunity of following my 
 instinct and forming myself." A visit to Rome prob- 
 ably was already designed, and he silently preparing for 
 it. Count Biinau, the author of a historical work then of 
 
152 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 note, had collected at Nothenitz a valuable library, now 
 part of the library of Dresden. In 1748 Winckelmann 
 wrote to Biinau in halting French: — He is emboldened, 
 he says, by Biinau's indulgence for needy men of letters. 
 He desires only to devote himself to study, having never 
 allowed himself to be dazzled by favourable prospects 
 in the Church. He hints at his doubtful position "in a 
 metaphysical .age, by which humane literature is 
 trampled under foot. At present," he goes on, "little 
 value is set on Greek literature, to which I have devoted 
 myself so far as I could penetrate, when good books are 
 so scarce and expensive." Finally, he desires a place in 
 some corner of Biinau's library. "Perhaps, at some 
 future time, I shall become more useful to the public, 
 if, drawn from obscurity in whatever way, I can find 
 means to maintain myself in the capital." 
 
 Soon afterwards we find Winckelmann in the library 
 at Nothenitz. Thence he made many visits to the collec- 
 tion of antiquities at Dresden. He became acquainted 
 with many artists, above all with Oeser, Goethe's future 
 friend and master, who, uniting a high culture with the 
 practical knowledge of art, was fitted to minister to 
 Winckelmann's culture. And now a new channel of 
 communion with the Greek life was opened for him. 
 Hitherto he had handled the words only of Greek poetry, 
 stirred indeed and roused by them, yet divining beyond 
 the words some unexpressed pulsation of sensuous life. 
 Suddenly he is in contact with that life, still fervent in 
 the relics of plastic art. Filled as our culture is with 
 the classical spirit, we can hardly imagine how deeply 
 the human mind was moved, when, at the Renaissance, 
 in the midst of a frozen world, the buried fire of ancient 
 
WINCKELMANN 
 
 153 
 
 art rose up from under the soil. Winckelmann here 
 reproduces for us the earlier sentiment of the Renais- 
 sance. On a sudden the imagination feels itself free. 
 How facile and direct, it seems to say, is this life of the 
 senses and the understanding, when once we have appre- 
 hended it ! Here, surely, is that .more liberal mode of 
 life we have been seeking so long, so near to us all the 
 while. How mistaken and .roundabout have been our 
 efforts to reach it by mystic passion, and monastic 
 reverie; how they have deflowered the flesh; how little 
 have they really emancipated us ! Hermione melts from 
 her stony posture, and the lost proportions of life right 
 themselves. Here, then, in vivid realisation we see the 
 native tendency of Winckelmann to escape from abstract 
 theory to intuition, to the exercise of sight and touch. 
 Lessing, in the Laocoon, has theorised finely on the 
 relation of poetry to sculpture; and philosophy may 
 give us theoretical reasons why not poetry but sculpture 
 should be the most sincere and exact expression of the 
 Greek ideal. By a happy, unperplexed dexterity, 
 Winckelmann solves the question in the concrete. It is 
 what Goethe calls his Gewahrwerden der griechischen 
 Kunst, his finding of Greek art. 
 
 Through the tumultuous richness of Goethe's culture, 
 the influence of Winckelmann is always discernible, as 
 the strong, regulative under-current of a clear, antique 
 motive. "One learns nothing from him," he says to 
 Eckermann, "but one becomes something." If we ask 
 what the secret of this influence was, Goethe himself 
 will tell us — wholeness, unity with one's self, intellec- 
 tual integrity. And yet these expressions, because they 
 fit Goethe, with his universal culture, so well, seem hardly 
 
*54 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 to describe the narrow, exclusive interest of Winckel- 
 mann. Doubtless Winckelmann's perfection is a narrow 
 perfection: his feverish nursing of the one motive of 
 his life is a contrast to Goethe's various energy. But 
 what affected Goethe, what instructed him and ministered 
 to his culture, was the integrity, the truth to its type, of 
 the given force. The development of this force was the 
 single interest of Winckelmann, unembarrassed by any- 
 thing else in him. Other interests, practical or intellec- 
 tual, those slighter talents and motives not supreme, 
 which in most men are the waste part of nature, and 
 drain away their vitality, he plucked out and cast from 
 him. The protracted longing of his youth is not a 
 vague, romantic longing: he knows what he longs for, 
 what he wills. Within its severe limits his enthusiasm 
 burns like lava. "You know/' says Lavater, speaking 
 of Winckelmann's countenance, "that I consider ardor 
 and indifference by no means incompatible in the same 
 character. If ever there was a striking instance of that 
 union, it is in the countenance before us." "A lowly 
 childhood," says Goethe, "insufficient instruction in 
 youth, broken, distracted studies in early manhood, the 
 burden of school-keeping! He was thirty years old 
 before he enjoyed a single favor of fortune: but so 
 soon as he had attained to an adequate condition of 
 freedom, he appears before us consummate and entire, 
 complete in the ancient sense." 
 
 But his hair is turning grey, and he has not yet reached 
 the south. The Saxon court had become Roman 
 Catholic, and the way to favour at Dresden was through 
 Roman ecclesiastics. Probably the thought of a pro- 
 fession of the papal religion was not new to Winckel- 
 
WINCKELM AN N 
 
 155 
 
 mann. At one time he had thought of begging his way 
 to Rome, from cloister to cloister, under the pretence of 
 a disposition to change his faith. In 1751, the papal 
 nuncio, Archinto, was one of the visitors at Ndthenitz. 
 He suggested Rome as the fitting stage for Winckel- 
 mann's accomplishments and held out the hope of a 
 place in the Pope's library. Cardinal Passionei, charmed 
 with Winckelmann's beautiful Greek writing, was ready 
 to play the part of Maecenas, if the indispensable change 
 were made. Winckelmann accepted the bribe, and visited 
 the nuncio at Dresden. Unquiet still at the word "pro- 
 fession," not without a struggle, he joined the Roman 
 Church, July the nth, 1754. 
 
 Goethe boldly pleads that Winckelmann was a pagan, 
 that the landmarks of Christendom meant nothing to 
 him. It is clear that he intended to deceive no one by 
 his disguise; fears of the inquisition are sometimes 
 visible during his life in Rome; he entered Rome 
 notoriously with the works of Voltaire in his possession ; 
 the thought of what Count Biinau might be thinking 
 of him seems to have been his greatest difficulty. On 
 the other hand, he may have had a sense of a certain 
 antique and as it were pagan grandeur in the Roman 
 Catholic religion. Turning from the crabbed Protes- 
 tantism, which had been the ennui of his youth, he 
 might reflect that while Rome had reconciled itself to 
 the Renaissance, the Protestant principle in art had 
 cut off Germany from the supreme tradition of beauty. 
 And yet to that transparent nature, with its simplicity 
 as of the earlier world, the loss of absolute sincerity 
 must have been a real loss. Goethe understands that 
 Winckelmann had made this sacrifice. Yet at the bar of 
 
156 THE RENAISSANCE v 
 
 the highest criticism, perhaps, Winckelmann may be 
 absolved. The insincerity of his religious profession was 
 only one incident of a culture in which the moral instinct, 
 like the religious or political, was merged in the artistic. 
 But then the artistic interest was that, by desperate 
 faithfulness to which Winckelmann was saved from the 
 mediocrity, which, breaking through no bounds, moves 
 ever in a bloodless routine, and misses its one chance in 
 the life of the spirit and the intellect. There have been 
 instances of culture developed by every high motive in 
 turn, and yet intense at every point ; and the aim of our 
 culture should be to attain not only as intense but as 
 complete a life as possible. But often the higher life 
 is only possible at all, on condition of the selection of 
 that in which one's motive is native and strong ; and this 
 selection involves the renunciation of a crown reserved 
 for others. Which is better? — to lay open a new sense, 
 to initiate a new organ for the human spirit, or to 
 cultivate many types of perfection up to a point which 
 leaves us still beyond the range of their transforming 
 power? Savonarola is one type of success; Winckel- 
 mann is another; criticism can reject neither, because 
 each is true to tiself . Winckelmann himself explains the 
 motive of his life when he says, "It will be my highest 
 reward, if posterity acknowledges that I have written 
 worthily." 
 
 For a time he remained at Dresden. There his first 
 book appeared, Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek 
 Works of Art in Painting and Sculpture. Full of 
 obscurities as it was, obscurities which baffled but did 
 not offend Goethe when he first turned to art-criticism, 
 its purpose was direct — an appeal from the artificial 
 
WINCKELMANN 
 
 157 
 
 classicism of the day to the study of the antique. The 
 book was well received, and a pension supplied through 
 the king's confessor. In September 1755 he started fof 
 Rome, in the company of a young Jesuit. He was 
 introduced to Raphael Mengs, a painter then of note, 
 and found a home near him, in the artists' quarter, in 
 a place where he could "overlook, far and wide, the 
 eternal city." At first he was perplexed with the sense 
 of being a stranger on what was to him, spiritually, 
 native soil. "Unhappily," he cries in French, often 
 selected by him as the vehicle of strong feeling, "I am 
 one of those whom the Greeks call bypuxadeh. — I have 
 come into the world and into Italy too late." More than 
 thirty ears afterwards, Goethe also, after many aspira- 
 tions and severe preparation of mind, visited Italy. In 
 early manhood, just as he, too, was finding Greek art, 
 the rumour of that true artist's life of Winckelmann in 
 Italy had strongly moved him. At Rome, spending a 
 whole year drawing from the antique, in preparation for 
 Iphigenie, he finds the stimulus of Winckelmann's 
 memory ever active. Winckelmann's Roman life was 
 simple, primeval, Greek. His delicate constitution per- 
 mitted him the use only of bread and wine. Condemned 
 by many as a renegade, he had no desire for places of 
 honour, but only to see his merits acknowledged, and 
 existence assured to him. He was simple without being 
 niggardly ; he desired to be neither poor nor rich. 
 
 Winckelmann's first years in Rome present all the 
 elements of an intellectual situation of the highest 
 interest. The beating of the soul against its bars, the 
 sombre aspect, the alien traditions, the still barbarous 
 literature of Germany, are afar off; before him are 
 
158 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 adequate conditions of culture, the sacred soil itself, the 
 first tokens of the advent of the new German literature, 
 with its broad horizons, its boundless intellectual promise. 
 Dante, passing from the darkness of the Inferno, is filled 
 with a sharp and joyful sense of light, which makes him 
 deal with it, in the opening of the Purgatorio, in a 
 wonderfully touching and penetrative way. Hellenism, 
 which is the principle pre-eminently of intellectual light 
 (our modern culture may have more colour, the medieval 
 spirit greater heat and profundity, but Hellenism 
 is pre-eminent for light), has always been most 
 effectively conceived by those who have crept into it 
 out of an intellectual world in which the sombre elements 
 predominate. So it had been in the ages of the Renais- 
 sance. This repression, removed at last, gave force 
 and glow to Winckelmann's native affinity to the Hellenic 
 spirit. "There had been known before him," says 
 Madame de Stael, "learned men who might be consulted 
 like books ; but no one had, if I may say so, made himself 
 a pagan for the purpose of penetrating antiquity." "One 
 is always a poor executant of conceptions not one's 
 own." — On execute mat ce qu'on n'a pas congu soi-meme 1 
 — are true in their measure of every genuine enthusiasm. 
 Enthusiasm, — that, in the broad Platonic sense of the 
 Phaedrus, was the secret of his divinatory power over 
 the Hellenic world. This enthusiasm, dependent as it 
 is to a great degree on bodily temperament, has a power 
 of re-enforcing the purer emotions of the intellect with 
 an almost physical excitement. That his affinity with 
 Hellenism was not merely intellectual, that the subtler 
 threads of temperament w r ere inwoven in it, is proved 
 1 Words of Charlotte Corday before the Convention. 
 
WINCKELMANN 
 
 by his romantic, fervent friendships with young men. 
 He has known, he says, many young men more beautiful 
 than Guido's archangel. These friendships, bringing him 
 into contact with the pride of human form, and staining 
 the thoughts with its bloom, perfected his reconciliation 
 to the spirit of Greek sculpture. A letter on taste, 
 addressed from Rome to a young nobleman, Friedrich 
 von Berg, is the record of such a friendship. 
 
 "I shall excuse my delay/' he begins, "in fulfilling my 
 promise of an essay on the taste for beauty in works of 
 art, in the words of Pindar. He says to Agesidamus, a 
 youth of Locri — Ideq, re kclXov, &pq re KeKpajxevov — whom 
 he had kept waiting for an intended ode, that a debt 
 paid with usury is the end of reproach. This may win 
 your good-nature on behalf of my present essay, which 
 has turned out far more detailed and circumstantial 
 than I had at first intended. 
 
 "It is from yourself that the subject is taken. Our 
 intercourse has been short, too short both for you and 
 me; but the first time I saw you, the affinity of our 
 spirits was revealed to me : your culture proved that my 
 hope was not groundless; and I found in a beautiful 
 body a soul created for nobleness, gifted with the sense 
 of beauty. My parting from you was, therefore, one of 
 the most painful in my life; and that this feeling con- 
 tinues our common friend is witness, for your separa- 
 tion from me leaves me no hope of seeing you again. 
 Let this essay be a memorial of our .friendship, which, 
 on my side, is free from every selfish motive, and ever 
 remains subject and dedicate to yourself alone." 
 
 The following passage is characteristic — 
 
 "As it is confessedly the beauty of man which is to 
 
i6o 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 be conceived under one general idea, so I have noticed 
 that those who are observant of beauty only in women, 
 and are moved little or not at all by the beauty of men, 
 seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for 
 beauty in art. To such persons the beauty of Greek 
 art will ever seem wanting, because its supreme beauty 
 is rather male than female. But the beauty of art 
 demands a higher sensibility than the beauty of nature, 
 because the beauty of art, like tears shed at a play, gives 
 no pain, is without life, and must be awakened and 
 repaired by culture. Now, as the spirit of culture is 
 much more ardent in youth than in manhood, the instinct 
 of which I am speaking must be exercised and directed 
 to what is beautiful, before that age is reached, at which 
 one would be afraid to confess that one had no taste 
 for it" 
 
 Certainly, of that beauty of living form which regu- 
 lated Winckelmann's friendships, it could not be said 
 that it gave no pain. One notable friendship, the fortune 
 of which we may trace through his letters, begins with 
 an antique, chivalrous letter in French, and ends noisily 
 in a burst of angry fire. Far from reaching the quietism, 
 the bland indifference of art, such attachments are never- 
 theless more susceptible than any others of equal strength 
 of a purely intellectual culture. Of passion, of physical 
 excitement, they contain only just so much as stimulates 
 the eye to the finest delicacies of colour and form. These 
 friendships, often the caprices of a moment, make 
 Winckelmann's letters, with their troubled colouring, an 
 instructive but bizarre addition to the History of Art, 
 that shrine of grave and mellow light around the mute 
 Olympian family. The impression which Winckelmann's 
 
WINCKELMANN 
 
 161 
 
 literary life conveyed to those about him was that of 
 excitement, intuition, inspiration of general principles. 
 The quick, susceptible enthusiast, betraying his tempera- 
 ment even in appearance, by his olive complexion, his 
 deep-seated, piercing eyes, his rapid movements, appre- 
 hended the subtlest principles of the Hellenic manner, 
 not through the understanding, but by instinct or touch. 
 A German biographer of Winckelmann has compared 
 him to Columbus. That is not the aptest of comparisons ; 
 but it reminds one of a passage in which Edgar Quinet 
 describes the great discoverer's famous voyage. His 
 science was often at fault; but he had a way of esti- 
 mating at once the slightest indication of land, in a 
 floating weed or passing bird; he seemed actually to 
 come nearer to nature than other men. And that world 
 in which others had moved with so much embarrassment, 
 seems to call out in Winckelmann new senses fitted to 
 deal with it. He is in touch with it; it penetrates him, 
 and becomes part of his temperament. He remodels 
 his writings with constant renewal of insight ; he catches 
 the thread of a whole sequence of laws in some hollowing 
 of the hand, or dividing of the hair ; he seems to realise 
 that fancy of the reminiscence of a forgotten knowledge 
 hidden for a time in the mind itself ; as if the mind of 
 one, lover and philosopher at once in some phase of 
 pre-existence — ^iKoao^rjaas Tore ixkr epcoros — fallen into 
 a new cycle, were beginning its intellectual career 
 over again, yet with a certain power of anticipating 
 its results. So comes the truth of Goethe's judgments 
 on his works; they are a life, a living thing, designed 
 for those who are alive — ein Lebendiges fur die Leberir 
 digen geschrieben, ein Leben selbst. 
 
l62 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 In 1758 Cardinal Albani, who had formed in his 
 Roman villa a precious collection of antiquities, became 
 Winckelmann's patron. Pompeii had just opened its 
 treasures; Winckelmann gathered its first fruits. But 
 his plan of a visit to Greece remained unfulfilled. From 
 his first arrival in Rome he had kept the History of 
 Ancient Art ever in view. All his other writings were 
 a preparation for that. It appeared, finally, in 1764; but 
 even after its publication Winckelmann was still 
 employed in perfecting it. It is since his time that many 
 of the most significant examples of Greek art have been 
 submitted to criticism. He had seen little or nothing of 
 what we ascribe to the age of Pheidias; and his con- 
 ception of Greek art tends, therefore, to put the mere 
 elegance of the imperial society of ancient Rome in 
 place of the severe and chastened grace of the palaestra. 
 For the most part he had to penetrate to Greek art 
 through copies, imitations, and later Roman art itself ; 
 and it is not surprising that this turbid medium has left 
 in Winckelmann's actual results much that a more 
 privileged criticism can correct. 
 
 He had been twelve years in Rome. Admiring Ger- 
 many had made many calls to him. At last, in 1768, 
 he set out to revisit the country of his birth ; and as he 
 left Rome, a strange, inverted home-sickness, a strange 
 reluctance to leave it at all, came over him. He reached 
 Vienna. There he was loaded with honours and presents : 
 other cities were awaiting him. Goethe, then nineteen 
 years old, studying art at Leipsic, was expecting his 
 coming, with that wistful eagerness which marked his 
 youth, when the news of Winckelmann's murder arrived. 
 All his "weariness of the North" had revived with 
 
WINCKELMANN 163 
 
 double force. He left Vienna, intending to hasten back 
 to Rome, and at Trieste a delay of a few days occurred. 
 With characteristic openness, Winckelmann had confided 
 his plans to a fellow-traveller, a man named Arcangeli, 
 and had shown him the gold medals received at Vienna. 
 Arcangeli's avarice was aroused. One morning he 
 entered Winckelmann's room, under pretence of taking 
 leave. Winckelmann was then writing "memoranda for 
 the future editor of the History of Art," still seeking the 
 perfection of his great work. Arcangeli begged to see 
 the medals once more. As Winckelmann stooped down 
 to take them from the chest, a cord was thrown round 
 his neck. Some time afterwards, a child with whose 
 (companionship Winckelmann had beguiled his delay< 
 knocked at the door, and receiving no answer, gave th$ 
 alarm. Winckelmann was found dangerously wounded! 
 and died a few hours later, after receiving the last 
 sacraments. It seemed as if the gods, in reward fof: 
 his devotion to them, had given him a death which, for 
 its swiftness and its opportunity, he might well have 
 desired. "He has," says Goethe, "the advantage of 
 figuring in the memory of posterity, as one eternally able 
 and strong; for the image in which one leaves the work) 
 is that in which one moves among the shadows." Yet, 
 perhaps, it is not fanciful to regret that his proposed 
 meeting with Goethe never took place. Goethe, then in 
 all the pregnancy of his wonderful youth, still unruffled 
 by the "stress and storm" of his earlier manhood, was 
 awaiting Winckelmann with a curiosity of the worthiest 
 kind. As it was, Winckelmann became to him something 
 like what Virgil was to Dante. And Winckelmann, with 
 his fiery friendships, had reached that age and that period 
 
164 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 of culture at which emotions hitherto fitful, sometimes 
 concentrate themselves in a vital, unchangeable relation- 
 ship. German literary history seems to have lost the 
 chance of one of those famous friendships, the very 
 tradition of which becomes a stimulus to culture, and 
 exercises an imperishable influence. 
 
 In one of the frescoes of the Vatican, Raphael has 
 commemorated the tradition of the Catholic religion. 
 Against a space of tranquil sky, broken in upon by the 
 beatific vision, are ranged the great personages of 
 Christian history, with the Sacrament in the midst. 
 Another fresco of Raphael in the same apartment pre- 
 sents a very different company, Dante alone appearing in 
 both. Surrounded by the muses of Greek mythology, 
 under a thicket of laurel, sits Apollo, with the sources 
 of Castalia at his feet. On either side are grouped those 
 on whom the spirit of Apollo descended, the classical 
 and Renaissance poets, to whom the waters of Castalia 
 come down, a river making glad this other "city of 
 God." In this fresco it is the classical tradition, the 
 orthodoxy of taste, that Raphael commemorates. Winck- 
 elmann's intellectual history authenticates the claims of 
 this tradition in human culture. In the countries where 
 that tradition arose, where it still lurked about its own 
 artistic relics, and changes of language had not broken 
 i its continuity, national pride might sometimes light up 
 anew an enthusiasm for it. Aliens might imitate that 
 enthusiasm, and classicism become from time to time an 
 intellectual fashion. But Winckelmann was not further 
 removed by language, than by local aspects and associa- 
 tions, from those vestiges of the classical spirit; and he 
 
WINCKELMANN 
 
 165 
 
 lived at a time when, in Germany, classical studies were 
 out of favour. Yet, remote in time and place, he feels 
 after the Hellenic world, divines those channels of an- 
 cient art, in which its life still circulates, and, like Scyles, 
 the half-barbarous yet Hellenising king, in the beautiful 
 story of Herodotus, is irresistibly attracted by it. This 
 testimony to the authority of the Hellenic tradition, its 
 fitness to satisfy some vital requirement of the intellect, 
 which Winckelmann contributes as a solitary man of 
 genius, is offered also by the general history of the mind. 
 The spiritual forces of the past, which have prompted 
 and informed the culture of a succeeding age, live, in- 
 deed, within that culture, but with an absorbed, under- 
 ground life. The Hellenic element alone has not been 
 so absorbed, or content with this underground life ; from 
 time to time it has started to the surface; culture has 
 been drawn back to its sources to be clarified and cor- 
 rected. Hellenism is not merely an absorbed element in 
 our intellectual life; it is a conscious tradition in it. 
 
 Again, individual genius works ever under conditions 
 of time and place : its products are coloured by the vary- 
 ing aspects of nature, and type of human form, and out- 
 ward manners of life. There is thus an element of 
 change in art ; criticism must never for a moment forget 
 that "the artist is the child of his time. ,, But besides 
 these conditions of time and place, and independent of 
 them, there is also an element of permanence, a standard 
 of taste, which genius confesses. This standard is main- 
 tained in a purely intellectual tradition. It acts upon 
 the artist, not as one of the influences of his own age, 
 but through those artistic products of the previous 
 generation which first excited, while they directed into 
 
i66 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 a particular channel, his sense of beauty. The supreme 
 artistic products of succeeding generations thus form a 
 series of elevated points, taking each from each the re- 
 flection of a strange light, the source of which is not in 
 the atmosphere around and above them, but in a stage 
 of society remote from ours. The standard of taste, 
 then, was fixed in Greece, at a definite historical period. 
 A tradition for all succeeding generations, it originates 
 in a spontaneous growth out of the influences of Greek 
 society. What were the conditions under which this 
 ideal, this standard of artistic orthodoxy, was generated? 
 How was Greece enabled to force its thought upon 
 Europe ? 
 
 Greek art, when we first catch sight of it, is entangled 
 with Greek religion. We are accustomed to think of 
 Greek religion as the religion of art and beauty, the 
 religion of which the Olympian Zeus and the Athena 
 Polias are the idols, the poems of Homer the sacred 
 books. Thus Cardinal Newman speaks of "the classical 
 polytheism which was gay and graceful, as was natural 
 in a civilised age." Yet such a view is only a partial 
 me. In it the eye is fixed on the sharp, bright edge of 
 high Hellenic culture, but loses sight of the sombre world 
 across which it strikes. Greek religion, where we can 
 observe it most distinctly, is at once a magnificent ritu- 
 alistic system, and a cycle of poetical conceptions. Re- 
 ligions, as they grow by natural laws out of man's life, 
 are modified by whatever modifies his life. They brighten 
 under a bright sky, they become liberal as the social 
 range widens, they grow intense and shrill in the clefts 
 of human life, where the spirit is narrow and confined, 
 and the stars are visible at noonday ; and a fine analysis 
 
WINCKELMANN 167 
 
 of these differences is one of the gravest functions of 
 religious criticism. Still, the broad foundation, in mere 
 human nature, of all religions as they exist for the great- 
 est number, is a universal pagan sentiment, a paganism 
 which existed before the Greek religion, and has lingered 
 far onward into the Christian world, ineradicable, like 
 some persistent vegetable growth, because its seed is an 
 element of the very soil out of which it springs. 
 
 This pagan sentiment measures the sadness with which 
 the human mind is filled, whenever its thoughts wander 
 far from what is here, and now. It is beset by notions 
 of irresistible natural powers, for the most part ranged 
 against man, but the secret also of his fortune, making 
 the earth golden and the grape fiery for him. He makes 
 gods in his own image, gods smiling and flower-crowned, 
 or bleeding by some sad fatality, to console him by their 
 wounds, never closed from generation to generation. It 
 is with a rush of home-sickness that the thought of death 
 presents itself. He would remain at home for ever on 
 the earth if he could. As it loses its colour and the senses 
 fail, he clings ever closer to it ; but since the mouldering 
 of bones and flesh must go on to the end, he is careful 
 for charms and talismans which may chance to have 
 some friendly power in them when the inevitable ship^ 
 wreck comes. Such sentiment is a part of the eternal bask 
 of all religions, modified indeed by changes of time and 
 place, but indestructible, because its root is so deep isa 
 the earth of man's nature. The breath of religious initi- 
 ators passes over them; a few "rise up with wings as 
 eagles," but the broad level of religious life is not per" 
 manently changed. Religious progress, like all purely 
 spiritual progress, is confined to a few. This sentiment 
 
i68 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 attaches itself in the earliest times to certain usages of 
 partriarchal life, the kindling of fire, the washing of the 
 body, the slaughter of the flock, the gathering of harvest, 
 holidays and dances. Here are the beginnings of a 
 ritual, at first as occasional and unfixed as the sentiment 
 which it expresses, but destined to become the permanent 
 element of religious life. The usages of patriarchal life 
 change; but this germ of ritual remains, promoted now 
 with a consciously religious motive, losing its domestic 
 character, and therefore becoming more and more in- 
 explicable with each generation. Such pagan worship, 
 in spite of local variations, essentially one, is an element 
 in all religions. It is the anodyne which the religious 
 principle, like one administering opiates to the incurable, 
 has added to the law which makes life sombre for the 
 vast majority of mankind. 
 
 More definite religious conceptions come from other 
 sources, and fix themselves upon this ritual m various 
 ways, changing it, and giving it new meanings. In 
 Greece they were derived from mythology, itself not 
 due to a religious source at all, but developing in the 
 course of time into a body of religious conceptions, en- 
 tirely human in form and character. To the unpro- 
 gressive ritual element it brought these conceptions, it- 
 self — 17 irrepov Swages, the power of the wing — an element 
 of refinement, of ascension, with the promise of an end- 
 less destiny. While the ritual remains unchanged, the aes- 
 thetic element, only accidentally connected with it, ex- 
 pands with the freedom and mobility of the things of 
 the intellect. Always, the fixed element is the religious 
 observance; the fluid, unfixed element is the myth, the 
 religious conception. This religion is itself pagan, and 
 
WINCKELMANN 
 
 has in any broad view of it the pagan sadness. It does 
 not at once, and for the majority, become the higher 
 Hellenic religion. The country people, of course, cherish 
 the unlovely idols of an earlier time, such as those which 
 Pausanias found still devoutly preserved in Arcadia. 
 Athenseus tells the story of one who, coming to a temple 
 of Latona, had expected to find some worthy presentment 
 of the mother of Apollo, and laughed on seeing only a 
 shapeless wooden figure. The wilder people have wilder 
 gods, which, however, in Athens, or Corinth, or Lace- 
 daemon, changing ever with the worshippers in whom 
 they live and move and have their being, borrow some- 
 thing of the lordliness and distinction of human nature 
 there. Greek religion, too, has its mendicants, its puri- 
 fications, its antinomian mysticism, its garments offered 
 to the gods, its statues worn with kissing, its exaggerated 
 superstitions for the vulgar only, its worship of sorrow, 
 its addolorata, its mournful mysteries. Scarcely a wild 
 or melancholy note of the medieval church but was an- 
 ticipated by Greek polytheism! What should we have 
 thought of the vertiginous prophetess at the very centre 
 of Greek religion? The supreme Hellenic culture is a 
 sharp edge of light across this gloom. The fiery, stupe- 
 fying wine becomes in a happier climate clear and exhil- 
 arating. The Dorian worship of Apollo, rational, chas- 
 tened, debonair, with his unbroken daylight, always op- 
 posed to the sad Chthonian divinities, is the aspiring ele- 
 ment, by force and spring of which Greek religion sub- 
 limes itself. Out of Greek religion, under happy con- 
 ditions, arises Greek art, to minister to human culture. It 
 was the privilege of Greek religion to be able to trans- 
 form itself into an artistic ideal. 
 
THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 For the thoughts of the Greeks about themselves, and 
 their relation to the world generally, were ever in the 
 happiest readiness to be transformed into objects for 
 the senses. In this lies the main distinction between 
 Greek art and the mystical art of the Christian middle 
 age, which is always struggling to express thoughts be- 
 yond itself. Take, for instance, a characteristic work 
 of the middle age, Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin 
 in the cloister of Saint Mark's at Florence. In some 
 strange halo of a moon Jesus and the Virgin Mother are 
 seated, clad in mystical white raiment, half shroud, half 
 priestly linen. Jesus, with rosy nimbus and the long, pale 
 hair — tanquam lana alba et tanquam nix — of the figure 
 in the Apocalypse, with slender finger-tips is setting a 
 crown of pearl on the head of Mary, who, corpse-like 
 in her refinement, is bending forward to receive it, the 
 light lying like snow upon her forehead. Certainly, it 
 cannot be said of Angelico's fresco that it throws into 
 a sensible form our highest thoughts about man and his 
 relation to the world ; but it did not do this adequately 
 even for Angelico. For him, all that is outward or 
 sensible in his work — the hair like wool, the rosy nimbus, 
 the crown of pearl — is only the symbol or type of a 
 really inexpressible world, to which he wishes to direct 
 the thoughts ; he would have shrunk from the notion that 
 what the eye apprehended was all. Such forms of art, 
 then, are inadequate to the matter they clothe; they re- 
 main ever below its level. Something of this kind is true 
 also of oriental art. As in the middle age from an ex- 
 aggerated inwardness, so in the East from a vagueness, 
 a want of definition, in thought, the matter presented to 
 art is unmanageable, and the forms of sense struggle 
 
WINCKELMANN 
 
 171 
 
 vainly with it. The many-headed gods of the East, the 
 orientalised, many-breasted Diana of Ephesus, like An- 
 gelico's fresco, are at best overcharged symbols, a means 
 of hinting at an idea which art cannot fitly or completely 
 express, which still remains in the world of shadows. 
 
 But take a work of Greek art, — the Venus of Melos. 
 That is in no sense a symbol, a suggestion, of anything 1 
 beyond its own victorious fairness. The mind begins 
 and ends with the finite image, yet loses no part of the 
 spiritual motive. That motive is not lightly and loosely 
 attached to the sensuous form, as its meaning to an alle- 
 gory, but saturates and is identical with it. The Greek 
 mind had advanced to a particular stage of self-reflexion, 
 but was careful not to pass beyond it. In oriental 
 thought there is a vague conception of life everywhere, 
 but no true appreciation of itself by the mind, no knowl- 
 edge of the distinction of man's nature: in its conscious- 
 ness of itself, humanity is still confused with the fantas- 
 tic, indeterminate life of the animal and vegetable world. 
 In Greek thought, on the other hand, the "lordship of the 
 soul" is recognised; that lordship gives authority and 
 divinity to human eyes and hands and feet; inanimate 
 nature is thrown into the background. But just there 
 Greek thought finds its happy limit; it has not yet be- 
 come too inward ; the mind has not yet learned to boast 
 its independence of the flesh ; the spirit has not yet ab- 
 sorbed everything with its emotions, nor reflected its 
 own colour everywhere. It has indeed committed itself 
 to a train of reflexion which must end in defiance of 
 form, of all that is outward, in an exaggerated idealism. 
 But that end is still distant : it has not yet plunged into 
 the depths of religious mysticism. 
 
172 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 This ideal art, in which the thought does not outstrip 
 or lie beyond the proper range of its sensible embodi- 
 ment, could not have arisen out of a phase of life that 
 was uncomely or poor. That delicate pause in Greek re- 
 flexion was joined, by some supreme good luck, to the 
 perfect animal nature of the Greeks. Here are the two 
 conditions of an artistic ideal. The influences which 
 perfected the animal nature of the Greeks are part of 
 the process by which "the ideal" was evolved. Those 
 "Mothers" who, in the second part of Faust, mould and 
 remould the typical forms that appear in human history, 
 preside, at the beginning of Greek culture, over such a 
 concourse of happy physical conditions as ever generates 
 by natural laws some rare type of intellectual or spiritual 
 life. That delicate air, "nimbly and sweetly recommend- 
 ing itself" to the senses, the finer aspects of nature, the 
 finer lime and clay of the human form, and modelling 
 of the dainty frame-work of the human countenance: — 
 these are the good luck of the Greek when he enters upon 
 life. Beauty becomes a distinction, like genius, or noble 
 place. 
 
 "By no people," says Winckelmann, "has beauty been 
 so highly esteemed as by the Greeks. The priests of a 
 youthful Jupiter at /Egae, of the Ismenian Apollo, and 
 the priest who at Tanagra led the procession of Mercury, 
 bearing a lamb upon his shoulders, were always youths 
 to whom the prize of beauty had been awarded. The 
 citizens of Egesta erected a monument to a certain Philip, 
 who was not their fellow-citizen, but of Croton, for his 
 distinguished beauty ; and the people made offerings at it. 
 In an ancient song, ascribed to Simonides or Epichar- 
 mus, of four wishes, the first was health, the second 
 
WINCKELMANN 
 
 173 
 
 beauty. And as beauty was so longed for and prized by 
 the Greeks, every beautiful person sought to become 
 known to the whole people by this distinction, and above 
 all to approve himself to the artists because they awarded 
 the prize; and this was for the artists an occasion for 
 having supreme beauty ever before their eyes. Beauty 
 even gave a right to fame ; and we find in Greek histories 
 the most beautiful people distinguished. Some were 
 famous for the beauty of one single part of their form; 
 as Demetrius Phalereus, for his beautiful eyebrows, was 
 called Charito-blepharos. It seems even to have been 
 thought that the procreation of beautiful children might 
 be promoted by prizes. This is shown by the existence 
 of contests for beauty, which in ancient times were es- 
 tablished by Cypselus, King of Arcadia, by the river 
 Alpheus; and, at the feast of Apollo of Philae, a prize 
 was offered to the youths for the deftest kiss. This was 
 decided by an umpire; as also at Megara, by the grave 
 of Diodes. At Sparta, and at Lesbos, in the temple of 
 Juno, and among the Parrhasii, there were contests for 
 beauty among women. The general esteem for beauty 
 went so far, that the Spartan women set up in their bed- 
 chambers a Nireus, a Narcissus, or a Hyacinth, that 
 they might bear beautiful children/' 
 
 So, from a few stray antiquarianisms, a few faces cast 
 up sharply from the waves, Winckelmann, as his manner 
 was, divines the temperament of the antique world, and 
 that in which it had delight. It has passed away with 
 that distant age, and we may venture to dwell upon it. 
 What sharpness and reality it has is the sharpness and 
 reality of suddenly arrested life. The Greek system of 
 gymnastics originated as part of a religious ritual. The 
 
174 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 worshipper was to recommend himself to the gods by 
 becoming fleet and fair, white and red, like them. The 
 beauty of the palaestra, and the beauty of the artist's 
 workshop, reacted on one another. The youth tried to 
 rival his gods ; and his increased beauty passed back into 
 them. — "I take the gods to witness, I had rather have a 
 fair body than a king's crown" — OfivvfXL iravras deovs 
 jlh) eKecrdaL av ttjv jSacrtXecos apxyv a*>ri rov /caXds elvai 
 • — that is the form in which one age of the world chose 
 the higher life. — A perfect world, if the gods could have 
 seemed for ever only fleet and fair, white and red ! Let 
 us not regret that this unperplexed youth of humanity, 
 satisfied with the vision of itself, passed, at the due mo- 
 ment, into a mournful maturity; for already the deep 
 joy was in store for the spirit, of finding the ideal of 
 that youth still red with life in the grave. 
 
 It followed that the Greek ideal expressed itself pre- 
 eminently in sculpture. All art has a sensuous element, 
 colour, form, sound — in poetry a dexterous recalling of 
 these, together with the profound, joyful sensuousness 
 of motion, and each of them may be a medium for the 
 ideal: it is partly accident which in any individual case 
 makes the born artist, poet, or painter rather than sculp- 
 tor. But as the mind itself has had an historical de- 
 velopment, one form of art, by the very limitations of 
 its material, may be more adequate than another for the 
 expression of any one phase of that development. Dif- 
 ferent attitudes of the imagination have a native affinity 
 with different types of sensuous form, so that they com- 
 bine together, with completeness and ease. The arts 
 may thus be ranged in a series, which corresponds to a 
 series of developments in the human mind itself. Archi- 
 
WINCKELMANN 
 
 175 
 
 tecture, which begins in a practical need, can only express 
 ; by vague hint or symbol the spirit or mind of the artist. 
 I He closes his sadness over him, or wanders in the per- 
 plexed intricacies of things, or projects his purpose from 
 him clean-cut and sincere, or bares himself to the sun- 
 light. But these spiritualities, felt rather than seen, can 
 but lurk about architectural form as volatile effects, to 
 be gathered from it by reflexion. Their expression is, 
 indeed, not really sensuous at all. As human form is 
 not the subject with which it deals, architecture is the 
 mode in which the artistic effort centres, when the 
 thoughts of man concerning himself are still indistinct, 
 when he is still little preoccupied with those harmonies, 
 storms, victories, of the unseen and intellectual world, 
 which, wrought out into the bodily form, give it an 
 interest and significance communicable to it alone. The 
 art of Egypt, with its supreme architectural effects, is, 
 according to Hegel's beautiful comparison, a Memnon 
 waiting for the day, the day of the Greek spirit, the 
 humanistic spirit, with its power of speech. 
 
 Again, painting, music, and poetry, with their endless 
 power of complexity, are the special arts of the romantic 
 and modern ages. Into these, with the utmost attenua- 
 tion of detail, may be translated every delicacy of thought 
 and feeling, incidental to a consciousness brooding with 
 delight over itself. Through their gradations of shade, 
 their exquisite intervals, they project in an external form 
 that which is most inward in passion or sentiment. Be- 
 tween architecture and those romantic arts of painting, 
 music, and poetry, comes sculpture, which, unlike archi- 
 tecture, deals immediately with man, while it contrasts 
 with the romantic arts because it is not self-analytical. 
 
176 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 It has to do more exclusively than any other art with j 
 the human form, itself one entire medium of spiritual j 
 expression, trembling, blushing, melting into dew, with 
 inward excitement. That spirituality which only lurks 
 about architecture as a volatile effect, in sculpture takes 
 up the whole given material, and penetrates it with an 
 imaginative motive; and at first sight sculpture, with its 
 solidity of form, seems a thing more real and full than 
 the faint, abstract world of poetry or painting. Still the 
 fact is the reverse. Discourse and action show man as 1 
 he is, more directly than the play of the muscles and the I 
 moulding of the flesh; and over these poetry has com- 
 mand. Painting, by the flushing of colour in the face and 
 dilatation of light in the eye — music, by its subtle range 
 of tones — can refine most delicately upon a single mo- 
 ment of passion, unravelling its subtlest threads. 
 
 But why should sculpture thus limit itself to pure 
 form? Because, by this limitation, it becomes a perfect 
 medium of expression for one peculiar motive of the 
 imaginative intellect. It, therefore, renounces all those 
 attributes of its material which do not forward that 
 motive. It has had, indeed, from the beginning an un- 
 fixed claim to colour ; but this element of colour in it has 
 always been more or less conventional, with no melting 
 or modulation of tones, never permitting more than a 
 very limited realism. It was maintained chiefly as a 
 religious tradition. In proportion as the art of sculpture 
 ceased to be merely decorative, and subordinate to archi- 
 tecture, it threw itself upon pure form. It renounces 
 the power of expression by lower or heightened tones. 
 In it, no member of the human form is more significant 
 than the rest; the eye is wide, and without pupil; the 
 
WINCKELMANN 177 
 
 lips and brow are hardly less significant than hands, 
 and breasts, and feet. But the limitation of its resources 
 is part of its pride: it has no backgrounds, no sky or 
 atmosphere, to suggest and interpret a train of feeling; 
 a little of suggested motion, and much of pure light on 
 its gleaming surfaces, with pure form — only these. And 
 it gains more than it loses by this limitation to its own 
 distinguishing motives; it unveils man in the repose of 
 his unchanging characteristics. That white light, purged 
 from the angry, bloodlike stains of action and passion, 
 reveals, not what is accidental in man, but the tranquil 
 godship in him, as opposed to the restless accidents of 
 life. The art of sculpture records the first naive, unper- 
 plexed recognition of man by himself ; and it is a proof 
 of the high artistic capacity of the Greeks, that they 
 apprehended and remained true to these exquisite limi- 
 tations, yet, in spite of them, gave to their creations a 
 mobile, a vital, individuality. 
 
 Heiterkeit — blitheness or repose, and Allgemeinheit— 
 generality or breadth, are, then, the supreme character- 
 istics of the Hellenic ideal. But that generality or 
 breadth has nothing in common with the lax observation, 
 the unlearned thought, the flaccid execution, which have 
 sometimes claimed superiority in art, on the plea of being 
 "broad" or "general." Hellenic breadth and generality 
 come of a culture minute, severe, constantly renewed, 
 rectifying and concentrating its impressions into certain 
 pregnant types. 
 
 The basis of all artistic genius lies in the power of 
 conceiving humanity in a new and striking way, of 
 putting a happy world of its own creation in place of 
 the meaner world of our common days, generating 
 
i;8 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of re- 
 fraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the im- 
 ages it transmits, according to the choice of the imagi- 
 native intellect. In exercising this power, painting and 
 poetry have a variety of subject almost unlimited. The 
 range of characters or persons open to them is as various 
 as life itself ; no character, however trivial, misshapen, 
 or unlovely, can resist their magic. That is because 
 those arts can accomplish their function in the choice and 
 development of some special situation, which lifts or 
 glorifies a character, in itself not poetical. To realise 
 this situation, to define, in a chill and empty atmosphere, 
 the focus where rays, in themselves pale and impotent, 
 unite and begin to burn, the artist may have, indeed, to 
 employ the most cunning detail, to complicate and re- 
 fine upon thought and passion a thousandfold. Let us 
 take a brilliant example from the poems of Robert 
 Browning. His poetry is pre-eminently the poetry of 
 situations. The characters themselves are always of 
 secondary importance ; often they are characters in them- 
 selves of little interest; they seem to come to him by 
 strange accidents from the ends of the world. His gift 
 is shown by the way in which he accepts such a charac- 
 ter, throws it into some situation, or apprehends it in 
 some delicate pause of life, in which for a moment it 
 becomes ideal. In the poem entitled Le Byron de nos 
 Jours, in his Dramatis Personae, we have a single mo- 
 ment of passion thrown into relief after this exquisite 
 fashion. Those two jaded Parisians are not intrinsically 
 interesting: they begin to interest us only when thrown 
 into a choice situation. But to discriminate that mo- 
 ment, to make it appreciable by us, that we may "find" 
 
WINCKELMANN 
 
 179 
 
 it, what a cobweb of allusions, what double and treble 
 reflexions of the mind upon itself, what an artificial 
 light is constructed and broken over the chosen situation ; 
 on how fine a needle's point that little world of passion 
 is balanced ! Yet, in spite of this intricacy, the poem has 
 the clear ring of a central motive. We receive from it 
 the impression of one imaginative tone, of a single cre- 
 ative act. 
 
 To produce such effects at all requires all the resources 
 of painting, with its power of indirect expression, of 
 subordinate but significant detail, its atmosphere, its 
 foregrounds and backgrounds. To produce them in a 
 pre-eminent degree requires all the resources of poetry, 
 language in its most purged form, its remote associations 
 and suggestions, its double and treble lights. These ap- 
 pliances sculpture cannot command. In it, therefore, 
 not the special situation, but the type, the general char- 
 acter of the subject to be delineated, is all-important. 
 In poetry and painting, the situation predominates over 
 the character; in sculpture, the character over the situa- 
 tion. Excluded by the proper limitation of its material 
 from the development of exquisite situations, it has to 
 choose from a select number of types intrinsically inter- 
 esting — interesting, that is, independently of any special 
 situation into which they may be thrown. Sculpture 
 finds the secret of its power in presenting these types, 
 in their broad, central, incisive lines. This it effects 
 not by accumulation of detail, but by abstracting from 
 it. All that is accidental, all that distracts the simple 
 effect upon us of the supreme types of humanity, all 
 traces in them of the commonness of the world, it gradu- 
 ally purges away. 
 
180 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 Works of art produced under this law, and only these, 
 are really characterised by Hellenic generality or breadth. || 
 In every direction it is a law of restraint. It keeps passion 
 always below that degree of intensity at which it must 1 
 necessarily be transitory, never winding up the features 
 to one note of anger, or desire, or surprise. In some of I 
 the feeble allegorical designs of the middle age, we find 
 isolated qualities potrayed as by so many masks ; its re- 
 ligious art has familiarised us with faces fixed immov- 
 ably into blank types of placid reverie. Men and women, 
 again, in the hurry of life, often wear the sharp impress 
 of one absorbing motive, from which it is said death 
 sets their features free. All such instances may be I 
 ranged under the grotesque; and the Hellenic ideal has 
 nothing in common with the grotesque. It allows pas- 
 sion to play lightly over the surface of the individual 
 form, losing thereby nothing of its central impassivity, 
 its depth and repose. To all but the highest culture, the 
 reserved faces of the gods will ever have something of 
 insipidity. 
 
 Again, in the best Greek sculpture, the archaic im- j 
 mobility has been stirred, its forms are in motion; but 
 it is a motion ever kept in reserve, and very seldom com- 
 mitted to any definite action. Endless as are the atti- 
 tudes of Greek sculpture, exquisite as is the invention j 
 of the Greeks in this direction, the actions or situations 
 it permits are simple and few. There is no Greek Ma- 
 donna; the goddesses are always childless. The actions 
 selected are those which would be without significance, 
 except in a divine person — binding on a sandal or pre- j 
 paring for the bath. When a more complex and signi- j 
 ficant action is permitted, it is most often represented 
 
WINCKELMANN 181 
 
 as just finished, so that eager expectancy is excluded, as 
 in the image of Apollo just after the slaughter of the 
 Python, or of Venus with the apple of Paris already in 
 her hand. The Laocoon, with all that patient science 
 through which it has triumphed over an almost unman- 
 ageable subject, marks a period in which sculpture has 
 begun to aim at effects legitimate, because delightful, 
 only in painting. 
 
 The hair, so rich a source of expression in painting, 
 because, relatively to the eye or the lip, it is mere drap- 
 ery, is withdrawn from attention ; its texture, as well as 
 its colour, is lost, its arrangement but faintly and severely 
 indicated, with no broken or enmeshed light. The eyes 
 are wide and directionless, not fixing anything with their 
 gaze, nor riveting the brain to any special external ob- 
 ject, the brows without hair. Again, Greek sculpture 
 deals almost exclusively with youth, where the moulding 
 of the bodily organs is still as if suspended between 
 growth and completion, indicated but not emphasised; 
 where the transition from curve to curve is so delicate 
 and elusive, that Winckelmann compares it to a quiet 
 sea, which, although we understand it to be in motion, 
 we nevertheless regard as an image of repose; where, 
 therefore, the exact degree of development is so hard to 
 apprehend. If a single product only of Hellenic art were 
 to be saved in the wreck of all beside, one might choose 
 perhaps from the "beautiful multitude" of the Panathe- 
 naic frieze, that line of youths on horseback, with their 
 level glances, their proud, patient lips, their chastened 
 reins, their whole bodies in exquisite service. This 
 colourless, unclassified purity of life, with its blending and 
 interpenetration of intellectual, spiritual, and physical 
 
182 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 elements, still folded together, pregnant with the possi- 
 bilities of a whole world closed within it, is the highest 
 expression of the indifference which lies beyond all that 
 is relative or partial. Everywhere there is the effect of 
 an awaking, of a child's sleep just disturbed. All these 
 effects are united in a single instance — the adorante of 
 the museum of Berlin, a youth who has gained the wrest- 
 ler's prize, with hands lifted and open, in praise for the 
 victory. Fresh, unperplexed, it is the image of a man 
 as he springs first from the sleep of nature, his white 
 light taking no colour from any one-sided experience. 
 He is characterless, so far as character involves subjec- 
 tion to the accidental influences of life. 
 
 'This sense," says Hegel, "for the consummate model- 
 ling of divine and human forms was pre-eminently at 
 home in Greece. In its poets and orators, its historians 
 and philosophers, Greece cannot be conceived from a 
 central point, unless one brings, as a key to the under- 
 standing of it, an insight into the ideal forms of sculp- 
 ture, and regards the images of statesmen and philoso- 
 phers, as well as epic and dramatic heroes, from the ar- 
 tistic point of view. For those who act, as well as those 
 who create and think, have, in those beautiful days of 
 Greece, this plastic character. They are great and free, 
 and have grown up on the soil of their own individuality, 
 creating themselves out of themselves, and moulding 
 themselves to what they were, and willed to be. The 
 age of Pericles was rich in such characters ; Pericles him- 
 self, Pheidias, Plato, above all Sophocles, Thucydides 
 also, Xenophon and Socrates, each in his own order, the 
 perfection of one remaining undiminished by that of the 
 others. They are ideal artists of themselves, cast each 
 
WINCKELMANN 183 
 
 in one flawless mould, works of art, which stand before 
 [ us as an immortal presentment of the gods. Of this 
 II modelling also are those bodily works of art, the victors 
 1 in the Olympic games ; yes ! and even Phryne, who, as 
 J the most beautiful of women, ascended naked out of 
 : ! the water, in the presence of assembled Greece." 
 
 This key to the understanding of the Greek spirit, 
 1 Winckelmann possessed in his own nature, itself like a 
 || relic of classical antiquity, laid open by accident to our 
 alien, modern atmosphere. To the criticism of that con- 
 summate Greek modelling he brought not only his culture 
 but his temperament. We have seen how definite was the 
 leading motive of that culture; how, like some central 
 root-fibre, it maintained the well-rounded unity of his 
 life through a thousand distractions. Interests not his, 
 nor meant for him, never disturbed him. In morals, as 
 in criticism, he followed the clue of instinct, of an un- 
 erring instinct. Penetrating into the antique world by 
 his passion, his temperament, he enunciated no formal 
 principles, always hard and one-sided. Minute and 
 anxious as his culture was, he never became one-sidedly 
 self-analytical. Occupied ever with himself, perfecting 
 himself and developing his genius, he was not content, 
 as so often happens with such natures, that the atmos- 
 phere between him and other minds should be thick and 
 clouded; he was ever jealously refining his meaning into 
 [ a form, express, clear, objective. This temperament he 
 nurtured and invigorated by friendships which kept him 
 always in direct contact with the spirit of youth. The 
 beauty of the Greek statues was a sexless beauty: the 
 statues of the gods had the least traces of sex. Here 
 I there is a moral sexlessness, a kind of ineffectual whole- 
 
THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 ness of nature, yet with a true beauty and significance 
 of its own. 
 
 One result of this temperament is a serenity — Heiter- 
 keit — which characterises Winckelmann's handling of the 
 sensuous side of Greek art. This serenity is, perhaps, in 
 great measure, a negative quality: it is the absence of 
 any- sense of want, or corruption, or shame. With the 
 sensuous element in Greek art he deals in the pagan 
 manner ; and what is implied in that ? It has been some- 
 times said that art is a means of escape from "the tyr- 
 anny of the senses." It may be so for the spectator: 
 he may find that the spectacle of supreme works of art 
 takes from the life of the senses something of its turbid 
 fever. But this is possible for the spectator only be- 
 cause the artist, in producing those works, has gradually 
 sunk his intellectual and spiritual ideas in sensuous form. 
 He may live, as Keats lived, a pure life ; but his soul, like 
 that of Plato's false astronomer, becomes more and more 
 immersed in sense, until nothing which lacks the appeal 
 to sense has interest for him. How could such an one 
 ever again endure the greyness of the ideal or spiritual 
 world? The spiritualist is satisfied as he watches the 
 escape of the sensuous elements from his conceptions; 
 his interest grows, as the dyed garment bleaches in the 
 keener air. But the artist steeps his thought again and 
 again into the fire of colour. To the Greek this immersion 
 in the sensuous was, religiously, at least, indifferent. 
 Greek sensuousness, therefore, does not fever the con- 
 science: it is shameless and childlike. Christian asceti- 
 cism, on the other hand, discrediting the slightest touch 
 of sense, has from time to time provoked into strong 
 emphasis the contrast or antagonism to itself, of the 
 
. WINCKELMANN 185 
 
 ! artistic life, with its inevitable sensuousness. — / did but 
 I taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in 
 \mine hand, and lot I must die. — It has sometimes 
 I seemed hard to pursue that life without something of 
 I conscious disavowal of a spiritual world ; and this im- 
 parts to genuine artistic interests a kind of intoxication. 
 From this intoxication Winckelmann is free: he fingers 
 those pagan marbles with unsinged hands, with no sense 
 of shame or loss. That is to deal with the sensuous side 
 of art in the pagan manner. 
 
 The longer we contemplate that Hellenic ideal, in 
 which man is at unity with himself, with his physical 
 nature, with the outward world, the more we may be 
 inclined to regret that he should ever have passed be- 
 yond it, to contend for a perfection that makes the blood 
 turbid, and frets the flesh, and discredits the actual world 
 about us. But if he was to be saved from the ennui 
 which ever attaches itself to realisation., even the realisa- 
 tion of the perfect life, it was necessary that a conflict 
 should come, that some sharper note should grieve the 
 existing harmony, and the spirit chafed by it beat out 
 at last only a larger and profounder music. In Greek 
 tragedy this conflict has begun: man finds himself face 
 to face with rival claims. Greek tragedy shows how 
 such a conflict may be treated with serenity, how the 
 evolution of it may be a spectacle of the dignity, not' of 
 the impotence, of the human spirit. But it is not only 
 in tragedy that the Greek spirit showed itself capable 
 of thus bringing joy out of matter in itself full of dis- 
 couragements. Theocritus, too, strikes often a note of 
 romantic sadness. But what a blithe and steady poise, 
 
i86 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 above these discouragements, in a clear and sunny strat- 
 um of the air ! 
 
 Into this stage of Greek achievement Winckelmann 
 did not enter. Supreme as he is where his true inter- 
 est lav, his insight into the typical unity and repose of 
 the highest sort of sculpture seems to have involved 
 limitation in another direction. His conception of art 
 excludes that bolder type of it which deals confidently 
 and serenely with life, conflict, evil. Living in a world 
 of exquisite but abstract and colourless form, he could 
 hardly have conceived of the subtle and penetrative, 
 yet somewhat grotesque art of the modern world. What 
 would he have thought of Gilliatt, in Victor Hugo's 
 Travailleurs de la Mer y or of the bleeding mouth of 
 Fantine in the first part of Les Miserables, penetrated as 
 those books are with a sense of beauty, as lively and 
 transparent as that of a Greek? Nay, a sort of prepara- 
 tion for the romantic temper is noticeable even within 
 the limits of the Greek ideal itself, which for his part 
 Winckelmann failed to see. For Greek religion has not 
 merely its mournful mysteries of Adonis, of Hyacinthus, 
 of Demeter, but it is conscious also of the fall of earlier 
 divine dynasties. Hyperion gives way to Apollo, Ocea- 
 nus to Poseidon. Around the feet of that tranquil 
 Olympian family still crowd the weary shadows of an 
 earlier, more formless, divine world. The placid minds 
 even of Olympian gods are troubled with thoughts of a 
 limit to duration, of inevitable decay, of dispossession. 
 Again, the supreme and colourless abstraction of those 
 divine forms, which is the secret of their repose, is also 
 a premonition of the fleshless, consumptive refinements 
 of the pale, medieval artists. That high indifference to 
 
WINCKELMANN 
 
 187 
 
 the outward, that impassivity, has already a touch of 
 the corpse in it : we see already Angelico and the Master 
 of the Passion in the artistic future. The suppression 
 of the sensuous, the shutting of the door upon it, the 
 ascetic interest, may be even now foreseen. Those ab- 
 stracted gods, "ready to melt out their essence fine into 
 the winds/' who can fold up their flesh as a garment, 
 and still remain themselves, seem already to feel that 
 bleak air in which, like Helen of Troy, they wander as 
 the spectres of the middle age. 
 
 Gradually, as the world came into the church, an ar- 
 tistic interest, native in the human soul, reasserted its 
 claims. But Christian art was still dependent on pagan 
 examples, building the shafts of pagan temples into its 
 churches, perpetuating the form of the basilica, in later 
 times working the disused amphitheatres as stone quar- 
 ries. The sensuous expression of ideas which unreserv- 
 edly discredit the world of sense, was the delicate prob- 
 lem which Christian art had before it. If we think of 
 medieval painting, as it ranges from the early German 
 schools, still with something of the air of the charnel- 
 house about them, to the clear loveliness of Perugino, we 
 shall see how that problem was solved. In the very 
 "worship of sorrow" the native blitheness of art asserted 
 itself. The religious spirit, as Hegel says, "smiled 
 through its tears." So perfectly did the young Raphael 
 infuse that Heiterkeit, that pagan blitheness, into relig- 
 ious works, that his picture of Saint Agatha at Bologna 
 became to Goethe a step in the evolution of Iphigenie. 1 
 But in proportion as the gift of smiling was found once 
 1 Italianise he Reise. Bologna, 19 Oct. 1776. 
 
i88 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 more, there came also an aspiration towards that lost 
 antique art, some relics of which Christian art had buried 
 in itself, ready to work wonders when their day came. 
 
 The histoy of art has suffered as much as any history 
 by trenchant and absolute divisions. Pagan and Chris- 
 tian art are sometimes harshly opposed, and the Renais- 
 sance is represented as a fashion which set in at a defi- 
 nite period. That is the superficial view: the deeper 
 view is that which preserves the identity of European 
 culture. The two are really continuous; and there is a 
 sense in which it may be said that the Renaissance was 
 an uninterrupted effort of the middle age, that it was 
 ever taking place. When the actual relics of the an- 
 tique were restored to the world, in the view of the 
 Christian ascetic it was as if an ancient plague-pit had 
 been opened. All the world took the contagion of the 
 life of nature and of the senses. And now it was seen 
 that the medieval spirit, too, had done something for the 
 new fortunes of the antique. By hastening the decline 
 of art, by withdrawing interest from it and yet keeping 
 unbroken the thread of its traditions, it had suffered the 
 human mind to repose itself, that when day came it 
 might awake, with eyes refreshed, to those ancient, 
 ideal forms. 
 
 The aim of a right criticism is to place Winckelmann 
 in an intellectual perspective, of which Goethe is the 
 foreground. For, after all, he is infinitely less than 
 Goethe; and it is chiefly because at certain points he 
 comes in contact with Goethe, that criticism entertains 
 consideration of him. His relation to modern culture 
 is a peculiar one. He is not of the modern world; nor 
 is he wholly of the eighteenth century, although so much 
 
WINCKELMANN 189 
 
 of his outer life is characteristic of it. But that note of 
 revolt against the eighteenth century, which we detect 
 in Goethe, was struck by Winckelmann. Goethe illus- 
 trates a union of the Romantic spirit, in its adventure, 
 its variety, its profound subjectivity of soul, with Hel- 
 lenism, in its transparency, its rationality, its desire of 
 beauty— that marriage of Faust and Helena, of which 
 the art of the nineteenth century is the child, the beau- 
 tiful lad Euphorion, as Goethe conceives him, on the 
 crags, in the "splendour of battle and in harness as for 
 victory," his brows bound with light. 1 Goethe illustrates, 
 too, the preponderance in this marriage of the Hellenic 
 element ; and that element, in its true essence, was made 
 known to him by Winckelmann. 
 
 Breadth, centrality, with blitheness and repose, are 
 the marks of Hellenic culture. Is such culture a lost 
 art? The local, accidental colouring of its own age has 
 passed from it; and the greatness that is dead looks 
 greater when every link with what is slight and vulgar 
 has been severed. We can only see it at all in the re- 
 flected, refined light which a great education creates for 
 us. Can we bring down that ideal into the gaudy, per- 
 plexed light of modern life? 
 
 Certainly, for us of the modern world, with its con- 
 flicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so 
 many sorrows, with many preoccupations, so bewildering 
 an experience, the problem of unity with ourselves, in 
 blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the 
 Greek within the simple terms of antique life. Yet, not 
 less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, cen- 
 trality. It is this which Winckelmann imprii?ts on the 
 1 Faust, Th. it. Act. 3. 
 
THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 imagination of Goethe, at the beginning of life, in its 
 original and simplest form, as in a fragment of Greek 
 art itself, stranded on that littered, indeterminate shore 
 of Germany in the eighteenth centry. In Winckelmann, 
 this type comes to him, not as in a book or a theory, but 
 more importunately, because in a passionate life, in a 
 personality. For Goethe, possessing all modern inter- 
 ests ready to be lost in the perplexed currents of modern 
 thought, he defines, in clearest outline, the eternal prob- 
 lem of culture — balance, unity with one's self, consum- 
 mate Greek modelling. 
 
 It could no longer be solved, as in Phyrne ascending 
 naked out of the water, by perfection of bodily form, 
 or any joyful union with the external world : the shadows 
 had grown too long, the light too solemn, for that. It 
 could hardly be solved, as in Pericles or Pheidias, by 
 the direct exercise of any single talent: amid the mani- 
 fold claims of our modern intellectual life, that could 
 only have ended in a thin, one-sided growth. Goethe's 
 Hellenism was of another order, the Allgemeinheit and 
 Heiterkeit, the completeness and serenity, of a watchful, 
 exigent intellectualism. Im Ganzen, Guten, Wahren, 
 resolut zu leben: — is Goethe's description of his own 
 higher life ; and what is meant by life in the whole — im 
 Ganzen? It means the life of one for whom, over and 
 over again, what was once precious has become indiffer- 
 ent. Every one who aims at the life of culture is met 
 hy many forms of it, arising out of the intense, laborious, 
 one-sided development of some special talent. They are 
 the brightest enthusiasms the world has to show: and 
 it is iiOt 1 their part to weigh the claims which this or that 
 alien fcan of genius makes upon them. But the proper 
 
WINCKELMANN 
 
 instinct of self-culture cares not so much to reap all 
 that those various forms of genius can give, as to find 
 in them its own strength. The demand of the intellect 
 is to feel itself alive. It must see into the laws, the op- 
 eration, the intellectual reward of every divided form of 
 culture; but only that it may measure the relation be- 
 tween itself and them. It struggles with those forms 
 till its secret is won from each, and then lets each fall 
 back into its place, in the supreme, artistic view of life. 
 With a kind of passionate coldness, such natures rejoice 
 to be away from and past their former selves, and above 
 all, they are jealous of that abandonment to one special 
 gift which really limits their capabilities. It would have 
 been easy for Goethe, with the gift of a sensuous nature, 
 to let it overgrow him. It comes easily and naturally, 
 perhaps, to certain "other worldly" natures to be even 
 as the Schdne Seele, that ideal of gentle pietism, in Wil- 
 helm Meister: but to the large vision of Goethe, this 
 seemed to be a phase of life that a man might feel all 
 round, and leave behind him. Again, it is easy to in- 
 dulge the commonplace metaphysical instinct. But a 
 taste for metaphysics may be one of those things which 
 we must renounce, if we mean to mould our lives to ar- 
 tistic perfection. Philosophy serves culture, not by the 
 fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but 
 by suggesting questions which help one to detect the pas- 
 sion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life. 
 
 But Goethe's culture did not remain "behind the veil" : 
 it ever emerged in the practical functions of art, in actual 
 production. For him the problem came to be : — Can the 
 blitheness and universality of the antique ideal be com- 
 municated to artistic productions, which shall contain the 
 
192 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 fulness of the experience of the modern world? We 
 have seen that the development of the various forms of 
 art has corresponded to the development of the thoughts 
 of man concerning humanity, to the growing revelation 
 of the mind to itself. Sculpture corresponds to the un- 
 perplexed, emphatic outlines of Hellenic humanism; 
 painting to the mystic depth and intricacy of the middle 
 age ; music and poetry have their fortune in the modern 
 world. 
 
 Let us understand by poetry all literary production 
 which attains the power of giving pleasure by its form, 
 as distinct from its matter. Only in this varied literary 
 form can art command that width, variety, delicacy of 
 resources, which will enable it to deal with the conditions 
 of modern life. What modern art has to do in the ser- 
 vice of culture is so to rearrange the details of modern 
 life, so to reflect it, that it may satisfy the spirit. And 
 what does the spirit need in the face of modern life? 
 The sense of freedom. That naive, rough sense of free- 
 dom, which supposes man's will to be limited, if at all, 
 only by a will stronger than his, he can never have again. 
 The attempt to represent it in art would have so little 
 verisimilitude that it would be flat and uninteresting. 
 The chief factor in the thoughts of the modern mind 
 concerning itself is the intricacy, the universality of 
 natural law, even in the moral order. For us, necessity is 
 not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without 
 us, with whom we can do warfare. It is rather a magic 
 web woven through and through us, like that magnetic 
 system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us 
 with a network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bear- 
 ing in it the central forces of the world. Can art represent 
 
WINCKELMANN 
 
 193 
 
 men and women in these bewildering toils so as to give 
 the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of free- 
 dom? Certainly, in Goethe's romances, and even more in 
 the romances of Victor Hugo, we have high examples 
 of modern art dealing thus with modern life, regarding 
 that life as the modern mind must regard it, yet reflect- 
 ing upon it blitheness and repose. Natural laws we shall 
 never modify, embarrass us as they may ; but there is still 
 something in the nobler or less noble attitude with which 
 we watch their fatal combinations. In those romances 
 of Goethe and Victor Hugo, in some excellent work done 
 after them, this entanglement, this network of law, be- 
 comes the tragic situation, in which certain groups of 
 noble men and women work out for themselves a su- 
 preme Denouement. Who, if he saw through all, would 
 fret against the chain of circumstance which endows one 
 at the end with those great experiences ? 
 
CONCLUSION 1 
 
 Aeyei irov "Hpd/cXetros on wclvtcl x°^P eL Ka ^ ovdev fxevet 
 To regard all things and principles of things as incon- 
 stant modes or fashions has more and more become the 
 tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that 
 which is without — our physical life. Fix upon it in one 
 of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, 
 of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer 
 heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment 
 but a combination of natural elements to which science 
 gives their names ? But those elements, phosphorus and 
 lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human 
 body alone: we detect them in places most remote from 
 it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them — 
 the passage of the blood, the waste and repairing of the 
 lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the 
 brain under every ray of light and sound — processes 
 which science reduces to simpler and more elementary 
 forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, 
 the action of these forces extends beyond us : it rusts iron 
 and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those ele- 
 
 1 This brief "Conclusion" was omitted in the second edi- 
 tion of this book, as I conceived it might possibly mislead 
 some of those young men into whose hands it might fall. 
 On the whole, I have thought it best to reprint it here, 
 with some slight changes which bring it closer to my 
 original meaning. I have dealt more fully in Metritis the 
 Epicurean with the thoughts suggested by it. 
 
 194 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 195 
 
 ments are broadcast, driven in many currents ; and birth 
 and gesture and death and the springing of violets from 
 the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant 
 combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and 
 limb is but an image of ours, under which we group 
 them — a design in a web, the actual threads of which 
 pass out beyond it. This at least of flame-like our life 
 has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment 
 to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their 
 ways. 
 
 Or, if we begin with the inward world of thought and 
 feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more 
 eager and devouring. There it is no longer the gradual 
 darkening of the eye, the gradual fading of colour from 
 the wall — movements of the shore-side, where the water 
 flows down indeed, though in apparent rest — but the race 
 of the mid-stream, a drift of momentary acts of sight 
 and passion and thought. At first sight experience seems 
 to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing 
 upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us 
 out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But 
 when reflexion begins to play upon those objects they 
 are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force 
 seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object 
 is loosed into a group of impressions — colour, odour, tex- 
 ture — in the mind of the observer. And if we continue 
 to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the 
 solidity with which language invests them, but of im- 
 pressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn 
 and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it 
 contracts still further: the whole scope of observation 
 is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual 
 
196 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 mind. Experience, already reduced to a group of im- 
 pressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that 
 thick wall of personality through which no real voice has 
 ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which 
 we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those 
 impressions is the impression of the individual in his 
 isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its 
 own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step farther still, 
 and assures us that those impressions of the individual 
 mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles 
 down, are in perpetual flight ; that each of them is limited 
 by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of 
 them is infinitely divisible also ; all that is actual in it 
 being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend 
 it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has 
 ceased to be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp 
 constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a single 
 sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less 
 fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our 
 life fines itself down. It is with this movement, with 
 the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sen- 
 sations, that analysis leaves off — that continual vanishing 
 away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of 
 ourselves. 
 
 Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren, vivi- 
 ficiren. The service of philosophy, of speculative cul- 
 ture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it 
 to a life of constant and eager observation. Every mo- 
 ment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some 
 tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest ; some 
 mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is 
 irresistibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 197 
 
 only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, 
 is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to 
 us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in 
 them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? 
 How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and 
 be present always at the focus where the greatest num- 
 ber of vital forces unite in their purest energy? 
 
 To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to main- 
 tain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might 
 even be said that our failure is to form habits : for, after 
 all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime 
 it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two 
 persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts 
 under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite pas- 
 sion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a 
 lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any 
 stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and 
 curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face 
 of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some 
 passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very 
 brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces 
 on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to 
 sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour 
 of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all 
 we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall 
 hardly have time to make theories about the things we 
 see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever 
 curiously testing new opinions and courting new im- 
 pressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of 
 Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theo- 
 ries or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, 
 may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass un- 
 
THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 regarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of 
 thought." The theory or idea or system which requires 
 of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in con- 
 sideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, 
 or some abstract theory we have not identified with 
 ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real 
 claim upon us. 
 
 One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is 
 that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he de- 
 scribes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An 
 undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, 
 and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten 
 by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make 
 as much as possible of the interval that remained; and 
 he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when 
 he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, 
 which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of 
 Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnes as Victor Hugo 
 says : we are all under sentence of death but with a sort 
 of indefinite reprieve — les hommes sont tons condamnes 
 a mort avec des sursis indeiinis: we have an interval, 
 and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this 
 interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, 
 at least among "the children of this world," in art and 
 song. For our one chance lies in expanding that inter- 
 val, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the 
 given time. Great passions may give us this quickened 
 sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various 
 forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, 
 which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is 
 passion — that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, 
 multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 199 
 
 passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own 
 sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly 
 to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments 
 as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake. 
 
 1868. 
 
 THE END 
 
V 
 
Modern Library of the World's Best Books 
 COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN 
 
 THE MODERN LIBRARY 
 
 For convenience in ordering 
 please use number at right of title 
 
 ADAMS, HENRY 
 AIKEN, CONRAD 
 
 AIKEN, CONRAD 
 ANDERSON, SHERWOOD 
 ANDERSON, SHERWOOD 
 ANDREYEV, LEONID 
 
 APULEIUS, LUCIUS 
 ARTZI B ASHEV, MICHAEL 
 
 BALZAC 
 BALZAC 
 BAUDELAIRE 
 BEEBE, WILLIAM 
 BEERBOHM, MAX 
 BENNETT, ARNOLD 
 BIERCE, AMBROSE 
 BLAKE, WILLIAM 
 BOCCACCIO 
 BRONTE, CHARLOTTE 
 BRONTE, EMILY 
 BURTON, RICHARD 
 BUTLER, SAMUEL 
 BUTLER, SAMUEL 
 
 CABELL, JAMES BRANCH 
 CABELL, JAMES BRANCH 
 CARPENTER, EDWARD 
 CARROLL, LEWIS 
 CASANOVA, JACQUES 
 GATHER, WILLA 
 CELLINI, BENVENUTO 
 CERVANTES 
 CHAUCER 
 
 CHESTERTON, G. K. 
 
 The Education of Henry Adams 76 
 A Comprehensive Anthology of 
 
 American Verse 101 
 Modern American Poetry 127 
 Poor White 115 
 Winesburg, Ohio 104 
 The Seven That Were Hanged, and 
 
 the Red Laugh 45 
 The Golden Ass 88 
 Sanine 189 
 
 Droll Stories 193 
 Short Stories 40 
 Prose and Poetry 70 
 Jungle Peace 30 
 Zuleika Dobson 116 
 The Old Wives' Tale 184 
 In the Midst of Life 133 
 Poems 91 
 
 The Decameron 71 
 
 Jane Eyre 64 
 
 Wuthering Heights 106 
 
 The Arabian Nights 201 
 
 Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited 136 
 
 The Way of All Flesh 13 
 
 Beyond Life 25 
 
 The Cream of the Jest 126 
 
 Love's Coming of Age 51 
 
 Alice in Wonderland, etc. 79 
 
 Memoirs of Casanova 165 
 
 Death Comes for the Archbishop 191 
 
 Autobiography of Cellini 3 
 
 Don Quixote 174 
 
 The Canterbury Tales 161 
 
 Man Who Was Thursday 35 
 
CONRAD, JOSEPH 
 
 CONRAD, JOSEPH 
 CONRAD, JOSEPH 
 CORNEILLE and RACINE 
 CORVO, FREDERICK BARON 
 CRANE, STEPHEN 
 
 D'ANNUNZIO, GABRIELE 
 DANTE 
 
 DAUDET, ALPHONSE 
 DEFOE, DANIEL 
 DEWEY, JOHN 
 DICKENS, CHARLES 
 DOS PASSOS, JOHN 
 DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR 
 DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR 
 DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR 
 DOUGLAS, NORMAN 
 DOUGLAS, NORMAN 
 DOWSON, ERNEST 
 DREISER, THEODORE 
 DREISER, THEODORE 
 DUMAS, ALEXANDRE 
 DUMAS, ALEXANDRE 
 DU MAURI ER, GEORGE 
 
 EDMAN, IRWIN 
 ELLIS, HAVELOCK 
 
 FAULKNER, WILLIAM 
 FEUCHTWANGER, LION 
 FIELDING, HENRY 
 FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE 
 FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE 
 FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE 
 FRANCE, ANATOLE 
 FRANCE, ANATOLE 
 FRANCE, ANATOLE 
 FRANCE, ANATOLE 
 FRANCE, ANATOLE 
 FRANCE, ANATOLE 
 FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN 
 
 GALSWORTHY, JOHN 
 
 GAUTIER, THEOPHILE 
 GEORGE, W. L. 
 GIDE, ANDRE 
 GILBERT, W. S. 
 GILBERT, W. S. 
 GISSING, GEORGE 
 
 Heart of Darkness 
 
 (In Great Modern Short Stones 168) 
 Lord Jim 1 86 
 Victory 34 
 
 Six Plays of Corneille and Racine 194 
 A History of the Borgias 192 
 Maggie, and Other Stories 102 
 
 Flame of Life 65 
 
 The Divine Comedy 208 
 
 Sapho 85 
 
 Moll Flanders 122 
 
 Human Nature and Conduct 173 
 
 Pickwick Papers 204 
 
 Three Soldiers 205 
 
 Crime and Punishment 199 
 
 The Brothers Karamazov 151 
 
 Poor People 10 
 
 Old Calabria 141 
 
 South Wind 5 
 
 Poems and Prose 74 
 
 Sister Carrie 8 
 
 Twelve Men I48 
 
 Camille 69 
 
 The Three Musketeers 143 
 Peter Ibbetson 207 
 
 The Philosophy of Plato 181 
 The Dance of Life 160 
 
 Sanctuary 61 
 Power 206 
 Tom Jones 185 
 Madame Bovary 28 
 Salammbo 118 
 
 Temptation of St. Anthony 92 
 
 Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard 22 
 
 Penguin Island 210 
 
 The Queen Pedauque no 
 
 The Red Lily 7 
 
 The Revolt of the Angels 11 
 
 Thais 67 
 
 Autobiography, etc. 39 
 
 The Apple Tree 
 
 (In Great Modern Short Stories 168) 
 Mile. De Maupin 53 
 A Bed of Roses 75 
 The Counterfeiters 187 
 The Mikado, Iolanthe, etc. 26 
 Pinafore and Other Plays 113 
 New Grub Street 125 
 
GISSING, GEORGE 
 GOETHE 
 
 GOETHE 
 
 GORKY, MAXIM 
 
 HARDY, THOMAS 
 HARDY, THOMAS 
 HARDY, THOMAS 
 HARDY, THOMAS 
 HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL 
 HEARN, LAFCADIO 
 HECHT, BEN 
 HEMINGWAY, ERNEST 
 HEMINGWAY, ERNEST 
 HOMER 
 HOMER 
 
 HUDSON, W. H. 
 HUDSON, W. H. 
 HUGHES, RICHARD 
 HUNEKER, TAMES G. 
 HUXLEY, ALDOUS 
 HUXLEY, ALDOUS 
 HUYSMANS, J. K. 
 
 IBSEN, HENRIK 
 IBSEN, HENRIK 
 
 IBSEN HENRIK 
 
 JAMES, HENRY 
 JAMES, HENRY 
 JAMES, WILLIAM 
 JOYCE, JAMES 
 JOYCE, JAMES 
 
 KENT, ROCKWELL 
 KOMROFF, MANUEL 
 KUPRIN, ALEXANDRE 
 
 LAWRENCE, D. H. 
 LAWRENCE, D. H. 
 LEWIS, SINCLAIR 
 LEWISOHN, LUDWIG 
 LONGFELLOW, HENRY W. 
 LOUYS, PIERRE 
 LUDWIG, EMIL 
 
 Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft 46 
 Faust 177 
 
 The Sorrows of Werther 
 
 (In Collected German Stories 108) 
 Creatures That Once Were Men and 
 
 Other Stones 48 
 
 Jude the Obscure 135 
 
 The Mayor of Casterbridge 17 
 
 The Return of the Native 121 
 
 Tess of the D'Urbervilles 72 
 
 The Scarlet Letter 93 
 
 Some Chinese Ghosts 130 
 
 Erik Dorn 29 
 
 A Farewell To Arms 91 
 
 The Sun Also Rises 170 
 
 The Iliad 166 
 
 The Odyssey 167 
 
 Green Mansions 89 
 
 The Purple Land 24 
 
 A High Wind in Jamaica 112 
 
 Painted Veils 43 
 
 Antic Hay 209 
 
 Point Counter Point 180 
 
 Against the Grain 183 
 
 A Doll's House, Ghosts, etc. 6 
 
 Hedda Gabler, Pillars of Society, The 
 
 Master Builder 36 
 The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, The 
 
 League of Youth, Peer Gynt 54 
 
 Daisy Miller, etc. 63 
 
 The Turn of the Screw 169 
 
 The Philosophy of William James 114 
 
 Dubliners 124 
 
 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young 
 Man 145 
 
 Wilderness 182 
 Oriental Romances 55 
 Yam a 203 
 
 The Rainbow 128 
 Sons and Lovers 109 
 Arrowsmith 42 
 Up Stream 123 
 Poems $6 
 Aphrodite 77 
 Napoleon 95 
 
WHISTLER, J. McNEIL 
 WHITMAN, WALT 
 WILDE, OSCAR 
 WILDE, OSCAR 
 WILDE, OSCAR 
 WILDE, OSCAR 
 WILDER, THORNTON 
 WOOLF, VIRGINIA 
 
 YEATS, W. B. 
 YOUNG, G. F. 
 
 ZOLA, EMILE 
 ZWEIG, STEFAN 
 
 Life and Art, with 32 Reproductions 150 
 Leaves of Grass 97 
 De Profundis 117 
 Dorian Gray 1 
 
 The Plays of Oscar Wilde 83 
 Poems and Fairy Tales 84 
 The Cabala 155 
 Mrs. Dalloway 96 
 
 Irish Fairy and Folk Tales 44 
 The Medici 179 
 
 Nana 142 
 Amok 
 
 (In Collected German Stories 108) 
 
 MODERN LIBRARY GIANTS 
 
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 and over 1200 pages long, 
 
 Gi. TOLSTOY, LEO. War and Peace. 
 
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 G 4 . THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS 
 
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 G5. PLUTARCH'S LIVES. 
 
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 G7. / the Roman Empire (Complete in Two Volumes). 
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