THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF ILLINOIS 
 LIBRARY 
 

 
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 in 2016 
 
 https://archive.org/details/miscellaneousstu00pate_0 
 
MISCELLANEOUS STUDIES 
 
BY WALTER PATER. 
 
 ESSAYS FROM THE GUARDIAN. 
 
 GASTON DE LATOUR : An Unfinished Romance. 
 Prepared for the Press by Charles L. Shadwell, 
 Fellow of Oriel College. 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS STUDIES : A Series of Essays. 
 Prepared for the Press by Charles L. Shadwell, 
 Fellow of Oriel College. 
 
 GREEK STUDIES : A Series of Essays. Prepared for 
 the Press by Charles L. Shadwell, Fellow of 
 Oriel College. 
 
 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. His Sensations and 
 Ideas. Two Vols. Third Edition, Completely 
 Revised. 
 
 IMAGINARY PORTRAITS: A Prince of Court 
 
 Painters ; Denys l’Auxerrois : Sebastian van Storck ; 
 Duke Carl of Rosenmold. 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE : Studies in Art and Poetry. 
 PLATO AND PLATONISM: A Series of Lectures. 
 APPRECIATIONS, with an Essay on Style. 
 
 WALTER PATER. By A. C. Benson. 
 
 [. English Men of Letters, 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd., LONDON. 
 
MISCELLANEOUS 
 
 STUDIES 
 
 A SERIES OF ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 WALTER PATER 
 
 LATE FELLOW OF BRASENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 PREPARED FOR THE PRESS 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES L. SHADWELL 
 
 FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE 
 
 Jgark 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 I 9°7 
 
 A ll rights reserved 
 
82 ^ 
 
 til OrvS 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 The volume of Greek Studies , issued early in the 
 present year, dealt with Mr. Pater’s contributions to 
 the study of Greek art, mythology, and poetry. The 
 present volume has no such unifying principle. Some 
 of the papers would naturally find their place along- 
 side of those collected in Imaginary Portraits , or in 
 Appreciations , or in the Studies in the Renaissance . 
 And there is no doubt, in the case of several of them, 
 that Mr. Pater, if he had lived, would have subjected 
 them to careful revision before allowing them to 
 reappear in a permanent form. The task, which he 
 left unexecuted, cannot now be taken up by any other 
 hand. But it is hoped that students of his writings 
 will be glad to possess, in a collected shape, what has 
 hitherto only been accessible in the scattered volumes 
 of magazines. It is with some hesitation that the 
 paper on Diaphaneite , the last in this volume, has 
 been added, as the only specimen known to be 
 preserved of those early essays of Mr. Pater’s, by 
 which his literary gifts were first made known to the 
 small circle of his Oxford friends. 
 
 Subjoined is a brief chronological list of his pub- 
 lished writings. It will be observed how considerable 
 
VI 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 a period, 1880 to 1885, was given up to the com- 
 position of Marius the Epicurean , the most highly- 
 finished of all his works, and the expression of his 
 deepest thought. 
 
 1866. 
 
 Coleridge. Appeared in Westminster Review, January, 1866. 
 Reprinted 1889 i n Appreciations. 
 
 1867. 
 
 Winckelmann. Appeared in Westminster Review , January, 
 1867* Reprinted 1873 in Studies in the Renaissance. 
 
 1868. 
 
 Aesthetic Poetry. Written in 1868. First published 1889 
 
 in Appreciations. 
 
 1869. 
 
 Notes on Leonardo da Vinci. Appeared in Fortnightly 
 Revieiv in November, 1869. Reprinted 1873 in Studies in 
 the Renaissance. 
 
 1870. 
 
 Sandro Botticelli. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in 
 August, 1870, entitled ‘A Fragment on Sandro Botticelli.’ 
 Reprinted 1873 in Studies in the Renaissance. 
 
 1871. 
 
 Pico della Mirandola. Appeared in Fortnightly Review 
 in October, 1871. Reprinted in 1873 in Studies in the 
 Renaissance. 
 
 Poetry of Michelangelo. Appeared in Fortnightly Review 
 in November, 1871. Reprinted in 1873 in Studies in the 
 Renaissance. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 vii 
 
 1873 - 
 
 Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Published 
 1 873 by Messrs. Macmillan. Contained : — 
 
 Aucassin and Nicolette. Entitled in second and later 
 editions, ‘Two Early French Stories.’ 
 
 Pico della Mirandola. See 1871. 
 
 Sandro Botticelli . See 1870. 
 
 Luca della Robbia. 
 
 Poetry of Michelangelo. See 1871. 
 
 Leonardo da Vinci. See 1869. 
 foachim du Bellay . 
 
 Winckelmann. See 1867. 
 
 Conclusion. 
 
 1874. 
 
 Wordsworth. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in April, 1874. 
 Reprinted in 1889 in Appreciations. 
 
 Measure for Measure. Appeared in Fortnightly Reviezv in 
 November, 1874. Reprinted in 1889 in Appreciations. 
 
 1875 - 
 
 Demeter and Persephone. Written as two lectures, and 
 delivered in 1875 at Birmingham and Midland Insti- 
 tute. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in January and 
 February, 1876. Reprinted in 1895 Greek Studies. 
 
 1876. 
 
 ROMANTICISM. Appeared in Macmillan'' s Magazine in Novem- 
 ber, 1876. Reprinted in 1889 in Appreciations under the 
 title ‘ Postscript.’ 
 
 A Study of Dionysus. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in 
 December, 1876. Reprinted in 1895 Greek Studies. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 viii 
 
 1877. 
 
 The School of Giorgione. Appeared in Fortnightly Review 
 in October, 1877. Reprinted in 1888 in third edition of 
 The Renaissance. 
 
 The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Second 
 edition. Messrs. Macmillan. Contained : — 
 
 Two Early French Stories . 
 
 Pico della Mirandola. 
 
 Sandro Botticelli. 
 
 Luca della Robbia. 
 
 The Poetry of Michelangelo. 
 
 Leonardo da Vinci. 
 
 Joachim du Bellay. 
 
 Winckelmann. 
 
 1878. 
 
 The Child in the House. Appeared in Macmillan' s Maga- 
 zine in August, 1878, under the heading, * Imaginary 
 Portrait. The Child in the House.’ Reprinted by Mr. 
 H. Daniel at his private press, Oxford, in 1894. Reprinted 
 in 1895 the present volume. 
 
 Charles Lamb. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in October, 
 1878. Reprinted in 1889 in Appreciations. 
 
 Love’s Labours Lost. Written in 1878. Appeared in Mac- 
 millan's Magazine in December, 1885. Reprinted in 1889 , 
 in Appreciations. 
 
 The Bacchanals of Euripides. Written in 1878. Appeared 
 in Macmillan' s Magazine in May, 1889. Reprinted in 
 Tyrrell’s edition of the Bacchae in 1892. Reprinted in 
 1895 Greek Studies. 
 
 1880. 
 
 The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture. Appeared in Fort- 
 nightly Review in February and March, 1880. Reprinted 
 in 1895 i n Greek Studies. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 IX 
 
 The Marbles of Aegina. Appeared in Fortnightly Review 
 in April, 1880. Reprinted in 1895 i n Greek Studies. 
 
 1883. 
 
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Written in 1883. Published in 
 1889 in Appreciations. 
 
 1885. 
 
 Marius the Epicurean. Published in 1885 by Messrs. Mac- 
 millan. Two volumes. 
 
 A Prince of Court Painters. Appeared in Macmillan' s 
 Magazine in October, 1885. Reprinted in 1887 in Imagi- 
 nary Portraits. 
 
 1886. 
 
 Feuillet’s ‘La Morte.’ Written in 1886. Published in 1890 
 in second edition of Appreciations. 
 
 Sir Thomas Browne. Written in 1886. Published in 1889 
 in Appreciations . 
 
 Sebastian van Storck. Appeared in Macmillan' s Magazine 
 in March, 1886. Reprinted in 1887 in Imaginary Por- 
 traits. 
 
 Denys l’Auxerrois. Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine 
 in October, 1886. Reprinted in 1887 in Imaginary Por- 
 traits. 
 
 1887. 
 
 Duke Carl of Rosenmold. Appeared in Macmillan's Maga- 
 zine in May, 1887. Reprinted in the same year in 
 Imaginary Portraits. 
 
 Imaginary Portraits. Published 1887 by Messrs. Macmillan. 
 Contained : — 
 
 A Prince of Court Painters. See 1885. 
 
 Denys I'Auxerrois. See 1886. 
 
 Sebastian van Storck. See 1886. 
 
 Duke Carl of Roseivnold. See above. 
 
X 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 1888. 
 
 Gaston de Latour. Appeared in Macmillan' s Magazine as 
 under : viz. 
 
 Chapter I. in June. 
 
 II. in July. 
 
 III. in August. 
 
 IV. in September. 
 
 V. in October. 
 
 Style. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in December, 1888. 
 
 Reprinted in 1889 in Appreciations . 
 
 The Renaissance. Third edition. Messrs. Macmillan. Con- 
 tained : — 
 
 Two Early French Stories. 
 
 Pico della Mirandola. 
 
 Sandro Botticelli. 
 
 Luca della Robbia. 
 
 The Poetry of Michelangelo. 
 
 Leonardo da Vinci. 
 
 The School of Giorgione. See 1877. 
 
 Joachim du Bellay. 
 
 Winckelmann. 
 
 Conclusion. 
 
 1889. 
 
 Hippolytus Veiled. Appeared in Macmillan' s Magazine in 
 August, 1889. Reprinted in 1895 i* 1 Greek Studies. 
 Giordano Bruno. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in August, 
 1889. 
 
 Appreciations, with an Essay on Style. Published 1889 
 by Messrs. Macmillan. Contained : — 
 
 Style. See 1888. 
 
 Wordsworth . See 1874. 
 
 Coleridge. See 1 866. 
 
 Charles Lamb. See 1878. 
 
 Sir Thomas Browne. See 1886. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 xi 
 
 Love's Labour's Lost. See 1878. 
 
 Measure for Measure. See 1874. 
 
 Shakspere's English Kings. 
 
 Aesthetic Poetry. See 1868. 
 
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti. See 1883. 
 
 Postscript. See under ‘ Romanticism,’ 1876. 
 
 1890. 
 
 Art Notes in North Italy. Appeared in New Review 
 in November, 1890 Reprinted in 1895 present 
 
 volume. 
 
 Prosper M£rim£e. Delivered as a lecture at Oxford in 
 November, 1890. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in 
 December, 1890. Reprinted in 1895 the present 
 volume. 
 
 Appreciations. Second edition. Messrs. Macmillan. Con- 
 tained as in first edition 1889, but omitting Aesthetic Poetry 
 and including a paper on Feuillet's “La Morte ” (see 1886). 
 
 1892. 
 
 The Genius of Plato. Appeared in Contemporary Review 
 in February, 1892. Reprinted 1893 as Chapter VI of 
 Plato and Platonis?n . 
 
 A Chapter on Plato. Appeared in Macmillan' s Magazine 
 in May, 1892. Reprinted 1893 as Chapter I of Plato and 
 Platonism. 
 
 Lacedaemon. Appeared in Contemporary Review in June, 
 1892. Reprinted 1893 as Chapter VIII of Plato and 
 Platonis?n. 
 
 Emerald Uthwart. Appeared in New Review in June and 
 July, 1892. Reprinted in 1895 the present volume. 
 
 1 Raphael. Delivered as a lecture at Oxford in August, 189^. 
 Appeared in Fort 7 iightly Review in October, 1892. Re- 
 printed in 1895 the present volume. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 xii 
 
 ■ 8 , 3 . 
 
 Apollo in Picardy. Appeared in Harper's Magazine in 
 November, 1893. Reprinted in 1895 th e present 
 
 volume. 
 
 Plato and Platonism. Published 1893 Messrs. Macmillan. |! 
 Included, as Chapters I, VI, and VIII, papers which had 1 
 already appeared in Magazines in 1892. 
 
 1894. 
 
 The Age of Athletic Prizemen. Appeared in Contempo- 
 rary Review in February, 1894. Reprinted in 1895 m 
 Greek Studies . 
 
 Some Great Churches in France — (1) Notre-Dame 
 d’Amiens; (2) Vezelay. Appeared in Nineteenth Cent- 
 ury in March and June, 1894. Reprinted in 1895 in the 
 present volume. 
 
 Pascal. Written for delivery as a lecture at Oxford in July, 
 1894. Appeared in Contemporary Review in December, 
 1894. Reprinted in 1895 the present volume. 
 
 1895. 
 
 Greek Studies. Published 1895 by Messrs. Macmillan. Con- 
 tained : — 
 
 A Study of Dionysus. See 1876. 
 
 The Bacchanals of Euripides. See 1878. 
 
 The Myth of Demeter and Persephone. See 1875. 
 Hippolytus Veiled. See 1889. 
 
 The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture — See 1 880 — 
 
 1. The Heroic Age of Greek Art. 
 
 11. The Age of Graven Images. 
 
 The Marbles of AEgina. See 1880. 
 
 The Age of Athletic Prizemen. See 1894. 
 
 August, 1895. 
 
 C. L. S. ! 
 
 i 
 
i 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Prosper M£rim£e 
 /Raphael . 
 
 Pascal 
 
 Art Notes in North Italy 
 Notre-Dame d’Amiens 
 V£zelay . 
 
 Apollo in Picardy 
 The Child in the House . 
 Emerald Uthwart 
 Diaphaneite 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I 
 
 26 
 
 48 
 
 74 
 
 9i 
 
 106 
 
 121 
 
 147 
 
 170 
 
 215 
 
 xiii 
 
PROSPER MERIMEE . 1 * 3 
 
 i 
 
 t 
 
 | 
 
 i 
 ■ 
 
 For one born in eighteen hundred and three much 
 •was recently become incredible that had at least 
 warmed the imagination even of the sceptical eigh- 
 teenth century. Napoleon, sealing the tomb of the 
 Revolution, had foreclosed many a problem, extin- 
 guished many a hope, in the sphere of practice. And 
 the mental parallel was drawn by Heine. In the men- 
 tal world too a great outlook had lately been cut off. 
 After Kant’s criticism of the mind, its pretensions to 
 pass beyond the limits of individual experience seemed 
 as dead as those of old French royalty. And Kant 
 did but furnish its innermost theoretic force to a 
 more general criticism, which had withdrawn from 
 'every department of action, underlying principles once 
 thought eternal. A time of disillusion followed. The 
 typical personality of the day was Obermann, the very 
 genius of enmii , a Frenchman disabused even of pa- 
 triotism, who has hardly strength enough to die. More 
 energetic souls, however, would recover themselves, 
 and find some way of making the best of a changed 
 
 1 A lecture delivered at the Taylor Institution, Oxford, and at 
 the London Institution. Published in the Fortnightly Review , Dec. 
 
 1890, and now reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors. 
 
 3 X 
 
2 
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 world. Art : the passions, above all, the ecstasy an* 
 sorrow of love : a purely empirical knowledge of natur< 
 a,nd man : these still remained, at least for pastime 
 in a world of which it was no longer proposed to ca] 
 culate the remoter issues : — art, passion, science 
 however, in a somewhat novel attitude towards tht 
 practical interests of life. The desillusionne , who ha r 
 found in Kant’s negations the last word concerning 
 an unseen world, and is living, on the morrow of th 
 Revolution, under a monarchy made out of handj|[ 
 might seem cut off from certain ancient natural hopes] 
 and will demand, from what is to interest him at all 
 something in the way of artificial stimulus. He ha* 
 lost that sense of large proportion in things, that all- 
 embracing prospect of life as a whole (from end ten 
 end of time and space, it had seemed), the utmost! 
 expanse of which was afforded from a cathedral tower/ 
 of the Middle Age: by the church of the thirteenth* 
 century, that is to say, with its consequent aptitude! 
 for the co-ordination of human effort. Deprived ofi 
 that exhilarating yet pacific outlook, imprisoned novfi 
 in the narrow cell of its own subjective experience, 
 the action of a powerful nature will be intense, but' 
 exclusive and peculiar. It will come to art, or science,) , 
 to the experience of life itself, not as to portions of j'J 
 human nature’s daily food, but as to something that 
 must be, by the circumstances of the case, excep- 
 tional ; almost as men turn in despair to gambling 
 or narcotics, and in a little while the narcotic, the 
 game of chance or skill, is valued for its own sake/ 
 / The vocation of the artist, of the student of life c 
 
PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 3 
 
 ! >ooks, will be realised with something — say ! of fanat- 
 cism, as an end in itself, unrelated, unassociated. 
 r he science he turns to will be a science of crudest 
 .act; the passion extravagant, a passionate love of 
 Passion, varied through all the exotic phases of French 
 iction as inaugurated by Balzac ; the art exaggerated, 
 i n matter or form, or both, as in Hugo or Baudelaire. 
 ‘The development of these conditions is the mental 
 sitory of the nineteenth century, especially as exempli- 
 ied in France. 
 
 In no century would Prosper M^rimee have been 
 i theologian or metaphysician. But that sense of 
 negation, of theoretic insecurity, was in the air, and 
 conspiring with what was of like tendency in himself 
 made of him a central type of disillusion. In him the 
 jpassive ennui of Obermann became a satiric, aggres- 
 sive, almost angry conviction of the littleness of the 
 world around ; it was as if man’s fatal limitations con- 
 stituted a kind of stupidity in him, what the French 
 /call betise. Gossiping friends, indeed, linked what was 
 constitutional in him and in the age with an incident 
 of his earliest years. Corrected for some childish 
 fault, in passionate distress, he overhears a half-pitying 
 l augh at his expense, and has determined, in a moment, 
 never again to give credit — to be for ever on his 
 guard, especially against his own instinctive move- 
 ments. Quite unreserved, certainly, he never was 
 again. Almost everywhere he could detect the hollow 
 ping of fundamental nothingness under the apparent 
 kurfkce of things. Irony surely, habitual irony, would 
 t>e the proper complement thereto, on his part. In 
 
4 
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 / 
 
 his infallible self-possession, you might even fancy hin 
 a mere man of the world, with a special aptitude fo: 
 matters of fact. Though indifferent in politics, h, 
 rises to social, to political eminence j but all the while 
 he is feeding all his scholarly curiosity, his imagina 
 tion, the very eye, with the, to him ever delightful, re 
 lieving, reassuring spectacle, of those straightforwarc 
 forces in human nature, which are also matters o 
 fact. There is the formula of Merimee ! the enthusi 
 astic amateur of rude, crude, naked force in men anc 
 women wherever it could be found ; himself carrying 
 ever, as a mask, the conventional attire of the moder] 
 world — carrying it with an infinite, contemptuous] 
 grace, as if that, too, were an all-sufficient end in itself.l 
 With a natural gift for words, for expression, it will be 
 his literary function to draw back the veil of time from 
 the true greatness of old Roman character ; the veil of 
 modern habit from the primitive energy of the creatures 
 of his fancy, as the Lettres a une Inconnue discovered 
 to general gaze, after his death, a certain depth of 
 passionate force which had surprised him in himself. 
 And how forcible will be their outlines in an other- 
 wise insignificant world ! Fundamental belief gone, 
 in almost all of us, at least some relics of it remain — 
 queries, echoes, reactions, afte r- thoughts ; and the) 
 help to make an atmosphere, a mental atmosphere^ 
 hazy perhaps, yet with many secrets of soothing lighi 
 and shade, associating more definite objects to eachJ) 
 other by a perspective pleasant to the inward eye/' 
 against a hopefully receding background of remote-- 
 and ever remoter possibilities. Not so with Merimee )r 
 
 
 i 
 
PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 5 
 
 \: 
 
 i 
 
 jFor him the fundamental criticism has nothing more 
 than it can do ; and there are no half-lights. The last"' 
 , :races of hypothesis, of supposition, are evaporated, 
 pylla, the false Demetrius, Carmen, Colomba, that 
 mpassioned self within himself, have no atmosphere. 
 Painfully distinct in outline, inevitable to sight, unre- 
 lieved, there they stand, like solitary mountain forms 
 }n some hard, perfectly transparent day. What 
 Vterimee gets around his singularly sculpturesque 
 reations is neither more nor less than empty space. 
 
 So disparate are his writings that at first sight you 
 night fancy them only the random efforts of a man 
 bf pleasure or affairs, who, turning to this or that for 
 the relief of a vacant hour, discovers to his surprise 
 \ workable literary gift, of whose scope, however, he 
 !js not precisely aware. His sixteen volumes never- 
 'lieless range themselves in three compact groups, 
 frhere are his letters — those Lettres a une Inconnue , 
 |and his letters to the librarian Panizzi, revealing him 
 in somewhat close contact with political intrigue. But 
 n this age of novelists, it is as a writer of novels, and 
 of fiction in the form of highly descriptive drama, that 
 ^jhe will count for most : — Colombo,, for instance, by its 
 Intellectual depth of motive, its firmly conceived struc- 
 ture, by the faultlessness of its execution, vindicating 
 Jhe function of the novel as no tawdry light literature, 
 ^)ut in very deed a fine art. The Chronique du Regne 
 Charles IX, an unusually successful specimen of 
 , istorical romance, links his imaginative work to the 
 ^hird 
 
 group 
 Assays. One 
 
 of Merimee’s writings, his historical 
 resource of the disabused soul of our 
 
6 
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 century, as we saw, would be the empirical study of 
 facts, the empirical science of nature and man, sur- 
 viving all dead metaphysical philosophies. M6rimee 
 perhaps, may have had in him the making of a maste 
 of such science, disinterested, patient, exact : scalpe 
 in hand, we may fancy, he would have penetrated far 
 But quite certainly he had something of genius for thf 
 exact study of history, for the pursuit of exact truth 
 with a keenness of scent as if that alone existed, ir 
 some special area of historic fact, to be determined b} 
 his own peculiar mental preferences. Power here to*i 
 again, — the crude power of men and women whici 
 mocks, while it makes its use of, average humar 
 nature : it was the magic function of history to put 
 one in living contact with that. To weigh the purely 
 physiognomic import of the memoir, of the pamphlet! 
 saved by chance, the letter, the anecdote, the very 
 gossip by which one came face to face with energetic 
 personalities : there lay the true business of the his- 
 toric student, not in that pretended theoretic inter- J 
 pretation of events by their mechanic causes, with 
 which he dupes others if not invariably himself. In 
 the great hero of the Social War , in Sylla, studied, 
 indeed, through his environment, but only so far as 
 that was in dynamic contact with himself, you saw, 
 without any manner of doubt, on one side, the solitary 
 height of human genius ; on the other, though on the] 
 seemingly so heroic stage of antique Roman storyt 
 the wholly inexpressive level of the humanity of evere 1 
 day, the spectacle of man’s eternal betise . Fascinated; 
 like a veritable son of the old pagan Renaissance 
 
PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 7 
 
 •^uy the grandeur, the concentration, the satiric hard- 
 iness of ancient Roman character, it is to Russia never- 
 theless that he most readily turns — youthful Russia, 
 :]vhose native force, still unbelittled by our western 
 Civilisation, seemed to have in it the promise of 
 A more dignified civilisation to come. It was as if 
 ibid Rome itself were here again ; as, occasionally, 
 vji new quarry is laid open of what was thought long 
 J^ince exhausted, ancient marble, cipollino or verde 
 ntique . Merim£e, indeed, was not the first to dis- 
 cern the fitness for imaginative service of the career 
 Jpf “ the false Demetrius,” pretended son of Ivan the 
 <lTerrible ; but he alone seeks its utmost force in 
 calm, matter-of-fact carefully ascertained present- 
 iment of the naked events. Yes ! In the last years 
 f the Valois, when its fierce passions seemed to be 
 ursting France to pieces, you might have seen, far 
 way beyond the rude Polish dominion of which one 
 jof those Valois princes had become king, a display 
 (more effective still of exceptional courage and cun- 
 ning, of horror in circumstance, of betise , of course, of 
 j betise and a slavish capacity of being duped, in average 
 jmankind : all that under a mask of solemn Muscovite 
 <\court-ceremonial. And Merim^e’s style, simple ancP^ 
 tpnconcerned, but with the eye ever on its object, 
 tlends itself perfectly to such purpose — to an almost 
 Iphlegmatic discovery of the facts, in all their crude 
 ^natural colouring, as if he but held up to view, as 
 hi piece of evidence, some harshly dyed oriental carpet 
 tfrom the sumptuous floor of the Kremlin, on which 
 eblood had fallen. 
 
PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 A lover of ancient Rome, its great character an 
 incident, M£rimee valued, as if it had been persona! 
 property of his, every extant relic of it in the art thai 
 had been most expressive of its genius — architectur 
 In that grandiose art of building, the most national: 
 the most tenaciously rooted of all the arts in th< 
 stable conditions of life, there were historic docul 
 ments hardly less clearly legible than the manuscrip 
 chronicle. By the mouth of those stately Roman-] 
 esque churches, scattered in so many strongly charac 
 terised varieties over the soil of France, above all i: 
 the hot, half-pagan south, the people of empire stil 1 
 protested, as he understood, against what must see 
 a smaller race. The Gothic enthusiasm indeed wad 
 already born, and he shared it — felt intelligently the] 
 fascination of the Pointed^ Style, but only as a further] 
 transformation of old Roman structure ; the rourn 
 arch is for him still the great architectural form, Id 
 forme noble , because it was to be seen in the monu 
 ments of antiquity. Romanesque, Gothic, the manner 
 of the Renaissance, of Lewis the Fourteenth: — they 
 were all, as in a written record, in the old abbey 
 church of Saint-Savin, of which M£rim£e was in- 
 structed to draw up a report. Again, it was as if to, 
 his concentrated attention through many months that 
 deserted sanctuary of Benedict were the only thing on 
 earth. Its beauties, its peculiarities, its odd military 
 features, its faded mural paintings, are no merely 
 picturesque matter for the pencil he could use so well, 
 but the lively record of a human society. With what 
 appetite ! with all the animation of George Sand’s 
 
PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 9 
 
 I lauprat, he tells the story of romantic violence 
 Laving its way there, defiant of law, so late as the 
 ear 1611; of the family of robber nobles perched, 
 s abbots in commendam , in those sacred places, 
 'hat grey, pensive old church in the little valley of 
 kfitou, was for a time like Santa Maria del Fiore 
 
 0 Michelangelo, the mistress of his affections — of 
 
 practical affection ; for the result of his elaborate 
 
 sport was the Government grant which saved the 
 lace from ruin. In architecture, certainly, he had 
 'hat for that day was nothing less than intuition 
 -an intuitive sense, above all, of its logic, of the 
 zecessity which draws into one all minor changes, as 
 elements in a reasonable development. And his 
 :are for it, his curiosity about it, were symptomatic 
 )f his own genius. Structure, proportion, design, 
 
 1 sort of architectural coherency : that was the 
 
 dm of his method in the art of literature, in that 
 form of it, especially, which he will live by, in 
 fiction. 
 
 As historian and archaeologist, as a man of erudition 
 aimed artist, he is well seen in the Chronique du 
 Regne de Charles IX, by which we pass naturally 
 from Merimee’s critical or scientific work to the prod- 
 lcts of his imagination. What economy in the use s 
 )f a large antiquarian knowledge ! what an instinct 
 riimid a hundred details, for the detail that carries 
 physiognomy in it, that really tells ! And again what 
 outline, what absolute clarity of outline ! For the 
 historian of that puzzling age which centres in the 
 I* Eve of Saint Bartholomew,” outward events them- 
 
10 
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 elves seem obscured by the vagueness of motive o 
 the actors in them. But Mdrimde, disposing of the3 
 as an artist, not in love with half-lights, compel? 
 events and actors alike to the clearness he desired' 
 takes his side without hesitation; and makes his her* 
 a uguenot of pure blood, allowing its charm, in thaj 
 arming youth, even to Huguenot piety. And ai 
 °r the incidents— however freely it may be under 
 mined by historic doubt, all reaches a perfectly firr? 
 surface at least for the eye of the reader. Th' 
 Chromcle of Charles the Ninth is like a series d 
 masterly drawings in illustration of a period -th? 
 period in which two other masters of French fiction 
 have found their opportunity, mainly by the develop* 
 ment of its actual historic characters. Those characf 
 
 vbh n me MedidS and the test — M6rim6e( ' 
 with significant irony and self-assertion, sets aside! 
 
 Place mn | t0 u ,° f th6m aS essentia % common 
 place. For him the interest lies in the creatures of 
 
 , ° Wn Wl11 ’ who carr - v m them, however, so lightly { 
 a learning equal to Balzac’s, greater than that o') 
 Dumas. He knows with like completeness the men f 
 as ions of the time — how courtier and soldier dressed; 
 emselves, and the large movements of the desperat J 
 game which fate or chance was playing with those 
 petty pieces Comparing that favourite century of' 
 the French Renaissance with our own, he notes ' 
 
 interest ° f ^i m ° re energetic P assions ™ th 
 
 merest of general tranquillity, and perhaps (onb 
 perhaps .) of general happiness. “ Assassination ” he 1 
 
 observes, as if with regret, “is no longer a part of oui 
 
PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 11 
 
 manners.” In fact, the duel, and the whole morality 
 of the duel, which does but enforce a certain regu- 
 larity on assassination, what has been well called le 
 sentiment du fer, the sentiment of deadly steel, had 
 then the disposition of refined existence. It was, 
 
 I indeed, very different, and is, in Merimee’s romance. 
 In his gallant hero, Bernard de Mergy, all the prompt- 
 ings of the lad’s virile goodness are in natural collusion 
 with that sentiment du fer. Amid his ingenuous blushes, 
 his prayers, and plentiful tears between-while, it is a 
 part of his very sex. With his delightful, fresh-blown 
 air, he is for ever tossing the sheath from the sword, but 
 always as if into bright natural sunshine. A winsome, 
 yet withal serious and even piteous figure, he conveys 
 his pleasantness, in spite of its gloomy theme, into 
 M£rimee’s one quite cheerful book. 
 
 Cheerful, because, after all, the gloomy passions it 
 presents are but the accidents of a particular age, and 
 not like the mental conditions in which Merimee was 
 most apt to look for the spectacle of human power, 
 allied to madness or disease in the individual. For 
 him, at least, it was the office of fiction to carry one 
 into a different if not a better world than that actually 
 around us ; and if the Chronicle of Charles the Ninth 
 provided an escape from the tame circumstances of 
 contemporary life into an impassioned past, Colomba 
 is a measure of the resources for mental alteration 
 which may be found even in the modern age. There 
 was a corner of the French Empire, in the manners of 
 which assassination still had a large part. 
 
 “ The beauty of Corsica,” says M£rim£e, “ is grave 
 
12 
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 and sad. The aspect of the capital does but augment 
 the impression caused by the solitude that surrounds 
 it. There is no movement in the streets. You hear 
 there none of the laughter, the singing, the loud 
 talking, common in the towns of Italy. Sometimes, 
 under the shadow of a tree on the promenade, a dozen 
 armed peasants will be playing cards, or looking on 
 at the game. The Corsican is naturally silent. Those 
 who walk the pavement are all strangers : the islanders 
 stand at their doors : every one seems to be on the 
 watch, like a falcon on its nest. All around the gulf 
 there is but an expanse of tanglework ; beyond it, 
 bleached mountains. Not a habitation ! Only, here 
 and there, on the heights about the town, certain 
 white constructions detach themselves from the back- 
 ground of green. They are funeral chapels or family 
 tombs.” 
 
 Crude in colour, sombre, taciturn, Corsica, as 
 Merimee here describes it, is like the national passion 
 of the Corsican — that morbid personal pride, usurping 
 the place even of grief for the dead, which centuries 
 of traditional violence had concentrated into an all- 
 absorbing passion for bloodshed, for bloody revenges, 
 in collusion with the natural wildness, and the wild 
 social condition of the island still unaffected even by 
 the finer ethics of the duel. The supremacy of that 
 passion is well indicated by the cry, put into the 
 mouth of a young man in the presence of the corpse 
 of his father deceased in the course of nature — a young 
 man meant to be common-place. “ Ah ! Would thou 
 hadst died malamorte — by violence ! We might have 
 
PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 13 
 
 avenged thee!” In Colomba, M^rim^e’s best known 
 creation, it is united * to a singularly wholesome type 
 of personal beauty, a natural grace of manner which 
 is irresistible, a cunning intellect patiently diverting 
 every circumstance to its design ; and presents itself 
 as a kind of genius, allied to fatal disease of mind. 
 The interest of Merimee’s book is that it allows us to 
 watch the action of this malignant power on Colomba’s 
 brother, Orso della Rebbia, as it discovers, rouses, 
 concentrates to the leaping-point, in the somewhat 
 weakly diffused nature of the youth, the dormant 
 elements of a dark humour akin to her own. Two 
 years after his father’s murder, presumably at the 
 instigation of his ancestral enemies, the young lieu- 
 tenant is returning home in the company of two 
 humorously conventional English people, himself now 
 half Parisianised, with an immense natural cheerful- 
 ness, and willing to believe an account of the crime 
 which relieves those hated Barricini of all complicity 
 in its guilt. But from the first, Colomba, with “ voice 
 soft and musical,” is at his side, gathering every 
 accident and echo and circumstance, the very lightest 
 circumstance, into the chain of necessity which draws 
 him to the action every one at home expects of him 
 as the head of his race. He is not unaware. Her 
 very silence on the matter speaks so plainly. “You 
 are forming me ! ” he admits. “ Well ! ‘ Hot shot, or 
 cold steel ! 9 — you see I have not forgotten my Corsi- 
 can.” More and more, as he goes on his way with 
 her, he finds himself accessible to the damning 
 thoughts he has so long combated. In horror, he 
 
14 
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 tries to disperse them by the memory of his com- 
 rades in the regiment, the drawing-rooms of Paris, 
 the English lady who has promised to be his bride, 
 and will shortly visit him in the humble memoir of his 
 ancestors. From his first .step among them the 
 villagers of Pietranera, divided already into two rival 
 camps, are watching him in suspense — Pietranera, 
 perched among those deep forests where the stifled 
 sense of violent death is everywhere. Colomba places 
 in his hands the little chest which contains the father's 
 shirt covered with great spots of blood. “ Behold 
 the lead that struck him ! ” and she laid on the shirt 
 two rusted bullets. “ Orso ! you will avenge him ! ” 
 She embraces him with a kind of madness, kisses 
 wildly the bullets and the shirt, leaves him with the 
 terrible relics already exerting their mystic power 
 upon him. It is as if in the nineteenth century a girl, 
 amid Christian habits, had gone back to that primitive 
 old pagan version of the story of the Grail, which 
 identifies it not with the Most Precious Blood, but 
 only with the blood of a murdered relation crying for 
 vengeance. Awake at last in his old chamber at 
 Pietranera, the house of the Barricini at the other end 
 of the square, with its rival tower and rudely carved 
 escutcheons, stares him in the face. His ancestral 
 enemy is there, an aged man now, but with two well- 
 grown sons, like two stupid dumb animals, whose 
 innocent blood will soon be on his so oddly lighted 
 conscience. At times, his better hope seemed to lie in 
 picking a quarrel and killing at least in fair fight, one 
 of these two stupid dumb animals ; with rude ill-sup* 
 
PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 15 
 
 pressed laughter one day, as they overhear Colomba’s 
 violent utterances at a funeral feast, for she is a re- 
 nowned improvisatrice. “Your father is an old man,” 
 he finds himself saying, “ I could crush with my hands. 
 Tis for you I am destined, for you and your brother ! ” 
 And if it is by course of nature that the old man dies 
 not long after the murder of these sons (self-pro- 
 voked after all), dies a fugitive at Pisa, as it happens, 
 by an odd accident, in the presence of Colomba, no 
 violent death by Orso’s own hand could have been 
 more to her mind. In that last hard page of M£rimee’s 
 story, mere dramatic propriety itself for a moment 
 seems to plead for the forgiveness, which from Joseph 
 and his brethren to the present day, as we know, has 
 been as winning in story as in actual life. Such 
 dramatic propriety, however, was by no means in 
 M£rim£e’s way. “What I must have is the hand 
 that fired the shot,” she had sung, “ the eye that 
 guided it ; aye ! and the mind moreover — the mind, 
 which had conceived the deed ! ” And now, it is in 
 idiotic terror, a fugitive from Orso’s vengeance, that 
 the last of the Barricini is dying. 
 
 Exaggerated art ! you think. But it was precisely ^ 
 such exaggerated art, intense, unrelieved, an art of 
 fierce colours, that is needed by those who are seek- 
 ing in art, as I said of Merimee, a kind of artificial 
 stimulus. And if his style is still impeccably correct, 
 cold-blooded, impersonal, as impersonal as that of 
 Scott himself, it does but conduce the better to his 
 one exclusive aim. It is like the polish of the stiletto 
 Colomba carried always under her mantle, or the 
 
16 
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 beauty of the fire-arms, that beauty coming of nice 
 adaptation to purpose, which she understood so well — 
 a task characteristic also of M6rim6e himself, a sort of 
 fanatic joy in the perfect pistol-shot, at its height in 
 the singular story he has translated from the Rus- 
 sian of Pouchkine. Those raw colours he preferred ; 
 Spanish, Oriental, African, perhaps, irritant certainly 
 to cisalpine eyes, he undoubtedly attained the colour- 
 ing you associate with sun-stroke, only possible under 
 a sun in which dead things rot quickly. 
 
 Pity and terror, we know, go to the making of the 
 essential tragic sense. In Merimee, certainly, we have 
 all its terror, but without the pity. Saint-Clair, the 
 consent of his mistress barely attained at last, rushes 
 madly on self-destruction, that he may die with the 
 taste of his great love fresh on his lips. All the gro- 
 tesque accidents of violent death he records with 
 visual exactness, and no pains to relieve them ; the 
 ironic indifference, for instance, with which, on the 
 scaffold or the battle-field, a man will seem to grin 
 foolishly at the ugly rents through which his life has 
 passed. Seldom or never has the mere pen of a 
 writer taken us so close to the cannon’s mouth as in 
 the Taking of the Redoubt , while Matteo Falcone — 
 twenty- five short pages — is perhaps the cruellest story 
 in the world. 
 
 Colomba, that strange, fanatic being, who has a code 
 of action, of self-respect, a conscience, all to herself, 
 / who with all her virginal charm only does not make 
 you hate her, is, in truth, the type of a sort of human- 
 ity M£rim6e found it pleasant to dream of — a human- 
 
PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 17 
 
 ity as alien as the animals, with whose moral affinities 
 to man his imaginative work is often directly concerned. 
 Were they so alien, after all? Were there not sur- 
 vivals of the old wild creatures in the gentlest, the 
 politest of us? Stories that told of sudden freaks of 
 gentle, polite natures, straight back, not into Paradise, 
 were always welcome to men’s fancies ; and that could 
 only be because they found a psychologic truth in 
 them. With much success, with a credibility insured 
 by his literary tact, M^rimee tried his own hand at 
 such stories : unfrocked the bear in the amorous young 
 Lithuanian noble, the wolf in the revolting peasant 
 of the Middle Age. There were survivals surely in 
 himself, in that stealthy presentment of his favourite 
 themes, in his own art. You seem to find your hand 
 on a serpent, in reading him. 
 
 In such survivals, indeed, you see the operation of 
 his favourite motive, the sense of wild power, under 
 a sort of mask, or assumed habit, realised as the very 
 genius of nature itself ; and that interest, with some 
 superstitions closely allied to it, the belief in the vam- 
 pire, for instance, is evidenced especially in certain 
 pretended Illyrian compositions — prose translations, 
 the reader was to understand, of more or less ancient 
 popular ballads ; La Guzla , he called the volume, The 
 Lyre , as we might say ; only that the instrument of 
 the Illyrian minstrel had but one string. Artistic de- 
 ception, a trick of which there is something in the 
 historic romance as such, in a book like his own 
 Chronicle of Charles the Ninth , was always welcome 
 to M£rim£e ; it was part of the machinery of his rooted 
 c 
 
18 
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 habit of intellectual reserve. A master of irony also, 
 in Madame Lucrezia he seems to wish to expose his 
 own method cynically ; to explain his art — how he 
 takes you in — as a clever, confident conjuror might do. 
 So properly were the readers of La Guzla taken in 
 that he followed up his success in that line by the 
 Theatre of Clara Gazul ' purporting to be from a rare 
 Spanish original, the work of a nun, who, under tame, 
 conventual reading, had felt the touch of mundane, of 
 physical passions ; had become a dramatic poet, and 
 herself a powerful actress. It may dawn on you in 
 reading her that M£rim6e was a kind of Webster, but 
 with the superficial mildness of our nineteenth century. 
 At the bottom of the true drama there is ever, logi- 
 cally at least, the ballad : the ballad dealing in a kind 
 of short-hand (or, say ! in grand, simple, universal 
 outlines) with those passions, crimes, mistakes, which 
 have a kind of fatality in them, a kind of necessity to 
 come to the surface of the human mind \ if not to the 
 surface of our experience , as in the case of some frankly 
 supernatural incidents which M£rimee re-handled. 
 Whether human love or hatred has had most to do in 
 shaping the universal fancy that the dead come back, 
 I cannot say. Certainly that old ballad literature has 
 instances in plenty, in which the voice, the hand, the 
 brief visit from the grave, is a natural response to the 
 cry of the human creature. That ghosts should return, 
 as they do so often in M^rim^e’s fiction, is but a sort 
 of natural justice. Only, in M^rimee’s prose ballads, 
 in those admirable, short, ballad-like stories, where 
 every word tells, of which he was a master, almost 
 
PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 19 
 
 the inventor, they are a kind of half-material ghosts — 
 a vampire tribe — and never come to do people good ; 
 congruously with the mental constitution of the writer, 
 which, alike in fact and fiction, could hardly have 
 horror enough — theme after theme. Merimee him- 
 self emphasises this almost constant motive of his fic- 
 tion when he adds to one of his volumes of short stories 
 some letters on a matter of fact — a Spanish bull-fight, 
 in which those old Romans, he regretted, might seem, 
 decadently, to have survived. It is as if you saw it. 
 In truth, M£rim6e was the unconscious parent of much 
 we may think of dubious significance in later French 
 literature. It is as if there were nothing to tell of in 
 this world but various forms of hatred, and a love that 
 is like lunacy ; and the only other world, a world of 
 maliciously active, hideous, dead bodies. 
 
 Merimee, a literary artist, was not a man who used 
 two words where one would do better, and he shines 
 especially in those brief compositions which, like 
 a minute intaglio, reveal at a glance his wonderful 
 faculty of design and proportion in the treatment 
 of his work, in which there is not a touch but counts. 
 That is an art of which there are few examples in 
 English ; our somewhat diffuse, or slipshod, literary 
 language hardly lending itself to the concentration 
 of thought and expression, which are of the essence 
 of such writing. It is otherwise in French, and if you 
 wish to know what art of that kind can come to, read 
 M£rim6e’s little romances; best of all, perhaps, La 
 Venus d? Ille and Arsene Guillot . The former is 
 
 a modern version of the beautiful old story of the 
 
20 
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 Ring given to Venus, given to her, in this case, by 
 a somewhat sordid creature of the nineteenth century, 
 whom she looks on with more than disdain. The 
 strange outline of the Canigou, one of the most 
 imposing outlying heights of the Pyrenees, down the 
 mysterious slopes of which the traveller has made his 
 way towards nightfall into the great plain of Toulouse, 
 forms an impressive background, congruous with the 
 many relics of irrepressible old paganism there, but 
 in entire contrast to the bourgeois comfort of the 
 place where his journey is to end, the abode of an 
 aged antiquary, loud and bright just now with the 
 celebration of a vulgar worldly marriage. In the 
 midst of this well-being, prosaic in spite of the neigh- 
 bourhood, in spite of the pretty old wedding customs, 
 morsels of that local colour in which Merim^e de- 
 lights, the old, pagan powers are supposed to reveal 
 themselves once more (malignantly, of course), in 
 the person of a magnificent bronze statue of Venus 
 recently unearthed in the antiquary’s garden. On 
 her finger, by ill-luck, the coarse young bridegroom 
 on the morning of his marriage places for a moment 
 the bridal ring only too effectually (the bronze hand 
 closes, like a wilful living one, upon it), and dies, you 
 are to understand, in her angry metallic embraces on 
 his marriage night. From the first, indeed, she had 
 seemed bent on crushing out men’s degenerate bodies 
 and souls, though the supernatural horror of the tale 
 is adroitly made credible by a certain vagueness in 
 the events, which covers a quite natural account of 
 the bridegroom’s mysterious death. 
 
PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 21 
 
 The intellectual charm of literary work so thoroughly 
 designed as Merimee’s depends in part on the sense 
 as you read, hastily perhaps, perhaps in need of 
 patience, that you are dealing with a composition, the 
 full secret of which is only to be attained in the last 
 paragraph, that with the last word in mind you will 
 retrace your steps, more than once (it may be) noting 
 then the minuter structure, also the natural or wrought 
 flowers by the way. Nowhere is such method better 
 illustrated than by another of M£rimee’s quintessen- 
 tial pieces, Arsene Guillot ', and here for once with a 
 conclusion ethically acceptable also. Merim^e loved 
 surprises in human nature, but it is not often that he 
 surprises us by tenderness or generosity of charac- 
 ter, as another master of French fiction, M. Octave 
 Feuillet, is apt to do ; and the simple pathos of Arsene 
 Guillot gives it a unique place in Merimee’s writings. 
 It may be said, indeed, that only an essentially pitiful 
 nature could have told the exquisitely cruel story of 
 Matteo Falcone precisely as M£rimee has told it ; 
 and those who knew him testify abundantly to his 
 own capacity for generous friendship. He was no 
 more wanting than others in those natural sympathies 
 (sending tears to the eyes at the sight of suffering age 
 or childhood) which happily are no extraordinary 
 component in men’s natures. It was, perhaps, no 
 fitting return for a friendship of over thirty years to 
 publish posthumously those Lettres a line Inconnue , 
 which reveal that reserved, sensitive, self-centred 
 nature, a little pusillanimously in the power, at the 
 disposition of another. For just there lies the interest, 
 
22 
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 the psychological interest, of those letters. An 
 amateur of power, of the spectacle of power and 
 force, followed minutely but without sensibility on 
 his part, with a kind of cynic pride rather for the 
 mainspring of his method, both of thought and ex- 
 pression, you find him here taken by surprise at last, 
 and somewhat humbled, by an unsuspected force of 
 affection in himself. His correspondent, unknown 
 but for these letters except just by name, figures in 
 them as, in truth, a being only too much like himself, 
 seen from one side ; reflects his taciturnity, his touchi- 
 ness, his incredulity except for self-torment. Agitated, 
 dissatisfied, he is wrestling in her with himself, his 
 own difficult qualities. He demands from her a free- 
 dom, a frankness, he would have been the last to 
 grant. It is by first thoughts, of course, that what is 
 forcible and effective in human nature, the force, there- 
 fore, of carnal love, discovers itself ; and for her first 
 thoughts Me rime e is always pleading, but always 
 complaining that he gets only her second thoughts ; 
 the thoughts, that is, of a reserved, self-limiting 
 nature, well under the yoke of convention, like his 
 own. Strange conjunction ! At the beginning of the 
 correspondence he seems to have been seeking only 
 a fine intellectual companionship ; the lady, perhaps, 
 looking for something warmer. Towards such com- 
 panionship that likeness to himself in her might have 
 been helpful, but was not enough of a complement 
 to his own nature to be anything but an obstruction 
 in love ; and it is to that, little by little, that his 
 humour turns. He — the Megalopsychus , as Aristotle 
 
PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 23 
 
 defines him — acquires all the lover’s humble habits : 
 himself displays all the tricks of love, its casuistries, its 
 exigency, its superstitions, aye ! even its vulgarities ; 
 involves with the significance of his own genius the 
 mere hazards and inconsequence of a perhaps average 
 nature ; but too late in the day — the years. After the 
 attractions and repulsions of half a lifetime, they are 
 but friends, and might forget to be that, but for his 
 death, clearly presaged in his last weak, touching 
 letter, just two hours before. There, too, had been 
 the blind and naked force of nature and circumstance, 
 surprising him in the uncontrollable movements of his 
 own so carefully guarded heart. 
 
 The intimacy, the effusion, the so freely exposed 7 
 personality of those letters does but emphasise the 
 fact that impersonality was, in literary art, Merim£e’s 
 central aim. Personality versus impersonality in art : — S 
 how much or how little of one’s self one may put into 
 one’s work : whether anything at all of it : whether 
 one can put there anything else : — is clearly a far- 
 reaching and complex question. \ Serviceable as the^ 
 basis of a precautionary maxim towards the conduct 
 of our work, self-effacement, or impersonality, in 
 literary or artistic creation, is, perhaps, after all, as 
 little possible as a strict realism.^ “ It has always been 
 my rule to put nothing of myself into my works,” 
 says another great master of French prose, Gustave 
 Flaubert ; but, luckily as we may think, he often 
 failed in thus effacing himself, as he too was aware. 
 
 “ It has always been my rule to put nothing of myself 
 into my works ” (to be disinterested in his literary 
 
24 
 
 PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 creations, so to speak), “yet I have put much of my- 
 self into them ” : and where he failed M£rim£e suc- 
 ceeded. There they stand — Carmen, Colomba, the 
 “False” Demetrius — as detached from him as from 
 each other, with no more filial likeness to their maker 
 than if they were the work of another person. And 
 to his method of conception, Merimee’s much-praised 
 literary style, his method of expression, is strictly 
 conformable — impersonal in its beauty, the perfection 
 of nobody’s style — thus vindicating anew by its very 
 impersonality that much worn, but not untrue saying, 
 that the style is the man : — a man, impassible, un- 
 familiar, impeccable, veiling a deep sense of what is 
 forcible, nay, terrible, in things, under the sort of 
 personal pride that makes a man a nice observer 
 of all that is most conventional. Essentially unlike 
 other people, he is always fastidiously in the fashion — 
 an expert in all the little, half-contemptuous elegances 
 of which it is capable. Merimee’s superb self-efface- 
 ment, his impersonality, is itself but an effective 
 personal trait, and, transferred to art, becomes a 
 markedly peculiar quality of literary beauty. For, 
 in truth, this creature of disillusion who had no care 
 for half-lights, and, like his creations, had no atmos- 
 phere about him, gifted as he was with pure mind , 
 with the quality which secures flawless literary struc- 
 ture, had, on the other hand, nothing of what we call 
 soul in literature : — hence, also, that singular harshness 
 in his ideal, as if, in theological language, he were 
 incapable of grace. He has none of those subjec- 
 tivities, colourings, peculiarities of mental refraction, 
 
PROSPER MERIMEE 
 
 25 
 
 which necessitate varieties of style — could we spare 
 such ? — and render the perfections of it no merely 
 negative qualities. There are masters of PTench 
 prose whose art has begun where the art of Merimee 
 leaves off. 
 
RAPHAEL . 1 2 
 
 By his immense productiveness, by the even per- 
 fection of what he produced, its fitness to its own day, 
 its hold on posterity, in the suavity of his life, some 
 would add in the “ opportunity ” of his early death, 
 Raphael may seem a signal instance of the luckiness, 
 of the good fortune, of genius. Yet, if we follow 
 the actual growth of his powers, within their proper 
 framework, the age of the Renaissance — an age of 
 which we may say, summarily, that it enjoyed itself, 
 and found perhaps its chief enjoyment in the attitude 
 of the scholar, in the enthusiastic acquisition of knowl- 
 edge for its own sake : — if we thus view Raphael and 
 his works in their environment we shall find even his 
 seemingly mechanical good fortune hardly distinguish- 
 able from his own patient disposal of the means 
 at hand. Facile master as he may seem, as indeed 
 he is, he is also one of the world’s typical scholars, 
 with Plato, and Cicero, and Virgil, and Milton. The 
 formula of his genius, if we must have one, is this: 
 genius by accumulation ; the transformation of meek 
 scholarship into genius — triumphant power of genius. 
 
 1 A lecture delivered to the University Extension Students, Oxford, 
 
 2 August, 1892. Published in the Fortnightly Review , Oct. 1892, 
 and now reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors. 
 
 26 
 
RAPHAEL 
 
 27 
 
 Urbino, where this prince of the Renaissance was 
 born in 1483, year also of the birth of Luther, leader 
 of the other great movement of that age, the Reforma- 
 tion — Urbino, under its dukes of the house of Monte- 
 feltro, had wherewithal just then to make a boy of 
 native artistic faculty from the first a willing learner. 
 The gloomy old fortress of the feudal masters of 
 the town had been replaced, in those later years 
 of the Quattro- cento, by a consummate monument of 
 Quattro-cento taste, a museum of ancient and modern 
 art, the owners of which lived there, gallantly at 
 home, amid the choicer flowers of living humanity. 
 The ducal palace was, in fact, become nothing less 
 than a school of ambitious youth in all the accom- 
 plishments alike of war and peace. Raphael’s con- 
 nexion with it seems to have become intimate, and 
 from the first its influence must have overflowed so 
 small a place. In the case of the lucky Raphael, for 
 once, the actual conditions of early life had been 
 suitable, propitious, accordant to what one’s imagina- 
 tion would have required for the childhood of the 
 man. He was born amid the art he was, not to trans-^ 
 form, but to perfect, by a thousand reverential retouch- 
 ings. In no palace, however, but in a modest abode, 
 still shown, containing the workshop of his father, 
 Giovanni Santi. But here, too, though in frugal 
 form, art, the arts, were present. A store of artistic 
 objects was, or had recently been, made there, and 
 now especially, for fitting patrons, religious pictures 
 in the old Umbrian manner. In quiet nooks of the 
 Apennines Giovanni’s works remain; and there is 
 
28 
 
 RAPHAEL 
 
 one of them, worth study, in spite of what critics say 
 of its crudity, in the National Gallery. Concede its 
 immaturity, at least, though an immaturity visibly 
 susceptible of a delicate grace, it wins you neverthe- 
 less to return again and again, and ponder, by a sin- 
 cere expression of sorrow, profound, yet resigned, be 
 the cause what it may, among all the many causes of 
 sorrow inherent in the ideal of maternity, human or 
 divine. But if you keep in mind when looking at it 
 the facts of Raphael’s childhood, you will recognise in 
 his father’s picture, not the anticipated sorrow of the 
 “ Mater Dolorosa ” over the dead son, but the grief 
 of a simple household over the mother herself taken 
 early from it. That may have been the first picture 
 the eyes of the world’s great painter of Madonnas 
 rested on ; and if he stood diligently before it to copy, 
 and so copying, quite unconsciously, and with no dis- 
 loyalty to his original, refined, improved, substituted, 
 — substituted himself, in fact, his finer self — he had 
 already struck the persistent note of his career. As 
 with his age, it is his vocation, ardent worker as he is, 
 to enjoy himself — to enjoy himself amiably, and to 
 find his chief enjoyment in the attitude of a scholar. 
 And one by one, one after another, his masters, the 
 very greatest of them, go to school to him. 
 
 It was so especially with the artist of whom Raphael 
 first became certainly a learner — Perugino. Giovanni 
 Santi had died in Raphael’s childhood, too early to 
 have been in any direct sense his teacher. The lad, 
 however, from one and another, had learned much, 
 when, with his share of the patrimony in hand, enough 
 
RAPHAEL 
 
 29 
 
 to keep him, but not to tempt him from scholarly 
 ways, he came to Perugia, hoping still further to 
 improve himself. He was in his eighteenth year, 
 and how he looked just then. you may see in a drawing 
 of his own in the University Galleries, of somewhat 
 stronger mould than less genuine likenesses may lead 
 you to expect. There is something of a fighter in the 
 way in which the nose springs from the brow between 
 the wide-set, meditative eyes. A strenuous lad ! ca- 
 pable of plodding, if you dare apply that word to 
 labour so impassioned as his — to any labour whatever 
 done at Perugia, centre of the dreamiest Apennine 
 scenery. Its various elements (one hardly knows 
 whether one is thinking of Italian nature or of 
 Raphael’s art in recounting them), the richly-planted 
 lowlands, the sensitive mountain lines in flight one 
 beyond the other into clear distance, the cool yet 
 glowing atmosphere, the romantic morsels of archi- 
 tecture, which lend to the entire scene I know not 
 what expression of reposeful antiquity, arrange them- 
 selves here as for set purpose of pictorial effect, 
 and have gone with little change into his painted 
 backgrounds. In the midst of it, on titanic old 
 Roman and Etruscan foundations, the later Gothic 
 town had piled itself along the lines of a gigantic 
 land of rock, stretched out from the last slope of the 
 Apennines into the plain. Between its fingers steep 
 dark lanes wind down into the olive gardens; on the 
 finger-tips military and monastic builders had perched 
 their towns. A place as fantastic in its attractiveness 
 as the human life which then surged up and down in 
 
30 
 
 RAPHAEL 
 
 it in contrast to the peaceful scene around. The 
 Baglioni who ruled there had brought certain tenden- 
 cies of that age to a typical completeness of expression, 
 veiling crime — crime, it might seem, for its own 
 sake, a whole octave of fantastic crime — not merely 
 under brilliant fashions and comely persons, but under 
 fashions and persons, an outward presentment of life 
 and of themselves, which had a kind of immaculate 
 grace and discretion about them, as if Raphael him- 
 self had already brought his unerring gift of selection 
 to bear upon it all for motives of art. With life in 
 those streets of Perugia, as with nature, with the work 
 of his masters, with the mere exercises of his fellow- 
 students, his hand rearranges, refines, renews, as if 
 by simple contact; but it is met here half-way in its 
 renewing office by some special aptitude for such grace 
 in the subject itself. Seemingly innocent, full of 
 natural gaiety, eternally youthful, those seven and more 
 deadly sins, embodied and attired in just the jaunty 
 dress then worn, enter now and afterwards as specta- 
 tors, or assistants, into many a sacred foreground and 
 background among the friends and kinsmen of the 
 Holy Family, among the very angels, gazing, con- 
 versing, standing firmly and unashamed. During his 
 apprenticeship at Perugia Raphael visited and left 
 his work in more modest places round about, along 
 those seductive mountain or lowland roads, and copied 
 for one of them Perugino’s “ Marriage of the Virgin ” 
 significantly, did it by many degrees better, with a 
 very novel effect of motion everywhere, and with that 
 grace which natural motion evokes, introducing for a 
 
RAPHAEL 
 
 31 
 
 temple in the background a lovely bit of his friend 
 Bramante’s sort of architecture, the true Renaissance 
 or perfected Quattro-ce?ito architecture. He goes on 
 building a whole lordly new city of the like as he 
 paints to the end of his life. The subject, we may 
 note, as we leave Perugia in Raphael’s company, had 
 been suggested by the famous mystic treasure of its 
 cathedral church, the marriage ring of the Blessed 
 Virgin herself. 
 
 Raphael’s copy had been made for the little old 
 Apennine town of Citta di Castello; and another 
 place he visits at this time is still more effective in 
 the development of his genius. About his twentieth 
 year he comes to Siena — that other rocky Titan’s 
 hand, just lifted out of the surface of the plain. It 
 is the most grandiose place he has yet seen; it has 
 not forgotten that it was once the rival of Florence; 
 and here the patient scholar passes under an influence 
 of somew T hat larger scope than Perugino’ s. Perugino ’ s 
 pictures are for the most part religious contempla- 
 tions, painted and made visible, to accompany the 
 action of divine sendee — a visible pattern to priests, 
 attendants, worshippers, of what the course of their 
 invisible thoughts should be at those holy functions. 
 Learning in the workshop of Perugino to produce the 
 like — such works as the Ansidei Madonna — to pro- 
 duce them very much better than his master, Raphael 
 was already become a freeman of the most strictly 
 religious school of Italian art, the so devout Umbrian 
 soul finding there its purest expression, still untroubled 
 by the naturalism, the intellectualism, the antique 
 
32 
 
 RAPHAEL 
 
 paganism, then astir in the artistic soul everywhere 
 else in Italy. The lovely work of Perugino, very 
 lovely at its best, of the early Raphael also, is in fact 
 “conservative,” and at various points slightly behind 
 its day, though not unpleasantly. In Perugino’ s 
 allegoric frescoes of the Cambio , the Hall of the 
 Money-changers, for instance, under the mystic rule 
 of the Planets in person, pagan personages take their 
 place indeed side by side with the figures of the New 
 Testament, but are no Romans or Greeks, neither are 
 the Jews Jews, nor is any one of them, warrior, sage, 
 king, precisely of Perugino’ s own time and place, 
 but still contemplations only, after the manner of the 
 personages in his church-work; or, say, dreams — 
 monastic dreams — thin, do-nothing creatures, con- 
 jured from sky and cloud. Perugino clearly never 
 broke through the meditative circle of the Middle 
 Age. 
 
 Now Raphael, on the other hand, in his final period 
 at Rome, exhibits a wonderful narrative power in 
 painting; and the secret of that power — the power 
 of developing a story in a picture, or series of pict- 
 ures — may be traced back from him to Pinturicchio, 
 as that painter worked on those vast, well-lighted 
 walls of the cathedral library at Siena, at the great 
 series of frescoes illustrative of the life of Pope Pius 
 the Second. It had been a brilliant personal history, 
 in contact now and again with certain remarkable 
 public events — a career religious yet mundane, you 
 scarcely know which, so natural is the blending of 
 lights, of interest in it. How unlike the Peruginesque 
 
RAPHAEL 
 
 33 
 
 conception of life in its almost perverse other-world- 
 liness, which Raphael now leaves behind him, but, 
 like a true scholar, will not forget. Pinturicchio 
 then had invited his remarkable young friend hither, 
 “to assist him by his counsels,” who, however, pupil- 
 wise, after his habit also learns much as he thus assists. 
 He stands depicted there in person in the scene of 
 the canonisation of Saint Catherine; and though his 
 actual share in the work is not to be defined, con- 
 noisseurs have felt his intellectual presence,* not at 
 one place only, in touches at once finer and more 
 forcible than were usual in the steady-going, some- 
 what Teutonic, Pinturicchio, Raphael’s elder by thirty 
 years. The meek scholar you see again, with his 
 tentative sketches and suggestions, had more than 
 learned his lesson; through all its changes that flexible 
 intelligence loses nothing; does but add continually 
 to its store. Henceforward Raphael will be able to 
 tell a story in a picture, better, with a truer economy, 
 with surer judgment, more naturally and easily than 
 any one else. 
 
 And here at Siena, of all Italian towns perhaps 
 most deeply impressed with medieval character — an 
 impress it still retains — grotesque, parti-coloured — 
 parti-coloured, so to speak, in its genius — Satanic, 
 yet devout of humour, as depicted in its old chroni- 
 cles, and beautiful withal, dignified; it is here that 
 Raphael becomes for the first time aware of that old 
 pagan world, which had already come to be so much 
 for the art-schools of Italy. There were points, as 
 we saw, at which the school of Perugia was behind its 
 
 D 
 
34 
 
 RAPHAEL 
 
 day. Amid those intensely Gothic surroundings in 
 the cathedral library where Pinturicchio worked, 
 stood, as it remained till recently, unashamed there, 
 a marble group of the three Graces — an average 
 Roman work, in effect — the sort of thing we are used 
 to. That, perhaps, is the only reason why for our 
 part, except with an effort, we find it conventional or 
 even tame. For the youthful Raphael, on the other 
 hand, at that moment, antiquity, as with “the dew 
 of herbs,” seemed therein “to awake and sing” out 
 of the dust, in all its sincerity, its cheerfulness and 
 natural charm. He has turned it into a picture ; has 
 helped to make his original only too familiar, perhaps, 
 placing the three sisters against his own favourite, so 
 unclassic, Umbrian background indeed, but with no 
 trace of the Peruginesque ascetic, Gothic meagreness 
 in themselves; emphasising rather, with a hearty 
 acceptance, the nude, the flesh; making the limbs, 
 in fact, a little heavy. It was but one gleam he had 
 caught just there in medieval Siena of that large 
 pagan world he was, not so long afterwards, more 
 completely than others to make his own. And when 
 somewhat later he painted the exquisite, still Peru- 
 ginesque, Apollo and Marsyas, semi-medieval habits 
 again asserted themselves with delightfully blent 
 effects. It might almost pass for a parable — that 
 little picture in the Louvre — of the contention 
 between classic art and the romantic, superseded in 
 the person of Marsyas, a homely, quaintly poetical 
 young monk, surely! Only, Apollo himself also is 
 clearly of the same brotherhood; has a touch, in 
 
RAPHAEL 
 
 35 
 
 truth, of Heine’s fancied Apollo “in exile,” who, 
 Christianity now triumphing, has served as a hired 
 shepherd, or hidden himself under the cowl in a 
 cloister; and Raphael, as if at work on choir-book or 
 missal, still applies symbolical gilding for natural 
 sunlight. It is as if he wished to proclaim amid 
 newer lights — this scholar who never forgot a lesson 
 — his loyal pupilage to Perugino, and retained still 
 something of medieval stiffness, of the monastic 
 thoughts also, that were born and lingered in places 
 like Borgo San Sepolcro or Citta di Castello. Chef- 
 d'oeuvre! you might exclaim, of the peculiar, tremu- 
 lous, half-convinced, monkish treatment of that 
 after all damnable pagan world. And our own 
 generation certainly, with kindred tastes, loving or 
 wishing to love pagan art as sincerely as did the 
 people of the Renaissance, and medieval art as well, 
 would accept, of course, of work conceived in that 
 so seductively mixed manner, ten per cent, of even 
 Raphael’s later, purely classical presentments. 
 
 That picture was suggested by a fine old intaglio 
 in the Medicean collection at Florence, was painted, 
 therefore, after Raphael’s coming thither, and there- 
 fore also a survival with him of a style limited, imma- 
 ture, literally provincial; for in the phase of which 
 he had now entered he is under the influence of style 
 in its most fully determined sense, of what might be 
 called the thorough-bass of the pictorial art, of a fully 
 realised intellectual system in regard to its processes, 
 well tested by experiment, upon a survey of all the 
 conditions and various applications of it — of style as 
 
36 
 
 RAPHAEL 
 
 understood by Da Vinci, then at work in Florence. 
 Raphael’s sojourn there extends from his twenty-first 
 to his twenty-fifth year. He came with flattering 
 recommendations from the Court of Urbino; was 
 admitted as an equal by the masters of his craft, being 
 already in demand for work, then and ever since duly 
 prized; was, in fact, already famous, though he alone 
 is unaware — is in his own opinion still but a learner, 
 and as a learner yields himself meekly, systematically 
 to influence; would learn from Francia, whom he 
 visits at Bologna; from the earlier naturalistic works 
 of Masolino and Masaccio; from the solemn prophetic 
 work of the venerable dominican, Bartolommeo, dis- 
 ciple of Savonarola. And he has already habitually 
 this strange effect, not only on the whole body of his 
 juniors, but on those whose manner had been long 
 since formed ; they lose something of themselves by 
 contact with him, as if they went to school again. 
 
 Bartolommeo, Da Vinci, were masters certainly of 
 what we call “the ideal” in art. Yet for Raphael, 
 so loyal hitherto to the traditions of Umbrian art, to 
 its heavy weight of hieratic tradition, dealing still 
 somewhat conventionally with a limited, non-natural 
 matter — for Raphael to come from Siena, Perugia, 
 Urbino, to sharp-witted, practical, masterful Florence 
 was in immediate effect a transition from reverie to 
 realities — to a world of facts. Those masters of the 
 ideal were for him, in the first instance, masters also 
 of realism, as we .say. Henceforth, to the end, he 
 will be the analyst, the faithful reporter, in his work, 
 of what he sees . He will realise the function of style 
 
RAPHAEL 
 
 37 
 
 as exemplified in the practice of Da Vinci, face to 
 face with the world of nature and man as they are; 
 selecting from, asserting one’s self in a transcript of 
 its veritable data; like drawing to like there, in 
 obedience to the master’s preference for the embodi- 
 ment of the creative form within him. Portrait-art 
 had been nowhere in the school of Perugino, but it 
 was the triumph of the school of Florence. And here 
 a faithful analyst of what he sees, yet lifting it withal, 
 unconsciously, inevitably, recomposing, glorifying, 
 Raphael too becomes, of course, a painter of portraits. 
 We may foresee them already in masterly series, from 
 Maddalena Doni, a kind of younger, more virginal 
 sister of La Gioconda, to cardinals and popes — to that 
 most sensitive of all portraits, the “ Violin-player,” 
 if it be really his. But then, on the other hand, the 
 influence of such portraiture will be felt also in his 
 inventive work, in a certain reality there, a certain 
 convincing loyalty to experience and observation. 
 In his most elevated religious work he will still keep, 
 for security at least, close to nature, and the truth of 
 nature. His modelling of the visible surface is lovely 
 because he understands, can see the hidden causes of 
 momentary action in the face, the hands — how men 
 and animals are really made and kept alive. Set side 
 by side, then, with that portrait of Maddalena Doni, 
 as forming together a measure of what he has learned 
 at Florence, the “ Madonna del Gran Duca,” which 
 still remains there. Call it on revision, and without 
 hesitation, the loveliest of his Madonnas, perhaps of 
 all Madonnas; and let it stand as representative of 
 
38 
 
 RAPHAEL 
 
 as many as fifty or sixty types of that subject, onwards 
 to the Sixtine Madonna, in all the triumphancy of his 
 later days at Rome. Observe the veritable atmosphere 
 about it, the grand composition of the drapery, the 
 magic relief, the sweetness and dignity of the human 
 hands and faces, the noble tenderness of Mary’s 
 gesture, the unity of the thing with itself, the faultless 
 exclusion of all that does not belong to its main pur- 
 pose; it is like a single, simple axiomatic thought. 
 Note withal the novelty of its effect on the mind, and 
 you will see that this master of style (that’s a con- 
 summate example of what is meant by style) has been 
 still a willing scholar in the hands of Da Vinci. But 
 then, with what ease also, and simplicity, and a sort 
 of natural success not his ! 
 
 It was in his twenty-fifth year that Raphael came to 
 the city of the popes, Michelangelo being already in 
 high favour there. For the remaining years of his 
 life he paces the same streets with that grim artist, 
 who was so great a contrast with himself, and for the 
 first time his attitude towards a gift different from his 
 own is not that of a scholar, but that of a rival. If 
 he did not become the scholar of Michelangelo, it 
 would be difficult, on the other hand, to trace any- 
 where in Michelangelo’s work the counter influence 
 usual with those who had influenced him. It was as 
 if he desired to add to the strength of Michelangelo 
 that sweetness which at first sight seems to be wanting 
 there. Ex forti dulcedo : and in the study of Michel- 
 angelo certainly it is enjoyable to detect, if we may, 
 sweet savours amid the wonderful strength, the strange- 
 
RAPHAEL 
 
 39 
 
 ness and potency of what he pours forth for us : with 
 Raphael, conversely, something of a relief to find in 
 the suavity of that so softly moving, tuneful existence, 
 an assertion of strength. There was the promise of 
 it, as you remember, in his very look as he saw him- 
 self at eighteen; and you know that the lesson, the 
 prophecy of those holy women and children he has 
 made his own, is that “the meek shall possess.” So, 
 when we see him at Rome at last, in that atmosphere 
 of greatness, of the strong, he too is found putting 
 forth strength, adding that element in due proportion 
 to the mere sweetness and charm of his genius; yet a 
 sort of strength, after all, still congruous with the line 
 of development that genius has hitherto taken, the 
 special strength of the scholar and his proper reward, 
 a purely cerebral strength — the strength, the power 
 of an immense understanding. 
 
 Now the life of Raphael at Rome seems as we read 
 of it hasty and perplexed, full of undertakings, of 
 vast works not always to be completed, of almost 
 impossible demands on his industry, in a world of 
 breathless competition, amid a great company of 
 spectators, for great rewards. You seem to lose him, 
 feel he may have lost himself, in the multiplicity of 
 his engagements; might fancy that, wealthy, variously 
 decorated, a courtier, cardinal in petto , he was “serv- 
 ing tables.” But, you know, he was forcing into this-^ 
 brief space of years (he died at thirty-seven) more 
 than the natural business of the larger part of a long 
 life; and one way of getting some kind of clearness 
 into it, is to distinguish the various divergent outlooks 
 
40 
 
 RAPHAEL 
 
 or applications, and group the results of that immense 
 intelligence, that still untroubled, flawlessly operating, 
 completely informed understanding, that purely cere- 
 bral power, acting through his executive, inventive or 
 creative gifts, through the eye and the hand with its 
 command of visible colour and form. In that way 
 you may follow him along many various roads till 
 brain and eye and hand suddenly fail in the very 
 midst of his work — along many various roads, 
 but you can follow him along each of them dis- 
 tinctly. 
 
 At the end of one of them is the Galatea , and in 
 quite a different form of industry, the datum for the 
 beginnings of a great literary work of pure erudition. 
 Coming to the capital of Christendom, he comes also 
 for the first time under the full influence of the antique 
 world, pagan art, pagan life, and is henceforth an 
 enthusiastic archaeologist. On his first coming to 
 Rome a papal bull had authorised him to inspect all 
 ancient marbles, inscriptions, and the like, with a 
 view to their adaptation in new buildings then pro- 
 posed. A consequent close acquaintance with an- 
 tiquity, with the very touch of it, blossomed literally 
 in his brain, and, under his facile hand, in artistic 
 creations, of which the Galatea is indeed the con- 
 summation. But the frescoes of the Farnese palace, 
 with a hundred minor designs, find their place along 
 that line of his artistic activity; they do not exhaust 
 his knowledge of antiquity, his interest in and control 
 of it. The mere fragments of it that still cling to his 
 memory would have composed, had he lived longer, 
 
RAPHAEL 
 
 41 
 
 a monumental illustrated survey of the monuments of 
 ancient Rome. 
 
 To revive something of the proportionable spirit at 
 least of antique building in the architecture of the 
 present, came naturally to Raphael as the son of his 
 age; and at the end of another of those roads of 
 diverse activity stands Saint Peter’s, though unfin- 
 ished. What a proof again of that immense intelli- 
 gence, by which, as I said, the element of strength 
 supplemented the element of mere sweetness and 
 charm in his work, that at the age of thirty, known 
 hitherto only as a painter, at the dying request of the 
 venerable Bramante himself, he should have been 
 chosen to succeed him as the director of that vast 
 enterprise ! And if little in the great church, as we 
 see it, is directly due to him, yet we must not forget 
 that his work in the Vatican also was partly that of an 
 architect. In the Loggie, or open galleries of the 
 Vatican, the last and most delicate effects of Quattro- 
 cento taste come from his hand, in that peculiar 
 arabesque decoration which goes by his name. 
 
 Saint Peter’s, as you know, had an indirect con- 
 nexion with the Teutonic reformation. When Leo 
 X pushed so far the sale of indulgences to the over- 
 throw of Luther’s Catholicism, it was done after all 
 for the not entirely selfish purpose of providing funds 
 to build the metropolitan church of Christendom with 
 the assistance of Raphael; and yet, upon another of 
 those diverse outways of his so versatile intelligence, 
 at the close of which we behold his unfinished picture 
 of the Transfiguration, what has been called Raphael’s 
 
42 
 
 RAPHAEL 
 
 Bible finds its place — that series of biblical scenes in 
 the Loggie of the Vatican. And here, while he has 
 shown that he could do something of Michelangelo’s 
 work a little more soothingly than he, this graceful 
 Roman Catholic rivals also what is perhaps best in 
 the work of the rude German reformer — of Luther, 
 who came to Rome about this very time, to find 
 nothing admirable there. Place along with them the 
 Cartoons, and observe that in this phase of his artistic 
 labour, as Luther printed his vernacular German ver- 
 sion of the Scriptures, so Raphael is popularising 
 them for an even larger world; he brings the simple, 
 to their great delight, face to face with the Bible as 
 it is, in all its variety of incident, after they had so 
 long had to content themselves with but fragments of 
 it, as presented in the symbolism and in the brief 
 lections of the Liturgy: — Biblia Pauperum , in a 
 hundred forms of reproduction, though designed 
 for popes and princes. 
 
 But then, for the wise, at the end of yet another of 
 those divergent ways, glows his painted philosophy in 
 the Parnassus and the School of Athens , with their 
 numerous accessories. In the execution of those 
 works, of course, his antiquarian knowledge stood 
 him in good stead ; and here, above all, is the pledge 
 of his immense understanding, at work on its own 
 natural ground on a purely intellectual deposit, the 
 apprehension, the transmission to others of complex 
 and difficult ideas. We have here, in fact, the sort 
 of intelligence to be found in Lessing, in Herder, in 
 Hegel, in those who, by the instrumentality of an 
 
RAPHAEL 
 
 43 
 
 organised philosophic system, have comprehended in 
 one view or vision what poetry has been, or what 
 Greek philosophy, as great complex dynamic facts in 
 the world. But then, with the artist of the sixteenth 
 century, this synoptic intellectual power worked in 
 perfect identity with the pictorial imagination and a 
 magic hand. By him large theoretic conceptions 
 are addressed, so to speak, to the intelligence of the 
 eye. There had been efforts at such abstract or 
 theoretic painting before, or say rather, leagues 
 behind him. Modern efforts, again, we know, and 7 
 not in Germany alone, to do the like for that larger 
 survey of such matters which belongs to the philosophy 
 of our own century; but for one or many reasons they 
 have seemed only to prove the incapacity of philosophy 
 to be expressed in terms of art. They have seemed, 
 in short, so far, not fit to be seen literally — those 
 ideas of culture, religion, and the like. Yet Plato, 
 as you know, supposed a kind of visible loveliness 
 about ideas. Well! in Raphael, painted ideas, ^ 
 painted and visible philosophy, are for once as 
 beautiful as Plato thought they must be, if one truly 
 apprehended them. For note, above all, that with 
 all his wealth of antiquarian knowledge in detail, and 
 with a perfect technique, it is after all the beauty, 
 the grace of poetry, of pagan philosophy, of religious 
 faith that he thus records. 
 
 Of religious faith also. The Disputa , in which, 
 under the form of a council representative of all ages, 
 he embodies the idea of theology, divinarum rerum 
 notifia, as constantly resident in the Catholic Church, 
 
44 
 
 RAPHAEL 
 
 ranks with the “ Parnassus ” and the “ School of 
 Athens,” if it does not rather close another of his 
 long lines of intellectual travail — a series of compo- 
 sitions, partly symbolic, partly historical, in which the 
 “ Deliverance of St. Peter from Prison,” the “ Expul- 
 sion of the Huns,” and the “ Coronation of Charle- 
 magne,” find their places; and by which, painting 
 in the great official chambers of the Vatican, Raphael 
 asserts, interprets the power and charm of the Catholic 
 ideal as realised in history. A scholar, a student of 
 the visible world, of the natural man, yet even more 
 ardently of the books, the art, the life of the old 
 pagan world, the age of the Renaissance, through all 
 its varied activity, had, in spite of the weakened hold 
 of Catholicism on the critical intellect, been still 
 under its influence, the glow of it, as a religious 
 ideal, and in the presence of Raphael you cannot 
 think it a mere after-glow. Independently, that is, 
 of less or more evidence for it, the whole creed of 
 the Middle Age, as a scheme of the world as it should 
 be, as we should be glad to find it, was still welcome 
 to the heart, the imagination. Now, in Raphael, all 
 the various conditions of that age discover themselves 
 as characteristics of a vivid personal genius, which 
 may be said therefore to be conterminous with the 
 genius of the Renaissance itself. For him, then, in 
 the breadth of his immense cosmopolitan intelligence, 
 for Raphael, who had done in part the work of Luther 
 also, the Catholic Church — through all its phases, as 
 reflected in its visible local centre, the papacy — is 
 alive still as of old, one and continuous, and still true 
 
RAPHAEL 
 
 45 
 
 to itself. Ah ! what is local and visible, as you know, 
 counts for so much with the artistic temper ! 
 
 Old friends, or old foes with but new faces, events 
 repeating themselves, as his large, clear, synoptic 
 vision can detect, the invading King of France, Louis 
 XII, appears as Attila : Leo X as Leo I : and he thinks 
 of, he sees, at one and the same moment, the corona- 
 tion of Charlemagne and the interview of Pope Leo 
 with Francis I, as a dutiful son of the Church : of 
 the deliverance of Leo X from prison, and the deliv- 
 erance of St. Peter. 
 
 I have abstained from anything like description of 
 Raphael’s pictures in speaking of him and his work, 
 have aimed rather at preparing you to look at his 
 work for yourselves, by a sketch of his life, and 
 therein especially, as most appropriate to this place, 
 of Raphael as a scholar. And now if, in closing, I 
 commend one of his pictures in particular to your 
 imagination or memory, your purpose to see it, or see 
 it again, it will not be the Transfiguration nor the 
 Sixtine Madonna, nor even the “ Madonna del Gran 
 Duca,” but the picture we have in London — the 
 Ansidei, or Blenheim, Madonna. I find there, at 
 first sight, with something of the pleasure one has in 
 a proposition of Euclid, a sense of the power of the 
 understanding, in the economy with which he has 
 reduced his material to the simplest terms, has dis- 
 entangled and detached its various elements. He is 
 painting in Florence, but for Perugia, and sends it a 
 specimen of its own old art — Mary and the babe 
 enthroned, with St. Nicolas and the Baptist in atten- 
 
46 
 
 RAPHAEL 
 
 dance on either side. The kind of thing people there 
 had already seen so many times, but done better, in 
 a sense not to be measured by degrees, with a wholly 
 original freedom and life and grace, though he per- 
 haps is unaware, done better as a whole, because 
 better in every minute particular, than ever before. 
 The scrupulous scholar, aged twenty-three, is now 
 indeed a master; but still goes carefully. Note, 
 therefore, how much mere exclusion counts for in the 
 positive effect of his work. There is a saying that 
 the true artist is known best by what he omits. Yes, 
 because the whole question of good taste is involved 
 precisely in such jealous omission. Note this, for 
 instance, in the familiar Apennine background, with 
 its blue hills and brown towns, faultless, for once — 
 for once only — and observe, in the Umbrian pictures 
 around, how often such background is marred by 
 grotesque, natural, or architectural detail, by incon- 
 gruous or childish incident. In this cool, pearl-grey, 
 quiet place, where colour tells for double — the jew- 
 elled cope, the painted book in the hand of Mary, 
 the chaplet of red coral — one is reminded that among 
 all classical writers Raphael’s preference was for the 
 faultless Virgil. How orderly, how divinely clean 
 and sweet the flesh, the vesture, the floor, the earth 
 and sky ! Ah, say rather the hand, the method of the 
 painter ! There is an unmistakeable pledge of strength, 
 of movement and animation in the cast of the Bap- 
 tist’s countenance, but reserved, repressed. Strange, 
 Raphael has given him a staff of transparent crystal. 
 Keep then to that picture as the embodied formula 
 
RAPHAEL 
 
 47 
 
 of Raphael’s genius. Amid all he has here already 
 achieved, full, we may think, of the quiet assurance 
 of what is to come, his attitude is still that of the 
 scholar ; he seems still to be saying, before all things, 
 from first to last, “I am utterly purposed that I will 
 not offend.” 
 
PASCAL . 1 
 
 About the middle of the seventeenth century, two 
 opposite views of a question, upon which neither 
 Scripture, nor Council, nor Pope, had spoken with 
 authority — the question as to the amount of freedom 
 left to man by the overpowering work of divine grace 
 upon him — had seemed likely for a moment to divide 
 the Roman Church into two rival sects. In the 
 diocese of Paris, however, the controversy narrowed 
 itself into a mere personal quarrel between the Jesuit 
 Fathers and the religious community of Port-Royal, 
 and might have been forgotten but for the intervention 
 of a new writer in whom French literature made more 
 than a new step. It became at once, as if by a new 
 creation, what it has remained — a pattern of abso- 
 lutely unencumbered expressiveness. 
 
 In 1656 Pascal, then thirty-three years old, under 
 the form of “ Letters to a Provincial by one of his 
 Friends,” put forth a series of pamphlets in which 
 all that was vulnerable in the Jesuit Fathers was laid 
 bare to the profit of their opponents. At the moment 
 
 1 Published in the Contemporary Review , Feb. 1895, and now 
 reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors. 
 
 
PASCAL 
 
 49 
 
 the quarrel turned on the proposed censure of Antoine 
 Arnauld by the Sorbonne, by the University of Paris 
 as a religious body. Pascal, intimate, like many 
 another fine intellect of the day, with the Port- 
 Royalists, was Arnauld’ s friend, and it belonged to 
 the ardour of his genius, at least as he was then, to 
 be a very active friend. He took up the pen as other 
 chivalrous gentlemen of the day took up the sword, 
 and showed himself a master of the art of fence there- 
 with. His delicate exercise of himself with that 
 weapon was nothing less than a revelation to all the 
 world of the capabilities, the true genius of the French 
 language in prose. 
 
 Those who think of Pascal in his final sanctity, his 
 detachment of soul from all but the greatest matters, 
 may be surprised, when they turn to the “ Letters,” 
 to find him treating questions, as serious for the 
 friends he was defending as for their adversaries, 
 ironically, with a but half-veiled disdain for them, or 
 an affected humility at being unskilled in them and 
 no theologian. He does not allow us to forget that 
 he is, after all, a layman; while he introduces us, 
 almost avowedly, into a world of unmeaning terms, 
 and unreal distinctions and suppositions that can 
 never be verified. The world in general, indeed, se 
 paye des paroles . That saying belongs to Pascal, and 
 he uses it with reference to the Jesuits and their 
 favourite expression of “ sufficient grace.” In the 
 earliest “ Letters ” he creates in us a feeling that, how- 
 ever orthodox one’s intention, it is scarcely possible 
 to speak of the matters then so abundantly discussed 
 
 E 
 
50 
 
 PASCAL 
 
 by religious people without heresy at some unguarded 
 point. The suspected proposition of Arnauld, it is 
 admitted by one of his foes, “ would be Catholic in 
 the mouth of any one but M. Arnauld.” “ The truth,” 
 as it lay between Arnauld and his opponents, is a 
 thing so delicate that “ pour peu qu' on s' en retire , on 
 tombe dans V erreur ; mais cette erreur est si deliee , 
 que , pour peu qu' on s'en eloigne , on se trouve dans la 
 verite .” 
 
 Some, indeed, may find in the very delicacy, the 
 curiosity, with which such distinctions are drawn, by 
 Pascal’ s friends as well as by their foes, only the 
 impertinence, the profanities, of the theologian by 
 profession, all too intimate in laying down the law of 
 the things he deals with — the things “ which eye hath 
 not seen ” — pressing into the secrets of God’s sublime 
 commerce with men, in which, it may be, He differs 
 with every single human soul, by forms of thought 
 adapted from the poorest sort of men’s dealings with 
 each other, from the trader, or the attorney. Pascal 
 notes too the “ impious buffooneries” of his oppo- 
 nents. The good Fathers, perhaps, only meant them 
 to promote geniality of temper in the debate. But 
 of such failures — failures of taste, of respect towards 
 one’s own point of view — the world is ever unamiably 
 aware; and in the “ Letters” there is much to move 
 the self-complacent smile of the worldling, as Pascal 
 describes his experiences, while he went from one 
 authority to another to find out what was really meant 
 by the distinction between grace “ sufficient,” grace 
 “ efficacious,” grace “ active,” grace “ victorious.” 
 
PASCAL 
 
 51 
 
 He heard, for instance, that all men have sufficient 
 grace to do God’s will; but it is not always prochain , 
 not always at hand, at the moment of temptation to 
 do otherwise. So far, then, Pascal’s charges are those 
 which may seem to lie ready to hand against all who 
 study theology, a looseness of thought and language, 
 that would pass nowhere else, in making what are 
 professedly very fine distinctions; the insincerity 
 with which terms are carefully chosen to cover oppo- 
 site meanings; the fatuity with which opposite mean- 
 ings revolve into one another, in the strange vacuous 
 atmosphere generated by professional divines. 
 
 Up to this point, you see, Pascal is the countryman 
 of Rabelais and Montaigne, smiling with the fine 
 malice of the one, laughing outright with the gaiety 
 of the other, all the world joining in the laugh — well, 
 at the silliness of the clergy, who seem indeed not to 
 know their own business. It is we, the laity, he 
 would urge, who are serious, and disinterested, be- 
 cause sincerely interested, in these great questionings. 
 Jalousie de metier , the reader may suspect, has some- 
 thing to do with the professional leaders on both sides 
 of the controversy; but at the actual turn controversy 
 took just then, it was against the Jesuit Fathers that 
 Pascal’s charges came home in full force. And their 
 sin is above all that sin, unpardonable with men of 
 the world sans peur et sans reproche , of a lack of 
 self-respect, sins against pride, if the paradox may 
 be allowed, all the undignified faults, in a word, of 
 essentially little people when they interfere in great 
 matters — faults promoted in the direction of the 
 
52 
 
 PASCAL 
 
 ^ consciences of women and children, weak concessions 
 to weak people who want to be saved in some easy 
 way quite other than PascaPs high, fine, chivalrous 
 way of gaining salvation, an incapacity to say what 
 one thinks with the glove thrown down. He sup- 
 poses a Jansenist to turn upon his opponent who uses 
 the term “ sufficient” grace, while really meaning, as 
 he alleges, insufficient , with the words : “ Your explana- 
 tion would be odious to men of the world. They 
 speak more sincerely than you on matters of far less 
 importance than this.” With the world, Pascal, in 
 the “ Provincial Letters,” had immediate success. 
 “All the world,” we read in his friend’s supposed 
 reply to the second “Letter,” “sees them; all the 
 world understands them. Men of the world find them 
 agreeable, and even women intelligible.” A century 
 later Voltaire found them very agreeable. The spirit 
 in which Pascal deals with his opponents, his irony, 
 may remind us of the “Apology” of Socrates; the 
 style which secured them immediate access to people 
 who, as a rule, find the subjects there treated hope- 
 lessly dry, reminds us of the “Apologia ” of Newman. 
 
 The essence of all good style, whatever its accidents 
 may be, is expressiveness. It is mastered in proportion 
 to the justice, the nicety with which words balance 
 or match their meaning, and their writer succeeds in 
 saying what he wills, grave or gay, severe or florid, 
 
 - simple or complex. Pascal was a master of style 
 because, as his sister tells us, recording his earliest 
 years, he had a wonderful natural facility a dire ce 
 qu'il voulait en la ?naniere qu'il voulait . 
 
PASCAL 
 
 53 
 
 Facit indignatio versus . The indignation which 
 caused Pascal to write the “Letters” was of a super- 
 cilious kind, and what he willed to say in them led to 
 the development of all those qualities that are summed 
 up in the French term P esprit. Voltaire declared 
 that the best comedies of Moliere 7p ont pas plus de 
 sel que les premieres lettres . “ Vos maximes Pascal 
 
 assures the Jesuit Fathers, u ont je ne sais quoi de 
 divertissant , qui rejouit touj ours le monde ,” and they 
 lose nothing of that character in his handling of them, 
 so much so that it was clear from the first that the 
 world in general would never ask whether Pascal had 
 been quite fair to his opponents: “ PPetes-vous done 
 pas ridicules, mes Peres? QiP on satisfait au pre - 
 cepte d' ouir la messe en entendant quatre quarts de 
 messe a la fois de differents pretres / ” When you have 
 the like of that it is impossible not to laugh, parce 
 que rien n'y porte davantage qiPune disproportion 
 surprena?ite entre ce qiP on attend et ce qtP on voit . 
 
 He has “salt” also, of another kind. He drives 
 straight at the Jesuits, for instance, rather than at 
 those who do but copy them, because, as he tells us : 
 Les choses valent toujours mieux dans leur source . 
 What equity of expression, how brief, how untrans- 
 lateable ! And the “ Letters ” abound in such things. 
 
 But to his comparison of Pascal with Moliere, 
 Voltaire added that Bossuet n' a rien de plus sublime 
 que les dernier es . And in truth the more serious note 
 
 of the impassioned servant of religion whose lips 
 have been touched with altar-fire, whose seriousness 
 came to be like some incurable malady, a visitation 
 
54 
 
 PASCAL 
 
 of God, as people used to say, is presently struck 
 when, in the natural course of his argument, his 
 thoughts are carried, from a mere passage of arms 
 between one man or one class of men and another, 
 deep down to those awful encounters of the individual 
 soul with itself which are formulated in the eternal 
 problem of predestination. 
 
 In their doctrine of “ sufficient grace” the Jesuits 
 had presented a view of the conflict of good and evil 
 in the soul, which is honourable to God and encour- 
 aging to man, and which has catholicity on its face. 
 All to whom entrance into the Church, through its 
 formal ministries, lies open are truly called of God, 
 while beyond it stretches the ocean of “ His uncove- 
 nanted mercies.” That is a doctrine for the many, 
 for those whose position in the religious life is medi- 
 ocrity, who so far as themselves or others can discern 
 have nothing about them of eternal or necessary or 
 irresistible reprobation, or of the eternal condition 
 opposite to that. 
 
 The so-called Jansenist doctrine, on the other 
 hand, of [ ] but irresistible grace was the 
 
 appropriate view of the Port-Royalists, high-pitched, 
 eager souls as they were, and of their friend Pascal 
 himself, however much in his turn he might refine 
 upon it. Whether or not, as a matter of fact, upon 
 which, as distinct from matters of faith, an infallible 
 pope can be mistaken, the dreary old Dutch bishop 
 Jansenius had really taught Jansenism, the Port- 
 Royalists had found in his “ Augustinus ” an incentive 
 to devotion, and were avowedly his adherents. In 
 
PASCAL 
 
 55 
 
 that somewhat gloomy, that too deeply impressed, 
 that fanatical age, they were the Calvinists of the ' 
 Roman Catholic Church, maintaining, emphasising 
 in it a view, a tradition, really constant in it from 
 St. Augustin, from St. Paul himself. It is a merit of 
 Pascal, his literary merit, to have given a very fine- 
 toned expression to that doctrine, though mainly in 
 the way of a criticism of its opponents, to one side 
 or aspect of an eternal controversy, eternally sus- 
 pended, as representing two opposite aspects of ex- 
 perience itself. Calvin and Arminius, Jansen and 
 Molina sum up, in fact, respectively, like the respective 
 adherents of the freedom or of the necessity of the 
 human will, in the more general question of moral 
 philosophy, two opposed, two counter trains of phe- 
 nomena actually observable by us in human action, 
 too large and complex a matter, as it is, to be 
 embodied or summed up in any one single proposi- 
 tion or idea. 
 
 There are moments of one’s own life, aspects of the^' 
 life of others, of which the conclusion that the will is 
 free seems to be the only — is the natural or reasonable 
 — account. Yet those very moments on reflexion, on 
 second thoughts, present themselves again, as but 
 links in a chain, in an all-embracing network of 
 chains. In all education we assume, in some inex- 
 plicable combination, at once the freedom and the 
 necessity of the subject of it. And who on a survey 
 of life from outside would willingly lose the dra- 
 matic contrasts, the alternating interests, for which 
 the opposed ideas of freedom and necessity are our 
 
56 
 
 PASCAL 
 
 respective points of view? How significant become 
 the details we might otherwise pass by almost unob- 
 served, but to which we are put on the alert by the 
 abstract query whether a man be indeed a freeman or 
 a slave, as we watch from aside his devious course, 
 his struggles, his final tragedy or triumph. So much 
 value at least there may be in problems insoluble in 
 themselves, such as that great controversy of Pascal’s 
 day between Jesuit and Jansenist. And here again 
 who would forego, in the spectacle of the religious 
 history of the human soul, the aspects, the details 
 which the doctrines of universal and particular grace 
 respectively embody? The Jesuit doctrine of suf- 
 ficient grace is certainly, to use the familiar expres- 
 sion, a very pleasant doctrine conducive to the due 
 feeding of the whole flock of Christ, as being, as 
 assuming them to be, what they really are, at the 
 worst, God’s silly sheep. It has something in it 
 congruous with the rising of the physical sun on the 
 evil and on the good, while the wheat and the tares 
 grow naturally, peacefully together. But how pleasant 
 also the opposite doctrine, how true, how truly de- 
 scriptive of certain distinguished, magnifical, or elect 
 souls, vessels of election, epris des hauteurs , as we 
 see them pass across the world’s stage, as if led on 
 by a kind of thirst for God ! Its necessary counter- 
 part, of course, we may find, at least dramatically true 
 of some; we can name them in history, perhaps from 
 our own experience; souls of whom it seems but an 
 obvious story to tell that they seemed to be in love 
 with eternal death, to have borne on them from the 
 
PASCAL 
 
 57 
 
 first signs of reprobation. Of certain quite visibly 
 elect souls, at all events, the theory of irresistible grace 
 might seem the almost necessary explanation. Most 
 reasonable, most natural, most truly is it descriptive 
 of Pascal himself. 
 
 So far, indeed, up to the year 1656, Pascal’s annus 
 mirabilis , the year of the “ Letters,” the world had 
 been allowed to see only one side of him. Early in 
 life he had achieved brilliant overtures in the abstract 
 sciences, and, inheriting much of the quality of a fine 
 gentleman, he figures, with his trenchant manner, 
 never at a loss, as a quite secular person, stirred on 
 occasion to take part in a religious debate. But it is 
 after the grand fashion of the mundane quarrels of 
 that day, the age of the sentiment of personal honour, 
 in which it was so natural for the good-natured Jesuits, 
 stirring all Pascal’s satiric power, to excuse as well as 
 they could the act de tuer pour un simple medisance . 
 The Church was still an estate of the realm with all 
 the obligations of the noblesse , and it was still some- 
 thing worse than bad taste, it was dangerous to express 
 religious doubts. About the Catholic religion, as he 
 conceived it, Pascal displays the assured attitude of 
 an ancient Crusader. He has the full courage of his 
 opinions, and by his elegant easy gallantry in speaking 
 for it he gives to religion then and now a kind of 
 dignity it had lost with other controversialists in the 
 eyes of the world. There is abundant gaiety also in 
 the “ Letters.” He quotes from Tertullian to the 
 effect that c' est proprement a la verite qu'il appartient 
 de rire parce qid ell e est gaie , et de se jouer de ses 
 
58 
 
 PASCAL 
 
 ennemis parce qu' elle est as sure e de sa victorie. For 
 he could find quotations to his purpose from recondite 
 writers, though he was not a man of erudition; like 
 a man of the world again, he read little, but that 
 absorbingly, was the master of two authors, Epictetus 
 and Montaigne, and, as appeared afterwards, of the 
 Scriptures in the Vulgate. 
 
 So far, his imposing carriage of himself intellectu- 
 ally might lead us to suspect that the forced humilities 
 of his later years are indirectly a discovery of what 
 seems one leading quality of the natural man in him, 
 a pride that could be quite fierce on occasion. And, 
 like another rich young man whom Jesus loved, he 
 lacked nothing to make the world also love and con- 
 , fide in, as it already flattered, him. He turned from 
 it, decided to live a single life. Was it the mere 
 oddity of genius? Or its last fine dainty touch of 
 difference from ordinary people and their motives? 
 Or that sanctity of which, in some cases, the world 
 itself instinctively feels the distinction, though it 
 shrinks from the true explanation of it? Certainly, 
 all things considered, on the morrow of the “Letters,” 
 Blaise Pascal, at the age of thirty-three, had a brilliant 
 worldly future before him, had he cared duly to wait 
 upon, to serve it. To develop the already consider- 
 able position of his family among the gentry of 
 Auvergne would have been to follow the way of his 
 time, in which so many noble names had been founded 
 on professional talents. Increasingly, however, from 
 early youth, he had been the subject of a malady so 
 hopeless and inexplicable that in that superstitious 
 
PASCAL 
 
 59 
 
 age some fancied it the result of a malign spell in 
 infancy. Gradually, the world almost loses sight of 
 him, hears at last, some time after it had looked for 
 that event, that he had died, of course very piously, 
 among those sombre people, his friends and relations 
 of Port-Royal, with whom he had taken refuge, and 
 seemed already to have been buried alive. And in 
 the year 1670, not till eight years after his death, the 
 “Pensees ” appeared — “Pensees de M. Pascal sur la 
 Religion et sur quelques autres sujets ” — or rather a 
 selection from those “ Thoughts ” by the Port-Royal- 
 ists, still in fear of consequences to the struggling 
 Jansenist party, anxious to present Pascal’s doctrine 
 as far as possible in conformity with the Jesuit sense, 
 as also to divert the vaguer parts of it more entirely 
 into their own. The incomparable words were 
 altered, the order changed or lost, the thoughts them- 
 selves omitted or retrenched. Written in short inter- 
 vals of relief from suffering, they were contributions 
 to a large and methodical work — “ Pensees de M. 
 Pascal sur la Religion et sur quelques autres sujets” 
 — on a good many things besides, as the reader finds, 
 on many of the great things of this world which 
 seemed to him to come in contact or competition 
 with religion. In the true version of the “ Thoughts, ” 
 edited at last by Faugere, in 1844, from Pascal’s own 
 MSS., in the National Library, they group themselves 
 into certain definite trains of speculation and study. 
 But it is still, nevertheless, as isolated thoughts, as 
 inspirations, so to call them, penetrating what seemed 
 hopelessly dark, summarising what seemed hopelessly 
 
60 
 
 PASCAL 
 
 confused, sticking fast in men’s memories, floating 
 lightly, or going far, that they have left so deep a 
 mark in literature. For again the manner, also, their 
 style precisely becomes them. The merits of Pascal’s 
 style, indeed, as of the French language itself, still 
 is to say beaucoup de choses en peu de mots ; and the 
 brevity, the discerning edge, the impassioned concen- 
 tration of the language are here one with the ardent 
 immediate apprehensions of his spirit. 
 
 One of the literary merits of the “ Provincial 
 Letters” is that they are really like letters; they are 
 essentially a conversation by writing with other per- 
 / sons. What we have in the “ Thoughts” is the con- 
 versation of the writer with himself, with himself 
 and with God, or rather concerning Him, for He is, 
 in Pascal’s favourite phrase from the Vulgate, Deus 
 absconditus , He who never directly shows Himself. 
 Choses de coeur the “ Thoughts” are, indeed those of 
 an individual, though they seem to have determined 
 the very outlines of a great subject for all other per- 
 sons. In Pascal, at the summit of the Puy de Dome 
 in his native Auvergne, experimenting on the weight 
 of the invisible air, proving it to be ever all around 
 by its effects, we are presented with one of the more 
 pleasing aspects of his earlier, more wholesome, open- 
 air life. In the great work of which the “ Thoughts ” 
 are the first head, Pascal conceived himself to be 
 doing something of the same kind in the spiritual 
 order by a demonstration of this other invisible world 
 all around us, with its really ponderable forces, its 
 movement, its attractions and repulsions, the world 
 
PASCAL 
 
 61 
 
 of grace, unseen, but, as he thinks, the one only 
 hypothesis that can explain the experienced, admitted 
 facts. Whether or not he was fixing permanently in 
 the “Pensees” the outlines, the principles, of a great 
 system of assent, of conviction, for acceptance by the 
 intellect, he was certainly fixing these with all the 
 imaginative depth and sufficiency of Shakespeare 
 himself, the fancied opposites, the attitudes, the 
 necessary forms of TrdOos, of a great tragedy in the 
 heart, the soul, the essential human tragedy, as typical 
 and central in its expression here, as Hamlet — what 
 the soul passes, and must pass, through, aux abois 
 with nothingness, or with those offended mysterious 
 powers that may really occupy it — or when confronted 
 with the thought of what are called the “four last 
 things ” it yields this way or that. What might have 
 passed with all its fiery ways for an esprit de secte et 
 de cabale is now revealed amid the disputes not of a 
 single generation but of eternal ones, by the light of 
 a phenomenal storm of blinding and blasting inspira- 
 tions. 
 
 Observe, he is not a sceptic converted, a returned 
 infidel, but is seen there as if at the very centre of a 
 perpetually maintained tragic crisis holding the faith 
 steadfastly, but amid the well-poised points of essen- 
 tial doubt all around him and it. It is no mere calm 
 supersession of a state of doubt by a state of faith; 
 the doubts never die, they are only just kept down in 
 a perpetual agonia . Everywhere in the “Letters” 
 he had seemed so great a master — a master of himself 
 — never at a loss, taking the conflict so lightly, with 
 
62 
 
 PASCAL 
 
 so light a heart : in the great Atlantean travail of the 
 “Thoughts ” his feet sometimes “are almost gone.” 
 In his soul’s agony, theological abstractions seem to 
 become personal powers. It was as if just below the 
 surface of the green undulations, the stately woods, 
 of his own strange country of Auvergne, the volcanic 
 fires had suddenly discovered themselves anew. In 
 truth into his typical diagnosis, as it may seem, of 
 the tragedy of the human soul, there have passed not 
 merely the personal feelings, the temperament of an 
 individual, but his malady also, a physical malady. 
 Great genius, we know, has the power of elevating, 
 transmuting, serving itself by the accidental condi- 
 tions about it, however unpromising — poverty, and 
 the like. It was certainly so with Pascal’s long-con- 
 tinued physical sufferings. That aigreur , which is 
 part of the native colour of Pascal’s genius, is rein- 
 forced in the “Pensees” by insupportable languor, 
 alternating with supportable pain, as he died little 
 by little through the eight years of their composition. 
 They are essentially the utterance of a soul malade — 
 a soul of great genius, whose malady became a new 
 quality of that genius, perfecting it thus, by its very 
 defect, as a type on the intellectual stage, and thereby 
 guiding, reassuring sympathetically, manning by a 
 sense of good company that large class of persons who 
 are malade in the same way. “ La maladie est /’ etat 
 naturel des Chretiens ,” says Pascal himself. And we 
 concede that every one of us more or less is ailing 
 thus, as another has told us that life itself is a disease 
 of the spirit. 
 
PASCAL 
 
 63 
 
 From Port-Royal also came, about the year 1670, 
 a painful book, the “Life of Pascal,” a portrait 
 painted slowly from the life or living death, but with 
 an almost exclusive preference for traits expressive of 
 disease. The post-mortem examination of Pascal’s 
 brain revealed, we are now told, the secret, not 
 merely of that long prostration, those sudden passing 
 torments, but of something analogous to them in 
 Pascal’s genius and work. Well! the light cast 
 indirectly on the literary work of Pascal by Mme. 
 Perier’s “ Life ” is of a similar kind. It is a veritable 
 chapter in morbid pathology, though it may have 
 truly a beauty for experts, the beauty which belongs 
 to all refined cases even of cerebral disturbance. 
 That he should have sought relief from his singular 
 wretchedness, in that sombre company, is like the 
 second stroke of tragedy upon him. At moments 
 Pascal becomes almost a sectarian, and seems to pass 
 out of the genial broad heaven of the Catholic Church. 
 He had lent himself in those last years to a kind of 
 pieties which do not make a winning picture, which 
 always have about them, even when they show them- 
 selves in men physically strong, something of the 
 small compass of the sick-chamber. His medieval 
 or oriental self-tortures, all the painful efforts at 
 absolute detachment, a perverse asceticism taking all 
 there still was to spare from the denuded and suffering 
 body, might well, you may think, have died with 
 him, but are here recorded, chiefly by way of showing 
 the world, the Jesuits, that the Jansenists, too, had a 
 saint quite after their mind. 
 
64 
 
 PASCAL 
 
 But though, at first sight, you may find a pettiness 
 in those minute pieties, they have their signification 
 as a testimony to the wholeness of Pascal’s assent, 
 the entirety of his submission, his immense sincerity, 
 the heroic grandeur of his achieved faith. The 
 seventeenth century presents survivals of the gloomy 
 mental habits of the Middle Age, but for the most 
 part of a somewhat theatrical kind, imitations of 
 Francis and Dominic or of their earlier imitators. 
 In Pascal they are original, and have all their serious- 
 ness. Que je ri* en sois jamais separe — pas separe 
 eternellement , he repeats, or makes that strange sort 
 of MS. amulet, of which his sister tells us, repeat for 
 him. Cast me not away from Thy presence ; and take 
 7io t Thy Holy Spirit from me . It is table rase he is 
 trying to make of himself, that He might reign there 
 absolutely alone, who, however, as he was bound to 
 think, had made and blest all those things he declined 
 to accept. Deeper and deeper, then, he retreated 
 into the renuncient life. He could not, had he 
 wished, deprive himself of that his greatest gift — 
 literally a gift he might have thought it not to be 
 buried but acounted for — the gift of le beau dire , of 
 writing beautifully. “II avoit renonce depuis long- 
 temps aux sciences pureinent humainsT To him who 
 had known them so well, and as if by intuition, those 
 abstract and perdurable forms of service might well 
 have seemed a part of “the Lord’s doing, marvellous 
 in our eyes,” as his favourite Psalm cxix, the psalm 
 des petites heures , the cxviii of the Vulgate, says. 1 
 
 1 The words here cited are, however, from Psalm cxviii, the cxvii 
 of the Vulgate, and not from Pascal’s favourite Psalm. (C.L.S.) 
 
PASCAL 
 
 65 
 
 These, too, he counts now as but a variety of le neant 
 and vanity of things. He no longer records, there- 
 fore, the mathematical aperqus that may visit him; 
 and in his scruples, his suspicions of visible beauty, 
 he interests us as precisely an inversion of what is 
 called the aesthetic life. 
 
 Yet his faith, as in the days of the Middle Age, 
 had been supported, rewarded, by what he believed 
 to be visible miracle among the strange lights and 
 shades of that retired place. Pascal’s niece, the 
 daughter of Madame Perier, a girl ten years of age, 
 suffered from a disease of the eyes pronounced to be 
 incurable. The disease was a peculiarly distressing 
 one, the sort of affliction which, falling on a young 
 child, may lead one to question the presence of divine 
 justice in the world, makes one long that miracles 
 were possible. Well ! Pascal, for one, believed that 
 on occasion that profound aspiration had been fol- 
 lowed up by the power desired. A thorn from the 
 crown of Jesus, as was believed, had been lately 
 brought to the Port-Royal du Faubourg S. Jacques in 
 Paris, and was one day applied devoutly to the eye of 
 the suffering child. What followed was an immediate 
 and complete cure, fully attested by experts. Ah / 
 Thou hast given him his heart' s desire : and hast not 
 denied him the request of his lips . Pascal, and tho' 
 young girl herself, faithfully to the end of a long life, 
 believed the circumstances to have been miraculous. 
 Otherwise, we do not see that Pascal was ever per- 
 mitted to enjoy (so to speak) the religion for which 
 he had exchanged so much; that the sense of accept- 
 
66 
 
 PASCAL 
 
 ance, of assurance, had come to him; that for him 
 the Spouse had ever penetrated the veil of the ordinary 
 routine of the means of grace; nothing that corre- 
 sponded as a matter of clear personal intercourse of 
 the very senses to the greatness of his surrender — 
 who had emptied himself of all other things. Besides, 
 there was some not wholly-explained delay in his 
 reception, in those his last days, of the Sacrament. 
 It was brought to him just in time — “ Void celui que 
 vous avez tant desire ” — the ministrant says to the 
 dying man. Pascal was then aged thirty-nine — an 
 age you may remember fancifully noted as fatal to 
 genius. 
 
 PascaPs “ Thoughts,” then, we shall not rightly 
 measure but as the outcome, the utterance, of a soul 
 diseased, a soul permanently ill at ease. We find in 
 their constant tension something of insomnia, of that 
 sleeplessness which can never be a quite healthful 
 condition of mind in a human body. Sometimes 
 they are cries, cries of obscure pain rather than 
 thoughts — those great fine sayings which seem to 
 betray by their depth of sound the vast unseen hollow 
 places of nature, of humanity, just beneath one’s feet 
 or at one’s side. Reading them, so modern still are 
 those thoughts, so rich and various in suggestion, that 
 one seems to witness the mental seed-sowing of the 
 next two centuries, and perhaps more, as to those 
 matters with which he concerns himself. Intuitions 
 of a religious genius, they may well be taken also as 
 the final considerations of the natural man, as a 
 religious inquirer on doubt and faith, and their place 
 
PASCAL 
 
 67 
 
 in things. Listen now to some of these “ Thoughts ” 
 taken at random : taken at first for their brevity. 
 Peu de chose nous console , parce que peu de chose nous 
 afflige . Par V espace Punivers me comprend et m’en- 
 gloutit comme un point : par la pensee je le comprends . 
 Things like these put us en route with Pascal. Toutes 
 les bonnes maximes sont dans le monde : on ne manque 
 que de les appliquer . The great ascetic was always 
 hard on amusements, on mere pastimes : Le divertis- 
 sement nous amuse , one and all of us, et nous fait 
 arriver insensiblement a la mort . Nous perdons encore 
 la vie avec joie , pourvu qu’ on en parle . On ne pent 
 faire une bonne physionomie (in a portrait) qu’en 
 accordant toutes nos contrarieties . L’homme n’est 
 qu’un roseau , le plus foible de la nature , mais Pest un 
 roseau pens ant. II ne faut pas que Punivers entier 
 s’ arme pour P e eraser. Une vapeur , une goutte d’ eau, 
 
 suffit pour le tuer. Mais quand Punivers P ecraseroit, 
 l’homme seroit encore plus noble que pe qui le tue , parce 
 qu’il salt qu’il meurt , et P avantage que Punivers a sur 
 lui, Punivers n’ en sait rien. It is not thought by 
 which that excels, but the convincing force of imagi- 
 nation which sublimates its very triteness. Toute 
 notre dignite consiste done en la pensee. 
 
 There, then, you have at random the sort of stuff of 
 which the “Pensees” are made. Let me now briefly 
 indicate, also by quotation again, some of the main 
 leading tendencies in them. La chose la plus impor- 
 tante a toute la vie e’est la choix du metier : le hasard 
 en dispose. There we recognise the manner of thought 
 of Montaigne. Now one of the leading interests in 
 
68 
 
 PASCAL 
 
 the study of Pascal is to trace the influence upon 
 him of the typical sceptic of the preceding century. 
 Pascal’s “ Thoughts ” we shall never understand unless 
 we realise the under-texture in them of Montaigne’s 
 very phrases, the fascination the “ Essays ” had for 
 Pascal in his capacity of one of the children of light, 
 as giving a veritable compte 1 'endu of the Satanic 
 course of this world since the Fall, set forth with 
 all the persuasiveness, the power and charm, all the 
 gifts of Satan, the veritable light on things he has 
 at his disposal. 
 
 Pascal re-echoes Montaigne then in asserting the 
 paradoxical character of man and his experience. 
 The old headings under which the Port-Royalist 
 editors grouped the “ Thoughts ” recall the titles of 
 Montaigne’s “ Essays” — “Of the Disproportion of 
 Man,” and the like. As strongly as Montaigne he 
 delights in asserting the relative, local, ephemeral 
 and merely provisional character of our ideas of 
 law, vice, virtue, happiness, and so forth. Comme la 
 mode fait /’ agrement anssi fait-elle la justice . La 
 justice et la verite sont deux pointes si subtiles , que 
 nos instruments sont trop mousses pour y toucher 
 exactement . Bien suivant la seule raison n'est juste 
 de soi : tout branle avec le temps . Sometimes he 
 strikes the express accent cf Montaigne: Ceux qui 
 sont dans un vaisseau croient que ceux qui sont au 
 bord fuient . I,e langage est pareil de tous cotes. 11 
 faut avoir un point fixe pour en juger . Le port juge 
 ceux qui sont dans un vaisseau , mais ou prendrons- 
 nous un port dans la morale ? At times he seems to 
 
PASCAL 
 
 69 
 
 forget that he himself and Montaigne are after all not 
 of the same flock, as his mind grazes in those pleasant 
 places. Qu'il (man) se regarde comme egare dans ce 
 canton detourne de la nature , et de ce petit cachot ou it 
 se trouve loge , qidil apprenne the earth, et soi-meme d 
 son juste prix . II faudrait avoir une regie . La raison 
 s' off re, mais elle est ploy able a tous sens ; et ainsi il 
 n'y en a point. Un me me sens change selon les paroles 
 
 qui V expriment. He has touches even of what he 
 calls the malignity, the malign irony of Montaigne. 
 Rien que la mediocrite ri* est bon , he says, — epris des 
 hauteurs , as he so conspicuously was — C est sortir 
 de P humanite que de sortir du milieu ; la grandeur de 
 P ame humaine consiste a savoir s'y tenir. Rien ne 
 fortijie plus le pyrrhonisme — that is ever his word for 
 scepticism — que ce qu'il y en a qui ne sont pas pyr- 
 rlioniens : si tous etaient its auraient tort. You may 
 even credit him, like Montaigne, with a somewhat 
 Satanic intimacy with the ways, the cruel ways, the 
 weakness, lachete , of the human heart, so that, as he 
 says of Montaigne, himself too might be a pernicious 
 study for those who have a native tendency to cor- 
 ruption. 
 
 The paradoxical condition of the world, the natural 
 inconsistency of man, his strange blending of mean- 
 ness with ancient greatness, the caprices of his status 
 here, of his power and attainments, in the issue of 
 his existence — that is what the study of Montaigne 
 had enforced on Pascal as the sincere compte rendu 
 of experience. But then he passes at a tangent from 
 the circle of the great sceptic’s apprehension. That 
 
70 
 
 PASCAL 
 
 prospect of man and the world , undulant, capricious, 
 inconsistent, contemptible, lache , full of contradic- 
 tion, with a soul of evil in things good, irreducible 
 to law, upon which, after all, Montaigne looks out 
 with a complacency so entire, fills Pascal with terror. 
 It is the world on the morrow of a great catastrophe, 
 the casual forces of which have by no means spent 
 themselves. Yesl this world we see, of which we 
 are a part, with its thousand dislocations, is precisely 
 what we might expect as resultant from the Fall of 
 Man, with consequences in full working still. It 
 presents the appropriate aspect of a lost world, though 
 with beams of redeeming grace about it, those, too, 
 distributed somewhat capriciously to chosen people 
 and elect souls, who, after all, can have but an ill 
 time of it here. Under the tragic eclairs of divine 
 wrath essentially implacable, the gently pleasantly 
 undulating, sunny, earthly prospect of poor loveable 
 humanity which opens out for one in Montaigne’s 
 Essays,” becomes for Pascal a scene of harsh preci- 
 pices, of threatening heights and depths — the depths 
 of his own nothingness. Vanity: nothingness: these 
 are his catchwords: Nous sommes incapables et die 
 V7'ai et du bien ; nous sommes tons condamnes . Ce 
 
 qui y parait (i.e., what we see in the world) ne 7narque 
 ni une exclusion totale ni une presence manifeste de 
 divinite , mais la presence d'un Dieu qui se cache : 
 (Dens absconditus, that is a recurrent favourite thought 
 of his) tout porte ce caractere . In this world of 
 abysmal dilemmas, he is ready to push all things to 
 their extremes. All or nothing; for him real morality 
 
PASCAL 
 
 71 
 
 will be nothing short of sanctity. En Jesus Christ 
 toutes les contradictions sont ac cor dees. Yet what 
 difficulties again in the religion of Christ! Nulle 
 autre religion ri* a propose de se hair . La seule religion 
 contraire a la nature , contraire au sens commun , est 
 la seule qui ait toujours ete. 
 
 Multitudes in every generation have felt at least'' 
 the aesthetic charm of the rites of the Catholic Church. 
 For Pascal, on the other hand, a certain weariness, a 
 certain puerility, a certain unprofitableness in them 
 is but an extra trial of faith. He seems to have little 
 sense of the beauty of holiness. And for his sombre, 
 trenchant, precipitous philosophy there could be no 
 middle terms; irresistible election, irresistible repro- 
 bation; only sometimes extremes meet, and again it 
 may be the trial of faith that the justified seem as 
 loveless and unlovely as the reprobate. Abetissez- 
 vous / A nature, you may think, that would magnify 
 things to the utmost, nurse, expand them beyond 
 their natural bounds by his reflex action upon them. 
 Thus revelation is to be received on evidence, indeed, 
 but an evidence conclusive only on a presupposition 
 or series of presuppositions, evidence that is supple- 
 mented by an act of imagination, or by the grace of 
 faith, shall we say? At any rate, the fact is, that the 
 genius of the great reasoner, of this great master of 
 the abstract and deductive sciences, turned theologian, 
 carrying the methods of thought there formed into the 
 things of faith, was after all of the imaginative order. 
 Now hear what he says of imagination: Cette faculte 
 trompeuse , qui semble nous etre donnee expres pour nous 
 
72 
 
 PASCAL 
 
 induire a une erreur necessaire . That has a sort of 
 necessity in it. What he says has again the air of 
 Montaigne, and he says much of the same kind : Cette 
 superbe puissance ennemie de la raison , combien toutes 
 les richesses de la terre sont insuffisantes sans son 
 consentement. The imagination has the disposition 
 of all things : Elle fait la be ante, la justice , et le bon- 
 heur , qui est le tout du monde . Li imagination dispose 
 de tout . And what we have here to note is its ex- 
 traordinary power in himself. Strong in him as the 
 reasoning faculty, so to speak, it administered the 
 reasoning faculty in him a son gre ; but he was unaware 
 of it, that power d' autant plus fourbe qu' elle ne Vest 
 pas toujours . Hidden under the apparent rigidity 
 of his favourite studies, imagination, even in them, 
 played a large part. Physics, mathematics were with 
 him largely matters of intuition, anticipation, preco- 
 cious discovery, short cuts, superb guessing. It was 
 the inventive element in his work and his way of 
 putting things that surprised those best able to judge. 
 He might have discovered the mathematical sciences 
 for himself, it is alleged, had his father, as he once 
 had a mind to do, withheld him from instruction 
 in them. 
 
 About the time when he was bidding adieu to the 
 world, Pascal had an accident. As he drove round a 
 corner on the Seine side to cross the bridge at Neuilly, 
 the horses were precipitated down the bank into the 
 water. Pascal escaped, but with a nervous shock, a 
 certain hallucination, from which he never recovered. 
 As he walked or sat he was apt to perceive a yawning 
 
PASCAL 
 
 73 
 
 depth beside him; would set stick or chair there to 
 reassure himself. We are now told, indeed, that that 
 circumstance has been greatly exaggerated. But how 
 true to Pascal’s temper, as revealed in his work, that 
 alarmed precipitous character in it! Intellectually 
 the abyss was evermore at his side. Nous avons , he 
 observes, un autre principe d' erreur, les maladies . 
 Now in him the imagination itself was like a physical 
 malady, troubling, disturbing, or in active collusion 
 with it. o . . 
 
ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY . 1 
 
 Titian, as we see him in what some have thought 
 his noblest work, the large altar-piece, dated 1522, 
 his forty-fifth year, of SS. Nazaro e Celso, at Brescia, 
 is certainly a religious — a great, religious painter. 
 The famous Gabriel of the Annunciation, aflight, in 
 all the effortless energy of an angel indeed, and 
 Sebastian, adapted, it was said, from an ancient 
 statue, yet as novel in design as if Titian had been the 
 first to handle that so familiar figure in old religious 
 art — may represent for us a vast and varied amount 
 of work — in which he expands to their utmost artistic 
 compass the earlier religious dreams of Mantegna and 
 the Bellini, affording sufficient proof how sacred 
 themes could rouse his imagination, and all his 
 manual skill, to heroic efforts. But he is also the 
 painter of the Venus of the Tribune and the Triumph 
 of Bacchus ; and such frank acceptance of the volup- 
 tuous paganism of the Renaissance, the motive of a 
 large proportion of his work, might make us think 
 that religion, grandly dramatic as was his conception 
 
 1 Published in the New Review , Nov. 1890, and now reprinted 
 by the kind permission of the proprietors. 
 
 74 
 
ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 
 
 75 
 
 of it, can have been for him only one of many pic- 
 torial attitudes. There are however painters of that 
 date who, while their work is great enough to be 
 connected (perhaps groundlessly) with Titian’s per- 
 sonal influence, or directly attributed to his hand, 
 possess at least this psychological interest, that about 
 their religiousness there can be no question. Their 
 work is to be looked for mainly in and about the two 
 sub-alpine towns of Brescia and Bergamo; in the 
 former of which it becomes definable as a school — 
 the school of Moretto, in whom the perfected art of 
 the later Renaissance is to be seen in union with a 
 Catholicism as convinced, towards the middle of the 
 sixteenth century, as that of Giotto or Angelico. 
 
 Moretto of Brescia, for instance, is one of the few 
 painters who have fully understood the artistic oppor- 
 tunities of the subject of Saint Paul, for whom, for 
 the most part, art has found only the conventional 
 trappings of a Roman soldier (a soldier, as being in 
 charge of those prisoners to Damascus), or a some- 
 what common-place old age. Moretto also makes 
 him a nobly accoutred soldier — the rim of the hel- 
 met, thrown backward in his fall to the earth, rings 
 the head already with a faint circle of glory — but a 
 soldier still in possession of all those resources of 
 unspoiled youth which he is ready to offer in a 
 moment to the truth that has just dawned visibly upon 
 him. The terrified horse, very grandly designed, 
 leaps high against the suddenly darkened sky above 
 the distant horizon of Damascus, with all Moretto’ s 
 peculiar understanding of the power of black and 
 
76 
 
 ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 
 
 white. But what signs the picture inalienably as 
 Moretto’s own is the thought of the saint himself, at 
 the moment of his recovery from the stroke of Heaven. 
 The pure, pale, beardless face, in noble profile, might 
 have had for its immediate model some military monk 
 of a later age, yet it breathes all the joy and confi- 
 dence of the Apostle who knows in a single flash of 
 time that he has found the veritable captain of his 
 soul. It is indeed the Paul whose genius of convic- 
 tion has so greatly moved the minds of men — the 
 soldier who, bringing his prisoners “ bound to Damas- 
 cus,” is become the soldier of Jesus Christ. 
 
 Moretto’s picture has found its place (in a dark 
 recess, alas!) in the Church of Santa Maria presso 
 San Celso , in the suburbs of Milan, hard by the site 
 of the old Roman cemetery, where Ambrose, at a 
 moment when in one of his many conflicts a “sign” 
 was needed, found the bodies of Nazarus and Celsus, 
 youthful patrician martyrs in the reign of Nero, over- 
 flowing now with miraculous powers, their blood still 
 fresh upon them — conspersa recenti sanguine . The 
 body of Saint Nazarus he removed into the city: that 
 of Saint Celsus remained within the little sanctuary 
 which still bears his name, and beside which, in the 
 fifteenth century, arose the glorious Church of the 
 Madonna, with spacious atrium after the Ambrosian 
 manner, a facade richly sculptured in the style of the 
 Renaissance, and sumptuously adorned within. Be- 
 hind the massive silver tabernacle of the altar of the 
 miraculous picture which gave its origin to this 
 splendid building, the rare visitor, peeping as into 
 
ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 
 
 77 
 
 some sacred bird-nest, detects one of the loveliest 
 works of Luini, a small, but exquisitely finished 
 “Holy Family.” Among the fine pictures around are 
 works by two other very notable religious painters of 
 the cinque- cento. Both alike, Ferrari and Borgognone, 
 may seem to have introduced into fiery Italian lati- 
 tudes a certain northern temperature, and somewhat 
 twilight, French, or Flemish, or German, thoughts. 
 Ferrari, coming from the neighbourhood of Varallo, 
 after work at Vercelli and Novara, returns thither to 
 labour, as both sculptor and painter, in the “ stations ” 
 of the Sacro Monte , at a form of religious art which 
 would seem to have some natural kinship with the 
 temper of a mountain people. It is as if the living 
 actors in the “ Passion Play” of Oberammergau had 
 been transformed into almost illusive groups in painted 
 terra-cotta . The scenes of the Last Supper, of the 
 Martyrdom of the Innocents, of the Raising of Jairus’ 
 daughter, for instance, are certainly touching in the 
 naive piety of their life-sized realism. But Gaudenzio 
 Ferrari had many helpmates at the Sacro Monte ; and 
 his lovelier work is in the Franciscan Church at the 
 foot of the hill, and in those two, truly Italian, far-off 
 towns of the Lombard plain. Even in his great, 
 many-storied fresco in the Franciscan Church at 
 Varallo there are traces of a somewhat barbaric hank- 
 ering after solid form; the armour of the Roman 
 soldiers, for example, is raised and gilt. It is as if 
 this serious soul, going back to his mountain home, 
 had lapsed again into mountain “ grotesque,” with 
 touches also, in truth, of a peculiarly northern poetry 
 
78 
 
 ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 
 
 — a mystic poetry, which now and again, in his treat- 
 ment, for instance, of angel forms and faces, reminds 
 one of Blake. There is something of it certainly in 
 the little white spectral soul of the penitent thief 
 making its escape from the dishonoured body along 
 the beam of his cross. 
 
 The contrast is a vigorous one when, in the space 
 of a few hours, the traveller finds himself at Vercelli, 
 half-stifled in its thick pressing crop of pumpkins and 
 mulberry trees. The expression of the prophet occurs 
 to him: “A lodge in a garden of cucumbers.” 
 Garden of cucumbers and half-tropical flowers, it has 
 invaded the quiet open spaces of the town. Search 
 through them, through the almost cloistral streets, 
 for the Church of the Umiliati; and there, amid the 
 soft garden-shadows of the choir, you may find the 
 sentiment of the neighbourhood expressed with great 
 refinement in what is perhaps the masterpiece of 
 Ferrari, “ Our Lady of the Fruit-garden,” as we might 
 say — attended by twelve life-sized saints and the 
 monkish donors of the picture. The remarkable 
 proportions of the tall panel, up which the green- 
 stuff is climbing thickly above the mitres and sacred 
 garniture of those sacred personages, lend themselves 
 harmoniously to the gigantic stature of Saint Christo- 
 pher in the foreground as the patron saint of the 
 church. With the savour of this picture in his 
 memory, the visitor will look eagerly in some half- 
 dozen neighbouring churches and deserted conventual 
 places for certain other works from Ferrari’s hand; 
 and so, leaving the place under the influence of his 
 
ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 
 
 79 
 
 delicate religious ideal, may seem to have been 
 listening to much exquisite church-music there, vio- 
 lins and the like, on that perfectly silent afternoon 
 — such music as he may still really hear on Sundays 
 at the neighbouring town of Novara, famed for it 
 from of old. Here, again, the art of Gaudenzio 
 Ferrari reigns. Gaudenzio! It is the name of the 
 saintly prelate on whom his pencil was many times 
 employed, First Bishop of Novara, and patron of the 
 magnificent basilica hard by which still covers his 
 body, whose earthly presence in cope and mitre 
 Ferrari has commemorated in the altar-piece of the 
 “Marriage of St. Catherine,” with its refined richness 
 of colour, like a bank of real flowers blooming there, 
 and like nothing else around it in the vast duomo of 
 old Roman architecture, now heavily masked in 
 modern stucco. The solemn mountains, under the 
 closer shadow of which his genius put on a northern 
 hue, are far away, telling at Novara only as the 
 grandly theatrical background to an entirely lowland 
 life. And here, as at Vercelli so at Novara, Ferrari 
 is not less graciously Italian than Luini himself. 
 
 If the name of Luini ’s master, Borgognone, is no 
 proof of northern extraction, a northern temper is 
 nevertheless a marked element of his genius — some- 
 thing of the patience , especially, of the masters of 
 Dijon or Bruges, nowhere more clearly than in the 
 two groups of male and female heads in the National 
 Gallery, family groups, painted in the attitude of 
 worship, with a lowly religious sincerity which may 
 remind us of the contemporary work of M. Legros 
 
80 
 
 ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 
 
 Like those northern masters, he accepts piously, but 
 can refine, what “has no comeliness.” And yet per- 
 haps no painter has so adequately presented that 
 purely personal beauty (for which, indeed, even 
 profane painters for the most part have seemed to 
 care very little) as Borgognone in the two deacons, 
 Stephen and Laurence, who, in one of the altar-pieces 
 of the Certosa, assist at the throne of Syrus, ancient, 
 sainted, First Bishop of Pavia — stately youths in 
 quite imperial dalmatics of black and gold. An 
 indefatigable worker at many forms of religious art, 
 here and elsewhere, assisting at last in the carving 
 and inlaying of the rich marble fagade of the Certosa, 
 the rich carved and inlaid woodwork of Santa Maria 
 at Bergamo, he is seen perhaps at his best, certainly 
 in his most significantly religious mood, in the Church 
 of the Incoronata at Lodi, especially in one picture 
 there, the “Presentation of Christ in the Temple.” 
 The experienced visitor knows what to expect in the 
 sacristies of the great Italian churches; the smaller, 
 choicer works of Luini, say, of Della Robbia or Mino 
 of Fiesole, the superb ambries and drawers and 
 presses of old oak or cedar, the still untouched morsel 
 of fresco — like sacred priestly thoughts visibly lin- 
 gering there in the half-light. Well ! the little 
 octagonal Church of the Incoronata is like one of 
 these sacristies. The work of Bramante- — you see 
 it, as it is so rarely one’s luck to do, with its furniture 
 and internal decoration complete and unchanged, 
 the coloured pavement, the colouring which covers 
 the walls, the elegant little organ of Domenico da 
 
ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 
 
 81 
 
 Lucca (1507), the altar-screens with their dainty rows 
 of brass cherubs. In Borgognone’s picture of the 
 u Presentation,” there the place is, essentially as we 
 see it to-day. The ceremony, invested with all the 
 sentiment of a Christian sacrament, takes place in this 
 very church, this “ Temple ” of the Incoronata where 
 you are standing, reflected on the dimly glorious wall, 
 as in a mirror. Borgognone in his picture has but 
 added in long legend, letter by letter, on the fascia 
 below the cupola, the Song of Simeon. 
 
 The Incoronata however is, after all, the monument 
 less of Ambrogio Borgognone than of the gifted Piazza 
 family : — Callisto, himself born at Lodi, his father, 
 his uncle, his brothers, his son Fulvio, working there 
 in three generations, under marked religious influ- 
 ence, and with so much power and grace that, quite 
 gratuitously, portions of their work have been attrib- 
 uted to the master-hand of Titian, in some imaginary 
 visit here to these painters, who were in truth the 
 disciples of another — Romanino of Brescia. At 
 Lodi, the lustre of Scipione Piazza is lost in that of 
 Callisto, his elder brother; but he might worthily be 
 included in a list of painters memorable for a single 
 picture, such pictures as the solemn Madonna of 
 Pierino del Vaga, in the Duomo of Pisa, or the Holy 
 Family of Pellegrino Piola, in the Goldsmiths’ Street 
 at Genoa. A single picture, a single figure in a 
 picture, signed and dated, over the altar of Saint 
 Clement, in the Church of San Spirito, at Bergamo, 
 might preserve the fame of Scipione Piazza, who did 
 not live to be old. The figure is that of the youthful 
 
 G 
 
82 
 
 ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 
 
 Clement of Rome himself, “ who had seen the blessed 
 Apostles,” writing at the dictation of Saint Paul. 
 For a moment he looks away from the letters of the 
 book with all the wistful intelligence of a boy softly 
 touched already by the radiancy of the celestial Wis- 
 dom. “Her ways are ways of pleasantness! ” That 
 is the lesson this winsome, docile, spotless creature 
 — ingenui vultus pner ingenuique pudoris — younger 
 brother or cousin of Borgognone’s noble deacons at 
 the Certosa — seems put there to teach us. And in 
 this church, indeed, as it happens, Scipione’s work 
 is side by side with work of his. 
 
 It is here, in fact, at Bergamo and at Brescia, that 
 the late survival of a really convinced religious spirit 
 becomes a striking fact in the history of Italian art. 
 Vercelli and Novara, though famous for their moun- 
 tain neighbourhood, enjoy but a distant and occasional 
 view of Monte Rosa and its companions; and even 
 then those awful stairways to tracts of airy sunlight 
 may seem hardly real. But the beauty of the twin 
 sub-alpine towns further eastward is shaped by the 
 circumstance that mountain and plain meet almost 
 in their streets, very effectively for all purposes of the 
 picturesque. Brescia, immediately below the “ Fal- 
 con of Lombardy ” (so they called its masterful 
 fortress on the last ledge of the Pie di Monte), to 
 which you may now ascend by gentle turfed paths, to 
 watch the purple mystery of evening mount gradually 
 from the great plain up the mountain-walls close at 
 hand, is as level as a church pavement, home-like, 
 with a kind of easy walking from point to point about 
 
ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 
 
 83 
 
 it, rare in Italian towns — a town full of walled gar- 
 dens, giving even to its smaller habitations the retire- 
 ment of their more sumptuous neighbours, and a 
 certain English air. You may peep into them, pacing 
 its broad streets, from the blaze of which you are 
 glad to escape into the dim and sometimes gloomy 
 churches, the twilight sacristies, rich with carved and 
 coloured woodwork. The art of Romanino still lights 
 up one of the darkest of those churches with the 
 altar-piece which is perhaps his most expressive and 
 noblest work. The veritable blue sky itself seems 
 to be breaking into the dark-cornered, low-vaulted, 
 Gothic sanctuary of the Barefoot Brethren, around 
 the Virgin and Child, the bowed, adoring figures 
 of Bonaventura, Saint Francis, Saint Antony, the 
 youthful majesty of Saint Louis, to keep for ever 
 in memory — not the King of France however, in 
 spite of the fleurs-de-lys on his cope of azure, but 
 Louis, Bishop of Toulouse. A Rubens in Italy ! you 
 may think, if you care to rove from the delightful 
 fact before you after vague supposititious alliances 
 — something between Titian and Rubens ! Certainly, 
 Romanino’ s bold, contrasted colouring anticipates 
 something of the northern freshness of Rubens. But 
 while the peculiarity of the work of Rubens is a sense 
 of momentary transition, as if the colours were even 
 now melting in it, Romanino’ s canvas bears rather 
 the steady glory of broad Italian noonday; while he 
 is distinguished also for a remarkable clearness of 
 design, which has perhaps something to do, is cer- 
 tainly congruous with, a markedly religious sentiment. 
 
84 
 
 ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 
 
 like that of Angelico or Perugino, lingering still in 
 the soul of this Brescian painter towards the middle 
 of the sixteenth century. 
 
 Romanino and Moretto, the two great masters of 
 Brescia in successive generations, both alike inspired 
 above all else by the majesty, the majestic beauty, of 
 religion — its persons, its events, every circumstance 
 that belongs to it — are to be seen in friendly rivalry, 
 though with ten years’ difference of age between 
 them, in the Church of San Giovanni Evangelista; 
 Romanino approaching there, as near as he might, 
 in a certain candle-lighted scene, to that harmony 
 in black, white, and grey preferred by the younger 
 painter. Before this or that example of Moretto 5 s 
 work, in that admirably composed picture of Saint 
 Paul’s Conversion, for instance, you might think of 
 him as but a very noble designer in grisaille . A 
 more detailed study would convince you that, what- 
 ever its component elements, there is a very complex 
 tone which almost exclusively belongs to him; the 
 “ Saint Ursula ” finally, that he is a great, though very 
 peculiar colourist — a lord of colour who, while he 
 knows the colour resources that may lie even in black 
 and white, has really included every delicate hue 
 whatever in that faded “silver grey,” which yet lin- 
 gers in one’s memory as their final effect. For some 
 admirers indeed he is definable as a kind of really 
 sanctified Titian. It must be admitted, however, 
 that whereas Titian sometimes lost a little of himself 
 in the greatness of his designs, or committed their 
 execution, in part, to others, Moretto, in his work, 
 
ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 
 
 85 
 
 is always all there — thorough, steady, even, in his 
 workmanship. That, again, was a result of his late- 
 surviving religious conscience. And here, as in other 
 instances,' the supposed influence of the greater master 
 is only a supposition. As a matter of fact, at least 
 in his earlier life, Moretto made no visit to Venice; 
 developed his genius at home, under such conditions 
 for development as were afforded by the example of 
 the earlier masters of Brescia itself; left his work 
 there abundantly, and almost there alone, as the 
 thoroughly representative product of a charming 
 place. In the little Church of San Clemente he is 
 still “at home ” to his lovers; an intimately religious 
 artist, full of cheerfulness, of joy. Upon the airy 
 galleries of his great altar-piece, the angels dance 
 against the sky above the Mother and the Child; 
 Saint Clement, patron of the church, being attendant 
 in pontifical white, with Dominic, Catherine, the 
 Magdalen, and good, big-faced Saint Florian in com- 
 plete armour, benign and strong. He knows many a 
 saint not in the Roman breviary. Was there a single 
 sweet-sounding name without its martyr patron ? 
 Lucia, Agnes, Agatha, Barbara, Cecilia — holy women, 
 dignified, high-bred, intelligent — have an altar of 
 their own ; and here, as in that festal high altar-piece, 
 the spectator may note yet another artistic alliance, 
 something of the pale effulgence of Correggio — an 
 approach, at least, to that peculiar treatment of light 
 and shade, and a pre-occupation with certain tricks 
 therein of nature itself, by which Correggio touches 
 Rembrandt on the one hand, Da Vinci on the other* 
 
86 
 
 ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 
 
 Here, in Moretto’s work, you may think that manner 
 more delightful, perhaps because more refined, than 
 in Correggio himself. Those pensive, tarnished, 
 silver side-lights, like mere reflexions of natural sun- 
 shine, may be noticed indeed in many another painter 
 of that day, in Lanini, for instance, at the National 
 Gallery. In his “ Nativity ” at the Brera, Procaccini 
 of Verona almost anticipates Correggio’s Heilige 
 Nacht It is, in truth, the first step in the decom- 
 position of light, a touch of decadence, of sunset, 
 along the whole horizon of North-Italian art. It is, 
 however, as the painter of the white-stoled Ursula and 
 her companions that the great master of Brescia is 
 most likely to remain in the memory of the visitor; 
 with this fact, above all, clearly impressed on it, that 
 Moretto had attained full intelligence of all the 
 pictorial powers of white . In the clearness, the 
 cleanliness, the hieratic distinction, of this earnest 
 and deeply-felt composition, there is something 
 “pre-Raphaelite ”; as also in a certain liturgical 
 formality in the grouping of the virgins — the looks, 
 “all one way,” of the closely-ranged faces; while in 
 the long folds of the drapery we may see something 
 of the severe grace of early Tuscan sculpture — some- 
 thing of severity in the long, thin, emphatic shadows. 
 For the light is high, as with the level lights of early 
 morning, the air of which ruffles the banners borne 
 by Ursula in her two hands, her virgin companions 
 laying their hands also upon the tall staves, as if tak- 
 ing share, with a good will, in her self-dedication, 
 with all the hazard of battle. They bring us, appro- 
 
ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 
 
 87 
 
 priately, close to the grave of this manly yet so 
 virginal painter, born in the year 1500, dead at 
 forty-seven. 
 
 Of Moretto and Romanino, whose works thus light 
 up, or refine, the dark churches of Brescia and its 
 neighbourhood, Romanino is scarcely to be seen 
 beyond it. The National Gallery, however, is rich 
 in Moretto’s work, with two of his rare poetic por- 
 traits ; and if the large altar-picture would hardly tell 
 his secret to one who had not studied him at Brescia, 
 in those who already know him it will awake many a 
 reminiscence of his art at its best. The three white 
 mitres, for instance, grandly painted towards the centre 
 of the picture, at the feet of Saint Bernardino of Siena 
 — the three bishoprics refused by that lowly saint — 
 may remind one of the great white mitre which, in the 
 genial picture of Saint Nicholas, in the Miracoli at 
 Brescia, one of the children, who as delightfully uncon- 
 ventional acolytes accompany their beloved patron 
 into the presence of the Madonna, carries along so 
 willingly, laughing almost, with pleasure and pride, at 
 his part in so great a function. In the altar-piece at 
 the National Gallery those white mitres form the key- 
 note from which the pale, cloistral splendours of the 
 whole picture radiate. You see what a wealth of 
 enjoyable colour Moretto, for one, can bring out of 
 monkish habits in themselves sad enough, and receive 
 a new lesson in the artistic value of reserve. 
 
 Rarer still (the single work of Romanino, it is said, 
 to be seen out of Italy) is the elaborate composition 
 in five parts on the opposite side of the doorway. 
 
88 
 
 ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 
 
 Painted for the high-altar of one of the many churches 
 of Brescia, it seems to have passed into secular hands 
 about a century ago. Alessandro, patron of the church, 
 one of the many youthful patrician converts Italy 
 reveres from the ranks of the Roman army, stands 
 there on one side, with ample crimson banner superbly 
 furled about his lustrous black armour, and on the 
 other — Saint Jerome, Romanino’s own namesake — 
 neither more nor less than the familiar, self-tormenting 
 anchorite ; for few painters (Bellini, to some degree, 
 in his picture of the saint’s study) have perceived the 
 rare pictorial opportunities of Jerome; Jerome with 
 the true cradle of the Lord, first of Christian anti- 
 quaries, author of the fragrant Vulgate version of the 
 Scriptures. Alessandro and Jerome support the Mother 
 and the Child in the central place. But the loveliest 
 subjects of this fine group of compositions are in the 
 corners above, half-length, life-sized figures — Gaudioso, 
 Bishop of Brescia, above Saint Jerome ; above Ales- 
 sandro, Saint Filippo Benizzi, meek founder of the 
 Order of Servites to which that church at Brescia 
 belonged, with his lily, and in the right hand a book ; 
 and what a book ! It was another very different 
 painter, Giuseppe Caletti, of Cremona, who, for the 
 truth and beauty of his drawing of them, gained the 
 title of the “ Painter of Books.” But if you wish to 
 see what can be made of the leaves, the vellum cover, 
 of a book, observe that in Saint Philip’s hand. — The 
 writer ? the contents ? you ask : What may they be ? 
 and whence did it come ? — out of embalmed sacristy, 
 or antique coffin of some early Brescian martyr, or, 
 
ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 
 
 89 
 
 through that bright space of blue Italian sky, from the 
 hands of an angel, like his Annunciation lily, or the 
 book received in the Apocalypse by John the Divine? 
 It is one of those old saints, Gaudioso (at home in 
 every church in Brescia), who looks out with full face 
 from the opposite corner of the altar-piece, from a 
 background which, though it might be the new heaven 
 over a new earth, is in truth only the proper, breath- 
 able air of Italy. As we see him here, Saint Gaudioso 
 is one of the more exquisite treasures of our National 
 Gallery. It was thus that at the magic touch of 
 Romanino’s art the dim, early, hunted-down Brescian 
 church of the primitive centuries, crushed into the 
 dust, it might seem, was “ brought to her king,” out of 
 those old dark crypts, “ in raiment of needle-work” — 
 the delicate, richly folded, pontifical white vestments, 
 the mitre and staff and gloves, and rich jewelled cope, 
 blue or green. The face, of remarkable beauty after a 
 type which all feel though it is actually rare in art, is 
 probably a portrait of some distinguished churchman 
 of Romanino’s own day ; a second Gaudioso, perhaps, 
 setting that later Brescian church to rights after the 
 terrible French occupation in the painter’s own time, 
 as his saintly predecessor, the Gaudioso of the earlier 
 century here commemorated, had done after the inva- 
 sion of the Goths. The eloquent eyes are open upon 
 some glorious vision. “ He hath made us kings and 
 priests ! ” they seem to say for him, as the clean, sensi- 
 tive lips might do so eloquently. Beauty and Holiness 
 had “ kissed each other,” as in Borgognone’s imperial 
 deacons at the Certosa. At the Renaissance the 
 
90 
 
 ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 
 
 world might seem to have parted them again. But 
 here certainly, once more, Catholicism and the Re- 
 naissance, religion and culture, holiness and beauty, 
 might seem reconciled, by one who had conceived 
 neither after any feeble way, in a gifted person. Here 
 at least, by the skill of Romanino’s hand, the obscure 
 martyr of the crypts shines as a saint of the later 
 Renaissance, with a sanctity of which the elegant 
 world itself would hardly escape the fascination, and 
 which reminds one how the great Apostle Saint Paul 
 has made courtesy part of the content of the Divine 
 charity itself. A Rubens in Italy ! — so Romanino has 
 been called. In this gracious presence we might think 
 that, like Rubens also, he had been a courtier. 
 
NOTRE-DAME D’AMIENS . 1 
 
 The greatest and purest of Gothic churches, Notre- 
 Dame d’Amiens, illustrates, by its fine qualities, a char- 
 acteristic secular movement of the beginning of the" 
 thirteenth century. Philosophic writers of French his- 
 tory have explained how, in that and in the two pre- 
 ceding centuries, a great number of the more important 
 towns in eastern and northern France rose against the 
 feudal establishment, and developed severally the local 
 and municipal life of the commune. To guarantee 
 their independence therein they obtained charters from 
 their formal superiors. The Charter of Amiens served 
 as the model for many other communes. Notre-Dame 
 d’Amiens is the church of a commune. In that cent- 
 ury of Saint Francis, of Saint Louis, they were still 
 religious. But over against monastic interests, as iden- 
 tified with a central authority — king, emperor, or 
 pope — they pushed forward the local, and, so to call 
 it, secular authority of their bishops, the flower of the 
 “ secular clergy” in all its mundane astuteness, ready 
 enough to make their way as the natural protectors of 
 
 1 Published in the Nineteenth Century , March 1894, and now 
 reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors. 
 
 91 
 
92 
 
 NOTRE-DAME D’AMIENS 
 
 such townships, The people of Amiens, for instance, 
 under a powerful episcopal patron, invested their civic 
 pride in a vast cathedral, outrivalling neighbours, as 
 being in effect their parochial church, and promoted 
 there the new, revolutionary, Gothic manner, at the 
 expense of the derivative and traditional, Roman or 
 Romanesque, style, the imperial style, of the great 
 monastic churches. Nay, those grand and beautiful 
 people's churches of the thirteenth century, churches 
 pre-eminently of “ Our Lady,” concurred also with 
 certain novel humanistic movements of religion itself 
 at that period, above all with the expansion of what is 
 reassuring and popular in the worship of Mary, as a 
 tender and accessible, though almost irresistible, inter- 
 cessor with her severe and awful Son. 
 
 Hence the splendour, the space, the novelty, of the 
 great French cathedrals in the first Pointed style, 
 monuments for the most part of the artistic genius of 
 laymen, signihcant pre-eminently of that Queen of 
 Gothic churches at Amiens. In most cases those 
 early Pointed churches are entangled, here or there, 
 by the constructions of the old round-arched style, the 
 heavy, Norman or other, Romanesque chapel or aisle, 
 side by side, though in strong contrast with, the soar- 
 ing new Gothic of nave or transept. But of that older 
 manner of the round arch, the plein-cintre , Amiens 
 has nowhere, or almost nowhere, a trace. The Pointed 
 style, fully pronounced, but in all the purity of its first 
 period, found here its completest expression. And 
 while those venerable, Romanesque, profoundly char- 
 acteristic, monastic churches, the gregarious product 
 
NOTRE-DAME D’AMIENS 
 
 93 
 
 of long centuries, are for the most part anonymous, as 
 if to illustrate from the first a certain personal ten- 
 dency which came in with the Gothic manner, we 
 know the name of the architect under whom, in the 
 year a . d . 1220, the building of the church of Amiens 
 began — a layman, Robert de Luzarches. 
 
 Light and space — floods of light, space for a vast 
 congregation, for all the people of Amiens, for their 
 movements, with something like the height and width 
 of heaven itself enclosed above them to breathe in ; — 
 you see at a glance that this is what the ingenuity 
 of the Pointed method of building has here secured. 
 For breadth, for the easy flow of a processional torrent, 
 there is nothing like the “ ambulatory,” the aisle of 
 the choir and transepts. And the entire area is on 
 one level. There are here no flights of steps upward, 
 as at Canterbury, no descending to dark crypts, as 
 in so many Italian churches — a few low, broad steps 
 to gain the choir, two or three to the high altar. To 
 a large extent the old pavement remains, though 
 almost worn-out by the footsteps of centuries. Price- 
 less, though not composed of precious material, it 
 gains its effect by ingenuity and variety in the pattern- 
 ing, zigzags, chequers, mazes, prevailing respectively, in 
 white and grey, in great square, alternate spaces — the 
 original floor of a medieval church for once untouched. 
 The massive square bases of the pillars of a Roman- 
 esque church, harshly angular, obstruct, sometimes 
 cruelly, the standing, the movements, of a multitude 
 of persons. To carry such a multitude conveniently 
 round them is the matter-of-fact motive of the gradual 
 
94 
 
 NOTRE-DAME D’ AMIENS 
 
 chiselling away, the softening of the angles, the grace- 
 ful compassing, of the Gothic base, till in our own 
 Perpendicular period it all but disappears. You may 
 study that tendency appropriately in the one church of 
 Amiens ; for such in effect Notre-Dame has always 
 been. That circumstance is illustrated by the great 
 font, the oldest thing here, an oblong trough, perhaps 
 an ancient saintly coffin, with four quaint prophetic 
 figures at the angles, carved from a single block of 
 stone. To it, as to the baptistery of an Italian town, 
 not so long since all the babes of Amiens used to 
 come for christening. 
 
 Strange as it may seem, in this “ queen ” of Gothic 
 churches, Veglise ogivale par excellence , there is nothing 
 of mystery in the vision, which yet surprises, over and 
 over again, the eye of the visitor who enters at the 
 western doorway. From the flagstone at one’s foot 
 to the distant keystone of the chevet , noblest of its 
 species — reminding you of how many largely graceful 
 things, sails of a ship in the wind, and the like ! — at 
 one view the whole is visible, intelligible ; — the integ- 
 rity of the first design ; how later additions affixed 
 themselves thereto ; how the rich ornament gathered 
 upon it ; the increasing richness of the choir ; its ' 
 glazed triforium ; the realms of light which expand in 
 the chapels beyond ; the astonishing boldness of the 
 vault, the astonishing lightness of what keeps it above 
 one ; the unity, yet the variety of perspective. There 
 is no mystery here, and indeed no repose. Like the 
 age which projected it, like the impulsive communal 
 movement which was here its motive, the Pointed 
 
NOTRE-DAME D’ AMIENS 
 
 95 
 
 style at Amiens is full of excitement. Go, for repose, 
 to classic work, with the simple vertical law of pressure 
 downwards, or to its Lombard, Rhenish, or Norman 
 derivatives. Here, rather, you are conscious restlessly 
 of that sustained equilibrium of oblique pressure on 
 all sides, which is the essence of the hazardous Gothic 
 construction, a construction of which the “ flying 
 buttress ” is the most significant feature. Across the 
 clear glass of the great windows of the triforium you 
 see it, feel it, at its Atlas-work audaciously. “ A 
 pleasant thing it is to behold the sun” those first 
 Gothic builders would seem to have said to them- 
 selves ; and at Amiens, for instance, the walls have 
 disappeared; the entire building is composed of its 
 windows. Those who built it might have had for 
 their one and only purpose to enclose as large a space 
 as possible with the given material. 
 
 No ; the peculiar Gothic buttress, with its double, 
 triple, fourfold flights, while it makes such marvels 
 possible, securing light and space and graceful effect, 
 relieving the pillars within of their massiveness, is not 
 a restful architectural feature. Consolidation of matter 
 naturally on the move, security for settlement in a 
 very complex system of construction — that is avow- 
 edly a part of the Gothic situation, the Gothic prob- 
 lem. With the genius which contended, though not 
 always quite successfully, with this difficult problem, 
 came also novel aesthetic effect, a whole volume of 
 delightful aesthetic effects. For the mere melody of 
 Greek architecture, for the sense as it were of music in 
 the opposition of successive sounds, you got harmony , 
 
96 
 
 NOTRE-DAME D’AMIENS 
 
 the richer music generated by opposition of sounds in 
 one and the same moment ; and were gainers. And 
 then, in contrast with the classic manner, and the 
 Romanesque survivals from it, the vast complexity of 
 the Gothic style seemed, as if consciously, to corre- 
 spond to the richness, the expressiveness, the thousand- 
 fold influence of the Catholic religion, in the thirteenth 
 century still in natural movement in every direction. 
 The later Gothic of the fifteenth and sixteenth cent- 
 uries tended to conceal, as it now took for granted, 
 the structural use of the buttress, for example ; seemed 
 to turn it into a mere occasion for ornament, not 
 always pleasantly : — while the ornament was out of 
 place, the structure failed. Such falsity is far enough 
 away from what at Amiens is really of the thirteenth 
 century. In this pre-eminently “ secular ” church, 
 the execution, in all the defiance of its method, is 
 direct, frank, clearly apparent, with the result not 
 only of reassuring the intelligence, but of keeping 
 one’s curiosity also continually on the alert, as we 
 linger in these restless aisles. 
 
 The integrity of the edifice, together with its volume 
 of light, has indeed been diminished by the addition 
 of a range of chapels, beyond the proper limits of the 
 aisles, north and south. Not a part of the original 
 design, these chapels were formed for private uses in 
 the fourteenth century, by the device of walling in and 
 vaulting the open spaces between the great buttresses 
 of the nave. Under the broad but subdued sunshine 
 which falls through range upon range of windows, 
 reflected from white wall and roof and gallery, sooth- 
 
NOTRE-DAME D’ AMIENS 
 
 97 
 
 ing to the eye, while it allows you to see the delicate 
 carved work in all its refinement of touch, it is only as 
 an after-thought, an artificial after-thought, that you 
 regret the lost stained glass, or the vanished mural 
 colour, if such to any large extent there ever were. 
 The best stained glass is often that stained by weather, 
 by centuries of weather, and we may well be grateful 
 for the amazing cheerfulness of the interior of Amiens, 
 as we actually find it. Windows of the richest remain, 
 indeed, in the apsidal chapels ; and the rose-windows 
 of the transepts are known, from the prevailing tones of 
 their stained glass, as Fire and Water, the western rose 
 symbolising in like manner Earth and Air^ as respec- 
 tively green and blue. But there is no reason to sup- 
 pose that the interior was ever so darkened as to prevent 
 one’s seeing, really and clearly, the dainty ornament, 
 which from the first abounded here ; the floriated 
 architectural detail ; the broad band of flowers and 
 foliage, thick and deep and purely sculptured, above 
 the arches of nave and choir and transepts, and wreath- 
 ing itself continuously round the embedded piers which 
 support the roof ; with the woodwork, the illuminated 
 metal, the magnificent tombs, the jewellers’ work in 
 the chapels. One precious, early thirteenth-century 
 window of grisaille remains, exquisite in itself, interest- 
 ing as evidence of the sort of decoration which origi- 
 nally filled the larger number of the windows. Grisaille , 
 with its lace-work of transparent grey, set here and 
 there with a ruby, a sapphire, a gemmed medallion, 
 interrupts the clear light on things hardly more than 
 the plain glass, of which indeed such windows are 
 
 H 
 
98 
 
 NOTRE-DAME D’AMIENS 
 
 mainly composed. The finely designed frames of iron 
 for the support of the glass, in the windows from which 
 even this decoration is gone, still remain, to the de- 
 light of those who are knowing in the matter. 
 
 Very ancient light, this seems, at any rate, as if it 
 had been lying imprisoned thus for long centuries; 
 were in fact the light over which the great vault 
 originally closed, now become almost substance of 
 thought, one might fancy, — a mental object or medium. 
 We are reminded that after all we must of necessity 
 look on the great churches of the Middle Age with 
 other eyes than those who built or first worshipped in 
 them ; that there is something verily worth having, 
 and a just equivalent for something else lost, in the 
 mere effect of time, and that the salt of all aesthetic 
 study is in the question, — What, precisely what, is this 
 to me? You and I, perhaps, should not care much 
 for the mural colouring of a medieval church, could we 
 see it as it was ; might think it crude, and in the way. 
 What little remains of it at Amiens has parted, indeed, 
 in the course of ages, with its shrillness and its coarse 
 grain. And in this matter certainly, in view of Gothic 
 polychrome, our difference from the people of the 
 thirteenth century is radical. We have, as it was very 
 unlikely they should have, a curiosity, a very pleasur- 
 able curiosity, in the mere working of the stone they 
 built with, and in the minute facts of their construc- 
 tion, which their colouring, and the layer of plaster it 
 involved, disguised or hid. We may think that in 
 architecture stone is the most beautiful of all things. 
 Modern hands have replaced the colour on some of 
 
NOTRE-DAME D’AMIENS 
 
 99 
 
 the tombs here — the effigies, the tabernacles above — ■ 
 skilfully as may be, and have but deprived them of 
 their dignity. Medieval colouring, in fact, must have 
 improved steadily, as it decayed, almost till there came 
 to be no question of colour at all. In architecture, 
 close as it is to men’s lives and their history, the visible 
 result of time is a large factor in the realised aesthetic 
 value, and what a true architect will in due measure 
 always trust to. A false restoration only frustrates the 
 proper ripening of his work. 
 
 If we may credit our modern eyes, then, those old, 
 very secular builders aimed at, they achieved, an 
 immense cheerfulness in their great church, with a 
 purpose which still pursued them into their minuter 
 decoration. The conventional vegetation of the 
 Romanesque, its blendings of human or animal with 
 vegetable form, in cornice or capital, have given way 
 here, in the first Pointed style, to a pleasanter, because 
 more natural, mode of fancy; to veritable forms of 
 vegetable life, flower or leaf, from meadow and wood- 
 side, though still indeed with a certain survival of the 
 grotesque in a confusion of the leaf with the flower, 
 which the subsequent Decorated period will wholly 
 purge away in its perfect garden-borders. It was not 
 with monastic artists and artisans that the sheds and 
 workshops around Amiens Cathedral were filled, as it 
 rose from its foundations through fifty years ; and 
 those lay schools of art, with their communistic senti- 
 ment, to which in the thirteenth century the great 
 episcopal builders must needs resort, would in the 
 natural course of things tend towards naturalism. The 
 
 j 
 
 i 
 
100 
 
 NOTRE-DAME D’AMIENS 
 
 subordinate arts also were no longer at the monastic 
 stage, borrowing inspiration exclusively from the ex- 
 periences of the cloister, but belonged to guilds of 
 laymen — smiths, painters, sculptors. The great con- 
 federation of the “city,” the commune, subdivided 
 itself into confederations of citizens. In the natural 
 objects of the first Pointed style there is the freshness 
 as of nature itself, seen and felt for the first time ; as if, 
 in contrast, those older cloistral workmen had but fed 
 their imagination in an embarrassed, imprisoned, and 
 really decadent manner, or mere reminiscence of, or 
 prescriptions about, things visible. 
 
 Congruous again with the popularity of the builders 
 of Amiens, of their motives, is the wealth, the freedom 
 and abundance, of popular, almost secular, teaching, 
 here afforded, in the carving especially, within and 
 without ; an open Bible, in place of later legend, as 
 at monastic V£zelay, — the Bible treated as a book 
 about men and women, and other persons equally real, 
 but blent with lessons, with the liveliest observations, 
 on the lives of men as they were then and now, what 
 they do, and how they do it, or did it then, and on the 
 doings of nature which so greatly influence what man 
 does ; together with certain impressive metaphysical 
 and moral ideas, a sort of popular scholastic philos- 
 ophy, or as if it were the virtues and vices Aristotle 
 defines, or the characters of Theophrastus, translated 
 into stone. Above all, it is to be observed that as 
 a result of this spirit, this “ free ” spirit, in it, art has at 
 last become personal. The artist, as such, appears at 
 Amiens, as elsewhere, in the thirteenth century ; and, 
 
NOTRE-DAME D’AMIENS 
 
 101 
 
 by making his personal way of conception and execu- 
 tion prevail there, renders his own work vivid and 
 organic, and apt to catch the interest of other people. 
 He is no longer a Byzantine, but a Greek — an uncon- 
 scious Greek. Proof of this is in the famous Beau-Dieu 
 of Amiens, as they call that benign, almost classically 
 proportioned figure, on the central pillar of the great 
 west doorway ; though in fact neither that, nor any- 
 thing else on the west front of Amiens, is quite the best 
 work here. For that we must look rather to the 
 sculpture of the portal of the south transept, called, 
 from a certain image there, Portail de la Vierge doree , 
 gilded at the expense of some unknown devout person 
 at the beginning of the last century. A presentation 
 of the mystic, the delicately miraculous, story of Saint 
 Honore, eighth Bishop of Amiens, and his companions, 
 with its voices, its intuitions, and celestial intimations, 
 it has evoked a correspondent method of work at 
 once naive and nicely expressive. The rose , or roue , 
 above it, carries on the outer rim seventeen per- 
 sonages, ascending and descending — another piece 
 of popular philosophy — the wheel of fortune, or of 
 human life. 
 
 And they were great brass-founders, surely, who at 
 that early day modelled and cast the tombs of the Bish- 
 ops Evrard and Geoffrey, vast plates of massive black 
 bronze in half- relief, like abstract thoughts of those 
 grand old prelatic persons. The tomb of Evrard, who 
 laid the foundations (qui ftmdamenla hujus basilic ce 
 locavit ), is not quite as it was. Formerly it was sunk 
 in the pavement, while the tomb of Bishop Geoffrey 
 
102 
 
 NOTRE-DAME D’AMIENS 
 
 opposite (it was he closed in the mighty vault of the 
 nave : hanc basilicam culmen usque perduxit ), itself 
 vaulted-over the space of the grave beneath. The 
 supreme excellence of those original workmen, the 
 journeymen of Robert de Luzarches and his successor, 
 would seem indeed to have inspired others, who have 
 been at their best here, down to the days of Louis the 
 Fourteenth. It prompted, we may think, a high level 
 of execution, through many revolutions of taste in such 
 matters ; in the marvellous furniture of the choir, for 
 instance, like a whole wood, say a thicket of old haw- 
 thorn, with its curved topmost branches spared, slowly 
 transformed by the labour of a whole family of artists, 
 during fourteen years, into the stalls, in number one 
 hundred and ten, with nearly four thousand figures. 
 Yet they are but on a level with the Flamboyant 
 carved and coloured enclosures of the choir, with the 
 histories of John the Baptist, whose face-bones are 
 here preserved, and of Saint Firmin — popular saint, 
 who protects the houses of Amiens from fire. Even 
 the screens of forged iron around the sanctuary, work 
 of the seventeenth century, appear actually to soar, in 
 their way, in concert with the airy Gothic structure ; to 
 let the daylight pass as it will ; to have come, they too, 
 from smiths, odd as it may seem at just that time, with 
 some touch of inspiration in them. In the beginning of 
 the fifteenth century they had reared against a certain 
 bald space of wall, between the great portal and the 
 western “rose,” an organ, a lofty, many-chambered, 
 veritable house of church-music, rich in azure and 
 gold, finished above at a later day, not incongruously, 
 
NOTRE-DAME D’AMIENS 
 
 103 
 
 in the quaint, pretty manner of Henri-Deux. And 
 those who are interested in the curiosities of ritual, 
 of the old provincial Gallican “ uses,” will be surprised 
 to find one where they might least have expected it. 
 The reserved Eucharist still hangs suspended in a pyx, 
 formed like a dove, in the midst of that lamentable 
 “ glory ” of the eighteenth century in the central bay of 
 the sanctuary, all the poor, gaudy, gilt rays converg- 
 ing towards it. There are days in the year in which 
 the great church is still literally filled with reverent 
 worshippers, and if you come late to service you 
 push the doors in vain against the closely serried 
 shoulders of the good people of Amiens, one and 
 all in black for church -holiday attire. Then, one and 
 all, they intone the Tantum ergo (did it ever sound 
 so in the Middle Ages?) as the Eucharist, after 
 a long procession, rises once more into its resting- 
 place. 
 
 If the Greeks, as at least one of them says, really 
 believed there could be no true beauty without bigness, 
 that thought certainly is most specious in regard to 
 architecture ; and the thirteenth -century church of 
 Amiens is one of the three or four largest buildings in 
 the world, out of all proportion to any Greek building, 
 both in that and in the multitude of its external sculpt- 
 ure. The chapels of the nave are embellished with- 
 out by a double range of single figures, or groups, 
 commemorative of the persons, the mysteries, to which 
 they are respectively dedicated — the gigantic form 
 of Christopher, the Mystery of the Annunciation. 
 
 The builders of the church seem to have projected 
 
104 
 
 NOTRE-DAME D’AMIENS 
 
 no very noticeable towers ; though it is conventional 
 to regret their absence, especially with visitors from 
 England, where indeed cathedral and other towers are 
 apt to be good, and really make their mark. Robert 
 de Luzarches and his successors aimed rather at the 
 domical outline, with its central point at the centre of 
 the church, in the spire or fleche . The existing spire 
 is a wonderful mass of carpentry of the beginning of 
 the sixteenth century, at which time the lead that 
 carefully wraps every part of it was heavily gilt. The 
 great western towers are lost in the west front, the 
 grandest, perhaps the earliest, example of its species — 
 three profound, sculptured portals ; a double gallery 
 above, the upper gallery carrying colossal images of 
 twenty-two kings of the House of Judah, ancestors of 
 Our Lady ; then the great rose ; above it the ringers’ 
 gallery, half masking the gable of the nave, and uniting 
 at their topmost storeys the twin, but not exactly 
 equal or similar, towers, oddly oblong in plan, as if 
 never intended to carry pyramids or spires. They 
 overlook an immense distance in those flat, peat-dig- 
 ging, black and green regions, with rather cheerless 
 rivers, and are the centre of an architectural region 
 wider still — of a group to which Soissons, far beyond 
 the woods of Compiegne, belongs, with St. Quentin, 
 and, towards the west, a too ambitious rival, Beauvais, 
 which has stood however — what we now see of it — 
 for six centuries. 
 
 It is a spare, rather sad world at most times that 
 Notre-Dame d’ Amiens thus broods over ; a country 
 with little else to be proud of ; the sort of world, in 
 
NOTRE-DAME D’AMIENS 
 
 105 
 
 fact, which makes the range of conceptions embodied 
 in these cliffs of quarried and carved stone all the 
 more welcome as a hopeful complement to the meagre- 
 ness of most peopled present existence, and its appar- 
 ent ending in a sparely built coffin under the flinty 
 soil, and grey, driving sea- winds. In Notre-Dame, 
 therefore, and her sisters, there is not only a common 
 method of construction, a single definable type, differ- 
 ent from that of other French latitudes, but a corre- 
 spondent common sentiment also ; something which 
 speaks, amid an immense achievement just here of 
 what is beautiful and great, of the necessity of an 
 immense effort in the natural course of things, of 
 what you may see quaintly designed in one of those 
 hieroglyphic carvings — radix de terra sitienti : “ a 
 root out of a dry ground.’’ 
 
VEZELAY . 1 
 
 As you discern the long unbroken line of its roof, 
 low-pitched for France, above the cottages and willow- 
 shaded streams of the place, you might think the abbey 
 church of Pontigny, the largest Cistercian church now 
 remaining, only a great farm- building. On a nearer 
 view there is something unpretending, something 
 pleasantly English, in the plain grey walls, pierced 
 with long “lancet” windows, as if they overlooked the 
 lowlands of Essex, or the meadows of Kent or Berk- 
 shire, the sort of country from which came those 
 saintly exiles of our race who made the cloisters of 
 Pontigny famous, and one of whom, Saint Edmund of 
 Abingdon, Saint- Edme, still lies enshrined here. The 
 country which the sons of Saint Bernard choose for 
 their abode is in fact but a patch of scanty pasture- 
 land in the midst of a heady wine-district. Like its 
 majestic Cluniac rivals, the church has its western 
 portico, elegant in structure but of comparatively 
 humble proportions, under a plain roof of tiles, pent- 
 wise. Within, a heavy coat of white-wash seems befit- 
 
 1 Published in the Nineteenth Century , June 1894, and now 
 reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors. 
 
 106 
 
VEZELAY 
 
 107 
 
 ting to the simple forms of the “ Transition/’ or quite 
 earliest “ Pointed/’ style, to its remarkable continence 
 of spirit, its uniformity, and cleanness of build. The 
 long prospect of nave and choir ends, however, with 
 a sort of graceful smallness, in a chevet of seven closely 
 packed, narrow bays. It is like a nun’s church, or like 
 a nun’s coif. 
 
 The church of Pontigny, representative generally of 
 the churches of the Cistercian order, including some of 
 the loveliest early English ones, was in truth significant 
 of a reaction, a reaction against monasticism itself, as 
 it had come to be in the order of Cluny, the genius of 
 which found its proper expression in the imperious, but 
 half-barbaric, splendours of the richest form of the 
 Romanesque , the monastic style pre-eminently, as we 
 may still see it at La Charit£-sur-Loire, at Saint- 
 Benoit, above all, on the hill of Vezelay. Saint 
 Bernard, who had lent his immense influence to the 
 order of Citeaux by way of a monastic reform, though 
 he had a genius for hymns and was in other ways an 
 eminent religious poet, and though he gave new life 
 to the expiring romance of the crusades, was, as regards 
 the visible world, much of a Puritan. Was it he who, 
 wrapt in thought upon the world unseen, walked along 
 the shores of Lake Leman without observing it? — the 
 eternal snows he might have taken for the walls of the 
 New Jerusalem ; the blue waves he might have fancied 
 its pavement of sapphire. In the churches, the wor- 
 ship, of his new order he required simplicity, and even 
 severity, being fortunate in finding so winsome an 
 exponent of that principle as the early Gothic of 
 
108 
 
 VEZELAY 
 
 Pontigny, or of the first Cistercian church, now 
 destroyed, at Citeaux itself. Strangely enough, while 
 Bernard’s own temper of mind was a survival from the 
 past (we see this in his contest with Abelard), hier- 
 archic, reactionary, suspicious of novelty, the archi- 
 tectural style of his preference was largely of secular 
 origin. It had a large share in that inventive and 
 innovating genius, that expansion of the natural human 
 soul, to which the art, the literature, the religious 
 movements of the thirteenth century in France, as in 
 Italy, where it ends with Dante, bear witness. 
 
 In particular, Bernard had protested against the 
 sculpture, rich and fantastic, but gloomy, it might be 
 indecent, developed more abundantly than anywhere 
 else in the churches of Burgundy, and especially in 
 those of the Cluniac order. “ What is the use,” he 
 asks, “ of those grotesque monsters in painting and 
 sculpture?” and almost certainly he had in mind the 
 marvellous carved work at Vezelay, whither doubtless 
 he came often — for example on Good Friday, 1146, to 
 preach, as we know, the second crusade in the presence 
 of Louis the Seventh. He too might have wept at the 
 sight of the doomed multitude (one in ten, it is said, 
 returned from the Holy Land), as its enthusiasm, 
 under the charm of his fiery eloquence, rose to the 
 height of his purpose. Even the aisles of Vezelay 
 were not sufficient for the multitude of his hearers, and 
 he preached to them in the open air, from a rock still 
 pointed out on the hillside. Armies indeed have been 
 encamped many times on the slopes and meadows 
 of the valley of the Cure, now to all seeming so 
 
VICZELAY 
 
 109 
 
 impregnably tranquil. The Cluniac order even then 
 had already declined from its first intention ; and that 
 decline became especially visible in the Abbey of 
 Vezelay itself not long after Bernard’s day. Its 
 majestic immoveable church was complete by the 
 middle of the twelfth century. And there it still 
 stands in spite of many a threat, while the conventual 
 buildings around it have disappeared ; and the institu- 
 tion it represented — secularised at its own request at 
 the Reformation — had dwindled almost to nothing at 
 all, till in the last century the last Abbot built him- 
 self, in place of the old Gothic lodging below those 
 solemn walls, a sort of Chateau Gaillard , a dainty 
 abode in the manner of Louis Quinze — swept away 
 that too at the Revolution — where the great oaks 
 now flourish, with the rooks and squirrels. 
 
 Yet the order of Cluny, in its time, in that dark 
 period of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, had 
 deserved well of those to whom religion, and art, and 
 social order are precious. The Cluniacs had in fact 
 represented monasticism in the most legitimate form 
 of its activity; and, if the church of Vezelay was not 
 quite the grandest of their churches, it is certainly 
 the grandest of them which remains. It is also 
 typical in character. As Notre-Dame d’Amiens is 
 pre-eminently the church of the city, of a commune, 
 so the Madeleine of Vezelay is typically the church 
 of a monastery. 
 
 The monastic style proper, then, in its peculiar power 
 and influence, was Romanesque, and with the Cluniac 
 order ; and here perhaps better than anywhere else we 
 
110 
 
 VEZELAY 
 
 may understand what it really came to, what was its 
 effect on the spirits, the imagination. 
 
 As at Pontigny, the Cistercians, for the most part, 
 built their churches in lowly valleys, according to the 
 intention of their founder. The representative church 
 of the Cluniacs, on the other hand, lies amid the closely 
 piled houses of the little town, which it protected and 
 could punish, on a steep hill-top, like a long massive 
 chest there, heavy above you, as you climb slowly the 
 winding road, the old unchanged pathway of Saint 
 Bernard. In days gone by it threatened the surround- 
 ing neighbourhood with four boldly built towers ; had 
 then also a spire at the crossing ; and must have been 
 at that time like a more magnificent version of the 
 buildings which still crown the hill of Laon. Exter- 
 nally, the proportions, the squareness, of the nave 
 (west and east, the vast narthex or porch, and the 
 Gothic choir, rise above its roof-line), remind one of 
 another great Romanesque church at home — of the 
 nave of Winchester, out of which Wykeham carved his 
 richly panelled Perpendicular interior. 
 
 At Vezelay however, the Romanesque, the Roman- 
 esque of Burgundy, alike in the first conception of the 
 whole structure, and in the actual locking together of 
 its big stones, its masses of almost unbroken masonry, 
 its inertia , figures as of more imperial character, and 
 nearer to the Romans of old, than its feebler kindred in 
 England or Normandy. We seem to have before us 
 here a Romanesque architecture, studied, not from 
 Roman basilicas or Roman temples, but from the 
 arenas, the colossal gateways, the triumphal arches, of 
 
VEZELAY 
 
 111 
 
 the people of empire,- such as remain even now, not in 
 the South of France only. The simple “ flying,” or 
 rather leaning and almost couchant, buttresses, quad- 
 rants of a circle, might be parts of a Roman aqueduct. 
 In contrast to the lightsome Gothic manner of the last 
 quarter of the twelfth century (as we shall presently find 
 it here too, like an escape for the eye, for the temper, 
 out of some grim under-world into genial daylight), the 
 Cluniac church might seem a still active instrument of 
 the iron tyranny of Rome, of its tyranny over the animal 
 spirits. As the ghost of ancient Rome still lingers 
 “ over the grave thereof,” in the papacy, the hierarchy, 
 so is it with the material structures also, the Cluniac and 
 other Romanesque churches, which most emphatically 
 express the hierarchical, the papal system. There is 
 something about this church of V^zelay, in the long- 
 sustained patience of which it tells, that brings to mind 
 the labour of slaves, whose occasional Fescennine 
 licence and fresh memories of a barbaric life also find 
 expression, now and again, in the strange sculpture of 
 the place. Yet here for once, around a great French 
 church, there is the kindly repose of English “ pre- 
 cincts,” and the country which this monastic acropolis 
 overlooks southwards is a very pleasant one, as we 
 emerge from the shadows of — yes ! of that peculiarly 
 sad place — a country all the pleasanter by reason of 
 the toil upon it, performed, or exacted from others, by 
 the monks, through long centuries ; Le Morvan, with 
 its distant blue hills and broken foreground, the vine- 
 yards, the patches of woodland, the roads winding into 
 their cool shadows ; though in truth the fortress-like 
 
112 
 
 VEZELAY 
 
 outline of the monastic church and the sombre hue of 
 its material lend themselves most readily to the effects 
 of a stormy sky. 
 
 By a door, which in the great days opened from 
 a magnificent cloister, you enter what might seem 
 itself but the ambulatory of a cloister, superbly vaulted 
 and long and regular, and built of huge stones of a 
 metallic colour. It is the southern aisle of the nave, 
 a nave of ten bays, the grandest Romanesque interior 
 in France, perhaps in the world. In its mortified light 
 the very soul of monasticism, Roman and half- military, 
 as the completest outcome of a religion of threats, 
 seems to descend upon one. Monasticism is indeed 
 the product of many various tendencies of the religious 
 soul, one or another of which may very properly con- 
 nect itself with the Pointed style, as we saw in those 
 lightsome aisles of Pontigny, so expressive of the 
 purity, the lowly sweetness, of the soul of Bernard. 
 But it is here at V£zelay, in this iron place, that 
 monasticism in its central, its historically most signifi- 
 cant purpose, presents itself as most completely at 
 home. There is no triforium. The monotonous 
 cloistral length of wall above the long-drawn series 
 of stately round arches, is unbroken save by a plain 
 small window in each bay, placed as high as possible 
 just below the cornice, as a mere after-thought, you 
 might fancy. Those windows were probably unglazed, 
 and closed only with wooden shutters as occasion 
 required. Furnished with the stained glass of the 
 period, they would have left the place almost in dark- 
 ness, giving doubtless full effect to the monkish can- 
 
VEZELAY 
 
 113 
 
 dle-light in any case needful here. An almost perfect 
 cradle-roof, tunnel-like from end to end of the long 
 central aisle, adds by its simplicity of form to the 
 magnificent unity of effect. The bearing-arches, which 
 span it from bay to bay, being parti-coloured, with 
 voussures of alternate white and a kind of grey or 
 green, being also somewhat flat at the keystone, and 
 literally eccentric, have, at least for English eyes, 
 something of a Saracenic or other Oriental character. 
 Again, it is as if the architects — the engineers — who 
 worked here, had seen things undreamt of by other 
 Romanesque builders, the builders in England and 
 Normandy. 
 
 Here then, scarcely relieving the almost savage 
 character of the work, abundant on tympanum and 
 doorway without, above all on the immense capitals 
 of the nave within, is the sculpture which offended 
 Bernard. A sumptuous band of it, a carved guipure 
 of singular boldness, passes continuously round the 
 arches, and along the cornices from bay to bay, 
 and with the large bossy tendency of the ornament 
 throughout may be regarded as typical of Burgun- 
 dian richness. Of sculptured capitals, to like, or to 
 dislike with Saint Bernard, there are nearly a hundred, 
 unwearied in variety, unique in the energy of their 
 conception, full of wild promise in their coarse 
 execution, cruel, you might say, in the realisation 
 of human form and features. Irresistibly they rivet 
 attention. 
 
 The subjects are for the most part Scriptural, chosen 
 apparently as being apt for strongly satiric treatment, 
 I i 
 
114 
 
 VEZELAY 
 
 the suicide of Judas, the fall of Goliath. The legend 
 of Saint Benedict, naturally at home in a Benedictine 
 church, presented the sculptor with a series of forcible 
 grotesques ready-made. Some monkish story, half 
 moral, half facetious, perhaps a little coarse, like that 
 of Sainte Eugenie, from time to time makes variety ; 
 or an example of the punishment of the wicked by 
 men or by devils, who play a large, and to themselves 
 thoroughly enjoyable and merry, part here. The 
 sculptor would seem to have witnessed the punishment 
 of the blasphemer ; how adroitly the executioner 
 planted knee on the culprit’s bosom, as he lay on the 
 ground, and out cam£ the sinful tongue, to meet the 
 iron pincers. The minds of those who worked thus 
 seem to have been almost insanely preoccupied just 
 then with the human countenance, but by no means 
 exclusively in its pleasantness or dignity. Bold, crude, 
 original, their work indicates delight in the power of 
 reproducing fact, curiosity in it, but little or no sense 
 of beauty. The humanity therefore here presented, as 
 in the Cluniac sculpture generally, is wholly unconven- 
 tional. M. Viollet-le-Duc thinks he can trace in it 
 individual types still actually existing in the peasantry 
 of Le Morvan. Man and morality, however, disap- 
 pearing at intervals, the acanthine capitals have a kind 
 of later Venetian beauty about them, as the Venetian 
 birds also, the conventional peacocks, or birds wholly 
 of fantasy, amid the long fantastic foliage. There are 
 still however no true flowers of the field here. There 
 is pity, it must be confessed, on the other hand, and the 
 delicacy, the beauty, which that always brings with it, 
 
VEZELAY 
 
 115 
 
 where Jephtha peeps at the dead daughter’s face, lift- 
 ing timidly the great leaves that cover it ; in the hang- 
 ing body of Absalom ; in the child carried away by 
 the eagle, his long frock twisted in the wind as he 
 goes. The parents run out in dismay, and the devil 
 grins, not because it is .the punishment of the child 
 or of them ; but because he is the author of all mis- 
 chief everywhere, as the monkish carver conceived — 
 so far wholesomely. 
 
 We must remember that any sculpture less em- 
 phatic would have been ineffective, because practically 
 invisible, in this sombre place. But at the west end 
 there is an escape for the eye, for the soul, towards 
 the unhindered, natural, afternoon sun ; not however 
 into the outer and open air, but through an arcade of 
 three bold round arches, high above the great closed 
 western doors, into a somewhat broader and loftier 
 place than this, a reservoir of light, a veritable camera 
 lucida . The light is that which lies below the vault 
 and within the tribunes of the famous narthex (as 
 they say), the vast fore-church or vestibule, into which 
 the nave is prolonged. A remarkable feature of many 
 Cluniac churches, the great western porch, on a scale 
 which is approached in England only at Peterborough, 
 is found also in some of the churches of the Cister- 
 cians. It is characteristic, in fact, rather of Burgundy 
 than of either of those religious orders especially. At 
 Pontigny itself, for instance, there is a good one ; 
 and a very early one at Paray-le-Monial. Saint- Pere- 
 sous-Vezelay, daughter of the great church, in the 
 vale below, has a late Gothic example ; Semur also, 
 
116 
 
 VEZELAY 
 
 with fantastic lodges above it. The cathedral of 
 Autun, a secular church in rivalry of the “ religious,” 
 presents, by way of such western porch or vestibule, 
 two entire bays of the nave, unglazed, with the vast 
 western arch open to the air ; the west front, with its 
 rich portals, being thrown back into the depths of the 
 great fore-church thus produced. 
 
 The narthex of Vezelay, the largest of these singular 
 structures, is glazed, and closed towards the west by 
 what is now the facade. It is itself in fact a great 
 church, a nave of three magnificent bays, and of three 
 aisles, with a spacious triforium. With their fantastic 
 sculpture, sheltered thus from accident and weather, 
 in all its original freshness, the great portals of the 
 primitive faqade serve now for doorways, as a second, 
 solemn, door of entrance, to the church proper within. 
 The very structure of the place, and its relation to the 
 main edifice, indicate that it was for use on occasion, 
 when, at certain great feasts, that of the Magdalen 
 especially, to whom the church of Vezelay is dedicated, 
 the monastery was swollen with pilgrims, too poor, 
 too numerous, to be lodged in the town, come hither 
 to worship before the relics of the friend of Jesus, 
 enshrined in a low-vaulted crypt, the floor of which is 
 the natural rocky surface of the hill-top. It may be 
 that the pilgrims were permitted to lie for the night, K 
 not only on the pavement, but (if so favoured) in the 
 high and dry chamber formed by the spacious triforium \ 
 over the north aisle, awaiting an early Mass. The 
 primitive west front, then, had become but a wall of 
 partition ; and above its central portal, where the 
 
VEZELAY 
 
 117 
 
 round arched west windows had been, ran now a kind 
 of broad, arcaded tribune, in full view of the entire 
 length of the church. In the midst of it stood an 
 altar; and here perhaps, the priest who officiated 
 being visible to the whole assembled multitude east 
 and west, the early Mass was said. 
 
 The great vestibule was finished about forty years 
 after the completion of the nave, towards the middle 
 of the twelfth century. And here, in the great pier- 
 arches, and in the eastern bay of the vault, still with 
 the large masonry, the large, fiat, unmoulded surfaces, 
 and amid the fantastic carvings of the Romanesque 
 building about it, the Pointed style, determined yet 
 discreet, makes itself felt — makes itself felt by appear- 
 ing, if not for the first time, yet for the first time in 
 the organic or systematic development of French archi- 
 tecture. Not in the unambitious fagade of Saint-Denis, 
 nor in the austere aisles of Sens, but at Vezelay, in 
 this grandiose fabric, so worthy of the event, Viollet-le- 
 Duc would fain see the birthplace of the Pointed style. 
 Here at last, with no sense of contrast, but by way 
 of veritable “ transition,” and as if by its own matured 
 strength, the round arch breaks into the double curve, 
 les arcs brises , with a wonderful access of grace. And 
 the imaginative effect is forthwith enlarged. Beyond, 
 far beyond, what is actually presented to the eye in 
 that peculiar curvature, its mysterious grace, and by the 
 stateliness, the elevation of the ogival method of vault- 
 ing, the imagination is stirred to present one with 
 what belongs properly to it alone. The masonry, 
 though large, is nicely fitted ; a large light is admitted 
 
118 
 
 VEZELAY 
 
 through the now fully pronounced Gothic windows 
 towards the west. At Amiens we found the Gothic 
 spirit, reigning there exclusively, to be a restless one. 
 At Vezelay, where it breathes for the first time amid 
 the heavy masses of the old imperial style, it breathes 
 the very genius of monastic repose. And then, whereas 
 at Amiens, and still more at Beauvais, at Saint-Quen- 
 tin, you wonder how these monuments of the past can 
 have endured so long, in strictly monastic Vezelay you 
 have a sense of freshness, such as, in spite of their 
 ruin, we perceive in the buildings of Greece. We 
 enjoy here not so much, as at Amiens, the sentiment 
 of antiquity, but that of eternal duration. 
 
 But let me place you once more where we stood for 
 a while, on entering by the doorway in the midst of 
 the long southern aisle. Cross the aisle, and gather 
 now in one view the perspective of the whole. Away 
 on the left hand the eye is drawn upward to the tran- 
 quil light of the vaults of the fore-church, seeming 
 doubtless the more spacious because partly concealed 
 from us by the wall of partition below. But on 
 the right hand, towards the east, as if with the set 
 purpose of a striking architectural contrast, an instruc- 
 tion as to the place of this or that manner in the archi- 
 tectural series, the long, tunnel-like, military work of 
 the Romanesque nave opens wide into the exhilarating 
 daylight of choir and transepts, in the sort of Gothic 
 Bernard would have welcomed, with a vault rising 
 now high above the roof-line of the body of the church, 
 sicut lilium excelsum . The simple flowers, the flora , 
 of the early Pointed style, which could never have 
 
VEZELAY 
 
 119 
 
 looked at home as an element in the half-savage 
 decoration of the nave, seem to be growing here upon 
 the sheaves of slender, reedy pillars, as if naturally 
 in the carved stone. Even here indeed, Roman, or 
 Romanesque, taste still lingers proudly in the monolith 
 columns of the chevet. Externally, we may note with 
 what dexterity the Gothic choir has been inserted into 
 its place, below and within the great buttresses of the 
 earlier Romanesque one. 
 
 Visitors to the great church of Assisi have sometimes 
 found a kind of parable in the threefold ascent from 
 the dark crypt where the body of Saint Francis lies, 
 through the gloomy “ lower ” church, into the height 
 and breadth, the physical and symbolic “illumination,” 
 of the church above. At Vezelay that kind of con- 
 trast suggests itself in one view; the hopeful, but 
 transitory, glory upon which one enters ; the long, 
 darksome, central avenue ; the “ open vision ” into 
 which it conducts us. As a symbol of resurrection, 
 its choir is a fitting diadem to the church of the 
 Magdalen, whose remains the monks meant it to 
 cover. 
 
 And yet, after all, notwithstanding this assertion of 
 the superiority (are we so to call it?) of the new Gothic 
 way, perhaps by the very force of contrast, the Made- 
 leine of Vezelay is still pre-eminently a Romanesque, 
 and thereby the typically monastic, church. In spite 
 of restoration even, as we linger here, the impression of 
 the monastic Middle Age, of a very exclusive monas- 
 ticism, that has verily turned its back upon common 
 life, jealously closed inward upon itself, is a singularly 
 
120 
 
 VEZELAY 
 
 weighty one ; the more so because, as the peasant said 
 when asked the way to an old sanctuary that had fallen 
 to the occupation of farm-labourers, and was now 
 deserted even by them : Maintenant il n'y a per- 
 sonne la . 
 
APOLLO IN PICARDY , 1 
 
 " Consecutive upon Apollo in all his solar fervour 
 and effulgence/’ says a writer of Teutonic proclivities, 
 “ we may discern even among the Greeks themselves, 
 elusively, as would be natural with such a being, almost 
 like a mock sun amid the mists, the northern or ultra- 
 northern sun-god. In hints and fragments the lexicog- 
 raphers and others have told us something of this 
 Hyperborean Apollo, fancies about him which evidence 
 some knowledge of the Land of the Midnight Sun, of 
 the sun’s ways among the Laplanders, of a hoary 
 summer breathing very softly on the violet beds, or 
 say, the London-pride and crab-apples, provided for 
 those meagre people, somewhere amid the remoteness 
 of their icy seas. In such wise Apollo had already 
 anticipated his sad fortunes in the Middle Age as a god 
 definitely in exile, driven north of the Alps, and even 
 here ever in flight before the summer. Summer 
 indeed he leaves now to the management of others, 
 finding his way from France and Germany to still 
 paler countries, yet making or taking with him always 
 
 1 Published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine , Nov. 1893, anc * 
 now reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors. 
 
 121 
 
122 
 
 APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 a certain seductive summer-in-winter, though also with 
 a divine or titanic regret, a titanic revolt in his heart, 
 and consequent inversion at times of his old beneficent 
 and properly solar doings. For his favours, his falla- 
 cious good-humour, which has in truth a touch of malign 
 magic about it, he makes men pay sometimes a terrible 
 price, and is in fact a devil ! ” 
 
 Devilry, devil’s work : — traces of such you might 
 fancy were to be found in a certain manuscript volume 
 taken from an old monastic library in France at the 
 Revolution. It presented a strange example of a cold 
 and very reasonable spirit disturbed suddenly, thrown 
 off its balance, as by a violent beam, a blaze of new 
 light, revealing, as it glanced here and there, a hundred 
 truths unguessed as before, yet a curse, as it turned out, 
 to its receiver, in dividing hopelessly against itself the 
 well-ordered kingdom of his thought. Twelfth volume 
 of a dry enough treatise on mathematics, applied, still 
 with no relaxation of strict method, to astronomy and 
 music, it should have concluded that work, and there- 
 with the second period of the life of its author, by 
 drawing tight together the threads of a long and 
 intricate argument. In effect however, it began, or, in 
 perturbed manner, and as with throes of childbirth, 
 seemed the preparation for, an argument of an entirely 
 new and disparate species, such as would demand a new 
 period of life also, if it might be, for its due expansion. 
 
 But with what confusion, what baffling inequalities ! 
 How afflicting to the mind’s eye ! It was a veritable 
 “ solar storm ” — this illumination, which had burst at 
 
APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 123 
 
 the last moment upon the strenuous, self-possessed, 
 much-honoured monastic student, as he sat down peace- 
 fully to write the last formal chapters of his work ere 
 he betook himself to its well-earned practical reward 
 as superior, with lordship and mitre and ring, of 
 the abbey whose music and calendar his mathemati- 
 cal knowledge had qualified him to reform. The very 
 shape of Volume Twelve, pieced together of quite 
 irregularly formed pages, was a solecism. It could 
 never be bound. In truth, the man himself, and what 
 passed with him in one particular space of time, had 
 invaded a matter, which is nothing if not entirely 
 abstract and impersonal. Indirectly the volume was 
 the record of an episode, an interlude, an interpolated 
 page of life. And whereas in the earlier volumes you 
 found by way of illustration no more than the simplest 
 indispensable diagrams, the scribe’s hand had strayed 
 here into mazy borders, long spaces of hieroglyph, and 
 as it were veritable pictures of the theoretic elements of 
 his subject. Soft wintry auroras seemed to play behind 
 whole pages of crabbed textual writing, line and figure 
 bending, breathing, flaming, into lovely “ arrange- 
 ments ” that were like music made visible ; till writing 
 and writer changed suddenly, “ to one thing constant 
 never,” after the known manner of madmen in such 
 work. Finally, the whole matter broke off with an 
 unfinished word, as a later hand testified, adding the 
 date of the author’s death, “ deliquio animi .” 
 
 He had been brought to the monastery as a little 
 child ; was bred there ; had never yet left it, busy 
 and satisfied through youth and early manhood ; was 
 
124 
 
 APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 grown almost as necessary a part of the community as 
 the stones of its material abode, as a pillar of the great 
 tower he ascended to watch the movement of the stars. 
 The structure of a fortified medieval town barred in 
 those who belonged to it very effectively. High 
 monastic walls intrenched the monk still further. 
 From the summit of the tower you looked straight 
 down into the deep narrow streets, upon the houses 
 (in one of which Prior Saint-Jean was born) climbing 
 as high as they dared for breathing-space within that 
 narrow compass. But you saw also the green breadth 
 of Normandy and Picardy, this way and that ; felt on 
 your face the free air of a still wider realm beyond 
 what was seen. The reviving scent of it, the mere 
 sight of the flowers brought thence, of the country prod- 
 uce at the convent gate, stirred the ordinary monkish 
 soul with desires, sometimes with efforts, to be sent 
 on duty there. Prior Saint- Jean, on the other hand, 
 shuddered at the view, at the thoughts it suggested to 
 him ; thoughts of unhallowed wild places, where the old 
 heathen had worshipped “ stocks and stones,” and where 
 their wickedness might still survive them in something 
 worse than mischievous tricks of nature, such as you 
 might read of in Ovid, whose verses, however, he for 
 his part had never so much as touched with a finger. 
 He gave thanks rather, that his vocation to the abstract 
 sciences had kept him far apart from the whole crew 
 of miscreant poets — Abode of demons. 
 
 Thither nevertheless he was now to depart, sent to 
 the Grange or Obedience of Notre-Dame De-Pratis by 
 the aged Abbot (about to resign in his favour) for the 
 
APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 125 
 
 benefit of his body’s health, a little impaired at last by 
 long intellectual effort, yet so invaluable to the com- 
 munity. But let him beware ! whispered his dearest 
 friend, who shared those strange misgivings, let him 
 “ take heed to his ways ” when he was come to that 
 place. “ The mere contact of one’s feet with its soil 
 might change one.” And that same night, disturbed 
 perhaps by thoughts of the coming journey with which 
 his brain was full, Prior Saint-Jean himself dreamed 
 vividly, as he had been little used to do. He saw the 
 very place in which he lay (he knew it ! his little inner 
 cell, the brown doors, the white breadth of wall, the black 
 crucifix upon it) alight, alight softly ; and looking, as he 
 fancied, from the window, saw also a low circlet of sound- 
 less flame, waving, licking daintily up the black sky, 
 but harmless, beautiful, closing in upon that round dark 
 space in the midst, which was the earth. He seemed 
 to feel upon his shoulder just then the touch of his 
 friend beside him. “It is hell-fire ! ” he said. 
 
 The Prior took with him a very youthful though 
 devoted companion — Hyacinthus, the pet of the com- 
 munity. They laughed admiringly at the rebellious 
 masses of his black hair, with blue in the depths of it, 
 like the wings of the swallow, which refused to conform 
 to the monkish pattern. It only grew twofold, crown 
 upon crown, after the half-yearly shaving. And he was 
 as neat and serviceable as he was delightful to be with. 
 Prior Saint- Jean, then, and the boy started before 
 daybreak for the long journey; onwards, till dark- 
 ness, a soft twilight rather, was around them again. 
 How unlike a winter night it seemed, the further they 
 
126 
 
 APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 went through the endless, lonely, turf-grown tracts, and 
 along the edge of a valley, at length — vallis mona- 
 chorum , monksvale — taken aback by its sudden steep- 
 ness and depth, as of an immense oval cup sunken in 
 the grassy upland, over which a golden moon now 
 shone broadly. Ah ! there it was at last, the white 
 Grange, the white gable of the chapel apart amid a 
 few scattered white gravestones, the white flocks 
 crouched about on the hoar-frost, like the white 
 clouds, packed somewhat heavily on the horizon, 
 and nacres as the clouds of June, with their own 
 light and heat in them, in their hollows, you might 
 fancy. 
 
 From the very first, the atmosphere, the light, the 
 influence of things, seemed different from what they 
 knew ; and how distant already the dark buildings of 
 their home ! Was there the breath of surviving sum- 
 mer blossom on the air? Now and then came a 
 gentle, comfortable bleating from the folds, and them- 
 selves slept soundly at last in the great open upper 
 chamber of the Grange ; were awakened by the 
 sound of thunder. Strange, in the late November 
 night ! It had parted, however, with its torrid fierce- 
 ness ; modulated by distance, seemed to break away 
 into musical notes. And the lightning lingered along 
 with it, but glancing softly; was in truth an aurora, 
 such as persisted month after month on the northern 
 sky as they sojourned here. Like Prospero’s en- 
 chanted island, the whole place was “full of noises.” 
 The wind it might have been, passing over metallic 
 strings, but that they were audible even when the 
 night was breathless. 
 
APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 127 
 
 So like veritable music, however, were they on that 
 first night that, upon reflexion, the Prior climbed 
 softly the winding stair down which they appeared 
 to flow, to the great solar among the beams of the 
 roof, where the farm produce lay stored. A flood of 
 moonlight now fell through the unshuttered dormer- 
 windows ; and, under the glow of a lamp hanging from 
 the low rafters, Prior Saint-Jean seemed to be looking 
 for the first time on the human form, on the old Adam 
 fresh from his Maker’s hand. A servant of the house, 
 or farm-labourer, perhaps ! — fallen asleep there by 
 chance on the fleeces heaped like golden stuff high in 
 all the corners of the place. A serf ! But what un- 
 serflike ease, how lordly, or godlike rather, in the 
 posture ! Could one fancy a single curve bettered in 
 the rich, warm, white limbs ; in the haughty features of 
 the face, with the golden hair, tied in a mystic knot, 
 fallen down across the inspired brow? And yet what 
 gentle sweetness also in the natural movement of the 
 bosom, the throat, the lips, of the sleeper ! Could that 
 be diabolical, and really spotted with unseen evil, which 
 was so spotless to the eye? The rude sandals of the 
 monastic serf lay beside him apart, and all around was 
 of the roughest, excepting only two strange objects 
 lying within reach (even in their own renowned 
 treasury Prior Saint-Jean had not seen the like of 
 them), a harp, or some such instrument, of silver-gilt 
 once, but the gold had mostly passed from it, and 
 a bow, fashioned somehow of the same precious sub- 
 stance. The very form of these things filled his mind 
 with inexplicable misgivings. He repeated a befitting 
 collect, and trod softly away. 
 
128 
 
 APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 It was in truth but a rude place to which they were 
 come. But, after life in the monastery, the severe dis- 
 cipline of which the Prior himself had done much to 
 restore, there was luxury in the free, self-chosen hours, 
 the irregular fare, in doing pretty much as one pleased, 
 in the sweet novelties of the country ; to the boy Hya- 
 cinth especially, who forgot himself, or rather found his 
 true self for the first time. Girding up his heavy frock, 
 which he laid aside erelong altogether to go in his 
 coarse linen smock only, he seemed a monastic novice 
 no longer ; yet, in his natural gladness, was found more 
 companionable than ever by his senior, surprised, 
 delighted, for his part, at the fresh springing of his 
 brain, the spring of his footsteps over the close green- 
 sward, as if smoothed by the art of man. Cause of his 
 renewed health, or concurrent with its effects, the air 
 here might have been that of a veritable paradise, still 
 unspoiled. “ Could there be unnatural magic,” he 
 asked himself again, “any secret evil, lurking in these 
 tranquil vale-sides, in their sweet low pastures, in the 
 belt of scattered woodland above them, in the rills of 
 pure water which lisped from the open down beyond?” 
 Making what was really a boy’s experience, he had 
 a wholly boyish delight in his holiday, and certainly 
 did not reflect how much we beget for ourselves in 
 what we see and feel, nor how far a certain diffused 
 music in the very breath of the place was the creation 
 of his own ear or brain. 
 
 That strange enigmatic owner of the harp and the 
 bow, whom he had found sleeping so divinely, actually 
 waited on them the next morning with all obsequious- 
 
APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 129 
 
 ness, stirred the great fire of peat, adjusted duly their 
 monkish attire, laid their meal. It seemed an odd 
 thing to be served thus, like St. Jerome by the lion, 
 as if by some imperiously beautiful wild animal tamed. 
 You hesitated to permit, were a little afraid of, his ser- 
 vices. Their silent tonsured porter himself, contrast 
 grim enough to any creature of that kind, had been so 
 far seduced as to permit him to sleep there in the 
 Grange, as he loved to do, instead of in ruder, rougher 
 quarters ; and, coaxed into odd garrulity on this one 
 matter, told the new-comers the little he knew, with 
 much also that he only suspected, about him ; among 
 other things, as to the origin of those precious objects, 
 which might have belonged to some sanctuary or noble 
 house, found thus in the possession of a mere labourer, 
 who is no Frenchman, but a pagan, or gipsy, white as 
 he looks, from far south or east, and who works or 
 plays furtively, by night for the most part, returning to 
 sleep awhile before daybreak. The other herdsmen of 
 the valley are bond-servants, but he a hireling at will, 
 though coming regularly at a certain season. He has 
 come thus for any number of years past, though seem- 
 ingly never grown older (as the speaker reflects), 
 singing his way meagrely from farm to farm, to the 
 sound of his harp. His name? — It was scarcely a 
 name at all, in the diffident syllables he uttered in 
 answer to that question, on first coming there ; but of 
 names known to them it came nearest to a malignant 
 one in Scripture, Apollyon. Apollyon had a just 
 discernible tonsure, but probably no right to it. 
 
 Well skilled in architecture, Prior Saint- Jean was set, 
 
 K 
 
130 
 
 APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 by way of a holiday task, to superintend the comple- 
 tion of the great monastic barn then in building. The 
 visitor admires it still ; perhaps supposes it, with its 
 noble aisle, though set north and south, to be a dese- 
 crated church. If he be an expert in such matters, he 
 will remark a sort of classical harmony in its broad, 
 very simple proportions, with a certain suppression of 
 Gothic emphasis, more especially in that peculiarly 
 Gothic feature, the buttresses, scarcely marking the 
 unbroken, windowless walls, which rise very straight, 
 taking the sun placidly. The silver-grey stone, cut, if 
 it came from this neighbourhood at all, from some now 
 forgotten quarry, has the fine, close-grained texture of 
 antique marble. The great northern gable is almost 
 a classic pediment. The horizontal lines of plinth and 
 ridge and cornice are kept unbroken, the roof of sea- 
 grey slates being pitched less angularly than is usual 
 in this rainy clime. A welcome contrast, the Prior 
 thought it, to the sort of architectural nightmare he 
 came from. He found the structure already more 
 than half-way up, the low squat pillars ready for their 
 capitals. 
 
 Yes ! it must have so happened often in the Middle 
 Age, as you feel convinced, in looking sometimes at 
 medieval building. Style must have changed under 
 the very hands of men who were no wilful innovators. 
 Thus it was here, in the later work of Prior Saint- Jean, 
 all unconsciously. The mysterious harper sat there 
 always, at the topmost point achieved ; played, idly 
 enough it might seem, on his precious instrument, but 
 kept in fact the hard taxed workmen literally in tune. 
 
APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 131 
 
 working for once with a ready will, and, so to speak, 
 with really inventive hands — working expeditiously, in 
 this favourable weather, till far into the night, as they 
 joined unbidden in a chorus, which hushed, or rather 
 turned to music, the noise of their chipping. It was 
 hardly noise at all, even in the night-time. Now and 
 again Brother Apollyon descended nimbly to surprise 
 them, at an opportune moment, by the display of an 
 immense strength. A great cheer exploded suddenly, 
 as single-handed he heaved a massive stone into its 
 place. He seemed to have no sense of weight : — 
 “Put there by the devil ! ” the modern villager assures 
 you. 
 
 With a change then, not so much of style as of 
 temper, of management, in the application of acknowl- 
 edged rules, Prior Saint- Jean shaping only, adapting, 
 simplifying, partly with a view to economy, not the 
 heavy stones only, but the heavy manner of using them, 
 turned light. With no pronounced ornamentation, it 
 is as if in the upper story ponderous root and stem 
 blossomed gracefully, blossomed in cornice and capital 
 and pliant arch-line, as vigorous as they were grace- 
 ful, and rose on high quickly. Almost suddenly tie-beam 
 and rafter knit themselves together into the stone, and 
 the dark, dry, roomy place was closed in securely to 
 this day. Mere audible music, certainly, had counted 
 for something in the operations of an art, held at its 
 best (as we know) to be a sort of music made visible. 
 That idle singer, one might fancy, by an art beyond 
 art, had attracted beams and stones into their fit 
 places. And there, sure enough, he still sits, as a 
 
132 
 
 APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 final decorative touch, by way of apex on the gable 
 which looks northward, though much weather-worn, 
 and with an ugly gap between the shoulder and the 
 fingers on the harp , 1 as if, literally, he had cut off his 
 right hand and put it from him : — King David, or an 
 angel? guesses the careless tourist. The space below 
 has been lettered. After a little puzzling you recognise 
 there the relics of a familiar verse from a Latin psalm : 
 Nisi Dominus cedificaverit do mum, and the rest : in- 
 scribed as well as may be in Greek characters. Prior 
 Saint- Jean caused it to be so inscribed, absurdly, 
 during his last days there. 
 
 And is not the human body, too, a building, with 
 architectural laws, a structure, tending by the very 
 forces which primarily held it together to drop asunder 
 in time? Not in vain, it seemed, had Prior Saint- Jean 
 come to this mystic place for the improvement of his 
 body’s health. Thenceforth that fleshly tabernacle 
 had housed him, had housed his cunning, overwrought 
 and excitable soul, ever the better day by day, and he 
 began to feel his bodily health to be a positive quality 
 or force, the presence near him of that singular being 
 having surely something to do with this result. He 
 and his fascinations, his music, himself, might at least 
 be taken for an embodiment of all those genial in- 
 fluences of earth and sky, and the easy ways of living 
 here, which made him turn, with less of an effort than 
 he had known for many years past, to his daily tasks, 
 and sink so regularly, so immediately, to wholesome 
 rest on returning from them. It was as if Brother 
 
 1 Or sundial, as some maintain, though turned from the south. 
 
APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 133 
 
 Apollyon himself abhorred the spectacle of distress, 
 and mainly for his own satisfaction charmed away 
 other people’s maladies. The mere touch of that ice- 
 cold hand, laid on the feverish brow, when the Prior 
 lapsed from time to time into his former troubles, 
 certainly calmed the respiration of a troubled sleeper. 
 Was there magic in it, not wholly natural ? The hand 
 might have been a dead one. But then, was it sur- 
 prising, after all, that the methods of curing men’s 
 maladies, as being in very deed the fruit of sin, should 
 have something strange and unlooked-for about them, 
 like some of those Old Testament healings and purifica- 
 tions which the Prior’s biblical lore suggested to him? 
 Yet Brother Apollyon, if their surly Janitor , in his less 
 kindly moments, spoke truly, himself greatly needed 
 purification, being not only a thief, but a homicide in 
 hiding from the law. Nay, once, on his annual return 
 from southern or eastern lands, he had been observed 
 on his way along the streets of the great town literally 
 scattering the seeds of disease till his serpent-skin bag 
 was empty. And within seven days the “ black death ” 
 was there, reaping its thousands. As a wise man 
 declared, he who can best cure disease can also most 
 cunningly engender it. 
 
 In short, these creatures of rule, these “ regulars,” 
 the Prior and his companion, were come in contact for 
 the first time in their lives with the power of untutored 
 natural impulse, of natural inspiration. The boy ex- 
 perienced it immediately in the games which suited 
 his years, but which he had never so much as seen 
 before : as his superior was to undergo its influence 
 
134 
 
 APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 by-and-by in serious study. By night chiefly, in its 
 long, continuous twilights, Hyacinth became really 
 a boy at last, with immense gaiety; eyes, hands 
 and feet awake, expanding, as he raced his comrade 
 over the turf, with the conical Druidic stone for a 
 goal, or wrestled lithely enough with him, though as 
 with a rock ; or, taking the silver bow in hand for 
 a moment, transfixed a mark, next a bird, on the 
 bough, on the wing, shedding blood for the first time, 
 with a boy’s delight, a boy’s remorse. Friend Apol- 
 lyon seemed able to draw the wild animals too, to 
 share their sport, yet not altogether kindly. Tired, 
 surfeited, he destroys them when his game with them 
 is at an end ; breaks the toy ; deftly snaps asunder the 
 fragile back. Though all alike would come at his call, 
 or the sound of his harp, he had his preferences ; and 
 warred in the night-time, as if on principle, against the 
 creatures of the day. The small furry thing he pierced 
 with his arrow fled to him nevertheless caressingly, 
 with broken limb, to die palpitating in his hand. In 
 this wonderful season, the migratory birds, from Nor- 
 way, from Britain beyond the seas, came there as usual 
 on the north wind, with sudden tumult of wings ; but 
 went that year no further, and by Christmas-time had 
 built their nests, filling that belt of woodland around the 
 vale with the chatter of their business and love quarrels. 
 In turn they drew after them strangers no one here 
 had ever known before ; the like of which Hyacinth, 
 who knew his bestiary, had never seen even in a 
 picture. The wild-cat, the wild-swan — the boy peeped 
 on these wonders as they floated over the vale, or 
 
APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 135 
 
 glided with unwonted confidence over its turf, under 
 the moonlight, or that frequent continuous aurora which 
 was not the dawn. Even the modest rivulets of the 
 hill-side felt that influence, and “ lisped ” no longer, but 
 babbled as they leapt, like mountain streams, exposing 
 their rocky bed. Were they angry, as they ran red 
 sometimes with blood-drops from the stricken bird 
 caught there by rock or bough, as it fell with rent 
 breast among the waves ? 
 
 But say, think, what you might against him, the 
 pagan outlaw was worth his hire as a herdsman ; 
 seemingly loved his sheep ; was an “ affectionate 
 shepherd ” ; cured their diseases ; brought them easily 
 to the birth, and if they strayed afar would bring them 
 back tenderly upon his shoulders. Monastic persons 
 would have seen that image many times before. 
 Yet if Apollyon looked like the great carved figure 
 over the low doorway of their place of penitence 
 at home, that could be but an accident, or perhaps a 
 deceit ; so closely akin to those soulless creatures did 
 he still seem to the wondering Prior, — immersed in, or 
 actually a part of, that irredeemable natural world he 
 had dreaded so greatly ere he came hither. And was 
 he after all making terms with it now, in the seductive 
 person of this mysterious being — man or demon — sus- 
 pected of murder ; who has an air of unfathomable evil 
 about him as from a distant but ineffaceable past, and 
 a sort of heathen understanding with the dark realm of 
 matter ; who is bringing the simple people, the women 
 and lovesick lads, back to those caves and cromlechs 
 and blasted trees, resorts of old godless secret- telling? 
 
136 
 
 APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 And still he has all his own way with beasts and man, 
 with the Prior himself, much as all alike distrust him. 
 
 Most conspicuous in the little group of buildings, 
 a feudal tower of goodly white stone, cylindrical and 
 smoothly polished without to hinder the ascent of 
 creeping things, and snugly plastered within to resist 
 the damp, was the pigeon-house — a veritable feudal 
 tower, a veritable feudal plaisance of birds, which the 
 common people dared not so much as ruffle. About 
 a thousand of them were housed there, each in its little 
 chamber, encouraged to grow plump, and to breed, in 
 perfect self-content. From perch to perch of the great 
 axle-tree in the centre, monastic feet might climb, 
 gentle monastic hands pass round to every tiny com- 
 partment in turn. The arms of the monastery were 
 carved on the keystone of the doorway, and the tower 
 finished in a conical roof, with becoming aerial gail- 
 lardise , with pretty dormer-windows for the inmates 
 to pass in and out, little balconies for brooding in the 
 sun, little awnings to protect them from rough breezes, 
 and a great weather-vane, on which the birds crowded 
 for the chance of a ride. If the peasants of that day, 
 whose small fields they plundered, noting all this, per- 
 haps envied the birds dumbly, for the brethren, on the 
 other hand, it was a constant delight to watch the 
 feathered brotherhood, which supplied likewise their 
 daintiest fare. Who then, what hawk, or wild-cat, or 
 other savage beast, had ravaged it so wantonly, so very 
 cruelly destroyed the bright creatures in a single night 
 — broken backs, rent away limbs, pierced the wings ? 
 And what was that object there below? The silver 
 
APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 137 
 
 harp surely, lying broken likewise on the sanded floor, 
 soaking in the pale milky blood and torn plumage. 
 
 Apolly.on sobbed and wept audibly as he went about 
 his ordinary doings next day, for once fully, though 
 very sadly, awake in it ; and towards evening, when 
 the villagers came to the Prior to confess themselves, 
 the Feast of the Nativity being now at hand, he too 
 came along with them in his place meekly, like any 
 other penitent, touched the lustral water devoutly, 
 knew all the ways, seemed to desire absolution from 
 some guilt of blood heavier than the slaughter of beast 
 or bird. The Prior and his attendant, on their side, 
 are reminded that by this time they have wellnigh for- 
 gotten the monastic duties still incumbent upon them, 
 especially in that matter of the “Offices.” On the 
 vigil of the feast, however, Brother Apollyon himself 
 summoned the devout to Midnight Mass with the great 
 bell, which had hung silent for a generation, wedged 
 in immoveably by a beam of the cradle fallen out of its 
 place. With an immense effort of strength he relieved 
 it, hitched the bell back upon its wheel ; the thick rust 
 cracked on the hinges, and the strokes tolled forth 
 betimes, with a hundred querulous, quaint creatures, 
 bats and owls, circling stupidly in the waves of sound, 
 but allowed to settle back again undisturbedly into 
 their beds. 
 
 People and priest, the Prior, vested as well as 
 might be, with Hyacinth as “server,” come in due 
 course, all alike amazed to find that frozen neglected 
 place, with its low-browed vault and narrow win- 
 dows, alight, and as if warmed with flowers from 
 
138 
 
 APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 a summer more radiant far than that of France, with 
 ilex and laurel — gilt laurel — by way of holly and box. 
 Prior Saint- Jean felt that he had never really seen 
 flowers before. Somewhat later they and the like of 
 them seemed to have grown into and over his brain ; 
 to have degraded the scientific and abstract outlines of 
 things into a tangle of useless ornament. Whence 
 were they procured? From what height, or hellish 
 depth perhaps? Apollyon, who entered the chapel 
 just then, as if quite naturally, though with a bleating 
 lamb in his bosom (“ dropped ” thus early in that won- 
 derful season) by way of an offering, took his place at 
 the altar’s very foot, and drawing forth his harp, now 
 restrung, at the right moment, turned to real silvery 
 music the hoarse Gloria in Excelsis of those rude wor- 
 shippers, still shrinking from him, while they listened in 
 a little circle, as he stood there in his outlandish attire 
 of skins strangely spotted and striped. With that how- 
 ever the Mass broke off unconsummated. The Prior 
 felt obliged to desist from the sacred office, and had 
 left the altar hurriedly. 
 
 But Brother Apollyon put his strange attire aside 
 next day, and in a much-worn monk’s frock, drawn forth 
 from a dark corner, came with them, still like a peni- 
 tent, when they turned once more to their neglected 
 studies somewhat sadly. See them then, after a 
 collect for “ Light ” repeated by Hyacinth, skull-cap 
 in hand, seated at their desks in the little scriptorium , 
 panelled off from their living-room on the first floor, 
 while the Prior makes an effort to recover the last 
 thought of his long-suspended work, in the execution 
 
c 
 
 APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 139 
 
 g 
 
 f which the boy is to assist with his skilful pen. The 
 f reat glazed windows remain open ; admit, as if 
 ^Iready on the soft air of spring, what seems like a 
 ^trearn of flowery odours, the entire moonlit scene, 
 vith the thorn bushes on the vale-side prematurely 
 bursting into blossom, and the sound of birds and 
 .locks emphasising the deep silence of the night. 
 f Apollyon then, as if by habit, as he had shared all 
 heir occupations of late, had taken his seat beside 
 hem, meekly enough, at first with the manner of a 
 aere suppliant for the crumbs of their high studies, 
 ^ut, straightway again, he surprises by more than rac- 
 ‘ng forward incredibly on the road to facts, and from 
 facts to luminous doctrine ; Prior Saint- Jean himself, 
 fin comparison, seeming to lag incompetently behind. 
 He can but wonder at this strange scholar’s knowledge 
 of a distant past, evidenced in his familiarity (it was 
 as if he might once have spoken them) with the dead 
 languages in which their text-books are written. 
 There was more surely than the utmost merely natural 
 acuteness in his guesses as to the words intended by 
 those crabbed contractions, of their meaning, in his 
 sense of allusions and the like. An ineffaceable mem- 
 ory it might rather seem of the entire world of which 
 those languages had been the living speech, once more 
 vividly awake under the Prior’s cross-questioning, and 
 now more than supplementing his own laborious search. 
 
 And at last something of the same kind happens 
 with himself. Had he, on his way hither from the 
 convent, passed unwittingly through some river or 
 rivulet of Lethe, that had carried away from him all 
 
/ 
 
 140 APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 his so carefully accumulated intellectual baggage 
 fact and theory? The hard and abstract laws, c r 
 theory of the laws, of music, of the stars, of mechani- 
 cal structure, in hard and abstract formula , adding t b 
 the abstract austerity of the man, seemed to have' 
 r deserted him ; to be revived in him again however, a 
 the contact of this extraordinary pupil or fellow-in- 
 quirer, though in a very different guise or attitude 
 towards himself, as matters no longer to be reasoned 
 upon and understood, but to be seen rather, to be 
 looked at and heard. Did not he see the angle of the 
 earth’s axis with the ecliptic, the deflexions of the 
 stars from their proper orbits with fatal results herd 
 below, and the earth — wicked, unscriptural truth ! — 
 moving round the *!sun, and those flashes of the eternal 
 and unorbed light such as bring water, flowers, living v 
 things, out of the rocks, the dust ? The singing of the 
 planets : he could hear it, and might in time effect its 
 notation. Having seen and heard, he might erelong 
 speak also, truly and with authority, on such matters. 
 Could one but arrest it for one’s self, for final trans- 
 ference to others, on the written or printed page — 
 this beam of insight, or of inspiration ! 
 
 Alas ! one result of its coming was that it encouraged 
 delay. If he set hand to the page, the firm halo, here 
 a moment since, was gone, had flitted capriciously to 
 the wall ; passed next through the window, to the wall 
 of the garden ; was dancing back in another moment 
 upon the innermost walls of one’s own miserable 
 brain, to swell there — that astounding white light ! — 
 rising steadily in the cup, the mental receptacle, till 
 
APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 141 
 
 it overflowed, and he lay faint and drowning in it c 
 Or he rose above it, as above a great liquid surface, 
 and hung giddily over it — light, simple, and absolute 
 — ere he fell. Or there was a battle between light 
 and darkness around him, with no way of escape from 
 the baffling strokes, the lightning flashes ; flashes of 
 blindness one might rather call them. In truth, the 
 intuitions of the night (for they worked still, or tried 
 to work, by night) became the sickly nightmares of 
 the day, in which Prior Saint-Jean slept, or tried to 
 sleep, or lay sometimes in a trance without food for 
 many hours, from which he would spring up suddenly 
 to crowd, against time, as much as he could into his 
 book with pen or brush ; winged flowers, or stars with 
 human limbs and faces, still intruding themselves, or 
 mere notes of light and darkness from the actual hori- 
 zon. There it all is still in the faded gold and colours 
 of the ancient volume — “ Prior Saint- Jean’s folly : ” — 
 till on a sudden the hand collapses, as he becomes 
 aware of that real, prosaic, broad daylight lying harsh 
 upon the page, making his delicately toned auroras 
 seem but a patch of grey, and himself for a moment, 
 with a sigh of disgust, of self-reproach, to be his old 
 unimpassioned monastic self once more. 
 
 The boy, for his part, was grown at last full of mis-"' 
 giving. He ponders how he may get the Prior away, 
 or escape by himself, find his way back to the convent 
 and report his master’s condition, his strange loss of 
 memory for names and the like, his illusions about 
 himself and others. And he is more than ever dis- 
 trustful now of his late beloved playmate, who quietly 
 
142 
 
 APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 obstructs any movement of the kind, and has under- 
 taken, at the Prior’s entreaty, to draw down the moon 
 from the sky, for some shameful price, known to the 
 magicians of that day. 
 
 Yet Apollyon, at all events, would still play as gaily 
 as ever on occasion. Hitherto they had played as 
 young animals do ; without playthings namely, apply- 
 ing hand or foot only to their games. But it happened 
 about this time that a grave was dug, a grave of 
 unusual depth, to be ready, in that fiery plaguesome 
 weather, the first heat of veritable summer come sud- 
 denly, for the body of an ancient villager then at the 
 point of death. In the drowsy afternoon Hyacinth 
 awakes Apollyon, to see the strange thing he has 
 found at the grave-side, among the gravel and yellow 
 bones cast up there. He had wrested it with difficulty 
 from the hands of the half-crippled gravedigger, at 
 eighty still excitable by the mere touch of metal. 
 
 The like of it had indeed been found before, within 
 living memory, in this place of immemorial use as 
 a graveyard — “ Devil’s penny-pieces” people called 
 them. Five such lay hidden already in a dark 
 corner of the chapel, to keep them from superstitious 
 employment. To-day they came out of hiding at last. 
 Apollyon knew the use of the thing at a glance ; had 
 put an expert hand to it forthwith ; poises the discus ; 
 sets it wheeling. How easily it spins round under 
 one’s arm, in the groove of the bent fingers, slips 
 thence smoothly like a knife flung from its sheath, as 
 if for a course of perpetual motion ! Splendescit 
 cundo : it seems to burn as it goes. It is heavier many 
 
APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 143 
 
 times than it looks, and sharp-edged. By night they 
 have scoured and polished the corroded surfaces. 
 Apollyon promises Hyacinth and himself rare sport 
 in the cool of the evening — an evening however, as 
 it turned out, not less breathless than the day. 
 
 In the great heat Apollyon had flung aside, as if 
 for ever, the last sorry remnant of his workman’s attire, 
 and challenged the boy to do the same. On the 
 moonlit turf there, crouching, right foot foremost, and 
 with face turned backwards to the disk in his right 
 hand, his whole body, in that moment of rest, full 
 of the circular motion he is about to commit to it, he 
 seemed — beautiful pale spectre — to shine from within 
 with a light of his own, like that of the glow-worm in 
 the thicket, or the dead and rotten roots of the old 
 trees. And as if they had a proper motion of their 
 own in them, the disks, the quoits, ran, amid the 
 delighted shouts and laughter of the boy, as he fol- 
 lows, scarcely less swift, to score the points of tHeir 
 contact with the grass. Again and again they recom- 
 mence, forgetful of the hours ; while the death-bell 
 cries out harshly for the grave’s occupant, and the 
 corpse itself is borne along stealthily not far from them, 
 and, unnoticed by either, the entire aspect of things has 
 changed. Under the overcast sky it is in darkness 
 they are playing, by guess and touch chiefly ; and sud- 
 denly an icy blast of wind has lifted the roof from the 
 old chapel, the trees are moaning in wild circular 
 motion, and their devil’s penny-piece, when Apollyon 
 throws it for the last time, is itself but a twirling leaf 
 in the wind, till it sinks edgewise, sawing through the 
 
144 
 
 APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 boy’s face, uplifted in the dark to trace it, crushing in 
 the tender skull upon the brain. 
 
 Plis shout of laughter is turned in an instant to a 
 cry of pain, of reproach ; and in that which echoed it 
 — an immense cry, as from the very heart of ancient 
 
 , over the Picard wolds — it was as if that half- 
 
 extinguished deity, its proper immensity, its old great- 
 ness and power, were restored for a moment. The 
 villagers in their beds wondered. It was like the 
 sound of some natural catastrophe. 
 
 The storm which followed was still in possession, 
 still moving tearfully among the poplar groves, though 
 it had spent its heat and thunder. The last drops of 
 the blood of Hyacinth still trickled through the thick 
 masses of dark hair, where the tonsure had been. 
 An abundant rain, mingling with the copious purple 
 stream, had coloured the grass all around where the 
 corpse lay, stealing afar in tiny channels. So it was, 
 when Apollyon, reduced in the morning light to his 
 smaller self, came with the other people of the Grange 
 to gaze, to enquire, and found the Prior already there, 
 speechless. Clearly this was no lightning stroke ; and 
 Apollyon straightway conceives certain very human 
 fears that, coming upon those antecedent suspicions of 
 himself, the boy’s death may be thought the result of 
 intention on his part. He proposes to bury the body 
 at once, with no delay for religious rites, in that still 
 uncovered grave, the bearers having fled from it in the 
 tempest. 
 
 And next day, fulfilling his annual custom, he went 
 his way northward, without a word of farewell to 
 
APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 145 
 
 Prior Saint- Jean, whom he leaves in fact under sus- 
 picion of murder. From the profound slumber which 
 had followed the excitements of yesterday, the Prior 
 awoke amid the sound of voices, the voices of the 
 peasants singing no Christian song, certainly, but 
 a song which Apollyon himself had taught them, to 
 dismiss him on his journey. For, strange or not as 
 it might be, they loved him, perhaps in spite of them- 
 selves ; would certainly protect him at any risk. Prior 
 Saint- Jean arose, and looked forth — with wonder. A 
 brief spell of sunshine amid the rain had clothed the 
 vale with a marvel of blue flowers, if it were not rather 
 with remnants of the blue sky itself, fallen among the 
 woods there. But there too, in the little courtyard, 
 the officers of justice are already in waiting to take 
 him, on the charge of having caused the death of his 
 young server by violence, in a fit of mania, induced by 
 dissolute living in that solitary place. One hitherto 
 so prosperous in life would, of course, have his 
 enemies. 
 
 The monastic authorities, however, claim him from 
 the secular power, to correct his offence in their own 
 way, and with friendly interpretation of the facts. 
 Madness, however wicked, being still madness. Prior, 
 now simple Brother, Saint- Jean, is detained in a suffi- 
 ciently cheerful apartment, in a region of the atmo- 
 sphere likely to restore lost wits, whence indeed he can 
 still see the country — vallis monachorum. The one 
 desire which from time to time fitfully rouses him again 
 to animation for a few moments is to return thither. 
 Here then he remains in peace, ostensibly for the com- 
 
146 
 
 APOLLO IN PICARDY 
 
 pletion of his great work. He never again set pen to 
 it, consistent and clear now on nothing save that long- 
 ing to be once more at the Grange, that he may get 
 well, or die and be well so. He is like the damned 
 spirit, think some of the brethren, saying “ I will return 
 to the house whence I came out.” Gazing thither 
 daily for many hours, he would mistake mere blue 
 distance, when that was visible, for blue flowers, for 
 hyacinths, and wept at the sight ; though blue, as he 
 observed, was the colour of Holy Mary’s gown on the 
 illuminated page, the colour of hope, of merciful omni- 
 present deity. The necessary permission came with 
 difficulty, just too late. Brother Saint- Jean died, 
 standing upright with an effort to gaze forth once 
 more, amid the preparations for his departure. 
 
THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE . 1 
 
 As Florian Deleal walked, one hot afternoon, he 
 overtook by the wayside a poor aged man, and, as 
 he seemed weary with the road, helped him on with 
 the burden which he carried, a certain distance. And 
 as the man told his story, it chanced that he named 
 the place, a little place in the neighbourhood of 
 a great city, where Florian had passed his earliest 
 years, but which he had never since seen, and, the 
 story told, went forward on his journey comforted. 
 And that night, like a reward for his pity, a dream of 
 that place came to Florian, a dream which did for 
 him the office of the finer sort of memory, bringing 
 its object to mind with a great clearness, yet, as 
 sometimes happens in dreams, raised a little above 
 itself, and above ordinary retrospect. The true 
 aspect of the place, especially of the house there in 
 which he had lived as a child, the fashion of its doors, 
 its hearths, its windows, the very scent upon the air 
 of it, was with him in sleep for a season ; only, with 
 tints more musically blent on wall and floor, and 
 some finer light and shadow running in and out along 
 
 1 Published in Macmillan's Magazine, Aug. 1878. 
 147 
 
148 
 
 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 its curves and angles, and with all its little carvings 
 daintier. He awoke with a sigh at the thought of 
 almost thirty years which lay between him and that 
 place, yet with a flutter of pleasure still within him at 
 the fair light, as if it were a smile, upon it. And it 
 happened that this accident of his dream was just the 
 thing needed for the beginning of a certain design he 
 then had in view, the noting, namely, of some things 
 in the story of his spirit — in that process of brain- 
 building by which we are, each one of us, what we 
 are. With the image of the place so clear and 
 favourable upon him, he fell to thinking of himself 
 therein, and how his thoughts had grown up to him. 
 In that half-spiritualised house he could watch the 
 better, over again, the gradual expansion of the soul 
 which had come to be there — of which indeed, through 
 the law which makes the material objects about them 
 so large an element in children’s lives, it had actually 
 become a part ; inward and outward being woven 
 through and through each other into one inextricable 
 texture — half, tint and trace and accident of homely 
 colour and form, from the wood and the bricks ; 
 half, mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows 
 how far. In the house and garden of his dream he 
 saw a child moving, and could divide the main streams 
 at least of the winds that had played on him, and 
 study so the first stage in that mental journey. 
 
 The old house , as when Florian talked of it after- 
 wards he always called it, (as all children do, who can 
 recollect a change of home, soon enough but not too 
 soon to mark a period in their lives) really was an old 
 
THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 149 
 
 house ; and an element of French descent in its in- 
 mates —descent from Watteau, the old court-painter, 
 one of whose gallant pieces still hung in one of the 
 rooms — might explain, together with some other things, 
 a noticeable trimness and comely whiteness about 
 everything there — the curtains, the couches, the paint 
 on the walls with which the light and shadow played 
 so delicately ; might explain also the tolerance of the 
 great poplar in the garden, a tree most often despised 
 by English people, but which French people love, 
 having observed a certain fresh way its leaves have of 
 dealing with the wind, making it sound, in never so 
 slight a stirring of the air, like running water. 
 
 The old-fashioned, low wainscoting went round the 
 rooms, and up the staircase with carved balusters and 
 shadowy angles, landing half-way up at a broad 
 window, with a swallow’s nest below the sill, and the 
 blossom of an old pear-tree showing across it in late 
 April, against the blue, below which the perfumed 
 juice of the find of fallen fruit in autumn was so 
 fresh. At the next turning came the closet which 
 held on its deep shelves the best china. Little angel 
 faces and reedy flutings stood out round the fire- 
 place of the children’s room. And on the top of the 
 house, above the large attic, where the white mice ran 
 in the twilight — an infinite, unexplored wonderland of 
 childish treasures, glass beads, empty scent-bottles 
 still sweet, thrum of coloured silks, among its lumber 
 — a flat space of roof, railed round, gave a view of the 
 neighbouring steeples ; for the house, as I said, stood 
 near a great city, which sent up heavenwards, over 
 
150 
 
 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 the twisting weather-vanes, not seldom, its beds of 
 rolling cloud and smoke, touched with storm or sun- 
 shine. But the child of whom I am writing did not 
 hate the fog because of the crimson lights which fell 
 from it sometimes upon the chimneys, and the whites 
 which gleamed through its openings, on summer morn- 
 ings, on turret or pavement. For it is false to suppose 
 that a child’s sense of beauty is dependent on any 
 choiceness or special fineness, in the objects which pre- 
 sent themselves to it, though this indeed comes to be 
 the rule with most of us in later life ; earlier, in some 
 degree, we see inwardly ; and the child finds for itself, 
 and with unstinted delight, a difference for the sense, 
 in those whites and reds through the smoke on very 
 homely buildings, and in the gold of the dandelions at 
 the road-side, just beyond the houses, where not a 
 handful of earth is virgin and untouched, in the lack 
 of better ministries to its desire of beauty. 
 
 / This house then stood not far beyond the gloom 
 and rumours of the town, among high garden-wall, 
 bright all summer-time with Golden-rod, and brown- 
 and-golden Wall-flower — Flos Parietis , as the children’s 
 Latin-reading father taught them to call it, while he 
 was with them. Tracing back the threads of his com- 
 plex spiritual habit, as he was used in after years to 
 do, Florian found that he owed to the place many 
 tones of sentiment afterwards customary with him, 
 certain inward lights under which things most natu- 
 rally presented themselves to him. The coming and 
 going of travellers to the town along the way, the 
 shadow of the streets, the sudden breath of the 
 
THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 151 
 
 neighbouring gardens, the singular brightness of 
 bright weather there, its singular darknesses which 
 linked themselves in his mind to certain engraved 
 illustrations in the old big Bible at home, the coolness 
 of the dark, cavernous shops round the great church, 
 with its giddy winding stair up to the pigeons and the 
 bells — a citadel of peace in the heart of the trouble — 
 all this acted on his childish fancy, so that ever after- 
 wards the like aspects and incidents never failed to 
 throw him into a well-recognised imaginative mood, 
 seeming actually to have become a part of the texture 
 of his mind. Also, Florian could trace home to this ? 
 point a pervading preference in himself for a kind 
 of comeliness and dignity, an urbanity literally, in 
 modes of life, which he connected with the pale 
 people of towns, and which made him susceptible to 
 a kind of exquisite satisfaction in the trimness and 
 well-considered grace of certain things and persons 
 he afterwards met with, here and there, in his way 
 through the world. 
 
 So the child of whom I am writing lived on there 
 quietly ; things without thus ministering to him, as 
 he sat daily at the window with the birdcage hanging 
 below it, and his mother taught him to read, wonder- 
 ing at the ease with which he learned, and at the 
 quickness of his memory. The perfume of the little 
 flowers of the lime-tree fell through the air upon 
 them like rain ; while tim? seemed to move ever more 
 slowly to the murmur of :he bees in it, till it almost 
 stood still on June afternoons. How insignificant, at 
 the moment, seem the influences of the sensible things 
 
152 
 
 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 which are tossed and fall and lie about us, so, or so, in 
 the environment of early childhood. How indelibly, 
 as we afterwards discover, they affect us ; with what 
 capricious attractions and associations they figure 
 themselves on the white paper, the smooth wax, of 
 our ingenuous souls, as “with lead in the rock for 
 ever,” giving form and feature, and as it were assigned 
 house-room in our memory, to early experiences of 
 feeling and thought, which abide with us ever after- 
 wards, thus, and not otherwise. The realities and 
 passions, the rumours of the greater world without, 
 steal in upon us, each by its own special little passage- 
 way, through the wall of custom about us ; and never 
 afterwards quite detach themselves from this or that 
 accident, or trick, in the mode of their first entrance to 
 us. Our susceptibilities, the discovery of our powers, 
 manifold experiences — our various experiences of the 
 coming and going of bodily pain, for instance — belong 
 to this or the other well-remembered place in the 
 material habitation — that little white room with the 
 window across which the heavy blossoms could beat 
 so peevishly in the wind, with just that particular 
 catch or throb, such a sense of teasing in it, on gusty 
 mornings ; and the early habitation thus gradually 
 becomes a sort of material shrine or sanctuary of senti- 
 ment ; a system of visible symbolism interweaves itself 
 through all our thoughts and passions ; and irresistibly, 
 little shapes, voices, accidents — the angle at which 
 the sun in the morning fell on the pillow — become 
 parts of the great chain wherewith we are bound. 
 
 Thus far, for Florian, what all this had determined 
 
THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 153 
 
 was a peculiarly strong sense of home — so forcible 
 a motive with all of us — prompting to us our cus- 
 tomary love of the earth, and the larger part of our 
 fear of death, that revulsion we have from it, as from 
 something strange, untried, unfriendly; though life- 
 long imprisonment, they tell you, and final banishment 
 from home is a thing bitterer still ; \ the looking for- 
 ward to but a short space, a mere childish gouter and 
 dessert of it, before the end, being so great a resource 
 of effort to pilgrims and wayfarers, and the soldier in 
 distant quarters, and lending, in lack of that, some 
 power of solace to the thought of sleep in the home 
 churchyard, at least — dead cheek by dead cheek, and 
 with the rain soaking in upon one from above. 
 
 So powerful is this instinct, and yet accidents like 
 those I have been speaking of so mechanically deter- 
 mine it ; its essence being indeed the early familiar, as 
 constituting our ideal, or typical conception, of rest and 
 security. Out of so many possible conditions, just this 
 for you and that for me, brings ever the unmistakeable 
 realisation of the delightful chez soi; this for the 
 Englishman, for me and youf with the closely-drawn 
 white curtain and the shaded lamp ; that, quite other, 
 for the wandering Arab, who folds his tent every 
 morning, and makes his sleeping-place among haunted 
 ruins, or in old tombs. 
 
 With Florian then the sense of home became sin- 
 gularly intense, his good fortune being that the special 
 character of his home was in itself so essentially 
 home-like. 'As after many wanderings I have come 
 to fancy that some parts of Surrey and Kent are, for 
 
 
154 
 
 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 Englishmen, the true landscape, true home-counties, 
 by right, partly, of a certain earthy warmth in the 
 yellow of the sand below their gorse-bushes, and of a 
 certain grey-blue mist after rain, in the hollows of the 
 hills there, welcome to fatigued eyes, and never seen 
 farther south ; so I think that the sort of house I have 
 described, with precisely those proportions of red- 
 brick and green, and with a just perceptible monotony 
 in the subdued order of it, for its distinguishing note, 
 is for Englishmen at least typically home-life. And 
 so for Florian that general human instinct was rein- 
 forced by this special home-likeness in the place his 
 wandering soul had happened to light on, as, in the 
 second degree, its body and earthly tabernacle ; the 
 sense of harmony between his soul and its phys- 
 ical environment became, for a time at least, like 
 perfectly played music, and the life led there singularly 
 tranquil and filled with a curious sense of self- 
 possession. The love of security, of an habitually 
 undisputed standing-ground or sleeping-place, came 
 to count for much in the generation and correcting of 
 his thoughts, and afterwards as a salutary principle of 
 restraint in all his wanderings of spirit. \ The wistful 
 yearning towards home, in absence from it, as the 
 shadows of evening deepened, and he followed in 
 thought what was doing there from hour to hour, 
 interpreted to him much of a yearning and regret 
 he experienced afterwards, towards he knew not what, 
 out of strange ways of feeling and thought in which, 
 from time to time, his spirit found itself alone ; and in 
 the tears shed in such absences there seemed always 
 
THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 155 
 
 to be some soul-subduing foretaste of what his last 
 tears might be. ] 
 
 And the sense of security could hardly have been 
 deeper, the quiet of the child’s soul being one with 
 the quiet of its home, a place “ inclosed ” and “ sealed.” 
 But upon this assured place, upon the child’s assured 
 soul which resembled it, there came floating in from / 
 the larger world without, as at windows left ajar 
 unknowingly, or over the high garden walls, two 
 streams of impressions, the sentiments of beauty and 
 pain — recognitions of the visible, tangible, audible 
 loveliness of things, as a very real and somewhat 
 tyrannous element in them — and of the sorrow of the 
 world, of grown people and children and animals, as 
 a thing not to be put by in them. From this point 
 he could trace two predominant processes of mental 
 change in him — the growth of an almost diseased 
 sensibility to the spectacle of suffering, and, parallel 
 with this, the rapid growth of a certain capacity of 
 fascination by bright colour and choice form — 
 the sweet curvings, for instance, of the lips of those 
 who seemed to him comely persons, modulated in 
 such delicate unison to the things they said or sang, 
 
 — marking early the activity in him of a more than/ 
 customary sensuousness, “ the lust of the eye,” as the 
 Preacher says, which might lead him, one day, how 
 far ! Could he have foreseen the weariness of the 
 way ! In music sometimes the two sorts of impres- 
 sions came together, and he would weep, to the 
 surprise of older people. Tears ofjoytoothe child 
 knew, also to older people’s surprise ; real tears, once, 
 
156 
 
 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 of relief from long-strung, childish expectation, when 
 he found returned at evening, with new roses in her 
 cheeks, the little sister who had been to a place 
 where there was a wood, and brought back for him 
 a treasure of fallen acorns, and black crow’s feathers, 
 and his peace at finding her again near him mingled 
 all night with some intimate sense of the distant 
 forest, the rumour of its breezes, with the glossy 
 blackbirds aslant and the branches lifted in them, and 
 of the perfect nicety of the little cups that fell, f So 
 those two elementary apprehensions of the tenderness 
 and of the colour in things grew apace in him, and 
 were seen by him afterwards to send their roots back 
 into the beginnings of life. 
 
 Let me note first some of the occasions of his recog- 
 nition of the element of pain in things — incidents, 
 now and again, which seemed suddenly to awake in 
 him the whole force of that sentiment which Goethe 
 has called the Weltschmerz , and in which the concen- 
 trated sorrow of the world seemed suddenly to lie 
 heavy upon him. A book lay in an old book-case, of 
 which he cared to remember one picture — a woman 
 sitting, with hands bound behind her, the dress, the 
 cap, the hair, folded with a simplicity which touched 
 him strangely, as if not by her own hands, but with 
 some ambiguous care at the hands of others — Queen 
 Marie Antoinette, on her way to execution — we all 
 remember David’s drawing, meant merely to make 
 her ridiculous. The face that had been so high had 
 learned to be mute and resistless ; but out of its very 
 resistlessness, seemed now to call on men to have 
 
THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 157 
 
 pity, and forbear; and he took note of that, as he 
 closed the book, as a thing to look at again, if he 
 should at any time find himself tempted to be cruel. 
 Again, he would never quite forget the appeal in the 
 small sister’s face, in the garden under the lilacs, 
 terrified at a spider lighted on her sleeve. He could 
 trace back to the look then noted a certain mercy he 
 conceived always for people in fear, even of little 
 things, which seemed to make him, though but for a 
 moment, capable of almost any sacrifice of himself. 
 Impressible, susceptible persons, indeed, who had had ^ 
 their sorrows, lived about him; and this sensibility 
 was due in part to the tacit influence of their presence, 
 enforcing upon him habitually the fact that there are 
 those who pass their days, as a matter of course, in 
 a sort of “ going quietly.” Most poignantly of all 
 he could recall, in unfading minutest circumstance, 
 the cry on the stair, sounding bitterly through the 
 house, and struck into his soul for ever, of an aged 
 woman, his father’s sister, come now to announce his 
 death in distant India ; how it seemed to make the 
 aged woman like a child again ; and, he knew not 
 why, but this fancy was full of pity to him. There 
 were the little sorrows of the diimb animals too — 
 of the white angora, with a dark taflliklTan ermine’s, 
 and a face like a flower, who fell into a lingering sick- 
 ness, and became quite delicately human in its valetu- 
 dinarianism, and came to have a hundred different 
 expressions of voice — how it grew worse and worse, 
 till it began to feel the light too much for it, and at 
 last, after one wild morning of pain, the little soul 
 
158 
 
 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 flickered away from the body, quite worn to death 
 already, and now but feebly retaining it. 
 
 So he wanted another pet ; and as there were star- 
 lings about the place, which could be taught to 
 speak, one of them was caught, and he meant to treat 
 it kindly ; but in the night its young ones could be 
 heard crying after it, and the responsive cry of the 
 mother-bird towards them ; and at last, with the first 
 light, though not till after some debate with himself, 
 he went down and opened the cage, and saw a sharp 
 bound of the prisoner up to her nestlings ; and there- 
 with came the sense of remorse, — that he too was 
 become an accomplice in moving, to the limit of his 
 small power, the springs and handles of that great 
 machine in things, constructed so ingeniously to play 
 pain-fugues on the delicate nerve-work of living 
 creatures. 
 
 I have remarked how, in the process of our brain- 
 building, as the house of thought in which we live gets 
 itself together, like some airy bird’s-nest of floating 
 thistle-down and chance straws, compact at last, little 
 accidents have their consequence ; and thus it hap- 
 pened that, as he walked one evening, a garden gate, 
 usually closed, stood open ; and lo ! within, a great 
 red hawthorn in full flower, embossing heavily the 
 bleached and twisted trunk and branches, so aged 
 that there were but few green leaves thereon — a 
 plumage of tender, crimson fire out of the heart of 
 the dry wood. The perfume of the tree had now 
 and again reached him, in the currents of the wind, 
 over the wall, and he had wondered what might be 
 
THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 159 
 
 behind it, and was now allowed to fill his arms with the 
 flowers — flowers enough for all the old blue-china pots 
 along the chimney-piece, making/^ in the children’s 
 room. Was it some periodic moment in the expan- 
 sion of soul within him, or mere trick of heat in the 
 heavily-laden summer air? But the beauty of the 
 thing struck home to him feverishly ; and in dreams 
 all night he loitered along a magic roadway of crim- 
 son flowers, which seemed to open ruddily in thick, 
 fresh masses about his feet, and fill softly all the little 
 hollows in the banks on either side. Always after- 
 wards, summer by summer, as the flowers came on, 
 the blossom of the red hawthorn still seemed to him 
 absolutely the reddest of all things ; and the goodly 
 crimson, still alive in the works of old Venetian 
 masters or old Flemish tapestries, called out always 
 from afar the recollection of the flame in those perish- 
 ing little petals, as it pulsed gradually out of them, 
 kept long in the drawers of an old cabinet. Also'' 
 then, for the first time, he seemed to experience 
 a passionateness in his relation to fair outward ob- 
 jects, an inexplicable excitement in their presence, 
 which disturbed him, and from which he half longed 
 to be free. A touch of regret or desire mingled all 
 night with the remembered presence of the red 
 flowers, and their perfume in the darkness about 
 him ; and the longing for some undivined, entire 
 possession of them was the beginning of a revelation 
 to him, growing ever clearer, with the coming of the 
 gracious summer guise of fields and trees and persons 
 in each succeeding year, of a certain, at times seem- 
 
160 
 
 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 ingly exclusive, predominance in his interests, of 
 beautiful physical things, a kind of tyranny of the 
 senses over him. 
 
 / In later years he came upon philosophies which 
 occupied him much in the estimate of the proportion 
 of the sensuous and the ideal elements in human 
 knowledge, the relative parts they bear in it ; and, 
 in his intellectual scheme, was led to assign very little 
 to the abstract thought, and much to its sensible vehi- 
 cle or occasion. Such metaphysical speculation did 
 but reinforce what was instinctive in his way of receiving 
 the world, and for him, everywhere, that sensible vehi- 
 cle or occasion became, perhaps only too surely, the 
 necessary concomitant of any perception of things, 
 real enough to be of any weight or reckoning, in his 
 Jhouse of thought. There were times when he could 
 think of the necessity he was under of associating all 
 thoughts to touch and sight, as a sympathetic link 
 between himself and actual, feeling, living objects ; 
 
 / a protest in favour of real men and women against 
 mere grey, unreal abstractions ; and he remembered 
 gratefully how the Christian religion, hardly less than 
 the religion of the ancient Greeks, translating so much 
 of its spiritual verity into things that may be seen, 
 condescends in part to sanction this infirmity, if so 
 it be, of our human existence, wherein the world of 
 sense is so much with us, and welcomed this thought 
 as a kind of keeper and sentinel over his soul therein. 
 But certainly, he came more and more to be unable 
 to care for, or think of soul but as in an actual body, 
 or of any world but that wherein are water and trees, 
 
THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 161 
 
 and where men and women look, so or so, and press 
 actual hands. It was the trick even his pity learned, 
 fastening those who suffered in anywise to his affec- 
 tions by a kind of sensible attachments. He would 
 think of Julian, fallen into incurable sickness, as spoiled 
 in the sweet blossom of his skin like pale amber, and 
 his honey-like hair ; of Cecil, early dead, as cut off from 
 the lilies, from golden summer days, from women’s 
 voices ; and then what comforted him a little was the 
 thought of the turning of the child’s flesh to violets 
 in the turf above him. And thinking of the very 
 poor, it was not the things which most men care most 
 for that he yearned to give them ; but fairer roses, 
 perhaps, and power to taste quite as they will, at their 
 ease and not task-burdened, a certain desirable, clear 
 light in the new morning, through which sometimes 
 he had noticed them, quite unconscious of it, on their 
 way to their early toil. 
 
 So he yielded himself to these things, to be played 
 upon by them like a musical instrument, and began to 
 note with deepening watchfulness, but always with 
 some puzzled, unutterable longing in his enjoyment, 
 the phases of the seasons and of the growing or wan- 
 ing day, down even to the shadowy changes wrought 
 on bare wall or ceiling — the light cast up from the 
 snow, bringing out their darkest angles ; the brown 
 light in the cloud, which meant rain ; that almost too 
 austere clearness, in the protracted light of the length- 
 ening day, before warm weather began, as if it lingered 
 but to make a severer workday, with the school-books 
 opened earlier and later; that beam of June sunshine, 
 
162 
 
 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 at last, as he lay awake before the time, a way of gold- 
 dust across the darkness ; all the humming, the fresh- 
 ness, the perfume of the garden seemed to lie upon 
 it — and coming in one afternoon in September, 
 along the red gravel walk, to look for a basket of 
 yellow crab-apples left in the cool, old parlour, he 
 remembered it the more, and how the colours struck 
 upon him, because a wasp on one bitten apple stung 
 him, and he felt the passion of sudden, severe pain. 
 For this too brought its curious reflexions ; and, in 
 relief from it, he would wonder over it — how it had 
 then been with him — puzzled at the depth of the 
 charm or spell over him, which lay, for a little while 
 at least, in the mere absence of pain ; once, especially, 
 when an older boy taught him to make flowers of 
 sealing-wax, and he had burnt his hand badly at the 
 lighted taper, and been unable to sleep. He remem- 
 bered that also afterwards, as a sort of typical thing 
 — a white vision of heat about him, clinging closely, 
 through the languid scent of the ointments put upon 
 the place to make it well. 
 
 Also, as he felt this pressure upon him of the 
 sensible world, then, as often afterwards, there would 
 come another sort of curious .questioning how the last 
 impressions of eye and ear might happen to him, 
 how they would find him — the scent of the last flower, 
 the soft yellowness of the last morning, the last recog- 
 nition of some object of affection, hand or voice ; it 
 could not be but that the latest look of the eyes, before 
 their final closing, would be strangely vivid ; one would 
 go with the hot tears, the cry, the touch of the wistful 
 
THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 163 
 
 bystander, impressed how deeply on one ! or would 
 it be, perhaps, a mere frail retiring of all things, great 
 or little, £way from one, into a level distance ? 
 
 For with this desire of physical beauty mingled 
 itself early the fear of death — the fear of death inten- 
 sified by the desire of beauty. Hitherto he had never 
 gazed upon dead faces, as sometimes, afterwards, at 
 the Morgue in Paris, or in that fair cemetery at Munich, 
 where all the dead must go and lie in state before 
 burial, behind glass windows, among the flowers and 
 incense and holy candles — the aged clergy with their 
 sacred ornaments, the young men in their dancing- 
 shoes and spotless white linen — after which visits, 
 those waxen, resistless faces would always live with 
 him for many days, making the broadest sunshine 
 sickly. The child had heard indeed of the death of 
 his father, and how, in the Indian station, a fever had 
 taken him, so that though not in action he had yet 
 died as a soldier ; and hearing of the “ resurrection of 
 the just,” he could think of him as still abroad in the 
 world, somehow, for his protection — a grand, though 
 perhaps rather terrible figure, in beautiful soldier’s 
 things, like the figure in the picture of Joshua’s Vision 
 in the Bible — and of that, round which the mourners 
 moved so softly, and afterwards with such solemn 
 singing, as but a worn-out garment left at a deserted 
 lodging. So it was, until on a summer day he walked 
 with his mother through a fair churchyard. In a 
 bright dress he rambled among the graves, in the gay 
 weather, and so came, in one corner, upon an open 
 grave for a child — a dark space on the brilliant grass 
 
164 
 
 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 — the black mould lying heaped up round it, weighing 
 down the little jewelled branches of the dwarf rose- 
 -bushes in flower. And therewith came, full-grown, 
 never wholly to leave him, with the certainty that even 
 children do sometimes die, the physical horror of death, 
 with its wholly selfish recoil from the association of 
 lower forms of life, and the suffocating weight above. 
 No benign, grave figure in beautiful soldier’s things 
 any longer abroad in the world for his protection ! 
 only a few poor, piteous bones ; and above them, 
 possibly, a certain sort of figure he hoped not to see. 
 For sitting one day in the garden below an open 
 window, he heard people talking, and could not but 
 listen, how, in a sleepless hour, a sick woman had 
 seen one of the dead sitting beside her, come to call 
 her hence ; and from the broken talk evolved with 
 much clearness the notion that not all those dead peo- 
 ple had really departed to the churchyard, nor were 
 quite so motionless as they looked, but led a secret, 
 half-fugitive life in their old homes, quite free by night, 
 though sometimes visible in the day, dodging from 
 room to room, with no great goodwill towards those 
 who shared the place with them. All night the 
 figure sat beside him in the reveries of his broken 
 sleep, and was not quite gone in the morning — an odd, 
 irreconcileable new member of the household, making 
 the sweet familiar chambers unfriendly and suspect by 
 its uncertain presence. He could have hated the dead 
 he had pitied so, for being thus. Afterwards he came 
 to think of those poor, home-returning ghosts, which 
 all men have fancied to themselves — the revenants — 
 
THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 165 
 
 pathetically, as crying, or beating with vain hands at 
 the doors, as the wind came, their cries distinguishable 
 in it as a wilder inner note. But, always making' 
 death more unfamiliar still, that old experience would 
 ever, from time to time, return to him ; even in the 
 living he sometimes caught its likeness ; at any time 
 or place, in a moment, the faint atmosphere of the 
 chamber of death would be breathed around him, and 
 the image with the bound chin, the quaint smile, the 
 straight, stiff feet, shed itself across the air upon the 
 bright carpet, amid the gayest company, or happiest 
 communing with himself. 
 
 To most children the sombre questionings to which 
 impressions like these attach themselves, if they come 
 at all, are actually suggested by religious books, which 
 therefore they often regard with much secret distaste, 
 and dismiss, as far as possible, from their habitual 
 thoughts as a too depressing element in life. To 
 Florian such impressions, these misgivings as to the 
 ultimate tendency of the years, of the relationship 
 between life and death, had been suggested spon- 
 taneously in the natural course of his mental growth 
 by a strong innate sense, for the soberer tones in things, 
 further strengthened by actual circumstances ; and 
 religious sentiment, that system of biblical ideas in 
 which he had been brought up, presented itself to him 
 as a thing that might soften and dignify, and light up 
 as with a “ lively hope,” a melancholy already deeply 
 settled in him. So he yielded himself easily to relig- ' 
 ious impressions, and with a kind of mystical appetite 
 for sacred things ; the more as they came to him 
 
166 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 through a saintly person who loved him tenderly, and 
 believed that this early pre-occupation with them 
 already marked the child out for a saint. He began 
 to love, for their own sakes, church lights, holy days, 
 all that belonged to the comely order of the sanctuary, 
 the secrets of its white linen, and holy vessels, and 
 fonts of pure water ; and its hieratic purity and 
 simplicity became the type of something he desired 
 always to have about him in actual life. He pored 
 over the pictures in religious books, and knew by 
 heart the exact mode in which the wrestling angel 
 grasped Jacob, how Jacob looked in his mysterious 
 sleep, how the bells and pomegranates were attached 
 to the hem of Aaron’s vestment, sounding sweetly as 
 die glided over the turf of the holy place. His way of 
 conceiving religion came then to be in effect what it 
 ever afterwards remained — a sacred history indeed, 
 but still more a sacred ideal, a transcendent version 
 or representation, under intenser and more expressive 
 light and shade, of human life and its familiar or 
 exceptional incidents, birth, death, marriage, youth, 
 age, tears, joy, rest, sleep, waking — a mirror, towards 
 which men might turn away their eyes from vanity 
 and dullness, and see themselves therein as angels, 
 with their daily meat and drink, even, become a kind 
 of sacred transaction — a complementary strain or 
 burden, applied to our every-day existence, whereby 
 the stray snatches of music in it re-set themselves, and 
 fall into the scheme of some higher and more con- 
 sistent harmony. A place adumbrated itself in his 
 thoughts, wherein those sacred personalities, which are 
 
THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 167 
 
 at once the reflex and the pattern of our nobler phases 
 of life, housed themselves ; and this region in his intel- 
 lectual scheme all subsequent experience did but tend 
 still further to realise and define. Some ideal, hieratic 
 persons he would always need to occupy it and keep 
 a warmth there. And he could hardly understand 
 those who felt no such need at all, finding themselves 
 quite happy without such heavenly companionship, 
 and sacred double of their life, beside them. 
 
 Thus a constant substitution of the typical for the / 
 actual took place in his thoughts. Angels might 
 be met by the way, under English elm or beech- 
 tree ; mere messengers seemed like angels, bound on 
 celestial errands ; a deep mysticity brooded over 
 real meetings and partings ; marriages were made in 
 heaven ; and deaths also, with hands of angels there- 
 upon, to bear soul and body quietly asunder, each to 
 its appointed rest. All the acts and accidents of daily 
 life borrowed a sacred colour and significance ; the 
 very colours of things became themselves weighty 
 with meanings like the sacred stuffs of Moses’ tab- 
 ernacle, full of penitence or peace. Sentiment, con- 
 gruous in the first instance only with those divine 
 transactions, the deep, effusive unction of the House 
 of Bethany, was assumed as the due attitude for the re- 
 ception of our every-day existence ; and for a time he 
 walked through the world in a sustained, not unpleasur- 
 able awe, generated by the habitual recognition, beside 
 every circumstance and event of life, or its celestial 
 correspondent. 
 
 Sensibility — the desire of physical beauty — a strange y 
 
168 
 
 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 biblical awe, which made any reference to the unseen 
 act on him like solemn music — these qualities the child 
 took away with him, when, at about the age of twelve 
 years, he left the old house, and was taken to live in 
 another place. He had never left home before, and, 
 anticipating much from this change, had long dreamed 
 over it, jealously counting the days till the time fixed 
 for departure should come ; had been a little careless 
 about others even, in his strong desire for it — when 
 Lewis fell sick, for instance, and they must wait still 
 two days longer. At last the morning came, very 
 fine ; and all things — the very pavement with its dust, 
 at the roadside — seemed to have a white, pearl-like 
 lustre in them. They were to travel by a favourite 
 road on which he had often walked a certain distance, 
 and on one of those two prisoner days, when Lewis 
 was sick, had walked farther than ever before, in his 
 great desire to reach the new place. They had started 
 and gone a little way when a pet bird was found to 
 have been left behind, and must even now — so it 
 presented itself to him — have already all the appealing 
 fierceness and wild self-pity at heart of one left by 
 others to perish of hunger in a closed house ; and he 
 returned to fetch it, himself in hardly less stormy 
 distress. But as he passed in search of it from room 
 to room, lying so pale, with a look of meekness in 
 their denudation, and at last through that little, 
 stripped white room, the aspect of the place touched 
 him like the face of one dead ; and a clinging back 
 towards it came over him, so intense that he knew it 
 would last long, and spoiling all his pleasure in the 
 
THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
 
 169 
 
 realisation of a thing so eagerly anticipated. And so, 
 with the bird found, but himself in an agony of home- 
 sickness, thus capriciously sprung up within him, he 
 was driven quickly away, far into the rural distance, 
 so fondly speculated on, of that favourite country- 
 road. 
 
EMERALD UTHWART . 1 
 
 We smile at epitaphs — at those recent enough to be 
 read easily ; smile, for the most part, at what for the 
 most part is an unreal and often vulgar branch of 
 literature ; yet a wide one, with its flowers here or 
 there, such as make us regret now and again not to 
 have gathered more carefully in our wanderings a fair 
 average of the like. Their very simplicity, of course, 
 may set one’s thoughts in motion to fill up the scanty 
 tale, and those of the young at least are almost always 
 worth while. At Siena, for instance, in the great 
 Dominican church, even with the impassioned work 
 of Sodoma at hand, you may linger in a certain dimly 
 lit chapel to spell out the black-letter memorials of the 
 German students who died here — cztatis flore ! — at the 
 University, famous early in the last century ; young 
 nobles chiefly, far from the Rhine, from Nuremberg, 
 or Leipsic. Note one in particular ! Loving parents 
 and elder brother meant to record carefully the 
 very days of the lad’s poor life — annos , menses , dies ; 
 
 1 Published in the New Review , June and July 1892, and now 
 reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors. 
 
 170 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 171 
 
 sent the order, doubtless, from the distant old castle 
 in the Fatherland, but not quite explicitly ; the spaces 
 for the numbers remain still unfilled; and they never 
 came to see. After two centuries the omission is not 
 to be rectified ; and the young man’s memorial has 
 perhaps its propriety as it stands, with those un- 
 numbered, or numberless, days. “ Full of affections,” 
 observed, once upon a time, a great lover of boys and 
 young men, speaking to a large company of them : — 
 “ full of affections, full of powers, full of occupation, how 
 naturally might the younger part of us especially (more 
 naturally than the older) receive the tidings that there 
 are things to be loved and things to be done which 
 shall never pass away. We feel strong, we feel active, 
 we feel full of life ; and these feelings do not altogether 
 deceive us, for we shall live for ever. We see a long 
 prospect before us, for which it is worth while to work, 
 even with much labour ; for we are as yet young, and 
 the past portion of our lives is but small in comparison 
 of that which probably remains to us. It is most true ! 
 The past years of our life are absolutely beyond pro- 
 portion small in comparison with those which certainly 
 remain to us.” 
 
 In a very different neighbourhood, here at home, in 
 a remote Sussex churchyard, you may read that 
 Emerald Uthwart was born on such a day, “ at Chase 
 Lodge, in this parish ; and died there,” on a day in 
 the year 18 — , aged twenty-six. Think, thereupon, of 
 the years of a very English existence passed without 
 a lost week in that bloomy English place, amid its 
 English lawns and flower-beds, its oldish brick and 
 
172 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 raftered plaster ; you may see it still, not far off, on 
 a clearing of the wooded hill-side sloping gradually to 
 the sea. But you think wrong. Emerald Uthwart, in 
 almost unbroken absence from his home, longed greatly 
 for it, but left it early and came back there only to die, 
 in disgrace, as he conceived ; of which it was he died 
 there, finding the sense of the place all around him at 
 last, like blessed oil in one’s wounds. 
 
 How they shook their musk from them! — those 
 gardens, among which the youngest son, but not the 
 youngest child, grew up, little considered till he 
 returned there in those last years. The rippling 
 note of the birds he distinguished so acutely seemed 
 a part of this tree-less place, open freely to sun and 
 air, such as rose and carnation loved, in the midst of 
 the old disafforested chase. Brothers and sisters, all 
 alike were gardeners, methodically intimate with their 
 flowers. You need words compact rather of perfume 
 than of colour to describe them, in nice annual order ; 
 terms for perfume, as immediate and definite as red, 
 purple, and yellow. Flowers there were which seemed 
 to yield their sweetest in the faint sea-salt, when the 
 loosening wind was strong from the south-west ; some 
 which found their way slowly towards the neighbour- 
 hood of the old oaks and beech-trees. Others con- 
 sorted most freely with the wall-fruit, or seemed made 
 for pot-pourri to sweeten the old black mahogany 
 furniture. The sweet-pea stacks loved the broad path 
 through the kitchen garden ; the old-fashioned garden 
 azalea was the making of a nosegay, with its honey 
 which clung to one’s finger. There were flowers all 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 173 
 
 the sweeter for a battle with the rain ; a flower like 
 aromatic medicine ; another like summer lingering 
 into winter ; it ripened as fruit does ; and another was 
 like August, his own birthday time, dropped into 
 March. 
 
 The very mould here, rich old black gardener’s 
 earth, was flower-seed ; and beyond, the fields, one 
 after another, through the white gates breaking the 
 well-grown hedge-rows, were hardly less garden-like ; 
 little velvety fields, little with the true sweet English 
 littleness of our little island, our land of vignettes. 
 Here all was little ; the very church where they went 
 to pray, to sit, the ancient Uthwarts sleeping all around 
 outside under the windows, deposited there as quietly 
 as fallen trees on their native soil, and almost unre- 
 corded, as there had been almost nothing to record ; 
 where however, Sunday after Sunday, Emerald 
 Uthwart reads, wondering, the solitary memorial of 
 one soldierly member of his race, who had, — well ! 
 who had not died here at home, in his bed. How 
 wretched ! how fine ! how inconceivably great and diffi- 
 cult ! — not for him ! And yet, amid all its littleness, 
 how large his sense of liberty in the place he, the 
 cadet doomed to leave it — his birth-place, where he 
 is also so early to die — had loved better than any one 
 of them ! Enjoying hitherto all the freedom of the 
 almost grown-up brothers, the unrepressed noise, the 
 unchecked hours, the old rooms, all their own way, 
 he is literally without the consciousness of rule. Only, 
 when the long irresponsible day is over, amid the 
 dew, the odours, of summer twilight, they roll their 
 
174 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 cricket-field against to-morrow’s game. So it had 
 always been with the Uthwarts ; they never went to 
 school. In the great attic he has chosen for himself 
 Emerald awakes ; — it was a rule, sanitary, almost medi- 
 cal, never to rouse the children — rises to play betimes ; 
 or, if he choose, with window flung open to the roses, 
 the sea, turns to sleep again, deliberately, deliciously, 
 under the fine old blankets. 
 
 A rather sensuous boy ! you may suppose, amid the 
 wholesome, natural self-indulgence of a very English 
 home. His days began there : it closed again, after 
 an interval of the larger number of them, indulgently, 
 mercifully, round his end. For a while he became 
 its centre, old habits changing, the old furniture re- 
 arranged about him, for the first time in many gen- 
 erations, though he left it now with something like 
 resentment in his heart, as if thrust harshly away, sent 
 ablactatus a matre ; made an effort thereon to snap the 
 last thread which bound him to it. Yet it would 
 come back upon him sometimes, amid so different a 
 scene, as through a suddenly opened door, or a rent 
 in the wall, with softer thoughts of his people, — there, 
 or not there, — and a sudden, dutiful effort on his 
 part to rekindle wasting affection. 
 
 The youngest of four sons, but not the youngest of 
 the family ! — you conceive the sort of negligence that 
 creeps over even the kindest maternities, in such case ; 
 unless, perhaps, sickness, or the sort of misfortune, 
 making the last first for the affectionate, that brought 
 Emerald back at length to die contentedly, interferes 
 with the way of nature. Little by little he comes to 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 175 
 
 understand that, while the brothers are indulged with 
 lessons at home, are some of them free even of these 
 and placed already in the world, where, however, there 
 remains no place for him, he is to go to school, chiefly 
 for the convenience of others — they are going to be 
 much away from home ! — that now for the first time, 
 as he says to himself, an old-English Uthwart is to 
 pass under the yoke. The tutor in the house, mean- 
 time, aware of some fascination in the lad, teaches him, 
 at his own irregularly chosen hours, more carefully 
 than the others ; exerts all his gifts for the purpose, 
 winning him on almost insensibly to youthful pro- 
 ficiency in those difficult rudiments. See him as he 
 stands, seemingly rooted in the spot where he has 
 come to flower ! He departs, however, a few days 
 before the departure of the rest — some to foreign 
 parts, the brothers, who shut up the old place, to town. 
 For a moment, he makes an effort to figure to himself 
 those coming absences as but exceptional intervals in 
 his life here ; he will count the days, going more 
 quickly so ; find his pleasure in watching the sands 
 fall, as even the sands of time at school must. In 
 fact, he was scarcely ever to lie at ease here again, till 
 he came to take his final leave of it, lying at his length 
 so. In brief holidays he rejoins his people, anywhere, 
 anyhow, in a sort of hurry and makeshift : — Flos 
 Parietis ! thus carelessly plucked forth. Emerald 
 Uthwart was born on such a day “ at Chase Lodge, 
 in this parish, and died there.” 
 
 See him then as he stands! counting now the hours 
 that remain, on the eve of that first emigration, and 
 
176 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 look away next at the other place, which through 
 centuries has been forming to receive him ; from those 
 garden-beds, now at their richest, but where all is so 
 winsomely little, to that place of “ great matters,” 
 great stones, great memories out of reach. Why ! the 
 Uthwarts had scarcely had more memories than their 
 woods, noiselessly deciduous; or their pre-historic, 
 entirely unprogressive, unrecording forefathers, in or 
 before the days of the Druids. Centuries of almost 
 “ still” life — of birth, death, and the rest, as merely 
 natural processes — had made them and their home 
 what we find them. Centuries of conscious endeavour, 
 on the other hand, had builded, shaped, and coloured 
 the place, a small cell, which Emerald Uthwart was 
 now to occupy; a place such as our most charac- 
 teristic English education has rightly tended to “ find 
 itself a house ” in — a place full, for those who came 
 within its influence, of a will of its own. Here every- 
 thing, one’s very games, have gone by rule onwards 
 from the dim old monastic days, and the Benedictine 
 school for novices with the wholesome severities which 
 have descended to our own time. Like its customs, — 
 there’s a book in the cathedral archives with the 
 names, for centuries past, of the “ scholars ” who have 
 missed church at the proper times for going there — 
 like its customs, well-worn yet well-preserved, time- 
 stained, time-engrained, time-mellowed, the venerable 
 Norman or English stones of this austere, beautifully 
 proportioned place look like marble, to which Emer- 
 ald’s softly nurtured being, his careless wild-growth 
 must now adapt itself, though somewhat painfully 
 

 EMERALD UTHWART 177 
 
 recoiling from contact with what seems so hard also, 
 and bright, and cold. From his native world of soft 
 garden touches, carnation and rose (they had been 
 everywhere in those last weeks), where everyone did 
 just what he liked, he was passed now to this world of 
 grey stone ; and here it was always the decisive word 
 of command. That old warrior Uthwart’s record in 
 the church at home, so fine, yet so wretched, so 
 unspeakably great and difficult ! seemed written here 
 everywhere around him, as he stood feeling himself 
 fit only to be taught, to be drilled into, his small 
 compartment ; in every movement of his companions, 
 with their quaint confining little cloth gowns ; in the 
 keen, clear, well-authorised dominancy of some, the 
 instant submission of others. In fact, by one of our 
 wise English compromises, we still teach our so 
 modern boys the Classics ; a lesson in attention and 
 patience, at the least. Nay ! by a double compromise, 
 with delightful physiognomic results sometimes, we 
 teach them their pagan Latin and Greek under the 
 shadow of medieval church- towers, amid the haunts, 
 the traditions, and with something of the discipline, 
 of monasticism ; for which, as is noticeable, the English 
 have never wholly lost an early inclination. The 
 French and others have swept their scholastic houses 
 empty of it, with pedantic fidelity to their theories. 
 English pedants may succeed in doing the like. But 
 the result of our older method has had its value so 
 far, at least, say ! for the careful aesthetic observer. 
 It is of such diagonal influences, through complication 
 of influence, that expression comes, in life, in our 
 
 N 
 
178 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 culture, in the very faces of men and boys — of these 
 boys. Nothing could better harmonise present with 
 past than the sight of them just here, as they shout 
 at their games, or recite their lessons, over-arched by 
 the work of medieval priors, or pass to church meekly, 
 into the seats occupied by the young monks before 
 them. 
 
 If summer comes reluctantly to our English shores, 
 it is also apt to linger with us ; — its flora of red and 
 gold leaves on the branches wellnigh to Christmas ; 
 the hot days that surprise you, and persist, though 
 heralded by white mornings, hinting that it is but the 
 year’s indulgence so to deal with us. To the fanciful, 
 such days may seem most at home in the places where 
 England has thus preferred to locate the somewhat 
 pensive education of its more favoured youth. As 
 CJ thwart passes through the old ecclesiastical city, 
 upon which any more modern touch, modern door or 
 window, seems a thing out of place through negligence, 
 the diluted sunlight itself seems driven along with a 
 sparing trace of gilded vane or red tile in it, under 
 the wholesome active wind from the East coast. The 
 long, finely weathered, leaden roof, and the great 
 square tower, gravely magnificent, emphatic from the 
 first view of it over the grey down above the hop-gar- 
 dens, the gently-watered meadows, dwarf now every- 
 thing beside ; have the bigness of nature’s work, 
 seated up there so steadily amid the winds, as rain 
 and fog and heat pass by. More and more persis- 
 tently, as he proceeds, in the “ Green Court ” at last, 
 they occupy the outlook. He is shown the narrow 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 179 
 
 cubicle in which he is to sleep ; and there it still is, 
 with nothing else, in the window-pane, as he lies ; — 
 “our tower,” the “ Angel Steeple,” noblest of its kind. 
 Here, from morning to night, everything seems chal- 
 lenged to follow the upward lead of its long, bold, 
 “ perpendicular ” lines. The very place one is in, its 
 stone-work, its empty spaces, invade you ; invade all 
 who belong to them, as Uthwart belongs, yielding 
 wholly from the first ; seem to question you master- 
 fully as to your purpose in being here at all, amid the 
 great memories of the past, of this school ; — chal- 
 lenge you, so to speak, to make moral philosophy one 
 of your acquirements, if you can, and to systematise 
 your vagrant self ; which however will in any case be 
 here systematised for you. In Uthwart, then, is the 
 plain tablet, for the influences of place to inscribe. 
 Say if you will, that he is under the power of an “ em- 
 bodied ideal,” somewhat repellent, but which he can- 
 not despise. He sits in the schoolroom — ancient, 
 transformed chapel of the pilgrims ; sits in the sober 
 white and brown place, at the heavy old desks, carved 
 this way and that, crowded as an old churchyard with 
 forgotten names, side by side with sympathetic or 
 antipathetic competitors, as it may chance. In a 
 delightful, exactly measured, quarter of an hour’s rest, 
 they come about him, seem to wish to be friends at 
 once, good and bad alike, dull and clever ; wonder a 
 little at the name, and the owner. A family name — 
 he explains, good-humouredly ; tries to tell some story 
 no one could ever remember precisely of the ancestor 
 from whom it came, the one story of the Uthwarts ; is 
 
180 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 spared ; nay ! petulantly forbidden to proceed. But 
 the name sticks the faster. Nicknames mark, for the 
 most part, popularity. Emerald! so every one called 
 Uthwart, but shortened to Aldy. They disperse ; 
 flock out into the court ; acquaint him hastily with 
 the curiosities of the Precincts, the “ dark entry,” the 
 rich heraldries of the blackened and mouldering clois- 
 ter, the ruined overgrown spaces where the old monas- 
 tery stood, the stones of which furnished material for 
 the rambling prebends’ houses, now “ antediluvian ” in 
 their turn ; are ready also to climb the scaffold-poles 
 always to be found somewhere about the great church, 
 or dive along the odd, secret passages of the old 
 builders, with quite learned explanations (being proud 
 of, and therefore painstaking about, the place) of 
 architectural periods, of Gothic “ late ” and “ early,” 
 layer upon layer, down to round-arched “ Norman,” 
 like the famous staircase of their school. 
 
 The reader comprehends that Uthwart was come 
 where the genius loci was a strong one, with a claim to 
 mould all who enter it to a perfect, uninquiring, willing 
 or unwilling, conformity to itself. On Saturday half- 
 holidays the scholars are taken to church in their sur- 
 plices, across the court, under the lime-trees ; emerge 
 at last up the dark winding passages into the melo- 
 dious, mellow-lighted space, always three days behind 
 the temperature outside, so thick are the walls ; — 
 how warm and nice ! how cool and nice ! The choir, 
 to which they glide in order to their places below the 
 clergy, seems conspicuously cold and sad. But the 
 empty chapels lying beyond it all about into the dis- 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 181 
 
 tance are a trap on sunny mornings for the clouds of 
 yellow effulgence. The Angel Steeple is a lantern 
 within, and sheds down a flood of the like just beyond 
 the gates. You can peep up into it where you sit, if 
 you dare to gaze about you. If at home there had 
 been nothing great, here, to boyish sense, one seems 
 diminished to nothing at all, amid the grand waves, 
 wave upon wave, of patiently-wrought stone ; the dar- 
 ing height, the daring severity, of the innumerable, 
 long, upward, ruled lines, rigidly bent just at last, in 
 due place, into the reserved grace of the perfect Gothic 
 arch ; the peculiar daylight which seemed to come 
 from further than the light outside. Next morning 
 they are here again. In contrast to those irregularly 
 broken hours at home, the passive length of things 
 impresses Uthwart now. It develops patience — that 
 tale of hours, the long chanted English service ; our 
 English manner of education is a development of 
 patience, of decorous and mannerly patience. “ It is 
 good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth : 
 he putteth his mouth in the dust, he keepeth silence, 
 because he hath borne it upon him.” — They have 
 this for an anthem ; sung however to wonderfully 
 cheerful and sprightly music, as if one liked the 
 thought. 
 
 The aim of a veritable community, says Plato, is 
 not that this or that member of it should be dispro- 
 portionately at ease, but that the whole should flourish ; 
 though indeed such general welfare might come round 
 again to the loyal unit therein, and rest with him, as 
 a privilege of his individual being after all. The 
 
182 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 social type he preferred, as we know, was conservative 
 / Sparta and its youth ; whose unsparing discipline 
 had doubtless something to do with the fact that it 
 was the handsomest and best-formed in all Greece. 
 A school is not made for one. It would misrepresent 
 Uthwart’s wholly unconscious humility to say that 
 he felt the beauty of the <*07070-15 (we need that Greek 
 word) to which he not merely finds himself subject, 
 but as under a fascination submissively yields him- 
 self, although another might have been aware of the 
 charm of it, half ethic, half physical, as visibly effective 
 in him. Its peculiarity would have lain in the expres- 
 sion of a stress upon him and his customary daily 
 existence, beyond what any definitely proposed issue 
 of it, at least for the moment, explained. Something 
 of that is involved in the very idea of a classical 
 education, at least for such as he ; in its seeming 
 indirectness or lack of purpose, amid so much diffi- 
 culty, as contrasted with forms of education more 
 obviously useful or practical. He found himself in 
 a system of fixed rules, amid which, it might be, some 
 of his own tendencies and inclinations would die out 
 of him through disuse. The confident word of com- 
 mand, the instantaneous obedience expected, the en- 
 forced silence, the very games that go by rule, a sort 
 of hardness natural to wholesome English youths 
 when they come together, but here de rigueur as a 
 point of good manners ; — he accepts al l these with- 
 out^ hesitation ; the early hours also, naturally dis- 
 tasteful to him, which gave to actual morning, to all 
 that had passed in it, when in more self-conscious 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 183 
 
 mood he looked back on the morning of life, a pre- 
 ponderance, a disproportionate place there, adding 
 greatly to the effect of its dreamy distance from him 
 at this later time ; — an ideal quality, he might have 
 said, had he ever used such words as that. 
 
 Uthwart duly passes his examination ; and, in their 
 own chapel in the transept of the choir, lighted up 
 late for evening prayer after the long day of trial, is 
 received to the full privileges of a Scholar with the 
 accustomed Latin words : — Introitum tuum et exitum 
 tuum custodiat Dominies ! He takes them, not to 
 heart, but rather to mind, as few, if they so much as 
 heard them, were wont to do ; ponders them for a 
 while. They seem scarcely meant for him — words 
 like those ! increase however his sense of respon- 
 sibility to the place, of which he is now more exclu- 
 sively than before a part — that he belongs to it, its 
 great memories, great dim purposes ; deepen the con- 
 sciousness he had on first coming hither of a demand 
 in the world about him, whereof the very stones are 
 emphatic, to which no average human creature could 
 be sufficient ; of reproof, reproaches, of this or that in 
 himself. 
 
 It was reported, there was a funny belief, at school, 
 that Aldy Uthwart had no feeling and was incapable 
 of tears. They never came to him certainly, when, at 
 nights for the most part, the very touch of home, so 
 soft, yet so indifferent to him, reached him, with 
 a sudden opulent rush of garden perfumes ; came at 
 the rattling of the window-pane in the wind, with any- 
 thing that expressed distance from the bare white walls 
 
184 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 around him here. He thrust it from him brusquely, 
 being of a practical turn, and, though somewhat 
 sensuous, wholly without sentimentality. There is 
 something however in the lad’s soldier-like, impas- 
 sible self-command, in his sustained expression of 
 a certain indifference to things, which awakes sud- 
 denly all the sentiment, the poetry, latent hitherto 
 in another — James Stokes, the prefect, his immediate 
 superior ; awakes for the first time into ample flower 
 something of genius in a seemingly plodding scholar, 
 and therewith also something of the waywardness popu- 
 larly thought to belong to genius. Preceptores , condi- 
 scipuli , alike, marvel at a sort of delicacy coming into 
 the habits, the person, of that tall, bashful, broad-shoul- 
 dered, very Kentish, lad ; so unaffectedly nevertheless, 
 that it is understood after all to be but the smartness 
 properly significant of change to early manhood, like 
 the down on his lip. Wistful anticipations of man- 
 hood are in fact aroused in him, thoughts of the future ; 
 his ambition takes effective outline. The well-worn, 
 perhaps conventional, beauties of their “dead ” Greek 
 and Latin books, associated directly now with the 
 living companion beside him, really shine for him at 
 last with their pristine freshness ; seem more than to 
 fulfil their claim upon the patience, the attention, of 
 modern youth. He notices as never before minute 
 points of meaning in Homer, in Virgil ; points out 
 thus, for instance, to his junior, one day in the sun- 
 shine, how the Greeks had a special word for the Fate 
 which accompanied one who would come to a violent 
 end. The common Destinies of men, Moi/xxi, Mozrce 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 185 
 
 — they accompanied all men indifferently. But K yp, 
 the extraordinary Destiny, one’s Doom, had a scent 
 for distant blood-shedding; and, to be in at a san- 
 guinary death, one of their number came forth to the 
 very cradle, followed persistently all the way, over the 
 waves, through powder and shot, through the rose- 
 gardens ; — where not ? Looking back, one might 
 trace the red footsteps all along, side by side. (Emer- 
 ald Uthwart, you remember, was to “die there,” of 
 lingering sickness, in disgrace, as he fancied, while the 
 word glory came to be softly whispered of them and 
 of their end.) Classic felicities, the choice expressions, 
 with which James Stokes has so patiently stored his 
 memory, furnish now a dainty embroidery upon every 
 act, every change in time or place, of their daily life 
 in common. He finds the Greek or the Latin model 
 of their antique friendship or tries to find it, in the 
 books they read together. None fits exactly. It is 
 of military glory they are really thinking, amid those 
 ecclesiastical surroundings, where however surplices 
 and uniforms are often mingled together; how they 
 will lie, in costly glory, costly to them, side by side, 
 (as they work and walk and play now, side by side) 
 in the cathedral aisle, with a tattered flag perhaps 
 above them, and under a single epitaph, like that of 
 those two older scholars, Ensigns, Signiferi , in their 
 respective regiments, in hac ecclesia pueri ins ti tic ti } with 
 the sapphic stanza in imitation of the Horace they 
 had learned here, written by their old master. 
 
 Horace ! — he was, had been always, the idol of 
 their school ; to know him by heart, to translate him 
 
186 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 into effective English idiom, have an apt phrase of his 
 instinctively on one’s lips for every occasion. That 
 boys should be made to spout him under penalties, 
 would have seemed doubtless to that sensitive, vain, 
 winsome poet, even more than to grim Juvenal, quite 
 the sorriest of fates ; might have seemed not so bad 
 however, could he, from the “ ashes” so persistently 
 in his thoughts, have peeped on these English boys, 
 row upon row, with black or golden heads, repeating 
 him in the fresh morning, and observed how well for 
 once the thing was done ; how well he was understood 
 by English James Stokes, feeling the old “fire” really 
 “ quick ” still, under the influence which now in truth 
 quickened, enlivened, everything around him. The 
 old heathen’s way of looking at things, his melodious 
 expression of it, blends, or contrasts itself oddly with 
 the everyday detail, with the very stones, the Gothic 
 stones, of a world he could hardly have conceived, 
 its medieval surroundings, their half-clerical life 
 here. Yet not so inconsistently after all ! The 
 builders of these aisles and cloisters had known 
 and valued as much of him as they could come by 
 in their own un-instructed time ; had built up their 
 intellectual edifice more than they were aware of from 
 fragments of pagan thought, as, quite consciously, they 
 constructed their churches of old Roman bricks and 
 pillars, or frank imitations of them. One’s day, then, 
 began with him, for all alike, Sundays of course ex- 
 cepted, — with an Ode, learned over-night by the 
 prudent, who, observing how readily the words which 
 send us to sleep cling to the brain and seem an inhe- 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 187 
 
 rent part of it next morning, kept him under their 
 pillows. Prefects, without a book, heard the repeti- 
 tion of the Juniors, must be able to correct their 
 blunders. Odes and Epodes, thus acquired, were a 
 score of days and weeks; alcaic and sapphic verses 
 like a bead-roll for counting off the time that inter- 
 vened before the holidays. Time — that tardy servant 
 of youthful appetite — brought them soon enough to 
 the point where they desired in vain “ to see one of” 
 those days, erased now so willingly; and sentimental 
 James Stokes has already a sense that this “ pause 
 ’twixt cup and lip ” of life is really worth pausing 
 over, worth deliberation : — all this poetry, yes ! poetry, 
 surely, of their alternate work and play ; light and 
 shade, call it ! Had it been, after all, a life in itself 
 less commonplace than theirs — that life, the trivial 
 details of which their Horace had touched so daintily, 
 gilded with real gold words ? 
 
 Regular, submissive, dutiful to play also, Aldy 
 meantime enjoys his triumphs in the Green Court ; 
 loves best however to run a paper-chase afar over 
 the marshes, till you come in sight, or within scent, 
 of the sea, in the autumn twilight ; and his dutifulness 
 to games at least had its full reward. A wonderful 
 hit of his at cricket was long remembered ; right over 
 the lime-trees on to the cathedral roof, was it ? lor over 
 the roof, and onward into space, circling there inde- 
 pendently, minutely, as Sidus Cantiorum? A comic 
 poem on it in Latin, and a pretty one in English, were 
 penned by James Stokes, still not so serious but that 
 he forgets time altogether one day, in a manner the 
 
188 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 converse of exemplary in a prefect, whereupon Uthwart, 
 his companion as usual, manages to take all the blame, 
 and the due penalty next morning. Stokes accepted 
 the sacrifice the more readily, believing — he too — 
 that Aldy was “ incapable of pain.” What surprised 
 those who were in the secret was that, when it was 
 over, he rose, and facing the headmaster — could it be 
 insolence ? or was it the sense of untruthfulness in his 
 friendly action, or sense of the universal peccancy of 
 all boys and men? — said submissively : “ And now, sir, 
 that I have taken my punishment, I hope you will 
 forgive my fault.” 
 
 Submissiveness ! — It had the force of genius with 
 Emerald Uthwart. In that very matter he had but 
 yielded to a senior against his own inclination. What 
 he felt in Horace was the sense, original, active, 
 personal, of “ things too high for me! ”, the sense, not 
 really unpleasing to him, of an unattainable height 
 here too, in this royal felicity of utterance, this literary 
 art, the minute cares of which had been really designed 
 for the minute carefulness of a disciple such as this — 
 all attention. Well ! the sense of authority, of a large 
 intellectual authority over us, impressed anew day after 
 day, of some impenetrable glory round “ the masters 
 of those who know,” is, of course, one of the effects we 
 look for from a classical education : — that, and a full 
 estimate of the preponderating value of the manner 
 of the doing of it in the thing done ; which again, for 
 ingenuous youth, is an encouragement of good manners 
 on its part:-^“I behave myself orderly.” Just at 
 those points, scholarship attains something of a relig- 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 189 
 
 ious colour. And in that place, religion, religious 
 system, its claim to overpower one, presented itself 
 in a way of which even the least serious by nature 
 could not be unaware. Their great church, its customs 
 and traditions, formed an element in that esprit de corps 
 into which the boyish mind throws itself so readily. 
 Afterwards, in very different scenes, the sentiment of 
 that place would come back upon him, as if resentfully, 
 by contrast with the conscious or unconscious pro- 
 fanities of others, crushed out about him straightway, 
 by the shadow of awe, the minatory flash, felt around 
 his unopened lips, in the glance, the changed manner. 
 Not to be “ occupied with great matters ” recommends 
 in heavenly places, as we know, the souls of some. 
 Yet there were a few to whom it seemed unfortunate 
 that religion whose flag Uthwart would have borne in 
 hands so pure, touched him from first to last, and till 
 his eyes were finally closed on this world, only, again, 
 as a thing immeasurable, surely not meant for the like 
 of him ; its high claims, to which no one could be 
 equal ; its reproaches. He would scarcely have pro- 
 posed to “ enter into ” such matters ; was constitu- 
 tionally shy of them. His submissiveness, you see, 
 was a kind of genius ; made him therefore, of course, 
 unlike those around him ; was a secret ; a thing, you 
 might say, “ which no one knoweth, saving he that 
 receive th it.” 
 
 Thus repressible, self-restrained, always concurring 
 with the influence, the claim upon him, the rebuke, of 
 others, in the bustle of school life he did not count 
 even with those who knew him best, with those who 
 
190 
 
 EMERALD UTIiWART 
 
 taught him, for the intellectual capacity he really had. 
 In every generation of schoolboys there are a few who 
 find out, almost for themselves, the beauty and power 
 of good literature, even in the literature they must 
 read perforce ; and this, in turn, is but the handsel of 
 a beauty and power still active in the actual world, 
 should they have the good fortune, or rather, acquire 
 the skill, to deal with it properly. It has something 
 of the stir and unction — this intellectual awaking with 
 a leap — of the coming of love. So it was with Uthwart 
 about his seventeenth year. 1 '. He felt it, felt the intel- 
 lectual passion, like the pressure outward of wings within 
 him — rj tt repov Svva [jus, says Plato, in the Phczdrus ; 
 but again, as some do with everyday love, withheld, 
 restrained himself; the status of a freeman in the 
 world of intellect can hardly be for him. The sense 
 of intellectual ambition, ambitious thoughts such as 
 sweeten the toil of some of those about him, coming to 
 him once in a way, he is frankly recommended to put 
 them aside, and acquiesces ; puts them from him once 
 for all, as he could do with besetting thoughts and 
 feelings, his preferences, (as he had put aside soft 
 thoughts of home as a disobedience to rule) and with 
 a countenance more good-humoured than ever, an 
 absolute placidity. It is fit he should be treated 
 sparingly in this matter of intellectual enjoyment. 
 He is made to understand that there is at least a 
 score of others as good scholars as he. He will have 
 of course all the pains, but must not expect the prizes, 
 of his work ; of his loyal, incessant, cheerful industry. 
 
 But only see him as he goes. It is as if he left 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 191 
 
 music, delightfully throbbing music, or flowers, behind 
 him, as he passes, careless of them, unconsciously, 
 through the world, the school, the precincts, the old 
 city. Strangers’ eyes, resting on him by chance, are 
 deterred for a while, even among the rich sights of the 
 venerable place, as he walks out and in, in his prim 
 gown and purple-tasselled cap ; goes in, with the 
 stream of sunlight, through the black shadows of the 
 mouldering Gothic gateway, like youth’s very self, 
 eternal, immemorial, eternally renewed, about those 
 immemorially ancient stones. “ Young Apollo ! ” peo- s 
 pie say — people who have pigeon-holes for their impres- 
 sions, watching the slim, trim figure with the exercise 
 books. His very dress seems touched with Hellenic 
 fitness to the healthy youthful form. “ Golden- 
 haired, scholar Apollo ! ” they repeat, foolishly, 
 ignorantly. He was better ; was more like a real por- 
 trait of a real young Greek, like Tryphon , Son of Euty- 
 chos , for instance, (as friends remembered him with 
 regret, as you may see him still on his tombstone in the 
 British Museum) alive among the paler physical and 
 intellectual lights of modern England, under the old 
 monastic stonework of the Middle Age. That theatri- 
 cal old Greek god never took the expressiveness, the 
 lines of delicate meaning, such as were come into the 
 face of the English lad, the physiognomy of his race ; 
 ennobled now, as if by the writing, the signature, there, 
 of a grave intelligence, by grave information and a sub- 
 dued will, though without a touch of melancholy in 
 this “ best of playfellows.” A musical composer’s 
 notes, we know, are not themselves till the fit executant 
 
192 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 comes, who can put all they may be into them. The 
 somewhat unmeaningly handsome facial type of the 
 Uthwarts, moulded to a mere animal or physical per- 
 fection through wholesome centuries, is breathed on 
 now, informed, by the touches, traces, complex influ- 
 ences from past and present a thousandfold, crossing 
 each other in this late century, and yet at unity in the 
 simple law of the system to which he is now subject. 
 Coming thus upon an otherwise vigorous and healthy 
 nature, an untainted physique, and limited by it, those 
 combining mental influences leave the firm unconscious 
 simplicity of the boyish nature still unperplexed. The 
 sisters, their friends, when he comes rarely upon them 
 in foreign places, are proud of the schoolboy’s com- 
 pany — to walk at his side ; the brothers, when he sees 
 them for a day, more considerate than of old. Every- 
 where he leaves behind him an odd regret for his 
 presence, as he in turn wonders sometimes at the 
 deference paid to one so unimportant as himself by 
 those he meets by accident perhaps ; at the ease, for 
 example, with which he attains to the social privileges 
 denied to others. 
 
 s They tell him, he knows it already, he would “ do 
 for the army.” “ Yes ! that would suit you,” people 
 observe at once, when he tells them what “ he is to 
 be” — undoubtedly suit him, that dainty, military, 
 very English kind of pride, in seeming precisely what 
 
 one is, neither more nor less. And the first mention 
 
 * 
 
 of Uthwart’s purpose defines also the vague outlooks 
 of James Stokes, who will be a soldier too. Uniforms, 
 their scarlet and white and blue, spruce leather and 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 193 
 
 steel, and gold lace, enlivening the old oak stalls at 
 service time — uniforms and surplices were always 
 close together here, where a military garrison had 
 been established in the suburbs for centuries past, and 
 there were always sons of its officers in the school. If 
 you stole out of an evening, it was like a stage scene — 
 nay ! like the Middle Age, itself, with this multitude 
 of soldiers mingling in the crowd which filled the un- 
 changed, gabled streets. A military tradition had 
 been continuous, from the days of crusading knights 
 who lay humbly on their backs in the “ Warriors’ 
 Chapel ” to the time of the civil wars, when a certain 
 heroic youth of eighteen was brought to rest there, 
 onward to Dutch and American wars, and to Harry, 
 and Geoffrey, and another James also, in hac ecclesia 
 pueri instituti. It was not so long since one of them 
 sat on those very benches in the sixth form ; had 
 come back and entered the school, in full uniform, 
 to say good-bye! Then the “ colours” of his regi- 
 ment had been brought, to be deposited by Dean 
 and Canons in the cathedral ; and a few weeks later 
 they had passed, scholars and the rest in long proces- 
 sion, to deposit Ensign himself there under his 
 
 flag, or what remained of it, a sorry, tattered fringe, 
 along the staff he had borne out of the battle at the 
 cost of his life, as a little tablet explained. There 
 were others in similar terms. Alas ! for that extraor- 
 dinary, peculiarly-named, Destiny, or Doom, ap- 
 pointed to walk side by side with one or another, 
 aware from the first, but never warning him, till the 
 random or well-considered shot comes. 
 
 o 
 
194 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 Meantime however, the University, with work in 
 preparation thereto, fills up the thoughts, the hours, 
 of these would-be soldiers, of James Stokes, and there- 
 fore of Emerald Uthwart, through the long summer- 
 time, till the Green Court is fragrant with lime-blossom, 
 and speech-day comes, on which, after their flower- 
 service and sermon from an old comrade, Emerald 
 surprises masters and companions by the fine quality 
 of a recitation; still more when “ Scholar Stokes” 
 and he are found bracketed together as “ Victors” of 
 the school, who will proceed together to Oxford. His 
 speech in the Chapter-house was from that place in 
 Homer, where the soul of the lad Elpenor, killed by 
 accident, entreats Ulysses for due burial rites. “Fix 
 my oar over my grave,” he says, “the oar I rowed 
 with when I lived, when I went with my companions.” 
 And in effect what surprised, charmed the hearers 
 was the scruple with which those naturally graceful 
 lips dealt with every word, every syllable, put upon 
 them. He seemed to be thinking only of his author, 
 except for just so much of self-consciousness as was 
 involved in the fact that he seemed also to be speak- 
 ing a little against his will ; like a monk, it might be 
 said, who sings in choir with a really fine voice, but at 
 the bidding of his superior, and counting the notes 
 all the while till his task be done, because his whole 
 nature revolts from so much as the bare opportunity 
 for personal display. It was his duty to speak on the 
 occasion. They had always been great in speech- 
 making, in theatricals, from before the days when the 
 Puritans destroyed the Dean’s “Great Hall” because 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 195 
 
 “ the King’s Scholars had profaned it by acting plays 
 there”; and that peculiar note or accent, as being 
 conspicuously free from the egotism which vulgarises 
 most of us, seemed to befit the person of Emerald, 
 impressing weary listeners pleasantly as a novelty in 
 that kind. Singular ! — The words, because seemingly 
 forced from him, had been worth hearing. The cheers, 
 the “ Kentish Fire,” of their companions might have 
 broken down the crumbling black arches of the old 
 cloister, or roused the dead under foot, as the “ Victors ” 
 came out of the Chapter-house side by side ; side by 
 side also out of that delightful period of their life at 
 school, to proceed in due course to the University. 
 
 They left it precipitately, after brief residence there, ^ 
 taking advantage of a sudden outbreak of war to join 
 the army at once, regretted — James Stokes for his 
 high academic promise, Uthwart for a quality, or 
 group of qualities, not strictly to be defined. He 
 seemed, in short, to harmonise by their combination 
 in himself all the various qualities proper to a large 
 and varied community of youths of nineteen or twenty, 
 to which, when actually present there, he was felt from 
 hour to hour to be indispensable. In fact school 
 habits and standards had survived in a world not so 
 different from that of school for those who are faithful 
 to its type. When he looked back upon it a little ' 
 later, college seemed to him, seemed indeed at the 
 time, had he ventured to admit it, a strange pro- 
 longation of boyhood, in its provisional character, the 
 narrow limitation of its duties and responsibility, the 
 very divisions of one’s day, the routine of play and 
 
196 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 work, its formal, perhaps pedantic rules. The veri- 
 table plunge from youth into manhood came when one 
 passed finally through those old Gothic gates, from 
 a somewhat dreamy or problematic preparation for 
 it, into the world of peremptory facts. A college, like 
 a school, is not made for one ; and as Uthwart sat 
 there, still but a scholar, still reading with care the 
 books prescribed for him by others — Greek and Latin 
 books — the contrast between his own position and 
 that of the majority of his coevals already at the 
 business of life impressed itself sometimes with an 
 odd sense of unreality in the place around him. Yet 
 the schoolboy's sensitive awe for the great things of 
 the intellectual world had but matured itself, and was 
 at its height here amid this larger competition, which 
 left him more than ever to find in doing his best 
 submissively the sole reward of so doing. He needs 
 now in fact less repression than encouragement not 
 to be a “ passman," as he may if he likes, acquiescing 
 in a lowly measure of culture w T hich certainly will not 
 manufacture Miltons, nor turn serge into silk, broom- 
 blossom into verbenas, but only, perhaps not so 
 faultily, leave Emerald Uthwart and the like of him 
 essentially what they are. “ He holds his book in 
 a peculiar way ; " notes in manuscript one of his tutors 
 “ holds on to it with both hands ; clings as if from 
 below, just as his tough little mind clings to the 
 sense of the Greek words he can English so closely, 
 precisely." Again, as at school, he had put his neck 
 under the yoke ; though he has now also much read- 
 ing quite at his own choice ; by preference, when he 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 197 
 
 can come by such, about the place where he finds 
 himself, about the earlier youthful occupants, if it 
 might be, of his own quaint rooms on the second 
 floor just below the roof; of what he can see from 
 his windows in the old black front eastwards, with 
 its inestimable patina of ancient smoke and weather 
 and natural decay (when you look close the very stone 
 is a composite of minute dead bodies) relieving heads 
 like his so effectively on summer mornings. On 
 summer nights the scent of the hay, the wild-flowers, 
 comes across the narrow fringe of town to right and 
 left ; seems to come from beyond the Oxford meadows, 
 with sensitive, half-repellent thoughts from the gardens 
 at home. He looks down upon the green square with 
 the slim, quaint, black, young figures that cross it on 
 the way to chapel on yellow Sunday mornings, or 
 upwards to the dome, the spire ; can watch them 
 closely in freakish moonlight, or flickering softly by 
 an occasional bonfire in the quadrangle behind him. 
 Yet how hard, how forbidding sometimes, under a late 
 stormy sky, the scheme of black, white, and grey, 
 to which the group of ancient buildings could attune 
 itself. And what he reads most readily is of the 
 military life that intruded itself so oddly, during 
 the Civil War, into these half-monastic places, till the 
 timid old academic world scarcely knew itself. He 
 treasures then every incident which connects a sol- 
 dier’s coat with any still recognisable object, wall, 
 or tree, or garden-walk ; that walk, for instance, under 
 Merton garden where young Colonel Windebank was 
 shot for a traitor. His body lies in Saint Mary 
 
198 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 Magdalen’s churchyard. Unassociated to such in- 
 cident, the mere beauties of the place counted at the 
 moment for less than in retrospect. It was almost 
 retrospect even now, with an anticipation of regret, 
 in rare moments of solitude perhaps, when the oars 
 splashed far up the narrow streamlets through the 
 fields on May evenings among the fritillaries — does 
 the reader know them? that strange remnant just 
 here of a richer extinct flora — dry flowers, though 
 with a drop of dubious honey in each. Snakes’ heads, 
 the rude call them, for their shape, scale-marked too, 
 and in colour like rusted blood, as if they grew from 
 some forgotten battle-field, the bodies, the rotten 
 armour — yet delicate, beautiful, waving proudly. In 
 truth the memory of Oxford made almost everything 
 he saw after it seem vulgar. But he feels also never- 
 theless, characteristically, that such local pride ( fastus 
 he terms it) is proper only for those whose occupations 
 are wholly congruous with it; for the gifted, the 
 freemen who can enter into the genius, who possess 
 the liberty, of the place ; that it has a reproach in 
 it for the outsider, which comes home to him. 
 
 Here again then as he passes through the world, 
 so delightfully to others, they tell him, as if weighing 
 him, his very self, against his merely scholastic capacity 
 and effects, that he would “ do for the army ” ; which 
 he is now wholly glad to hear, for from first to last, 
 through all his successes there, the army had still been 
 scholar Stokes’ choice, and he had no difficulty, as 
 the reader sees, in keeping Uthwart also faithful to 
 first intentions. Their names were already entered 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 199 
 
 for commissions ; but the war breaking out afresh, in- 
 formation reaches \ them suddenly one morning that 
 they may join their regiment forthwith. Bidding good- 
 bye therefore, gladly, hastily, they set out with as little 
 delay as possible for Flanders; and passing the old 
 school by their nearest road thither, stay for an hour, 
 find an excuse for coming into the hall in uniform, 
 with which it must be confessed they seem thoroughly 
 satisfied — Uthwart quite perversely at ease in the 
 stiff make of his scarlet jacket with black facings — 
 and so pass onward on their way to Dover, Dunkirk, 
 they scarcely know whither finally, among the feature- 
 less villages, the long monotonous lines of the wind- 
 mills, the poplars, blurred with cold fogs, but marking 
 the roads through the snow which covers the endless 
 plain, till they come in sight at last of the army in 
 motion, like machines moving — how little it looked 
 on that endless plain ! — pass on their rapid way to 
 fame, to unpurchased promotion, as a matter of course 
 to responsibility also, till, their fortune turning upon 
 them, they miscarry in the latter fatally. They joined 
 in fact a distinguished regiment in a gallant army, im- 
 mediately after a victory in those Flemish regions; 
 shared its encouragement as fully as if they had had a 
 share in its perils ; the high character of the young 
 officers consolidating itself easily, pleasantly for them, 
 till the hour of an act of thoughtless bravery, almost 
 the sole irregular or undisciplined act of Uthwart’s 
 life, he still following his senior — criminal however 
 to the military conscience, under the actual circum- 
 stances, and in an enemy’s country. The faulty thing 
 
200 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 was done, certainly, with a scrupulous, a characteristic 
 completeness on their part ; and with their prize actu- 
 ally in hand, an old weather-beaten flag such as hung 
 in the cathedral aisle at school, they bethought them 
 for the first time of its price, with misgivings now in 
 rapid growth, as they return to their posts as nearly as 
 may be, for the division has been ordered forward in 
 their brief absence, to find themselves under arrest, 
 with that damning proof of heroism, of guilt, in their 
 possession, relinquished however along with the swords 
 they will never handle again — toys, idolised toys of 
 our later youth, we weep at the thought of them as 
 never to be handled again ! — as they enter the prison 
 to await summary trial next day on the charge of 
 wantonly deserting their posts while in position of 
 high trust in time of war. 
 
 The full details of what had happened could have 
 been told only by one or other of themselves ; by 
 Uthwart best, in the somewhat matter-of-fact and 
 prosaic journal he had managed to keep from the 
 first, noting there the incidents of each successive 
 day, as if in anticipation of its possible service by way 
 of piece justificative , should such become necessary, 
 attesting hour by hour their single-hearted devotion 
 to soldierly duty. Had a draughtsman equally truth- 
 ful or equally “ realistic,” as we say, accompanied 
 them and made a like use of his pencil, he might have 
 been mistaken at home for an artist aiming at “ effect,” 
 by skilful “ arrangements ” to tickle people’s interest 
 in the spectacle of war — the sudden ruin of a village 
 street, the heap of bleeding horses in the half-ploughed 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 201 
 
 field, the gaping bridges, hand or face of the dead 
 peeping from a hastily made grave at the roadside, 
 smoke-stained rents in cottage -walls, ignoble ruin 
 everywhere — ignoble but for its frank expression. 
 
 But you find in Uthwart’s journal, side by side 
 with those ugly patches, very precise and unadorned 
 records of their common gallantry, the more effective 
 indeed for their simplicity ; and not of gallantry 
 only, but of the long-sustained patience also, the 
 essential monotony of military life, even on a cam- 
 paign. Peril, good-luck, promotion, the grotesque 
 hardships which leave them smart as ever, (as if, so 
 others observe, dust and mire wouldn’t hold on them, 
 so “ spick and span ” they were, more especially on 
 days of any exceptional risk or effort) the great con- 
 fidence reposed in them at last ; all is noted, till, 
 with a little quiet pride, he records a gun-shot wound 
 which keeps him a month alone in hospital wearily ; 
 and at last, its hasty but seemingly complete healing. 
 
 Following, leading, resting sometimes perforce, amid 
 gun-shots, putrefying wounds, green corpses, they 
 never lacked good spirits, any more than the birds 
 warbling perennially afresh, as they will, over such 
 gangrened places, or the grass which so soon covers 
 them. And at length fortune, their misfortune, per- 
 versely determined that heroism should take the form 
 of patience under the walls of an unimportant frontier 
 town, with old Vauban fortifications seemingly made 
 only for appearance’ sake, like the work in the trenches 
 — gardener’s work ! round about the walls they are 
 called upon to superintend day after day. It was like 
 
202 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 a calm at sea, delaying one’s passage, one’s purpose 
 in being on board at all, a dead calm, yet with an 
 awful feeling of tension, intolerable at last for those 
 who were still all athirst for action. How dumb and 
 stupid the place seemed, in its useless defiance of 
 conquerors, anxious, for reasons not indeed apparent, 
 but which they were undoubtedly within their rights 
 in holding to, not to blow it at once into the air — the 
 steeple, the perky weathercock — to James Stokes in 
 particular, always eloquent in action, longing for 
 heroic effort, and ready to pay its price, maddened 
 now by the palpable imposture in front of him morn- 
 ing after morning, as he demonstrates conclusively 
 to Uthwart, seduced at last from the clearer sense 
 of duty and discipline, not by the demonstrated ease, 
 but rather by the apparent difficulty of what Stokes 
 proposes to do. They might have been deterred by 
 
 recent example. Colonel , who, as every one 
 
 knew, had actually gained a victory by disobeying 
 orders, had not been suffered to remain in the army 
 of which he was an ornament. It was easy in fact 
 for both, though it seemed the heroic thing, to dash 
 through the calm with delightful sense of active 
 powers renewed ; to pass into the beleaguered town 
 with a handful of men, and no loss, after a manner 
 the feasibility of which Stokes had explained acutely 
 but in vain at headquarters. He proved it to Uthwart 
 at all events, and a few others. Delightful heroism ! 
 delightful self-indulgence ! It was delayed for a mo- 
 ment by orders to move forward at last, with hopes 
 checked almost immediately after by a countermand, 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 203 
 
 bringing them right round their stupid dumb enemy 
 to the same wearisome position once again, to the 
 trenches and the rest, but with their thirst for action 
 only stimulated the more. How great the disappoint- 
 ment ! encouraging a certain laxity of discipline that 
 had prevailed about them of late. They take advan- 
 tage however of a vague phrase in their instructions ; 
 determine in haste to proceed on their plan as care- 
 fully, as sparingly of the lives of others as may be ; 
 detach a small company, hazarding thereby an alge- 
 braically certain scheme at headquarters of victory 
 or secure retreat, which embraced the entire country 
 in its calculations ; detach themselves ; finally pass 
 into the place, and out again with their prize, them- 
 selves secure. Themselves only could have told the 
 details — the intensely pleasant, the glorious sense of 
 movement renewed once more ; of defiance, just for 
 once, of a seemingly stupid control ; their dismay at 
 finding their company led forward by others, their 
 own posts deserted, their handful of men — nowhere ! 
 
 In an ordinary trial at law, the motives, every detail 
 of so irregular an act might have been weighed, 
 changing the colour of it. Their general character 
 would have told in their favour, but actually told 
 against them now ; they had but won an exceptional 
 trust to betray it. Martial courts exist not for con- 
 sideration, but for vivid exemplary effect and prompt 
 punishment. “ There is a kind of tribunal incidental 
 to service in the field,” writes another diarist, who 
 may tell in his own words what remains to be told. 
 “This court,” he says, “may consist of three staff- 
 
204 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 officers only, but has the power of sentencing to 
 death. On the — st two young officers of the — th 
 regiment, in whom it appears unusual confidence had 
 been placed, were brought before this court, on the 
 charge of desertion and wantonly exposing their 
 company to danger. They were found guilty, and 
 the proper penalty death, to be inflicted next morning 
 before the regiment marches. The delinquents were 
 understood to have appealed to a general court- 
 martial ; desperately at last, to ‘ the judgment of 
 their country ’ ; but were held to have no locus standi 
 whatever for an appeal under the actual circum- 
 stances. As a civilian I cannot but doubt the justice, 
 whatever may be thought of the expediency, of such 
 a summary process in regard to the capital penalty. 
 The regiment to which the culprits belonged, with 
 some others, was quartered for the night in the fau- 
 bourg of Saint , recently under blockade by a 
 
 portion of our forces. I was awoke at daybreak 
 by the sound of marching. The morning was a par- 
 ticularly clear one, though, as the sun was not yet 
 risen, it looked grey and sad along the empty street, 
 up which a party of grey soldiers were passing with 
 steady pace. I knew for what purpose. 
 
 “The whole of the force in garrison here had 
 already marched to the place of execution, the im- 
 mense courtyard of a monastery, surrounded irregu- 
 larly by ancient buildings like those of some cathedral 
 precincts I have seen in England. Here the soldiers 
 then formed three sides of a great square, a grave 
 having been dug on the fourth side. Shortly after- 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 205 
 
 wards the funeral procession came up. First came 
 the band of the — th, playing the Dead March ; 
 next the firing party, consisting of twelve non- 
 commissioned officers ; then the coffins, followed im- 
 mediately by the unfortunate prisoners, accompanied 
 by a chaplain. Slowly and sadly did the mournful 
 procession approach, when it passed through three 
 sides of the square, the troops having been pre- 
 viously faced inwards, and then halted opposite to 
 the grave. The proceedings of the court-martial 
 were then read ; and the elder prisoner having been 
 blindfolded was ordered to kneel down on his coffin, 
 which had been placed close to the grave, the firing 
 party taking up a position exactly opposite at a few 
 yards’ distance. The poor fellow’s face was deadly 
 pale, but he had marched his last march as steadily 
 as ever I saw a man step, and bore himself throughout 
 most bravely, though an oddly mixed expression 
 passed over his countenance when he was directed 
 to remove himself from the side of his companion, 
 shaking his hand first. At this moment there was 
 hardly a dry eye, and several young soldiers fainted, 
 numberless as must be the scenes of horror which 
 even they have witnessed during these last months. 
 At length the chaplain, who had remained praying 
 with the prisoner, quietly withdrew, and at a given 
 signal, but without word of command, the muskets 
 were levelled, a volley was fired, and the body of 
 the unfortunate man sprang up, falling again on his 
 back. One shot had purposely been reserved ; and 
 as the presiding officer thought he was not quite dead 
 
206 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 a musket was placed close to his head and fired. All 
 was now over ; but the troops having been formed 
 into columns were marched close by the body as it 
 lay on the ground, after which it was placed in one of 
 the coffins and buried. 
 
 “ I had almost forgotten his companion, the younger 
 and more fortunate prisoner, though I could scarcely 
 tell, as I looked at him, whether his fate was really 
 preferable in leaving his own rough coffin unoccupied 
 behind him there. Lieutenant (I think Edward) 
 Uthwart, as being the younger of the two offenders, 
 ‘ by the mercy of the court 1 had his sentence com- 
 muted to dismissal from the army with disgrace. 
 A colour-sergeant then advanced with the former 
 officer’s sword, a remarkably fine one, which he there- 
 upon snapped in sunder over the prisoner’s head as he 
 knelt. After this the prisoner’s regimental coat was 
 handed forward and put upon him, the epaulettes and 
 buttons being then torn off and flung to a distance. 
 This part of such sentences is almost invariably spared ; 
 but, I suppose through unavoidable haste, was on the 
 present occasion somewhat rudely carried out. I shall 
 never forget the expression of this man’s countenance, 
 though I have seen many sad things in the course of 
 my profession. He had the sort of good looks which 
 always rivet attention, and in most minds friendly 
 interest ; and now, amid all his pain and bewilder- 
 ment, bore a look of humility and submission as he 
 underwent those extraordinary details of his punish- 
 ment, which touched me very oddly with a sort of 
 desire (I cannot otherwise express it) to share his lot, 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 207 
 
 to be actually in his place for a moment. Yet, alas ! — 
 no ! say rather Thank Heaven ! the nearest approach 
 to that look I have seen has been on the face of those 
 whom I have known from circumstances to be almost 
 incapable at the time of any feeling whatever. 
 I would have offered him pecuniary aid, supposing 
 he needed it, but it was impossible. I went on with 
 the regiment, leaving the poor wretch to shift for 
 himself, Heaven knows how, the state of the country 
 being what it is. He might join the enemy ! ” 
 
 What money Uthwart had about him had in fact 
 passed that morning into the hands of his guards. 
 To tell what followed would be to accompany him 
 on a roundabout and really aimless journey, the details 
 of which he could never afterwards recall. See him 
 lingering for morsels of food at some shattered farm- 
 stead, or assisted by others almost as wretched as 
 himself, sometimes without his asking. In his worn 
 military dress he seems a part of the ruin under which 
 he creeps for a night’s rest as darkness comes on. He 
 actually came round again to the scene of his disgrace, 
 of the execution ; looked in vain for the precise spot 
 where he had knelt ; then, almost envying him who 
 lay there, for the unmarked grave ; passed over it 
 perhaps unrecognised for some change in that terrible 
 place, or rather in himself ; wept then as never before 
 in his life ; dragged himself on once more, till suddenly 
 the whole country seems to move under the rumour, 
 the very thunder, of “ the crowning victory,” as he is 
 made to understand. Falling in with the tide of its 
 heroes returning to English shores, his vagrant foot- 
 
208 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 steps are at last directed homewards. He finds him- 
 self one afternoon at the gate, turning out of the quiet 
 Sussex road, through the fields for whose safety he 
 had fought with so much of undeniable gallantry and 
 approval. 
 
 On that July afternoon the gardens, the woods, 
 mounted in flawless sweetness all round him as he 
 stood, to meet the circle of a flawless sky. Not 
 a cloud ; not a motion on the grass ! At the first 
 he had intended to return home no more ; and it had 
 been a proof of his great dejection that he sent at last, 
 as best he could, for money. They knew his fate 
 already by report, and were touched naturally when 
 that had followed on the record of his honours. Had 
 it been possible they would have set forth at any risk 
 to meet, to seek him ; were waiting now for the weary 
 one to come to the gate, ready with their oil and wine, 
 to speak metaphorically, and from this time forth 
 underwent his charm to the utmost — the charm of an 
 exquisite character, felt in some way to be inseparable 
 from his person, his characteristic movements, touched 
 also now with seemingly irreparable sorrow. For his 
 part, drinking in here the last sweets of the sensible 
 world, it was as if he, the lover of roses, had never 
 before been aware of them at all. The original soft- 
 ness of his temperament, against which the sense of 
 greater things thrust upon him had successfully re- 
 acted, asserted itself again now as he lay at ease, the 
 ease well merited by his deeds, his sorrows. That 
 he was going to die moved those about him to humour 
 this mood, to soften all things to his touch ; and look- 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 209 
 
 ing back he might have pronounced those four last 
 years of doom the happiest of his life. The memory 
 of the grave into which he had gazed so steadily on 
 the execution morning, into which, as he feels, one 
 half of himself had then descended, does not lessen his 
 shrinking from the fate before him, yet fortifies him 
 to face it manfully, gives a sort of fraternal familiarity 
 to death ; in a few weeks’ time this battle too is 
 fought out ; it is as if the thing were ended. The 
 delightful summer heat, the freshness it enhances — he 
 contrasts such things no longer with the sort of place 
 to which he is hastening. The possible duration of 
 life for him was indeed uncertain, the future to some 
 degree indefinite ; but as regarded any fairly distant 
 date, anything like a term of years, from the first there 
 had been no doubt at all ; he would be no longer here. 
 Meantime it was like a delightful few days’ additional 
 holiday from school, with which perforce one must be 
 content at last ; or as though he had not been pardoned 
 on that terrible morning, but only reprieved for two or 
 three years. Yet how large a proportion they would 
 have seemed in the whole sum of his years. He would 
 have liked to lie finally in the garden among departed 
 pets, dear dead dogs and horses; faintly proposes it 
 one day ; but after a while comprehends the church- 
 yard, with its white spots in the distant flowery view, 
 as filling harmoniously its own proper place there. 
 The weary soul seemed to be settling deeper into the 
 body and the earth it came of, into the condition of the 
 flowers, the grass, proper creatures of the earth to 
 which he is returning. The saintly vicar visits him 
 
 p 
 
210 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 considerately ; is repelled with politeness ; goes on his 
 way pondering inwardly what kind of place there might 
 be, in any possible scheme of another world, for so 
 absolutely unspiritual a subject. In fact, as the breath 
 of the infinite world came about him, he clung all 
 the faster to the beloved finite things still in contact 
 with him ; he had successfully hidden from his eyes 
 all beside. 
 
 His reprieve however lasted long enough, after all, 
 for a certain change of opinion of immense weight to 
 him — a revision or reversal of judgment. It came 
 about in this way. When peace was arranged, with 
 question of rewards, pensions, and the like, certain 
 battles or incidents therein were fought over again, 
 sometimes in the highest places of debate. On such 
 an occasion a certain speaker cites the case of 
 Lieutenant James Stokes and another, as being 
 “ pessimi exempli” : whereupon a second speaker gets 
 up, prepared with full detail, insists, brings that inci- 
 dental matter to the front for an hour, tells his 
 unfortunate friend’s story so effectively, pathetically, 
 that, as happens with our countrymen, they repent. 
 The matter gets into the newspapers, and, coming 
 thus into sympathetic public view, something like 
 glory wins from Emerald Uthwart his last touch of 
 animation. Just not too late he received the offer 
 of a commission; kept the letter there open within 
 sight. Aldy, who “ never shed tears and was in- 
 capable of pain,” in his great physical weakness, 
 wept — shall we say for the second time in his life? 
 A less excitement would have been more favourable 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 211 
 
 to any chance there might be of the patient’s sur- 
 viving. In fact the old gun-shot wound, wrongly 
 thought to be cured, which had caused the one illness 
 of his life, is now drawing out what remains of it, as he 
 feels with a kind of odd satisfaction and pride — his 
 old glorious wound ! And then, as of old, an absolute ' 
 submissiveness comes over him, as he gazes round at 
 the place, the relics of his uniform, the letter lying 
 there. It was as if there was nothing more that could 
 be said. Accounts thus settled, he stretched himself 
 in the bed he had occupied as a boy, more completely 
 at his ease than since the day when he had left home 
 for the first time. Respited from death once, he was 
 twice believed to be dead before the date actually 
 registered on his tomb. “ What will it matter a hun- 
 dred years hence?” they used to ask by way of simple 
 comfort in boyish troubles at school, overwhelming 
 at the moment. Was that in truth part of a certain 
 revelation of the inmost truth of things to “ babes,” 
 such as we have heard of? What did it matter — the 
 gifts, the good-fortune, its terrible withdrawal, the long 
 agony? Emerald Uthwart would have been all but 
 a centenarian to-day. 
 
 Postscript ■ from the Diary of a Surgeon , 
 
 August —th f 1 8 — . 
 
 I was summoned by letter into the country to per^ 
 form an operation on the dead body of a young man, 
 formerly an officer in the army. The cause of death 
 is held to have been some kind of distress of mind, 
 
212 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 concurrent with the effects of an old gun-shot wound, 
 the ball still remaining somewhere in the body. My 
 instructions were to remove this, at the express desire, 
 as I understood, of the deceased, rather than to ascer- 
 tain the precise cause of death. This however became 
 apparent in the course of my search for the ball, which 
 had enveloped itself in the muscular substance in the 
 region of the heart, and was removed with difficulty. 
 I have known cases of this kind, where anxiety has 
 caused incurable cardiac derangement (the deceased 
 seems to have been actually sentenced to death for 
 some military offence when on service in Flanders), and 
 such mental strain would of course have been aggra- 
 vated by the presence of a foreign object in that 
 place. On arriving at my destination, a small village 
 in a remote part of Sussex, I proceeded through the 
 little orderly churchyard, where however the monthly 
 roses were blooming all their own way among the 
 formal white marble monuments of the wealthier 
 people of the neighbourhood. At one of these the 
 masons were at work, picking and chipping in the 
 otherwise absolute stillness of the summer afternoon. 
 They were in fact opening the family burial-place of 
 the people who summoned me hither ; and the work- 
 men pointed out their abode, conspicuous on the slope 
 beyond, towards which I bent my steps accordingly. 
 I was conducted to a large upper room or attic, set 
 freely open to sun and air, and found the body lying 
 in a coffin, almost hidden under very rich-scented cut 
 flowers, after a manner I have never seen in this 
 country, except in the case of one or two Catholics 
 
EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 213 
 
 laid out for burial. The mother of the deceased was 
 present, and actually assisted my operations, amid 
 such tokens of distress, though perfectly self-controlled, 
 as I fervently hope I may never witness again. De- 
 ceased was in his twenty-seventh year, but looked 
 many years younger ; had indeed scarcely yet reached 
 the full condition of manhood. The extreme purity of 
 the outlines, both of the face and limbs, was such as is 
 usually found only in quite early youth ; the brow es- 
 pecially, under an abundance of fair hair, finely formed, 
 not high, but arched and full, as is said to be the way 
 with those who have the imaginative temper in excess. 
 Sad to think that had he lived reason must have 
 deserted that so worthy abode of it ! I was struck by 
 the great beauty of the organic developments, in the 
 strictly anatomic sense ; those of the throat and 
 diaphragm in particular might have been modelled 
 for a teacher of normal physiology, or a professor of 
 design. The flesh was still almost as firm as that 
 of a living person ; as happens when, as in this case, 
 death comes to all intents and purposes as gradually 
 as in old age. This expression of health and life, 
 under my seemingly merciless doings, together with 
 the mother’s distress, touched me to a degree very 
 unusual, I conceive, in persons of my years and pro- 
 fession. Though I believed myself to be acting by 
 his express wish, I felt like a criminal. The ball,-'’’" 
 a small one, much corroded with blood, was at length 
 removed ; and I was then directed to wrap it in 
 a partly-printed letter, or other document, and place 
 it in the breast-pocket of a faded and much-worn 
 
214 
 
 EMERALD UTHWART 
 
 scarlet soldier’s coat, put over the shirt which envel- 
 oped the body. The flowers were then hastily 
 replaced, the hands and the peak of the handsome 
 nose remaining visible among them ; the wind ruffled 
 the fair hair a little ; the lips were still red. I shall 
 not forget it. The lid was then placed on the coffin 
 and screwed down in my presence. There was no 
 plate or other inscription upon it. 
 
DIAPHANEITE 
 
 There are some unworldly types of character which 
 the world is able to estimate. It recognises certain 
 moral types, or categories, and regards whatever falls 
 within them as having a right to exist. The saint, the 
 artist, even the speculative thinker, out of the world’s 
 order as they are, yet work, so far as they work at all, 
 in and by means of the main current of the world’s 
 energy. Often it gives them late, or scanty, or mis- 
 taken acknowledgment ; still it has room for them in 
 its scheme of life, a place made ready for them in its 
 affections. It is also patient of doctrinaires of every 
 degree of littleness. As if dimly conscious of some 
 great sickness and weariness of heart in itself, it turns 
 readily to those who theorise about its unsoundness. 
 To constitute one of these categories, or types, a 
 breadth and generality of character is required. There 
 is another type of character, which is not broad and 
 general, rare, precious above all to the artist, a char- 
 acter which seems to have been the supreme moral 
 charm in the Beatrice of the Commedia. It does not 
 take the eye by breadth of colour; rather it is that 
 fine edge of light, where the elements of our moral 
 215 
 
216 
 
 DIAPHANEITE 
 
 nature refine themselves to the burning point. It 
 crosses rather than follows the main current of the 
 world’s life. The world has no sense fine enough for 
 those evanescent shades, which fill up the blanks 
 between contrasted types of character — delicate pro- 
 vision in the organisation of the moral world for the 
 transmission to every part of it of the life quickened 
 at single points ! For this nature there is no place 
 ready in its affections. This colourless, unclassified 
 purity of life it can neither use for its service, nor 
 contemplate as an ideal. 
 
 “ Sibi unitus et simplificatus esse,” that is the long 
 struggle of the Imitatio Christi. The spirit which it 
 forms is the very opposite of that which regards life 
 as a game of skill, and values things and persons as 
 marks or counters of something to be gained, or 
 x achieved, beyond them. It seeks to value everything 
 at its eternal worth, not adding to it, or taking from 
 it, the amount of influence it may have for or against 
 its own special scheme of life. It is the spirit that 
 sees external circumstances as they are, its own power 
 and tendencies as they are, and realises the given 
 conditions of its life, not disquieted by the desire for 
 change, or the preference of one part in life rather 
 than another, or passion, or opinion. The character 
 we mean to indicate achieves this perfect life by a 
 happy gift of nature, without any struggle at all.J 
 Not the saint only, the artist also, and the speculative 
 thinker, confused, jarred, disintegrated in the world, 
 as sometimes they inevitably are, aspire for this 
 simplicity to the last. The struggle of this aspi- 
 
DIAPHANEITE 
 
 217 
 
 ration with a lower practical aim in the mind of 
 Savonarola has been subtly traced by the author of 
 Romola. As language, expression, is the function 
 of intellect, as art, the supreme expression, is the 
 highest product of intellect, so this desire for sim- 
 plicity is a kind of indirect self-assertion of the intel- 
 lectual part of such natures. Simplicity in purpose 
 and act is a kind of determinate expression in 
 dexterous outline of one’s personality. It is a kind 
 of moral expressiveness ; there is an intellectual tri- 
 umph implied in it. Such a simplicity is character- 
 istic of the repose of perfect intellectual culture. 
 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 becomes thinner and thinner. This intellect- 
 ual throne is rarely won. Like the religious life, it 
 is a paradox in the world, denying the first conditions 
 of man’s ordinary existence, cutting obliquely the 
 spontaneous order of things. But the character we 
 have before us is a kind of prophecy of this repose 
 and simplicity, coming as it were in the order of 
 grace, not of nature, by some happy gift, or accident 
 of birth or constitution, showing that it is indeed 
 within the limits of man’s destiny. Like all the 
 higher forms of inward life this character is a subtle 
 blending and interpenetration of intellectual, moral 
 and spiritual elements. But it is as a phase of intellect, 
 of culture, that it is most striking and forcible. It 
 is a mind of taste lighted up by some spiritual ray 
 
218 
 
 DIAPHANEITE 
 
 within. What is meant by taste is an imperfect intel- 
 lectual state ; it is but a sterile kind of culture. It 
 is the mental attitude, the intellectual manner of 
 perfect culture, assumed by a happy instinct. Its 
 beautiful way of handling everything that appeals 
 to the senses and the intellect is really directed by 
 the laws of the higher intellectual life, but while 
 culture is able to trace those laws, mere taste is 
 ^unaware of them. In the character before us, taste, 
 without ceasing to be instructive, is far more than 
 a mental attitude or manner. A magnificent in- 
 tellectual force is latent within it. 3 It is like the 
 reminiscence of a forgotten culture that once adorned 
 the mind; as if the mind of one cjuXoao^yaas ttotz 
 /Her €/oo)ro 5 , fallen into a new cycle, were beginning 
 its spiritual progress over again, but with a certain 
 power of anticipating its stages. It has the freshness 
 without the shallowness of taste, the range and seri- 
 ousness of culture without its strain and over-con- 
 sciousness. Such a habit may be described as 
 wistfulness of mind, the feeling that there is “so 
 much to know,” rather as a longing after what is 
 unattainable, than as a hope to apprehend. Its 
 ethical result is an intellectual guilelessness, or in- 
 tegrity, that instinctively prefers what is direct and 
 clear, lest one’s own confusion and in transparency 
 should hinder the transmission from without of light 
 that is not yet inward. He who is ever looking for 
 the breaking of a light he knows not whence about 
 him, notes with a strange heedfulness the faintest 
 paleness in the sky. That truthfulness of temper, 
 
DIAPHANEITE 
 
 219 
 
 that receptivity, which professors often strive in vain 
 to form, is engendered here less by wisdom than by 
 innocence. Such a character is like a relic from the 
 classical age, laid open by accident to our alien 
 modern atmosphere. It has something of the clear 
 ring, the eternal outline of the antique. Perhaps it 
 is nearly always found with a corresponding outward 
 semblance. The veil or mask of such a nature would 
 be the very opposite of the “ dim blackguardism ” of 
 Danton, the *type Carlyle has made too popular for 
 the true interest of art. It is just this sort of entire 
 transparency of nature that lets through unconsciously 
 all that is really lifegiving in the established order 
 of things; it detects without difficulty all sorts of 
 affinities between its own elements, and the nobler 
 elements in that order. But then its wistfulness and 
 a confidence in perfection it has makes it love the 
 lords of change. ^ What makes revolutionists is 
 either self-pity, or indignation for the sake of others, 
 or a sympathetic perception of the dominant under- 
 current of progress in things. The nature before us 
 is revolutionist from the direct sense of personal 
 worth, that x^V? that pride of life, which to the 
 Greek was a heavenly grace. How can he value 
 what comes of accident, or usage, or convention, 
 whose individual life nature itself has isolated and 
 perfected? Revolution is often impious. They who 
 prosecute revolution have to violate again and again 
 the instinct of reverence. That is inevitable, since 
 after all progress is a kind of violence. But in this ^ 
 nature revolutionism is softened, harmonised, subdued 
 
220 
 
 DIAPHANEITE 
 
 as by distance. It is the revolutionism of one who 
 has slept a hundred years. Most of us are neutralised 
 by the play of circumstances. To most of us only 
 one chance is given in the life of the spirit and the 
 intellect, and circumstances prevent our dexterously 
 seizing that one chance. The one happy spot in our 
 nature has no room to burst into life. Our collective 
 life, pressing equally on every part of every one of 
 us, reduces nearly all of us to the level of a colour- 
 less uninteresting existence. Others are neutralised, 
 not by suppression of gifts, but by just equipoise 
 among them. In these no single gift, or virtue, or 
 idea, has an unmusical predominance. The world 
 easily confounds these two conditions. It sees in 
 the character before us only indifferentism. Doubt- 
 less the chief vein of the life of humanity could 
 hardly pass through it. Not by it could the prog- 
 ress of the world be achieved. It is not the guise 
 of Luther or Spinoza ; rather it is that of Raphael, who 
 in the midst of the Reformation and the Renaissance, 
 himself lighted up by them, yielded himself to neither, 
 but stood still to live upon himself, even in outward 
 form a youth, almost an infant, yet surprising all the 
 world. The beauty of the Greek statues was a sexless 
 beauty ; the statues of the gods had the least traces 
 of sex. Here there is a moral sexlessness, a kind of 
 impotence, an ineffectual wholeness of nature, yet with 
 a divine beauty and significance of its own. \ 
 
 Over and over again the world has been surprised 
 by the heroism, the insight, the passion, of this clear 
 crystal nature. Poetry and poetical history have 
 
DIAPHANEITE 
 
 221 
 
 dreamed of a crisis, where it must needs be that 
 some human victim be sent down into the grave. 
 These are they whom in its profound emotion hu- 
 manity might choose to send. “ What,” says Carlyle, 
 of Charlotte Corday, “ What if she had emerged from 
 her secluded stillness, suddenly like a star; cruel- 
 lovely, with half-angelic, half-daemonic splendour ; to 
 gleam for a moment, and in a moment be extin- 
 guished ; to be held in memory, so bright complete 
 was she, through long centuries ! ” 
 
 Often the presence of this nature is felt like a sweet 
 aroma in early manhood. Afterwards, as the adul- 
 terated atmosphere of the world assimilates us to itself, 
 the savour of it faints away. Perhaps there are 
 flushes of it in all of us ; recurring moments of it 
 in every period of life. Certainly this is so with 
 every man of genius. It is a thread of pure white 
 light that one might disentwine from the tumultuary 
 richness of Goethe’s nature. It is a natural prophecy 
 of what the next generation will appear, renerved, 
 modified by the ideas of this. There is a violence,^ 
 an impossibility about men who have ideas, which 
 makes one suspect that they could never be the 
 type of any widespread life. Society could not be 
 conformed to their image but by an unlovely strain- 
 ing from its true order. Well, in this nature the 
 idea appears softened, harmonised as by distance, 
 with an engaging naturalness, without the noise of 
 axe or hammer. 
 
 People have often tried to find a type of life that 
 might serve as a basement type. The philosopher, 
 
222 
 
 DIAPHANEITE 
 
 the saint, the artist, neither of them can be this 
 type ; the order of nature itself makes them ex- 
 ceptional. It cannot be the pedant, or the con- 
 servative, or anything rash and irreverent. Also the 
 type must be one discontented with society as it is. 
 The nature here indicated alone is worthy to be this 
 type. A majority of such would be the regeneration 
 of the world. 
 
 July, 1864. 
 

r UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-URBANA 
 
 
 
 
 
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