THE RENAISSANCE

STUDIES IN ART AND POETRY

by

Walter Pater

Sixth Edition

 Dedication To C. L. S. 

PREFACE

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

"To see the object as in itself it really is, " has been justly said tobe the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticismthe first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to knowone's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise itdistinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals--music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life--are indeedreceptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the productsof nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to ME? Whateffect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and ifso, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by itspresence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions arethe original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as inthe study of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primarydata for oneself, or not at all. And he who experiences theseimpressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination andanalysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstractquestion what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truthor experience--metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysicalquestions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, answerable ornot, of no interest to him. 

The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has todo, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, aspowers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more orless peculiar or unique kind. This influence he feels, and wishes toexplain, analysing it and reducing it to its elements. To him, thepicture, the landscape, the engaging personality in life or in a book, La Gioconda, the hills of Carrara, Pico of Mirandola, are valuable fortheir virtues, as we say, in speaking of a herb, a wine, a gem; for theproperty each has of affecting one with a special, a unique, impressionof pleasure. Our education becomes complete in proportion as oursusceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety. Andthe function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, analyse, andseparate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this specialimpression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of thatimpression is, and under what conditions it is experienced. His end isreached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemistnotes some natural element, for himself and others; and the rule forthose who would reach this end is stated with great exactness in thewords of a recent critic of Sainte-Beuve:--De se borner a connaitre depres les belles choses, et a s'en nourrir en exquis amateurs, enhumanistes accomplis. 

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correctabstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind oftemperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence ofbeautiful objects. He will remember always that beauty exists in manyforms. To him all periods, types, schools of taste, are in themselvesequal. In all ages there have been some excellent workmen, and someexcellent work done. The question he asks is always:--In whom did thestir, the genius, the sentiment of the period find itself? where was thereceptacle of its refinement, its elevation, its taste? "The ages areall equal, " says William Blake, "but genius is always above its age. "

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

The subjects of the following studies are taken from the history of theRenaissance, and touch what I think are the chief points in thatcomplex, many-sided movement. I have explained in the first of them whatI understand by the word, giving it a much wider scope than wasintended by those who originally used it to denote only that revival ofclassical antiquity in the fifteenth century which was but one of manyresults of a general excitement and enlightening of the human mind, ofwhich the great aim and achievements of what, as Christian art, is oftenfalsely opposed to the Renaissance, were another result. This outbreakof the human spirit may be traced far into the middle age itself, withits qualities already clearly pronounced, the care for physical beauty, the worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which thereligious system of the middle age imposed on the heart and theimagination. I have taken as an example of this movement, this earlierRenaissance within the middle age itself, and as an expression of itsqualities, two little compositions in early French; not because theyconstitute the best possible expression of them, but because they helpthe unity of my series, inasmuch as the Renaissance ends also in France, in French poetry, in a phase of which the writings of Joachim du Bellayare in many ways the most perfect illustration; the Renaissance thusputting forth in France an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, theproducts of which have to the full that subtle and delicate sweetnesswhich belongs to a refined and comely decadence; just as its earliestphases have the freshness which belongs to all periods of growth in art, the charm of ascesis, of the austere and serious girding of the loins inyouth. 

But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that the interest of theRenaissance mainly lies, --in that solemn fifteenth century which canhardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results in thethings of the intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art, its special and prominent personalities, with their profound aestheticcharm, but for its general spirit and character, for the ethicalqualities of which it is a consummate type. 

The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up theculture of an age, move for the most part from differentstarting-points, and by unconnected roads. As products of the samegeneration they partake indeed of a common character, and unconsciouslyillustrate each other; but of the producers themselves, each group issolitary, gaining what advantage or disadvantage there may be inintellectual isolation. Art and poetry, philosophy and the religiouslife, and that other life of refined pleasure and action in the openplaces of the world, are each of them confined to its own circle ofideas, and those who prosecute either of them are generally littlecurious of the thoughts of others. There come, however, from time totime, eras of more favourable conditions, in which the thoughts of mendraw nearer together than is their wont, and the many interests of theintellectual world combine in one complete type of general culture. Thefifteenth century in Italy is one of these happier eras; and what issometimes said of the age of Pericles is true of that of Lorenzo:--it isan age productive in personalities, many-sided, centralised, complete. Here, artists and philosophers and those whom the action of the worldhas elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe acommon air, and catch light and heat from each other's thoughts. Thereis a spirit of general elevation and enlightenment in which all alikecommunicate. It is the unity of this spirit which gives unity to all thevarious products of the Renaissance; and it is to this intimate alliancewith mind, this participation in the best thoughts which that ageproduced, that the art of Italy in the fifteenth century owes much ofits grave dignity and influence. 

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

CONTENTS

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

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES

The history of the Renaissance ends in France, and carries us away fromItaly to the beautiful cities of the country of the Loire. But it was inFrance also, in a very important sense, that the Renaissance had begun;and French writers, who are so fond of connecting the creations ofItalian genius with a French origin, who tell us how Francis of Assisitook not his name only, but all those notions of chivalry and romanticlove which so deeply penetrated his thoughts, from a French source, howBoccaccio borrowed the outlines of his stories from the old Frenchfabliaux, and how Dante himself expressly connects the origin of the artof miniature-painting with the city of Paris, have often dwelt on thisnotion of a Renaissance in the end of the twelfth and the beginning ofthe thirteenth century, a Renaissance within the limits of the middleage itself--a brilliant, but in part abortive effort to do for humanlife and the human mind what was afterwards done in the fifteenth. Theword Renaissance, indeed, is now generally used to denote not merelythat revival of classical antiquity which took place in the fifteenthcentury, and to which the word was first applied, but a whole complexmovement, of which that revival of classical antiquity was but oneelement or symptom. For us the Renaissance is the name of a many-sidedbut yet united movement, in which the love of the things of theintellect and the imagination for their own sake, the desire for a moreliberal and comely way of conceiving life, make themselves felt, urgingthose who experience this desire to search out first one and thenanother means of intellectual or imaginative enjoyment, and directingthem not merely to the discovery of old and forgotten sources of thisenjoyment, but to the divination of fresh sources thereof--newexperiences, new subjects of poetry, new forms of art. Of such feelingthere was a great outbreak in the end of the twelfth and the beginningof the following century. Here and there, under rare and happyconditions, in Pointed architecture, in the doctrines of romantic love, in the poetry of Provence, the rude strength of the middle age turns tosweetness; and the taste for sweetness generated there becomes the seedof the classical revival in it, prompting it constantly to seek afterthe springs of perfect sweetness in the Hellenic world. And coming aftera long period in which this instinct had been crushed, that true "darkage, " in which so many sources of intellectual and imaginative enjoymenthad actually disappeared, this outbreak is rightly called a Renaissance, a revival. 

Theories which bring into connexion with each other modes of thought andfeeling, periods of taste, forms of art and poetry, which the narrownessof men's minds constantly tends to oppose to each other, have a greatstimulus for the intellect, and are almost always worth understanding. It is so with this theory of a Renaissance within the middle age, whichseeks to establish a continuity between the most characteristic work ofthe middle age, the sculpture of Chartres and the windows of Le Mans, and the work of the later Renaissance, the work of Jean Cousin andGermain Pilon, and thus heals that rupture between the middle age andthe Renaissance which has so often been exaggerated. But it is not somuch the ecclesiastical art of the middle age, its sculpture andpainting--work certainly done in a great measure for pleasure's sake, inwhich even a secular, a rebellious spirit often betrays itself--butrather the profane poetry of the middle age, the poetry of Provence, andthe magnificent after-growth of that poetry in Italy and France, whichthose French writers have in view, when they speak of this Renaissancewithin the middle age. In that poetry, earthly passion, with itsintimacy, its freedom, its variety--the liberty of the heart--makesitself felt; and the name of Abelard, the great clerk and the greatlover, connects the expression of this liberty of heart with the freeplay of human intelligence around all subjects presented to it, with theliberty of the intellect, as that age understood it. Every one knows thelegend of Abelard, a legend hardly less passionate, certainly not lesscharacteristic of the middle age, than the legend of Tannhaeuser; howthe famous and comely clerk, in whom Wisdom herself, self-possessed, pleasant, and discreet, seemed to sit enthroned, came to live in thehouse of a canon of the church of Notre-Dame, where dwelt a girlHeloise, believed to be the old priest's orphan niece, his love for whomhe had testified by giving her an education then unrivalled, so thatrumour even asserted that, through the knowledge of languages, enablingher to penetrate into the mysteries of the older world, she had become asorceress, like the Celtic druidesses; and how as Abelard and Heloisesat together at home there, to refine a little further on the nature ofabstract ideas, "Love made himself of the party with them. " You conceivethe temptations of the scholar, who, in such dreamy tranquillity, amidthe bright and busy spectacle of the "Island, " lived in a world ofsomething like shadows; and that for one who knew so well how to assignits exact value to every abstract idea, those restraints which lie onthe consciences of other men had been relaxed. It appears that hecomposed many verses in the vulgar tongue: already the young men sangthem on the quay below the house. Those songs, says M. De Remusat, wereprobably in the taste of the Trouveres, of whom he was one of the firstin date, or, so to speak, the predecessor. It is the same spirit whichhas moulded the famous "letters, " written in the quaint Latin of themiddle age. At the foot of that early Gothic tower, which the nextgeneration raised to grace the precincts of Abelard's school, on the"Mountain of Saint Genevieve, " the historian Michelet sees in thought "aterrible assembly; not the hearers of Abelard alone, fifty bishops, twenty cardinals, two popes, the whole body of scholastic philosophy;not only the learned Heloise, the teaching of languages, and theRenaissance; but Arnold of Brescia--that is to say, the revolution. " Andso from the rooms of this shadowy house by the Seine side we see thatspirit going abroad, with its qualities already well defined, itsintimacy, its languid sweetness, its rebellion, its subtle skill individing the elements of human passion, its care for physical beauty, its worship of the body, which penetrated the early literature of Italy, and finds an echo in Dante. 

That Abelard is not mentioned in the Divine Comedy may appear a singularomission to the reader of Dante, who seems to have inwoven into thetexture of his work whatever had impressed him as either effective incolour or spiritually significant among the recorded incidents of actuallife. Nowhere in his great poem do we find the name, nor so much as anallusion to the story of one who had left so deep a mark on thephilosophy of which Dante was an eager student, of whom in the LatinQuarter, and from the lips of scholar or teacher in the University ofParis, during his sojourn among them, he can hardly have failed to hear. We can only suppose that he had indeed considered the story and the man, and had abstained from passing judgment as to his place in the schemeof "eternal justice. " In the famous legend of Tannhaeuser, the erringknight makes his way to Rome, to seek absolution at what was then thecentre of Christian religion. "So soon, " thought and said the Pope, "asthe staff in his hand should bud and blossom, so soon might the soul ofTannhaeuser be saved, and no sooner; and it came to pass not long afterthat the dry wood of a staff which the Pope had carried in his hand wascovered with leaves and flowers. " So, in the cloister of Godstow apetrified tree was shown, of which the nuns told that the fair Rosamond, who had died among them, had declared that, the tree being then aliveand green, it would be changed into stone at the hour of her salvation. When Abelard died, like Tannhaeuser, he was on his way to Rome: whatmight have happened had he reached his journey's end is uncertain; andit is in this uncertain twilight that his relation to the generalbeliefs of his age has always remained. In this, as in other things, heprefigures the character of the Renaissance, that movement in which, invarious ways, the human mind wins for itself a new kingdom of feelingand sensation and thought, not opposed to, but only beyond andindependent of the spiritual system then actually realised. Theopposition into which Abelard is thrown, which gives its colour to hiscareer, which breaks his soul to pieces, is a no less subtle oppositionthan that between the merely professional, official, hireling ministersof that system, with their ignorant worship of system for its own sake, and the true child of light, the humanist, with reason and heart andsenses quick, while theirs were almost dead. He reaches out towards, heattains, modes of ideal living, beyond the prescribed limits of thatsystem, though possibly contained in essential germ within it. As alwayshappens, the adherents of the poorer and narrower culture had nosympathy with, because no understanding of, a culture richer and moreample than their own: after the discovery of wheat they would still liveupon acorns--apres l'invention du ble ils voulaient encore vivre dugland; and would hear of no service to the higher needs of humanity withinstruments not of their forging. 

But the human spirit, bold through those needs, was too strong for them. Abelard and Heloise write their letters--letters with a wonderfuloutpouring of soul--in medieval Latin; and Abelard, though he composessongs in the vulgar tongue, writes also in Latin those treatises inwhich he tries to find a ground of reality below the abstractions ofphilosophy, as one bent on trying all things by their congruity withhuman experience, who had felt the hand of Heloise, and looked into hereyes, and tested the resources of humanity in her great and energeticnature. Yet it is only a little later, early in the thirteenth century, that French prose romance begins; and in one of the pretty volumes ofthe Bibliotheque Elzevirienne some of the most striking fragments of itmay be found, edited with much intelligence. In one of thesethirteenth-century stories, Li Amitiez de Ami et Amile, that free playof human affection, of the claims of which Abelard's story is anassertion, makes itself felt in the incidents of a great friendship, afriendship pure and generous, pushed to a sort of passionate exaltation, and more than faithful unto death. Such comradeship, though instances ofit are to be found everywhere, is still especially a classical motive;Chaucer expressing the sentiment of it so strongly in an antique tale, that one knows not whether the love of both Palamon and Arcite forEmelya, or of those two for each other, is the chiefer subject of theKnight's Tale--

 He cast his eyen upon Emelya, And therewithal he bleynte and cried, ah! As that he stongen were unto the herte. 

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

The friendship of Amis and Amile is deepened by the romanticcircumstance of an entire personal resemblance between the two heroes, so that they pass for each other again and again, and thereby into manystrange adventures; that curious interest of the Doppelgaenger, whichbegins among the stars with the Dioscuri, being entwined in and outthrough all the incidents of the story, like an outward token of theinward similitude of their souls. With this, again, like a secondreflexion of that inward similitude, is connected the conceit of twomarvellously beautiful cups, also exactly like each other--children'scups, of wood, but adorned with gold and precious stones. These twocups, which by their resemblance help to bring the friends together atcritical moments, were given to them by the Pope, when he baptized themat Rome, whither the parents had taken them for that purpose, inthankfulness for their birth, and cross and recross in the narrative, serving the two heroes almost like living things, and with thatwell-known effect of a beautiful object kept constantly before the eyein a story or poem, of keeping sensation well awake, and giving acertain air of refinement to all the scenes into which it enters; with aheightening also of that sense of fate, which hangs so much of theshaping of human life on trivial objects, like Othello's strawberryhandkerchief; and witnessing to the enjoyment of beautiful handiwork byprimitive people, almost dazzled by it, so that they give it an oddlysignificant place among the factors of a human history. 

Amis and Amile, then, are true to their comradeship through all trials;and in the end it comes to pass that at a moment of great need Amistakes the place of Amile in a tournament for life or death. "After thisit happened that a leprosy fell upon Amis, so that his wife would notapproach him, and wrought to strangle him; and he departed from hishome, and at last prayed his servants to carry him to the house ofAmile"; and it is in what follows that the curious strength of the pieceshows itself:--

"His servants, willing to do as he commanded, carried him to the placewhere Amile was: and they began to sound their rattles before the courtof Amile's house, as lepers are accustomed to do. And when Amile heardthe noise he commanded one of his servants to carry meat and bread tothe sick man, and the cup which was given to him at Rome filled withgood wine. And when the servant had done as he was commanded, hereturned and said, Sir, if I had not thy cup in my hand, I shouldbelieve that the cup which the sick man has was thine, for they arealike, the one to the other, in height and fashion. And Amile said, Goquickly and bring him to me. And when Amis stood before his comradeAmile demanded of him who he was, and how he had gotten that cup. I amof Briquam le Chastel, answered Amis, and the cup was given to me by theBishop of Rome, who baptized me. And when Amile heard that, he knew thatit was his comrade Amis, who had delivered him from death, and won forhim the daughter of the King of France to be his wife. And straightwayhe fell upon him, and began to weep greatly, and kissed him. And whenhis wife heard that, she ran out with her hair in disarray, weeping anddistressed exceedingly, for she remembered that it was he who had slainthe false Ardres. And thereupon they placed him in a fair bed, and saidto him, Abide with us until God's will be accomplished in thee, for allthat we have is at thy service. So he and the two servants abode withthem. 

"And it came to pass one night, when Amis and Amile lay in one chamberwithout other companions, that God sent His angel Raphael to Amis, whosaid to him, Amis, art thou asleep? And he, supposing that Amile hadcalled him, answered and said, I am not asleep, fair comrade! And theangel said to him, Thou hast answered well, for thou art the comrade ofthe heavenly citizens. --I am Raphael, the angel of our Lord, and am cometo tell thee how thou mayest be healed; for thy prayers are heard. Thoushalt bid Amile, thy comrade, that he slay his two children and washthee in their blood, and so thy body shall be made whole. And Amis saidto him, Let not this thing be, that my comrade should become a murdererfor my sake. But the angel said, It is convenient that he do this. Andthereupon the angel departed. 

"And Amile also, as if in sleep, heard those words; and he awoke andsaid, Who is it, my comrade, that hath spoken with thee? And Amisanswered, No man; only I have prayed to our Lord, as I am accustomed. And Amile said, Not so! but some one hath spoken with thee. Then hearose and went to the door of the chamber; and finding it shut he said, Tell me, my brother, who it was said those words to thee to-night. AndAmis began to weep greatly, and told him that it was Raphael, the angelof the Lord, who had said to him, Amis, our Lord commands thee that thoubid Amile slay his two children, and wash thee in their blood, and thoushalt be healed of thy leprosy. And Amile was greatly disturbed at thosewords, and said, I would have given to thee my man-servants and mymaid-servants and all my goods, and thou feignest that an angel hathspoken to thee that I should slay my two children. And immediately Amisbegan to weep, and said, I know that I have spoken to thee a terriblething, but constrained thereto; I pray thee cast me not away from theshelter of thy house. And Amile answered that what he had covenantedwith him, that he would perform, unto the hour of his death: But Iconjure thee, said he, by the faith which there is between me and thee, and by our comradeship, and by the baptism we received together at Rome, that thou tell me whether it was man or angel said that to thee. AndAmis answered, So truly as an angel hath spoken to me this night, so mayGod deliver me from my infirmity!

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

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

"Then Amis was cleansed of his leprosy. And Amile clothed his companionin his best robes; and as they went to the church to give thanks, thebells, by the will of God, rang of their own accord. And when the peopleof the city heard that, they ran together to see the marvel. And thewife of Amile, when she saw Amis and Amile coming, began to ask which ofthe twain was her husband, and said, I know well the vesture of themboth, but I know not which of them is Amile. And Amile said to her, I amAmile, and my companion is Amis, who is healed of his sickness. And shewas full of wonder, and desired to know in what manner he was healed. Give thanks to our Lord, answered Amile, but trouble not thyself as tothe manner of the healing. 

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

There, as I said, is the strength of the old French story. For theRenaissance has not only the sweetness which it derives from theclassical world, but also that curious strength of which there are greatresources in the true middle age. And as I have illustrated the earlystrength of the Renaissance by the story of Amis and Amile, a storywhich comes from the North, in which even a certain racy Teutonicflavour is perceptible, so I shall illustrate that other element of itsearly sweetness, a languid excess of sweetness even, by another storyprinted in the same volume of the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne, and ofabout the same date, a story which comes, characteristically, from theSouth, and connects itself with the literature of Provence. 

The central love-poetry of Provence, the poetry of the Tenson and theAubade, of Bernard de Ventadour and Pierre Vidal, is poetry for the few, for the elect and peculiar people of the kingdom of sentiment. But belowthis intenser poetry there was probably a wide range of literature, lessserious and elevated, reaching, by lightness of form and comparativehomeliness of interest, an audience which the concentrated passion ofthose higher lyrics left untouched. This literature has long sinceperished, or lives only in later French or Italian versions. One suchversion, the only representative of its species, M. Fauriel thought hedetected in the story of Aucassin and Nicolette, written in the Frenchof the latter half of the thirteenth century, and preserved in a uniquemanuscript, in the national library of Paris; and there were reasonswhich made him divine for it a still more ancient ancestry, traces in itof an Arabian origin, as in a leaf lost out of some early ArabianNights. * The little book loses none of its interest through thecriticism which finds in it only a traditional subject, handed on by onepeople to another; for after passing thus from hand to hand, its outlineis still clear, its surface untarnished; and, like many other stories, books, literary and artistic conceptions of the middle age, it has cometo have in this way a sort of personal history, almost as full of riskand adventure as that of its own heroes. The writer himself calls thepiece a cantefable, a tale told in prose, but with its incidents andsentiment helped forward by songs, inserted at irregular intervals. Inthe junctions of the story itself there are signs of roughness and wantof skill, which make one suspect that the prose was only put together toconnect a series of songs--a series of songs so moving and attractivethat people wished to heighten and dignify their effect by a regularframework or setting. Yet the songs themselves are of the simplest kind, not rhymed even, but only imperfectly assonant, stanzas of twenty orthirty lines apiece, all ending with a similar vowel sound. And here, aselsewhere in that early poetry, much of the interest lies in thespectacle of the formation of a new artistic sense. A new music isarising, the music of rhymed poetry, and in the songs of Aucassin andNicolette, which seem always on the point of passing into true rhyme, but which halt somehow, and can never quite take flight, you see peoplejust growing aware of the elements of a new music in their possession, and anticipating how pleasant such music might become. The piece wasprobably intended to be recited by a company of trained performers, manyof whom, at least for the lesser parts, were probably children. Thesongs are introduced by the rubric, Or se cante (ici on chante); andeach division of prose by the rubric, Or dient et content et fabloient(ici on conte). The musical notes of part of the songs have beenpreserved; and some of the details are so descriptive that theysuggested to M. Fauriel the notion that the words had been accompaniedthroughout by dramatic action. That mixture of simplicity and refinementwhich he was surprised to find in a composition of the thirteenthcentury, is shown sometimes in the turn given to some passing expressionor remark; thus, "the Count de Garins was old and frail, his time wasover"--Li quens Garins de Beaucaire estoit vix et frales; si avoit sontans trespasse. And then, all is so realised! One still sees the ancientforest, with its disused roads grown deep with grass, and the placewhere seven roads meet--u a forkeut set cemin qui s'en vont par le pais;we hear the light-hearted country people calling each other by theirrustic names, and putting forward, as their spokesman, one among themwho is more eloquent and ready than the rest--li un qui plus fu enparlesdes autres; for the little book has its burlesque element also, so thatone hears the faint, far-off laughter still. Rough as it is, the piececertainly possesses this high quality of poetry, that it aims at apurely artistic effect. Its subject is a great sorrow, yet it claims tobe a thing of joy and refreshment, to be entertained not for its matteronly, but chiefly for its manner; it is cortois, it tells us, et bienassis. 

*Recently, Aucassin and Nicolette has been edited and translated intoEnglish, with much graceful scholarship, by Mr. F. W. Bourdillon. Morerecently still we have had a translation--a poet's translation--from theingenious and versatile pen of Mr. Andrew Lang. The reader shouldconsult also the chapter on "The Out-door Poetry, " in Vernon Lee's mostinteresting Euphorion; being Studies of the Antique and Mediaeval in theRenaissance, a work abounding in knowledge and insight on the subjectsof which it treats. 

For the student of manners, and of the old language and literature, ithas much interest of a purely antiquarian order. To say of an ancientliterary composition that it has an antiquarian interest, often meansthat it has no distinct aesthetic interest for the reader of to-day. Antiquarianism, by a purely historical effort, by putting its object inperspective, and setting the reader in a certain point of view, fromwhich what gave pleasure to the past is pleasurable for him also, mayoften add greatly to the charm we receive from ancient literature. Butthe first condition of such aid must be a real, direct, aesthetic charmin the thing itself; unless it has that charm, unless some purelyartistic quality went to its original making, no merely antiquarianeffort can ever give it an aesthetic value, or make it a proper subjectof aesthetic criticism. This quality, wherever it exists, it is alwayspleasant to define, and discriminate from the sort of borrowed interestwhich an old play, or an old story, may very likely acquire through atrue antiquarianism. The story of Aucassin and Nicolette has somethingof this quality. Aucassin, the only son of Count Garins of Beaucaire, ispassionately in love with Nicolette, a beautiful girl of unknownparentage, bought of the Saracens, whom his father will not permit himto marry. The story turns on the adventures of these two lovers, untilat the end of the piece their mutual fidelity is rewarded. Theseadventures are of the simplest sort, adventures which seem to be chosenfor the happy occasion they afford of keeping the eye of the fancy, perhaps the outward eye, fixed on pleasant objects, a garden, a ruinedtower, the little hut of flowers which Nicolette constructs in theforest whither she has escaped from her enemies, as a token to Aucassinthat she has passed that way. All the charm of the piece is in itsdetails, in a turn of peculiar lightness and grace given to thesituations and traits of sentiment, especially in its quaint fragmentsof early French prose. 

All through it one feels the influence of that faint air of overwroughtdelicacy, almost of wantonness, which was so strong a characteristic ofthe poetry of the Troubadours. The Troubadours themselves were often menof great rank; they wrote for an exclusive audience, people of muchleisure and great refinement, and they came to value a type of personalbeauty which has in it but little of the influence of the open air andsunshine. There is a languid Eastern deliciousness in the very sceneryof the story, the full-blown roses, the chamber painted in somemysterious manner where Nicolette is imprisoned, the cool brown marble, the almost nameless colours, the odour of plucked grass and flowers. Nicolette herself well becomes this scenery, and is the bestillustration of the quality I mean--the beautiful, weird, foreign girl, whom the shepherds take for a fay, who has the knowledge of simples, thehealing and beautifying qualities of leaves and flowers, whose skilfultouch heals Aucassin's sprained shoulder, so that he suddenly leaps fromthe ground; the mere sight of whose white flesh, as she passed the placewhere he lay, healed a pilgrim stricken with sore disease, so that herose up, and returned to his own country. With this girl Aucassin is sodeeply in love that he forgets all his knightly duties. At lastNicolette is shut up to get her out of his way, and perhaps theprettiest passage in the whole piece is the fragment of prose whichdescribes her escape from this place:--

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

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

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

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

But scattered up and down through this lighter matter, always tingedwith humour and often passing into burlesque, which makes up the generalsubstance of the piece, there are morsels of a different quality, touches of some intenser sentiment, coming it would seem from theprofound and energetic spirit of the Provencal poetry itself, to whichthe inspiration of the book has been referred. Let me gather up thesemorsels of deeper colour, these expressions of the ideal intensity oflove, the motive which really unites together the fragments of thelittle composition. Dante, the perfect flower of ideal love, hasrecorded how the tyranny of that "Lord of terrible aspect" becameactually physical, blinding his senses, and suspending his bodilyforces. In this Dante is but the central expression and type ofexperiences known well enough to the initiated, in that passionate age. Aucassin represents this ideal intensity of passion--

 Aucassin, li biax, li blons, Li gentix, li amorous;

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

One of the strongest characteristics of that outbreak of the reason andthe imagination, of that assertion of the liberty of the heart, in themiddle age, which I have termed a medieval Renaissance, was itsantinomianism, its spirit of rebellion and revolt against the moral andreligious ideas of the time. In their search after the pleasures of thesenses and the imagination, in their care for beauty, in their worshipof the body, people were impelled beyond the bounds of the Christianideal; and their love became sometimes a strange idolatry, a strangerival religion. It was the return of that ancient Venus, not dead, butonly hidden for a time in the caves of the Venusberg, of those old pagangods still going to and fro on the earth, under all sorts of disguises. And this element in the middle age, for the most part ignored by thosewriters who have treated it pre-eminently as the "Age of Faith"--thisrebellious and antinomian element, the recognition of which has made thedelineation of the middle age by the writers of the Romantic school inFrance, by Victor Hugo for instance in Notre-Dame de Paris, sosuggestive and exciting, is found alike in the history of Abelard andthe legend of Tannhaeuser. More and more, as we come to mark changes anddistinctions of temper in what is often in one all-embracing confusioncalled the middle age, this rebellious element, this sinister claim forliberty of heart and thought, comes to the surface. The Albigensianmovement, connected so strangely with the history of Provencal poetry, is deeply tinged with it. A touch of it makes the Franciscan order, withits poetry, its mysticism, its "illumination, " from the point of view ofreligious authority, justly suspect. It influences the thoughts of thoseobscure prophetical writers, like Joachim of Flora, strange dreamers ina world of flowery rhetoric of that third and final dispensation of a"spirit of freedom, " in which law shall have passed away. Of this spiritAucassin and Nicolette contains perhaps the most famous expression: itis the answer Aucassin gives when he is threatened with the pains ofhell, if he makes Nicolette his mistress. A creature wholly of affectionand the senses, he sees on the way to paradise only a feeble company ofaged priests, "clinging day and night to the chapel altars, " barefoot orin patched sandals. With or even without Nicolette, "his sweet mistresswhom he so much loves, " he, for his part, is ready to start on the wayto hell, along with "the good scholars, " as he says, and the actors, andthe fine horsemen dead in battle, and the men of fashion, * and "the faircourteous ladies who had two or three chevaliers apiece beside their owntrue lords, " all gay with music, in their gold and silver and beautifulfurs--"the vair and the grey. "

*Parage, peerage--which came to signify all that ambitious youthaffected most on the outside of life, in that old world of theTroubadours, with whom this term is of frequent recurrence. 

But in the House Beautiful the saints too have their place; and thestudent of the Renaissance has this advantage over the student of theemancipation of the human mind in the Reformation, or the FrenchRevolution, that in tracing the footsteps of humanity to higher levels, he is not beset at every turn by the inflexibilities and antagonisms ofsome well-recognised controversy, with rigidly defined opposites, exhausting the intelligence and limiting one's sympathies. Theopposition of the professional defenders of a mere system to that moresincere and general play of the forces of human mind and character, which I have noted as the secret of Abelard's struggle, is indeed alwayspowerful. But the incompatibility of souls really "fair" is notessential; and within the enchanted region of the Renaissance, one needsnot be for ever on one's guard: here there are no fixed parties, noexclusions: all breathes of that unity of culture in which "whatsoeverthings are comely" are reconciled, for the elevation and adorning of ourspirits. And just in proportion as those who took part in theRenaissance become centrally representative of it, just so much the moreis this condition realised in them. The wicked popes, and the lovelesstyrants, who from time to time became its patrons, or mere speculatorsin its fortunes, lend themselves easily to disputations, and, from thisside or that, the spirit of controversy lays just hold upon them. Butthe painter of the Last Supper, with his kindred, live in a land wherecontroversy has no breathing-place, and refuse to be classified. In thestory of Aucassin and Nicolette, in the literature which it represents, the note of defiance, of the opposition of one system to another, issometimes harsh: let me conclude with a morsel from Amis and Amile, inwhich the harmony of human interests is still entire. For the story ofthe great traditional friendship, in which, as I said, the liberty ofthe heart makes itself felt, seems, as we have it, to have been writtenby a monk--La vie des saints martyrs Amis et Amile. It was not till theend of the seventeenth century that their names were finally excludedfrom the martyrology; and their story ends with this monkish miracle ofearthly comradeship, more than faithful unto death:--

"For, as God had united them in their lives in one accord, so they werenot divided in their death, falling together side by side, with a hostof other brave men, in battle for King Charles at Mortara, so calledfrom that great slaughter. And the bishops gave counsel to the king andqueen that they should bury the dead, and build a church in that place;and their counsel pleased the king greatly; and there were built theretwo churches, the one by commandment of the king in honour of SaintOseige, and the other by commandment of the queen in honour of SaintPeter. 

"And the king caused the two chests of stone to be brought in the whichthe bodies of Amis and Amile lay; and Amile was carried to the church ofSaint Peter, and Amis to the church of Saint Oseige; and the othercorpses were buried, some in one place and some in the other. But lo!next morning, the body of Amile in his coffin was found lying in thechurch of Saint Oseige, beside the coffin of Amis his comrade. Beholdthen this wondrous amity, which by death could not be dissevered!

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

1872. 

PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA

No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of theattempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century toreconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece. To reconcileforms of sentiment which at first sight seem incompatible, to adjust thevarious products of the human mind to each other in one many-sided typeof intellectual culture, to give humanity, for heart and imagination tofeed upon, as much as it could possibly receive, belonged to thegenerous instincts of that age. An earlier and simpler generation hadseen in the gods of Greece so many malignant spirits, the defeated butstill living centres of the religion of darkness, struggling, not alwaysin vain, against the kingdom of light. Little by little, as the naturalcharm of pagan story reasserted itself over minds emerging out ofbarbarism, the religious significance which had once belonged to it waslost sight of, and it came to be regarded as the subject of a purelyartistic or poetical treatment. But it was inevitable that from time totime minds should arise, deeply enough impressed by its beauty and powerto ask themselves whether the religion of Greece was indeed a rival ofthe religion of Christ; for the older gods had rehabilitated themselves, and men's allegiance was divided. And the fifteenth century was animpassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that itconsecrated everything with which art had to do as a religious object. The restored Greek literature had made it familiar, at least in Plato, with a style of expression concerning the earlier gods, which had aboutit much of the warmth and unction of a Christian hymn. It was toofamiliar with such language to regard mythology as a mere story; and itwas too serious to play with a religion. 

"Let me briefly remind the reader"--says Heine, in the Gods in Exile, anessay full of that strange blending of sentiment which is characteristicof the traditions of the middle age concerning the pagan religions--"howthe gods of the older world, at the time of the definite triumph ofChristianity, that is, in the third century, fell into painfulembarrassments, which greatly resembled certain tragical situations oftheir earlier life. They now found themselves beset by the sametroublesome necessities to which they had once before been exposedduring the primitive ages, in that revolutionary epoch when the Titansbroke out of the custody of Orcus, and, piling Pelion on Ossa, scaledOlympus. Unfortunate Gods! They had then to take flight ignominiously, and hide themselves among us here on earth, under all sorts ofdisguises. The larger number betook themselves to Egypt, where forgreater security they assumed the forms of animals, as is generallyknown. Just in the same way, they had to take flight again, and seekentertainment in remote hiding-places, when those iconoclastic zealots, the black brood of monks, broke down all the temples, and pursued thegods with fire and curses. Many of these unfortunate emigrants, nowentirely deprived of shelter and ambrosia, must needs take to vulgarhandicrafts, as a means of earning their bread. Under thesecircumstances, many whose sacred groves had been confiscated, letthemselves out for hire as wood-cutters in Germany, and were forced todrink beer instead of nectar. Apollo seems to have been content to takeservice under graziers, and as he had once kept the cows of Admetus, sohe lived now as a shepherd in Lower Austria. Here, however, havingbecome suspected on account of his beautiful singing, he was recognisedby a learned monk as one of the old pagan gods, and handed over to thespiritual tribunal. On the rack he confessed that he was the god Apollo;and before his execution he begged that he might be suffered to playonce more upon the lyre, and to sing a song. And he played sotouchingly, and sang with such magic, and was withal so beautiful inform and feature, that all the women wept, and many of them were sodeeply impressed that they shortly afterwards fell sick. And some timeafterwards the people wished to drag him from the grave again, so that astake might be driven through his body, in the belief that he had been avampire, and that the sick women would by this means recover. But theyfound the grave empty. "

The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, greatrather by what it designed than by what it achieved. Much which itaspired to do, and did but imperfectly or mistakenly, was accomplishedin what is called the eclaircissement of the eighteenth century, or inour own generation; and what really belongs to the rival of thefifteenth century is but the leading instinct, the curiosity, theinitiatory idea. It is so with this very question of the reconciliationof the religion of antiquity with the religion of Christ. A modernscholar occupied by this problem might observe that all religions may beregarded as natural products; that, at least in their origin, theirgrowth, and decay, they have common laws, and are not to be isolatedfrom the other movements of the human mind in the periods in which theyrespectively prevailed; that they arise spontaneously out of the humanmind, as expressions of the varying phases of its sentiment concerningthe unseen world; that every intellectual product must be judged fromthe point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced. He might go on to observe that each has contributed something to thedevelopment of the religious sense, and ranging them as so many stagesin the gradual education of the human mind, justify the existence ofeach. The basis of the reconciliation of the religions of the worldwould thus be the inexhaustible activity and creativeness of the humanmind itself, in which all religions alike have their root, and inwhich all alike are reconciled; just as the fancies of childhood and thethoughts of old age meet and are laid to rest, in the experience of theindividual. Far different was the method followed by the scholars of thefifteenth century. They lacked the very rudiments of the historic sense, which, by an imaginative act, throws itself back into a world unlikeone's own, and estimates every intellectual creation in its connexionwith the age from which it proceeded; they had no idea of development, of the differences of ages, of the gradual education of the human race. In their attempts to reconcile the religions of the world, they werethus thrown back upon the quicksand of allegorical interpretation. Thereligions of the world were to be reconciled, not as successive stages, in a gradual development of the religious sense, but as subsisting sideby side, and substantially in agreement with each other. And here thefirst necessity was to misrepresent the language, the conceptions, thesentiments, it was proposed to compare and reconcile. Plato and Homermust be made to speak agreeably to Moses. Set side by side, the meresurfaces could never unite in any harmony of design. Therefore one mustgo below the surface, and bring up the supposed secondary, or still moreremote meaning, that diviner signification held in reserve, in recessudivinius aliquid, latent in some stray touch of Homer, or figure ofspeech in the books of Moses. 

And yet as a curiosity of the human mind, a "madhouse-cell, " if youwill, into which we peep for a moment, and see it at work weavingstrange fancies, the allegorical interpretation of the fifteenth centuryhas its interest. With its strange web of imagery, its quaint conceits, its unexpected combinations and subtle moralising, it is an element inthe local colour of a great age. It illustrates also the faith of thatage in all oracles, its desire to hear all voices, its generous beliefthat nothing which had ever interested the human mind could wholly loseits vitality. It is the counterpart, though certainly the feeblercounterpart, of that practical truce and reconciliation of the gods ofGreece with the Christian religion, which is seen in the art of thetime; and it is for his share in this work, and because his own story isa sort of analogue or visible equivalent to the expression of thispurpose in his writings, that something of a general interest stillbelongs to the name of Pico della Mirandola, whose life, written by hisnephew Francis, seemed worthy, for some touch of sweetness in it, to betranslated out of the original Latin by Sir Thomas More, that greatlover of Italian culture, among whose works this life of Pico, Earlof Mirandola, and a great lord of Italy, as he calls him, may still beread, in its quaint, antiquated English. 

Marsilio Ficino has told us how Pico came to Florence. It was the veryday--some day probably in the year 1482--on which Ficino had finishedhis famous translation of Plato into Latin, the work to which he hadbeen dedicated from childhood by Cosmo de' Medici, in furtherance of hisdesire to resuscitate the knowledge of Plato among his fellow-citizens. Florence indeed, as M. Renan has pointed out, had always had an affinityfor the mystic and dreamy philosophy of Plato, while the colder and morepractical philosophy of Aristotle had flourished in Padua, and othercities of the north; and the Florentines, though they knew perhaps verylittle about him, had had the name of the great idealist often on theirlips. To increase this knowledge, Cosmo had founded the Platonicacademy, with periodical discussions at the villa of Careggi. The fallof Constantinople in 1453, and the council in 1438 for thereconciliation of the Greek and Latin Churches, had brought to Florencemany a needy Greek scholar. And now the work was completed, the door ofthe mystical temple lay open to all who could construe Latin, and thescholar rested from his labour; when there was introduced into hisstudy, where a lamp burned continually before the bust of Plato, asother men burned lamps before their favourite saints, a young man freshfrom a journey, "of feature and shape seemly and beauteous, of staturegoodly and high, of flesh tender and soft, his visage lovely and fair, his colour white, intermingled with comely reds, his eyes grey, andquick of look, his teeth white and even, his hair yellow and abundant, "and trimmed with more than the usual artifice of the time. It is thusthat Sir Thomas More translates the words of the biographer of Pico, who, even in outward form and appearance, seems an image of that inwardharmony and completeness, of which he is so perfect an example. The wordmystic has been usually derived from a Greek word which signifies toshut, as if one shut one's lips, brooding on what cannot be uttered; butthe Platonists themselves derive it rather from the act of shutting theeyes, that one may see the more, inwardly. Perhaps the eyes of themystic Ficino, now long past the midway of life, had come to be thushalf-closed; but when a young man, not unlike the archangel Raphael, asthe Florentines of that age depicted him in his wonderful walk withTobit, or Mercury, as he might have appeared in a painting by SandroBotticelli or Piero di Cosimo, entered his chamber, he seems to havethought there was something not wholly earthly about him; at least, heever afterwards believed that it was not without the co-operation of thestars that the stranger had arrived on that day. For it happened thatthey fell into a conversation, deeper and more intimate than men usuallyfall into at first sight. During this conversation Ficino formed thedesign of devoting his remaining years to the translation of Plotinus, that new Plato, in whom the mystical element in the Platonic philosophyhad been worked out to the utmost limit of vision and ecstasy; and it isin dedicating this translation to Lorenzo de' Medici that Ficino hasrecorded these incidents. 

It was after many wanderings, wanderings of the intellect as well asphysical journeys, that Pico came to rest at Florence. He was then abouttwenty years old, having been born in 1463. He was called Giovanni atbaptism; Pico, like all his ancestors, from Picus, nephew of the EmperorConstantine, from whom they claimed to be descended; and Mirandola, fromthe place of his birth, a little town afterwards part of the duchy ofModena, of which small territory his family had long been the feudallords. Pico was the youngest of the family, and his mother, delightingin his wonderful memory, sent him at the age of fourteen to the famousschool of law at Bologna. From the first, indeed, she seems to have hadsome presentiment of his future fame, for, with a faith in omenscharacteristic of her time, she believed that a strange circumstance hadhappened at the time of Pico's birth--the appearance of a circular flamewhich suddenly vanished away, on the wall of the chamber where she lay. He remained two years at Bologna; and then, with an inexhaustible, unrivalled thirst for knowledge, the strange, confused, uncriticallearning of that age, passed through the principal schools of Italy andFrance, penetrating, as he thought, into the secrets of all ancientphilosophies, and many eastern languages. And with this flood oferudition came the generous hope, so often disabused, of reconciling thephilosophers with each other, and all alike with the Church. At last hecame to Rome. There, like some knight-errant of philosophy, he offeredto defend nine hundred bold paradoxes, drawn from the most oppositesources, against all comers. But the pontifical court was led to suspectthe orthodoxy of some of these propositions, and even the reading of thebook which contained them was forbidden by the Pope. It was not until1493 that Pico was finally absolved, by a brief of Alexander the Sixth. Ten years before that date he had arrived at Florence; an early instanceof those who, after following the vain hope of an impossiblereconciliation from system to system, have at last fallen backunsatisfied on the simplicities of their childhood's belief. 

The oration which Pico composed for the opening of this philosophicaltournament still remains; its subject is the dignity of human nature, the greatness of man. In common with nearly all medieval speculation, much of Pico's writing has this for its drift; and in common also withit, Pico's theory of that dignity is founded on a misconception of theplace in nature both of the earth and of man. For Pico the earth is thecentre of the universe: and around it, as a fixed and motionless point, the sun and moon and stars revolve, like diligent servants or ministers. And in the midst of all is placed man, nodus et vinculum mundi, the bondor copula of the world, and the "interpreter of nature": that famousexpression of Bacon's really belongs to Pico. Tritum est in scholis, hesays, esse hominem minorem mundum, in quo mixtum ex elementis corpus etspiritus coelestis et plantarum anima vegetalis et brutorum sensus etratio et angelica mens et Dei similitudo conspicitur. --"It is acommonplace of the schools that man is a little world, in which we maydiscern a body mingled of earthy elements, and ethereal breath, and thevegetable life of plants, and the senses of the lower animals, andreason, and the intelligence of angels, and a likeness to God. "--Acommonplace of the schools! But perhaps it had some new significance andauthority, when men heard one like Pico reiterate it; and, false as itsbasis was, the theory had its use. For this high dignity of man, thusbringing the dust under his feet into sensible communion with thethoughts and affections of the angels, was supposed to belong to him, not as renewed by a religious system, but by his own natural right. Theproclamation of it was a counterpoise to the increasing tendency ofmedieval religion to depreciate man's nature, to sacrifice this or thatelement in it, to make it ashamed of itself, to keep the degrading orpainful accidents of it always in view. It helped man onward to thatreassertion of himself, that rehabilitation of human nature, the body, the senses, the heart, the intelligence, which the Renaissance fulfils. And yet to read a page of one of Pico's forgotten books is like a glanceinto one of those ancient sepulchres, upon which the wanderer inclassical lands has sometimes stumbled, with the old disused ornamentsand furniture of a world wholly unlike ours still fresh in them. Thatwhole conception of nature is so different from our own. For Pico theworld is a limited place, bounded by actual crystal walls, and amaterial firmament; it is like a painted toy, like that map or system ofthe world, held, as a great target or shield, in the hands of thegrey-headed father of all things, in one of the earlier frescoes of theCampo Santo at Pisa. How different from this childish dream is our ownconception of nature, with its unlimited space, its innumerable suns, and the earth but a mote in the beam; how different the strange new awe, or superstition, with which it fills our minds! "The silence of thoseinfinite spaces, " says Pascal, contemplating a starlight night, "thesilence of those infinite spaces terrifies me"--Le silence eternel deces espaces infinis m'effraie. 

He was already almost wearied out when he came to Florence. He had lovedmuch and been beloved by women, "wandering over the crooked hills ofdelicious pleasure"; but their reign over him was over, and long beforeSavonarola's famous "bonfire of vanities, " he had destroyed thoselove-songs in the vulgar tongue, which would have been such a relief tous, after the scholastic prolixity of his Latin writings. It was inanother spirit that he composed a Platonic commentary, the only work ofhis in Italian which has come down to us, on the "Song of DivineLove"--secondo la mente ed opinione dei Platonici--"according to themind and opinion of the Platonists, " by his friend Hieronymo Beniveni, in which, with an ambitious array of every sort of learning, and aprofusion of imagery borrowed indifferently from the astrologers, theCabala, and Homer, and Scripture, and Dionysius the Areopagite, heattempts to define the stages by which the soul passes from the earthlyto the unseen beauty. A change indeed had passed over him, as if thechilling touch of the abstract and disembodied beauty Platonists professto long for was already upon him; and perhaps it was a sense of this, coupled with that over-brightness which in the popular imaginationalways betokens an early death, that made Camilla Rucellai, one of thoseprophetic women whom the preaching of Savonarola had raised up inFlorence, declare, seeing him for the first time, that he would departin the time of lilies--prematurely, that is, like the field-flowerswhich are withered by the scorching sun almost as soon as they aresprung up. It was now that he wrote down those thoughts on the religiouslife which Sir Thomas More turned into English, and which anotherEnglish translator thought worthy to be added to the books of theImitation. "It is not hard to know God, provided one will not forceoneself to define Him":--has been thought a great saying of Joubert's. "Love God, " Pico writes to Angelo Politian, "we rather may, than eitherknow Him, or by speech utter Him. And yet had men liefer by knowledgenever find that which they seek, than by love possess that thing, whichalso without love were in vain found. "

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

It is because the life of Pico, thus lying down to rest in theDominican habit, yet amid thoughts of the older gods, himself like oneof those comely divinities, reconciled indeed to the new religion, butstill with a tenderness for the earlier life, and desirous literally to"bind the ages each to each by natural piety"--it is because this lifeis so perfect a parallel to the attempt made in his writings toreconcile Christianity with the ideas of paganism, that Pico, in spiteof the scholastic character of those writings, is really interesting. Thus, in the Heptaplus, or Discourse on the Seven Days of the Creation, he endeavours to reconcile the accounts which pagan philosophy had givenof the origin of the world with the account given in the books ofMoses--the Timaeus of Plato with the book of Genesis. The Heptaplus isdedicated to Lorenzo the Magnificent, whose interest, the preface tellsus, in the secret wisdom of Moses is well known. If Moses seems in hiswritings simple and even popular, rather than either a philosopher or atheologian, that is because it was an institution with the ancientphilosophers, either not to speak of divine things at all, or to speakof them dissemblingly: hence their doctrines were called mysteries. Taught by them, Pythagoras became so great a "master of silence, " andwrote almost nothing, thus hiding the words of God in his heart, andspeaking wisdom only among the perfect. In explaining the harmonybetween Plato and Moses, Pico lays hold on every sort of figure andanalogy, on the double meanings of words, the symbols of the Jewishritual, the secondary meanings of obscure stories in the later Greekmythologists. Everywhere there is an unbroken system of correspondences. Every object in the terrestrial world is an analogue, a symbol orcounterpart, of some higher reality in the starry heavens, and thisagain of some law of the angelic life in the world beyond the stars. There is the element of fire in the material world; the sun is the fireof heaven; and in the super-celestial world there is the fire of theseraphic intelligence. "But behold how they differ! The elementary fireburns, the heavenly fire vivifies, the super-celestial fire loves. " Inthis way, every natural object, every combination of natural forces, every accident in the lives of men, is filled with higher meanings. Omens, prophecies, supernatural coincidences, accompany Pico himself allthrough life. There are oracles in every tree and mountain-top, and asignificance in every accidental combination of the events of life. 

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

I said that the Renaissance of the fifteenth century was in many thingsgreat, rather by what it designed or aspired to do, than by what itactually achieved. It remained for a later age to conceive the truemethod of effecting a scientific reconciliation of Christian sentimentwith the imagery, the legends, the theories about the world, of paganpoetry and philosophy. For that age the only possible reconciliation wasan imaginative one, and resulted from the efforts of artists, trained inChristian schools, to handle pagan subjects; and of this artisticreconciliation work like Pico's was but the feebler counterpart. Whatever philosophers had to say on one side or the other, whether theywere successful or not in their attempts to reconcile the old to thenew, and to justify the expenditure of so much care and thought on thedreams of a dead faith, the imagery of the Greek religion, the directcharm of its story, were by artists valued and cultivated for their ownsake. Hence a new sort of mythology, with a tone and qualities of itsown. When the ship-load of sacred earth from the soil of Jerusalem wasmingled with the common clay in the Campo Santo at Pisa, a new flowergrew up from it, unlike any flower men had seen before, the anemone withits concentric rings of strangely blended colour, still to be found bythose who search long enough for it, in the long grass of the Maremma. Just such a strange flower was that mythology of the ItalianRenaissance, which grew up from the mixture of two traditions, twosentiments, the sacred and the profane. Classical story was regarded asso much imaginative material to be received and assimilated. It did notcome into men's minds to ask curiously of science concerning its origin, its primary form and import, its meaning for those who projected it. Itsank into their minds, to issue forth again with all the tangle about itof medieval sentiment and ideas. In the Doni Madonna in the Tribune ofthe Uffizii, Michelangelo actually brings the pagan religion, and withit the unveiled human form, the sleepy-looking fauns of a Dionysiacrevel, into the presence of the Madonna, as simpler painters hadintroduced there other products of the earth, birds or flowers; and hehas given to that Madonna herself much of the uncouth energy of theolder and more primitive "Mighty Mother. "

It is because this picturesque union of contrasts, belonging properly tothe art of the close of the fifteenth century, pervades, in Pico dellaMirandola, an actual person, that the figure of Pico is so attractive. He will not let one go; he wins one on, in spite of oneself, to turnagain to the pages of his forgotten books, although we know already thatthe actual solution proposed in them will satisfy us as little asperhaps it satisfied him. It is said that in his eagerness formysterious learning he once paid a great sum for a collection ofcabalistic manuscripts, which turned out to be forgeries; and the storymight well stand as a parable of all he ever seemed to gain in the wayof actual knowledge. He had sought knowledge, and passed from system tosystem, and hazarded much; but less for the sake of positive knowledgethan because he believed there was a spirit of order and beauty inknowledge, which would come down and unite what men's ignorance haddivided, and renew what time had made dim. And so, while his actual workhas passed away, yet his own qualities are still active, and he himselfremains, as one alive in the grave, caesiis et vigilibus oculis, as hisbiographer describes him, and with that sanguine, clear skin, decentirubore interspersa, as with the light of morning upon it; and he has atrue place in that group of great Italians who fill the end of thefifteenth century with their names, he is a true HUMANIST. For theessence of humanism is that belief of which he seems never to havedoubted, that nothing which has ever interested living men and women canwholly lose its vitality--no language they have spoken, nor oraclebeside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once beenentertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have everbeen passionate, or expended time and zeal. 

1871. 

SANDRO BOTTICELLI

In Leonardo's treatise on painting only one contemporary is mentioned byName--Sandro Botticelli. This pre-eminence may be due to chance only, but to some will rather appear a result of deliberate judgment; forpeople have begun to find out the charm of Botticelli's work, and hisname, little known in the last century, is quietly becoming important. In the middle of the fifteenth century he had already anticipated muchof that meditative subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to thegreat imaginative workmen of its close. Leaving the simple religionwhich had occupied the followers of Giotto for a century, and the simplenaturalism which had grown out of it, a thing of birds and flowers only, he sought inspiration in what to him were works of the modern world, thewritings of Dante and Boccaccio, and in new readings of his own ofclassical stories: or, if he painted religious incidents, painted themwith an under-current of original sentiment, which touches you as thereal matter of the picture through the veil of its ostensible subject. What is the peculiar sensation, what is the peculiar quality ofpleasure, which his work has the property of exciting in us, and whichwe cannot get elsewhere? For this, especially when he has to speak of acomparatively unknown artist, is always the chief question which acritic has to answer. 

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

He is before all things a poetical painter, blending the charm of storyand sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of lineand colour, the medium of abstract painting. So he becomes theillustrator of Dante. In a few rare examples of the edition of 1481, theblank spaces, left at the beginning of every canto for the hand of theilluminator, have been filled, as far as the nineteenth canto of theInferno, with impressions of engraved plates, seemingly by way ofexperiment, for in the copy in the Bodleian Library, one of the threeimpressions it contains has been printed upside down, and much awry, inthe midst of the luxurious printed page. Giotto, and the followers ofGiotto, with their almost childish religious aim, had not learned to putthat weight of meaning into outward things, light, colour, everydaygesture, which the poetry of the Divine Comedy involves, and before thefifteenth century Dante could hardly have found an illustrator. Botticelli's illustrations are crowded with incident, blending, with anaive carelessness of pictorial propriety, three phases of the samescene into one plate. The grotesques, so often a stumbling-block topainters who forget that the words of a poet, which only feebly presentan image to the mind, must be lowered in key when translated into form, make one regret that he has not rather chosen for illustration the moresubdued imagery of the Purgatorio. Yet in the scene of those who "godown quick into hell, " there is an invention about the fire taking holdon the upturned soles of the feet, which proves that the design is nomere translation of Dante's words, but a true painter's vision; whilethe scene of the Centaurs wins one at once, for, forgetful of the actualcircumstances of their appearance, Botticelli has gone off with delighton the thought of the Centaurs themselves, bright, small creatures ofthe woodland, with arch baby face and mignon forms, drawing tiny bows. 

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

But he is far enough from accepting the conventional orthodoxy of Dantewhich, referring all human action to the simple formula of purgatory, heaven and hell, leaves an insoluble element of prose in the depths ofDante's poetry. One picture of his, with the portrait of the donor, Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit or discredit of attracting someshadow of ecclesiastical censure. This Matteo Palmieri--two dim figuresmove under that name in contemporary history--was the reputed author ofa poem, still unedited, La Citta Divina, which represented the humanrace as an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer, were neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies, a fantasy of that earlierAlexandrian philosophy about which the Florentine intellect in thatcentury was so curious. Botticelli's picture may have been only one ofthose familiar compositions in which religious reverie has recorded itsimpressions of the various forms of beatified existence--Glorias, asthey were called, like that in which Giotto painted the portrait ofDante; but somehow it was suspected of embodying in a picture thewayward dream of Palmieri, and the chapel where it hung was closed. Artists so entire as Botticelli are usually careless about philosophicaltheories, even when the philosopher is a Florentine of the fifteenthcentury, and his work a poem in terza rima. But Botticelli, who wrote acommentary on Dante, and became the disciple of Savonarola, may wellhave let such theories come and go across him. True or false, the storyinterprets much of the peculiar sentiment with which he infuses hisprofane and sacred persons, comely, and in a certain sense like angels, but with a sense of displacement or loss about them--the wistfulness ofexiles, conscious of a passion and energy greater than any known issueof them explains, which runs through all his varied work with asentiment of ineffable melancholy. 

So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of heaven and hell, Botticelli accepts, that middle world in which men take no side in greatconflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great refusals. He thussets for himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by any moralambition, does its most sincere and surest work. His interest is neitherin the untempered goodness of Angelico's saints, nor the untempered evilof Orcagna's Inferno; but with men and women, in their mixed anduncertain condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes by passionwith a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually bythe shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink. Hismorality is all sympathy; and it is this sympathy, conveying into hiswork somewhat more than is usual of the true complexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he is, so forcible a realist. 

It is this which gives to his Madonnas their unique expression andcharm. He has worked out in them a distinct and peculiar type, definiteenough in his own mind, for he has painted it over and over again, sometimes one might think almost mechanically, as a pastime during thatdark period when his thoughts were so heavy upon him. Hardly anycollection of note is without one of these circular pictures, into whichthe attendant angels depress their heads so naively. Perhaps you havesometimes wondered why those peevish-looking Madonnas, conformed to noacknowledged or obvious type of beauty, attract you more and more, andoften come back to you when the Sistine Madonna and the Virgins of FraAngelico are forgotten. At first, contrasting them with those, you mayhave thought that there was something in them mean or abject even, forthe abstract lines of the face have little nobleness, and the colour iswan. For with Botticelli she too, though she holds in her hands the"Desire of all nations, " is one of those who are neither for Jehovah norfor His enemies; and her choice is on her face. The white light on it iscast up hard and cheerless from below, as when snow lies upon theground, and the children look up with surprise at the strange whitenessof the ceiling. Her trouble is in the very caress of the mysteriouschild, whose gaze is always far from her, and who has already that sweetlook of devotion which men have never been able altogether to love, andwhich still makes the born saint an object almost of suspicion to hisearthly brethren. Once, indeed, he guides her hand to transcribe in abook the words of her exaltation, the Ave, and the Magnificat, and theGaude Maria, and the young angels, glad to rouse her for a moment fromHer dejection, are eager to hold the inkhorn and to support the book;but the pen almost drops from her hand, and the high cold words have nomeaning for her, and her true children are those others, among whom inher rude home, the intolerable honour came to her, with that look ofwistful inquiry on their irregular faces which you see in startledanimals--gipsy children, such as those who, in Apennine villages, stillhold out their long brown arms to beg of you, but on Sundays becomeenfants du choeur, with their thick black hair nicely combed, and fairwhite linen on their sunburnt throats. 

What is strangest is that he carries this sentiment into classicalsubjects, its most complete expression being a picture in the Uffizii, of Venus rising from the sea, in which the grotesque emblems of themiddle age, and a landscape full of its peculiar feeling, and even itsstrange draperies, powdered all over in the Gothic manner with a quaintconceit of daisies, frame a figure that reminds you of the faultlessnude studies of Ingres. At first, perhaps, you are attracted only by aquaintness of design, which seems to recall all at once whatever youhave read of Florence in the fifteenth century; afterwards you may thinkthat this quaintness must be incongruous with the subject, and that thecolour is cadaverous or at least cold. And yet, the more you come tounderstand what imaginative colouring really is, that all colour is nomere delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon them bywhich they become expressive to the spirit, the better you will likethis peculiar quality of colour; and you will find that quaint design ofBotticelli's a more direct inlet into the Greek temper than the works ofthe Greeks themselves even of the finest period. Of the Greeks as theyreally were, of their difference from ourselves, of the aspects of theiroutward life, we know far more than Botticelli, or his most learnedcontemporaries; but for us long familiarity has taken off the edge ofthe lesson, and we are hardly conscious of what we owe to the Hellenicspirit. But in pictures like this of Botticelli's you have a record ofthe first impression made by it on minds turned back towards it, inalmost painful aspiration, from a world in which it had been ignored solong; and in the passion, the energy, the industry of realisation, withwhich Botticelli carries out his intention, is the exact measure of thelegitimate influence over the human mind of the imaginative system ofwhich this is the central myth. The light is indeed cold--mere sunlessdawn; but a later painter would have cloyed you with sunshine; and youcan see the better for that quietness in the morning air each longpromontory, as it slopes down to the water's edge. Men go forth to theirlabours until the evening; but she is awake before them, and you mightthink that the sorrow in her face was at the thought of the whole longday of love yet to come. An emblematical figure of the wind blows hardacross the grey water, moving forward the dainty-lipped shell on whichshe sails, the sea "showing his teeth" as it moves in thin lines offoam, and sucking in, one by one, the falling roses, each severe inoutline, plucked off short at the stalk but embrowned a little, asBotticelli's flowers always are. Botticelli meant all that imagery to bealtogether pleasurable; and it was partly an incompleteness ofresources, inseparable from the art of that time, that subdued andchilled it; but his predilection for minor tones counts also; and whatis unmistakable is the sadness with which he has conceived the goddessof pleasure, as the depositary of a great power over the lives of men. 

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

But, after all, it may be asked, is a painter like Botticelli--asecondary painter--a proper subject for general criticism? There are afew great painters, like Michelangelo or Leonardo, whose work has becomea force in general culture, partly for this very reason that they haveabsorbed into themselves all such workmen as Sandro Botticelli; and, over and above mere technical or antiquarian criticism, generalcriticism may be very well employed in that sort of interpretation whichadjusts the position of these men to general culture, whereas smallermen can be the proper subjects only of technical or antiquariantreatment. But, besides those great men, there is a certain number ofartists who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey tous a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; andthese, too, have their place in general culture, and must be interpretedto it by those who have felt their charm strongly, and are often theobjects of a special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate, just because there is not about them the stress of a great name andauthority. Of this select number Botticelli is one; he has thefreshness, the uncertain and diffident promise which belongs to theearlier Renaissance itself, and makes it perhaps the most interestingperiod in the history of the mind: in studying his work one begins tounderstand to how great a place in human culture the art of Italy hadbeen called. 

1870. 

LUCA DELLA ROBBIA

The Italian sculptors of the earlier half of the fifteenth century aremore than mere forerunners of the great masters of its close, and oftenreach perfection, within the narrow limits which they chose to impose ontheir work. Their sculpture shares with the paintings of Botticelli andthe churches of Brunelleschi that profound expressiveness, that intimateimpress of an indwelling soul, which is the peculiar fascination of theart of Italy in that century. Their works have been much neglected, andoften almost hidden away amid the frippery of modern decoration, and wecome with some surprise on the places where their fire still smoulders. One longs to penetrate into the lives of the men who have givenexpression to so much power and sweetness; but it is part of thereserve, the austere dignity and simplicity of their existence, thattheir histories are for the most part lost, or told but briefly. Fromtheir lives, as from their work, all tumult of sound and colour haspassed away. Mino, the Raffaelle of sculpture, Maso del Rodario, whoseworks add a new grace to the church of Como, Donatello even--one asks invain for more than a shadowy outline of their actual days. 

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

These Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century worked for the most partin low relief, giving even to their monumental effigies something of itsdepression of surface, getting into them by this means a patheticsuggestion of the wasting and etherealisation of death. They are hatersof all heaviness and emphasis, of strongly-opposed light and shade, andseek their means of expression among those last refinements of shadow, which are almost invisible except in a strong light, and which thefinest pencil can hardly follow. The whole essence of their work isEXPRESSION, the passing of a smile over the face of a child, the rippleof the air on a still day over the curtain of a window ajar. 

What is the precise value of this system of sculpture, this low relief?Luca della Robbia, and the other sculptors of the school to which hebelongs, have before them the universal problem of their art; and thissystem of low relief is the means by which they meet and overcome thespecial limitation of sculpture--a limitation resulting from thematerial and the essential conditions of all sculptured work, and whichconsists in the tendency of this work to a hard realism, a one-sidedpresentment of mere form, that solid material frame which only motioncan relieve, a thing of heavy shadows, and an individuality ofexpression pushed to caricature. Against this tendency to the hardpresentment of mere form trying vainly to compete with the reality ofnature itself, all noble sculpture constantly struggles: each greatsystem of sculpture resisting it in its own way, etherealising, spiritualising, relieving its hardness, its heaviness and death. The useof colour in sculpture is but an unskilful contrivance to effect, byborrowing from another art, what the nobler sculpture effects bystrictly appropriate means. To get not colour, but the equivalent ofcolour; to secure the expression and the play of life; to expand the toofixed individuality of pure, unrelieved, uncoloured form--this is theproblem which the three great styles in sculpture have solved in threedifferent ways. 

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

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

That was the Greek way of relieving the hardness and unspirituality ofpure form. But it involved to a certain degree the sacrifice of what wecall expression; and a system of abstraction which aimed always at thebroad and general type, at the purging away from the individual of whatbelonged only to him, and of the mere accidents of a particular timeand place, imposed upon the range of effects open to the Greek sculptorlimits somewhat narrowly defined; and when Michelangelo came, with agenius spiritualised by the reverie of the middle age, penetrated by itsspirit of inwardness and introspection, living not a mere outward lifelike the Greek, but a life full of inward experiences, sorrows, consolations, a system which sacrificed so much of what was inward andunseen could not satisfy him. To him, lover and student of Greeksculpture as he was, work which did not bring what was inward to thesurface, which was not concerned with individual expression, withindividual character and feeling, the special history of the specialsoul, was not worth doing at all. 

And so, in a way quite personal and peculiar to himself, which often is, and always seems, the effect of accident, he secured for his workindividuality and intensity of expression, while he avoided a too hardrealism, that tendency to harden into caricature which therepresentation of feeling in sculpture must always have. What time andaccident, its centuries of darkness under the furrows of the "littleMelian farm, " have done with singular felicity of touch for the Venus ofMelos, fraying its surface and softening its lines, so that some spiritin the thing seems always on the point of breaking out, as though in itclassical sculpture had advanced already one step into the mysticalChristian age, its expression being in the whole range of ancient workmost like that of Michelangelo's own:--this effect Michelangelo gains byleaving nearly all his sculpture in a puzzling sort of incompleteness, which suggests rather than realises actual form. Something of thewasting of that snow-image which he moulded at the command of Piero de'Medici, when the snow lay one night in the court of the Pitti palace, almost always lurks about it, as if he had determined to make thequality of a task, exacted from him half in derision, the pride of allhis work. Many have wondered at that incompleteness, suspecting, however, that Michelangelo himself loved and was loath to change it, andfeeling at the same time that they too would lose something if thehalf-realised form ever quite emerged from the stone, so rough hewnhere, so delicately finished there; and they have wished to fathom thecharm of this incompleteness. Well! that incompleteness isMichelangelo's equivalent for colour in sculpture; it is his way ofetherealising pure form, of relieving its hard realism, andcommunicating to it breath, pulsation, the effect of life. It was acharacteristic too which fell in with his peculiar temper and mode oflife, his disappointments and hesitations. And it was in reality perfectfinish. In this way he combines the utmost amount of passion andintensity with the sense of a yielding and flexible life: he gets notvitality merely, but a wonderful force of expression. 

Midway between these two systems--the system of the Greek sculptors andthe system of Michelangelo--comes the system of Luca della Robbia. Andthe other Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century, partaking both ofthe Allgemeinheit of the Greeks, their way of extracting certain selectelements only of pure form and sacrificing all the rest, and the studiedincompleteness of Michelangelo, relieving that expression of intensity, passion, energy, which might otherwise have hardened into caricature. Like Michelangelo, these sculptors fill their works with intense andindividualised expression: their noblest works are the studiedsepulchral portraits of particular persons--the monument of Conte Ugo inthe Badia of Florence, of the youthful Medea Colleoni, with thewonderful, long throat, in the chapel on the cool north side of theChurch of Santa Maria Maggiore at Bergamo--monuments which abound in thechurches of Rome, inexhaustible in suggestions of repose, of a subduedSabbatic joy, a kind of sacred grace and refinement:--and they unitethese elements of tranquillity, of repose, to that intense andindividual expression by a system of conventionalism as skilful andsubtle as that of the Greeks, subduing all such curves as indicate solidform, and throwing the whole into lower relief. 

The life of Luca, a life of labour and frugality, with no adventure andno excitement except what belongs to the trial of new artisticprocesses, the struggle with new artistic difficulties, the solution ofpurely artistic problems, fills the first seventy years of the fifteenthcentury. After producing many works in marble for the Duomo and theCampanile of Florence, which place him among the foremost sculptors ofthat age, he became desirous to realise the spirit and manner of thatsculpture, in a humbler material, to unite its science, its exquisiteand expressive system of low relief, to the homely art of pottery, tointroduce those high qualities into common things, to adorn andcultivate daily household life. In this he is profoundly characteristicof the Florence of that century, of that in it which lay below itssuperficial vanity and caprice, a certain old-world modesty andseriousness and simplicity. People had not yet begun to think that whatwas good art for churches was not so good, or less fitted, for their ownhouses. Luca's new work was in plain white earthenware at first, a mererough imitation of the costly, laboriously wrought marble, finished in afew hours. But on this humble path he found his way to a fresh success, to another artistic grace. The fame of the oriental pottery, with itsstrange, bright colours--colours of art, colours not to be attained inthe natural stone--mingled with the tradition of the old Roman potteryof the neighbourhood. The little red, coral-like jars of Arezzo, dug upin that district from time to time, are still famous. These colourshaunted Luca's fancy. "He still continued seeking something more, " hisbiographer says of him; "and instead of making his figures of bakedearth simply white, he added the further invention of giving themcolour, to the astonishment and delight of all who beheld them"--Cosasingolare, e multo utile per la state!--a curious thing, and very usefulfor summertime, full of coolness and repose for hand and eye. Luca lovedthe forms of various fruits, and wrought them into all sorts ofmarvellous frames and garlands, giving them their natural colours, onlysubdued a little, a little paler than nature. But in his noblerterra-cotta work he never introduces colour into the flesh, keepingmostly to blue and white, the colours of the Virgin Mary. 

I said that the work of Luca della Robbia possessed in an unusualmeasure that special characteristic which belongs to all the workmen ofhis school, a characteristic which, even in the absence of much positiveinformation about their actual history, seems to bring those workmenthemselves very near to us--the impress of a personal quality, aprofound expressiveness, what the French call intimite, by which ismeant some subtler sense of originality--the seal on a man's work ofwhat is most inward and peculiar in his moods, and manner ofapprehension: it is what we call expression, carried to its highestintensity of degree. That characteristic is rare in poetry, rarer stillin art, rarest of all in the abstract art of sculpture; yet essentially, perhaps, it is the quality which alone makes works in the imaginativeand moral order really worth having at all. It is because the works ofthe artists of the fifteenth century possess this quality in anunmistakable way that one is anxious to know all that can be known aboutthem, and explain to oneself the secret of their charm. 

1872. 

THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO

Critics of Michelangelo have sometimes spoken as if the onlycharacteristic of his genius were a wonderful strength, verging, as inthe things of the imagination great strength always does, on what issingular or strange. A certain strangeness, something of the blossomingof the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art; that theyshall excite or surprise us is indispensable. But that they shall givepleasure and exert a charm over us is indispensable too; and thisstrangeness must be sweet also--a lovely strangeness. And to the trueadmirers of Michelangelo this is the true type of theMichelangelesque--sweetness and strength, pleasure with surprise, anenergy of conception which seems at every moment about to break throughall the conditions of comely form, recovering, touch by touch, aloveliness found usually only in the simplest natural things--ex fortidulcedo. 

In this way he sums up for them the whole character of medieval artitself in that which distinguishes it most clearly from classical work, the presence of a convulsive energy in it, becoming in lower handsmerely monstrous or forbidding, but felt, even in its most gracefulproducts, as a subdued quaintness or grotesque. Yet those who feel thisgrace or sweetness in Michelangelo might at the first moment be puzzledif they were asked wherein precisely the quality resided. Men ofinventive temperament--Victor Hugo, for instance, in whom, as inMichelangelo, people have for the most part been attracted or repelledby the strength, while few have understood his sweetness--have sometimesrelieved conceptions of merely moral or spiritual greatness, but withlittle aesthetic charm of their own, by lovely accidents or accessories, like the butterfly which alights on the blood-stained barricade in LesMiserables, or those sea-birds for which the monstrous Gilliatt comes tobe as some wild natural thing, so that they are no longer afraid of him, in Les Travailleurs de la Mer. But the austere genius of Michelangelowill not depend for its sweetness on any mere accessories like these. The world of natural things has almost no existence for him; "When onespeaks of him, " says Grimm, "woods, clouds, seas, and mountainsdisappear, and only what is formed by the spirit of man remains behind";and he quotes a few slight words from a letter of his to Vasari as thesingle expression in all he has left of a feeling for nature. He hastraced no flowers, like those with which Leonardo stars over hisgloomiest rocks; nothing like the fretwork of wings and flames in whichBlake frames his most startling conceptions; no forest-scenery likeTitian's fills his backgrounds, but only blank ranges of rock, and dimvegetable forms as blank as they, as in a world before the creation ofthe first five days. 

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

This creation of life--life coming always as relief or recovery, andalways in strong contrast with the rough-hewn mass in which it iskindled--is in various ways the motive of all his work, whether itsimmediate subject be Pagan or Christian, legend or allegory; and this, although at least one-half of his work was designed for the adornment oftombs--the tomb of Julius, the tombs of the Medici. Not the Judgment butthe Resurrection is the real subject of his last work in the SistineChapel; and his favourite Pagan subject is the legend of Leda, thedelight of the world breaking from the egg of a bird. As I have alreadypointed out, he secures that ideality of expression which in Greeksculpture depends on a delicate system of abstraction, and in earlyItalian sculpture on lowness of relief, by an incompleteness, which issurely not always undesigned, and which I suppose no one regrets, andtrusts to the spectator to complete the half-emergent form. And as hispersons have something of the unwrought stone about them, so, as if torealise the expression by which the old Florentine records describe asculptor--master of live stone--with him the very rocks seem to havelife; they have but to cast away the dust and scurf that they may riseand stand on their feet. He loved the very quarries of Carrara, thosestrange grey peaks which even at mid-day convey into any scene fromwhich they are visible something of the solemnity and stillness ofevening, sometimes wandering among them month after month, till at lasttheir pale ashen colours seem to have passed into his painting; and onthe crown of the head of the David there still remains a morsel of uncutstone, as if by one touch to maintain its connexion with the place fromwhich it was hewn. 

And it is in this penetrative suggestion of life that the secret of thatsweetness of his is to be found. He gives us indeed no lovely naturalobjects like Leonardo or Titian, but only the coldest, most elementaryshadowing of rock or tree; no lovely draperies and comely gestures oflife, but only the austere truths of human nature; "simple persons"--ashe replied in his rough way to the querulous criticism of Julius theSecond, that there was no gold on the figures of the SistineChapel--"simple persons, who wore no gold on their garments"; but hepenetrates us with a sense of that power which we associate with all thewarmth and fulness of the world, and the sense of which brings intoone's thoughts a swarm of birds and flowers and insects. The broodingspirit of life itself is there; and the summer may burst out in amoment. 

He was born in an interval of a rapid midnight journey in March, at aplace in the neighbourhood of Arezzo, the thin, clear air of which, aswas then thought, being favourable to the birth of children of greatparts. He came of a race of grave and dignified men, who, claimingkinship with the family of Canossa, and some colour of imperial blood intheir veins, had, generation after generation, received honourableemployment under the government of Florence. His mother, a girl ofnineteen years, put him out to nurse at a country house among the hillsof Settignano, where every other inhabitant is a worker in the marblequarries, and the child early became familiar with that strange firststage in the sculptor's art. To this succeeded the influence of thesweetest and most placid master Florence had yet seen, DomenicoGhirlandajo. At fifteen he was at work among the curiosities of thegarden of the Medici, copying and restoring antiques, winning thecondescending notice of the great Lorenzo. He knew too how to excitestrong hatreds; and it was at this time that in a quarrel with afellow-student he received a blow on the face which deprived him forever of the comeliness of outward form. It was through an accident thathe came to study those works of the early Italian sculptors whichsuggested much of his own grandest work, and impressed it with so deep asweetness. He believed in dreams and omens. One of his friends dreamedtwice that Lorenzo, then lately dead, appeared to him in grey and dustyapparel. To Michelangelo this dream seemed to portend the troubles whichafterwards really came, and with the suddenness which was characteristicof all his movements, he left Florence. Having occasion to pass throughBologna, he neglected to procure the little seal of red wax which thestranger entering Bologna must carry on the thumb of his right hand. Hehad no money to pay the fine, and would have been thrown into prison hadnot one of the magistrates interposed. He remained in this man's house awhole year, rewarding his hospitality by readings from the Italian poetswhom he loved. Bologna, with its endless colonnades and fantasticleaning towers, can never have been one of the lovelier cities of Italy. But about the portals of its vast unfinished churches and its darkshrines, half hidden by votive flowers and candles, lie some of thesweetest works of the early Tuscan sculptors, Giovanni da Pisa andJacopo della Quercia, things as winsome as flowers; and the year whichMichelangelo spent in copying these works was not a lost year. It wasnow, on returning to Florence, that he put forth that unique presentmentof Bacchus, which expresses, not the mirthfulness of the god of wine, but his sleepy seriousness, his enthusiasm, his capacity for profounddreaming. No one ever expressed more truly than Michelangelo the notionof inspired sleep, of faces charged with dreams. A vast fragment ofmarble had long lain below the Loggia of Orcagna, and many a sculptorhad had his thoughts of a design which should just fill this famousblock of stone, cutting the diamond, as it were, without loss. UnderMichelangelo's hand it became the David which stood till lately on thesteps of the Palazzo Vecchio, when it was replaced below the Loggia. Michelangelo was now thirty years old, and his reputation wasestablished. Three great works fill the remainder of his life--threeworks often interrupted, carried on through a thousand hesitations, athousand disappointments, quarrels with his patrons, quarrels with hisfamily, quarrels perhaps most of all with himself--the Sistine Chapel, the Mausoleum of Julius the Second, and the Sacristy of San Lorenzo. 

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

But his genius is in harmony with itself; and just as in the products ofhis art we find resources of sweetness within their exceeding strength, so in his own story also, bitter as the ordinary sense of it may be, there are select pages shut in among the rest--pages one might easilyturn over too lightly, but which yet sweeten the whole volume. Theinterest of Michelangelo's poems is that they make us spectators of thisstruggle; the struggle of a strong nature to adorn and attune itself;the struggle of a desolating passion, which yearns to be resigned andsweet and pensive, as Dante's was. It is a consequence of the occasionaland informal character of his poetry, that it brings us nearer tohimself, his own mind and temper, than any work done only to support aliterary reputation could possibly do. His letters tell us little thatis worth knowing about him--a few poor quarrels about money andcommissions. But it is quite otherwise with these songs and sonnets, written down at odd moments, sometimes on the margins of his sketches, themselves often unfinished sketches, arresting some salient feeling orunpremeditated idea as it passed. And it happens that a true study ofthese has become within the last few years for the first time possible. A few of the sonnets circulated widely in manuscript, and became almostwithin Michelangelo's own lifetime a subject of academical discourses. But they were first collected in a volume in 1623 by the great-nephew ofMichelangelo, Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger. He omitted much, re-wrote the sonnets in part, and sometimes compressed two or morecompositions into one, always losing something of the force andincisiveness of the original. So the book remained, neglected even byItalians themselves in the last century, through the influence of thatFrench taste which despised all compositions of the kind, as it despisedand neglected Dante. "His reputation will ever be on the increase, because he is so little read, " says Voltaire of Dante. --But in 1858 thelast of the Buonarroti bequeathed to the municipality of Florence thecuriosities of his family. Among them was a precious volume containingthe autograph of the sonnets. A learned Italian, Signor Cesare Guasti, undertook to collate this autograph with other manuscripts at theVatican and elsewhere, and in 1863 published a true version ofMichelangelo's poems, with dissertations and a paraphrase. *

*The sonnets have been translated into English, with much poetic tasteand skill, by Mr. J. A. Symonds. 

People have often spoken of these poems as if they were a mere cry ofdistress, a lover's complaint over the obduracy of Vittoria Colonna. Butthose who speak thus forget that though it is quite possible thatMichelangelo had seen Vittoria, that somewhat shadowy figure, as earlyas 1537, yet their closer intimacy did not begin till about the year1542, when Michelangelo was nearly seventy years old. Vittoria herself, an ardent neo-catholic, vowed to perpetual widowhood since the news hadreached her, seventeen years before, that her husband, the youthful andprincely Marquess of Pescara, lay dead of the wounds he had received inthe battle of Pavia, was then no longer an object of great passion. In adialogue written by the painter, Francesco d'Ollanda, we catch a glimpseof them together in an empty church at Rome, one Sunday afternoon, discussing indeed the characteristics of various schools of art, butstill more the writings of Saint Paul, already following the ways andtasting the sunless pleasures of weary people, whose hold on outwardthings is slackening. In a letter still extant he regrets that when hevisited her after death he had kissed her hands only. He made, or set towork to make, a crucifix for her use, and two drawings, perhaps inpreparation for it, are now in Oxford. From allusions in the sonnets, wemay divine that when they first approached each other he had debatedmuch with himself whether this last passion would be the mostunsoftening, the most desolating of all--un dolce amaro, un si e no mimuovi; is it carnal affection, or, del suo prestino stato (Plato'sante-natal state) il raggio ardente? The older, conventional criticism, dealing with the text of 1623, had lightly assumed that all or nearlyall the sonnets were actually addressed to Vittoria herself; but SignorGuasti finds only four, or at most five, which can be so attributed ongenuine authority. Still, there are reasons which make him assign themajority of them to the period between 1542 and 1547, and we may regardthe volume as a record of this resting-place in Michelangelo's story. Weknow how Goethe escaped from the stress of sentiments too strong for himby making a book about them; and for Michelangelo, to write down hispassionate thoughts at all, to make sonnets about them, was already insome measure to command, and have his way with them--

 La vita del mia amor non e il cor mio, Ch'amor, di quel ch'io t'amo, e senza core. 

It was just because Vittoria raised no great passion that the space inhis life where she reigns has such peculiar suavity; and the spirit ofthe sonnets is lost if we once take them out of that dreamy atmospherein which men have things as they will, because the hold of all outwardthings upon them is faint and thin. Their prevailing tone is a calm andmeditative sweetness. The cry of distress is indeed there, but as a mereresidue, a trace of bracing chalybeate salt, just discernible in thesong which rises as a clear, sweet spring from a charmed space in hislife. 

This charmed and temperate space in Michelangelo's life, without whichits excessive strength would have been so imperfect, which saves himfrom the judgment of Dante on those who "wilfully lived in sadness, " isthen a well-defined period there, reaching from the year 1542 to theyear 1547, the year of Vittoria's death. In it the lifelong effort totranquillise his vehement emotions by withdrawing them into the regionof ideal sentiment, becomes successful; and the significance of Vittoriathere is, that she realises for him a type of affection which even indisappointment may charm and sweeten his spirit. In this effort totranquillise and sweeten life by idealising its vehement sentiments, there were two great traditional types, either of which an Italian ofthe sixteenth century might have followed. There was Dante, whose littlebook of the Vita Nuova had early become a pattern of imaginative love, maintained somewhat feebly by the later followers of Petrarch; and sincePlato had become something more than a name in Italy by the publicationof the Latin translation of his works by Marsilio Ficino, there was thePlatonic tradition also. Dante's belief in the resurrection of the body, through which, even in heaven, Beatrice loses for him no tinge offlesh-colour, or fold of raiment even--and the Platonic dream of thepassage of the soul through one form of life after another, with itspassionate haste to escape from the burden of bodily formaltogether--are, for all effects of art or poetry, principlesdiametrically opposite; and it is the Platonic tradition rather thanDante's that has moulded Michelangelo's verse. In many ways no sentimentcould have been less like Dante's love for Beatrice than Michelangelo'sfor Vittoria Colonna. Dante's comes in early youth: Beatrice is a child, with the wistful, ambiguous vision of a child, with a character stillunaccentuated by the influence of outward circumstances, almostexpressionless. Vittoria is a woman already weary, in advanced age, ofgrave intellectual qualities. Dante's story is a piece of figured wood, inlaid with lovely incidents. In Michelangelo's poems, frost and fireare almost the only images--the refining fire of the goldsmith; once ortwice the phoenix; ice melting at the fire; fire struck from the rockwhich it afterwards consumes. Except one doubtful allusion to a journey, there are almost no incidents. But there is much of the bright, sharp, unerring skill, with which in boyhood he gave the look of age to thehead of a faun by chipping a tooth from its jaw with a single stroke ofthe hammer. For Dante, the amiable and devout materialism of the middleage sanctifies all that is presented by hand and eye. Michelangelo isalways pressing forward from the outward beauty--il bel del fuor cheagli occhi piace--to apprehend the unseen beauty; trascenda nella formauniversale--that abstract form of beauty, about which the Platonistsreason. And this gives the impression in him of something flitting andunfixed, of the houseless and complaining spirit, almost clairvoyantthrough the frail and yielding flesh. He accounts for love at firstsight by a previous state of existence--la dove io t'amai prima. 

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

Some of those whom the gods love die young. This man, because the godsloved him, lingered on to be of immense, patriarchal age, till thesweetness it had taken so long to secrete in him was found at last. Outof the strong came forth sweetness, ex forti dulcedo. The world hadchanged around him. The New-catholicism had taken the place of theRenaissance. The spirit of the Roman Church had changed: in the vastworld's cathedral which his skill had helped to raise for it, it lookedstronger than ever. Some of the first members of the Oratory were amonghis intimate associates. They were of a spirit as unlike as possiblefrom that of Lorenzo, or Savonarola even. The opposition of theReformation to art has been often enlarged upon; far greater was that ofthe Catholic revival. But in thus fixing itself in a frozen orthodoxy, the Roman Catholic Church has passed beyond him, and he was a strangerto it. In earlier days, when its beliefs had been in a fluid state, hetoo might have been drawn into the controversy; he might have been forspiritualising the papal sovereignty, like Savonarola; or for adjustingthe dreams of Plato and Homer with the words of Christ, like Pico ofMirandola. But things had moved onward, and such adjustments were nolonger possible. For himself, he had long since fallen back on thatdivine ideal, which above the wear and tear of creeds has been formingitself for ages as the possession of nobler souls. And now he began tofeel the soothing influence which since that time the Roman Church hasoften exerted over spirits too independent to be its subjects, yetbrought within the neighbourhood of its action; consoled andtranquillised, as a traveller might be, resting for one evening in astrange city, by its stately aspect, and the sentiment of its manyfortunes, just because with those fortunes he has nothing to do. So helingers on; a revenant, as the French say, a ghost out of another age, in a world too coarse to touch his faint sensibilities too closely;dreaming, in a worn-out society, theatrical in its life, theatrical inits art, theatrical even in its devotion, on the morning of the world'shistory, on the primitive form of man, on the images under which thatprimitive world had conceived of spiritual forces. 

I have dwelt on the thought of Michelangelo as thus lingering beyond histime in a world not his own, because, if one is to distinguish thepeculiar savour of his work, he must be approached, not through hisfollowers, but through his predecessors; not through the marbles ofSaint Peter's, but through the work of the sculptors of the fifteenthcentury over the tombs and altars of Tuscany. He is the last of theFlorentines, of those on whom the peculiar sentiment of the Florence ofDante and Giotto descended: he is the consummate representative of theform that sentiment took in the fifteenth century with men like LucaSignorelli and Mino da Fiesole. Up to him the tradition of sentiment isunbroken, the progress towards surer and more mature methods ofexpressing that sentiment continuous. But his professed disciples didnot share this temper; they are in love with his strength only, and seemnot to feel his grave and temperate sweetness. Theatricality is theirchief characteristic; and that is a quality as little attributable toMichelangelo as to Mino or Luca Signorelli. With him, as with them, allIs serious, passionate, impulsive. 

This discipleship of Michelangelo, this dependence of his on thetradition of the Florentine schools, is nowhere seen more clearly thanin his treatment of the Creation. The Creation of Man had haunted themind of the middle age like a dream; and weaving it into a hundredcarved ornaments of capital or doorway, the Italian sculptors had earlyimpressed upon it that pregnancy of expression which seems to give itmany veiled meanings. As with other artistic conceptions of the middleage, its treatment became almost conventional, handed on from artist toartist, with slight changes, till it came to have almost an independent, abstract existence of its own. It was characteristic of the medievalmind thus to give an independent traditional existence to a specialpictorial conception, or to a legend, like that of Tristram orTannhaeuser, or even to the very thoughts and substance of a book, likethe Imitation, so that no single workman could claim it as his own, andthe book, the image, the legend, had itself a legend, and its fortunes, and a personal history; and it is a sign of the medievalism ofMichelangelo, that he thus receives from tradition his centralconception, and does but add the last touches, in transferring it to thefrescoes of the Sistine Chapel. 

But there was another tradition of those earlier more seriousFlorentines, of which Michelangelo is the inheritor, to which he givesthe final expression, and which centres in the sacristy of San Lorenzo, as the tradition of the Creation centres in the Sistine Chapel. It hasbeen said that all the great Florentines were preoccupied with death. Outre-tombe! Outre-tombe!--is the burden of their thoughts, from Danteto Savonarola. Even the gay and licentious Boccaccio gives a keener edgeto his stories by putting them in the mouths of a party of people whohad taken refuge from the danger of death by plague, in a country-house. It was to this inherited sentiment, this practical decision that to bepre-occupied with the thought of death was in itself dignifying, and anote of high quality, that the seriousness of the great Florentines ofthe fifteenth century was partly due; and it was reinforced in them bythe actual sorrows of their times. How often, and in what various ways, had they seen life stricken down, in their streets and houses! La bellaSimonetta dies in early youth, and is borne to the grave with uncoveredface. The young Cardinal Jacopo di Portogallo dies on a visit toFlorence--insignis forma fui et mirabili modestia--his epitaph dares tosay. Antonio Rossellino carves his tomb in the church of San Miniato, with care for the shapely hands and feet, and sacred attire; Luca dellaRobbia puts his skyeyest works there; and the tomb of the youthful andprincely prelate became the strangest and most beautiful thing in thatstrange and beautiful place. After the execution of the Pazziconspirators, Botticelli is employed to paint their portraits. Thispreoccupation with serious thoughts and sad images might easily haveresulted, as it did, for instance, in the gloomy villages of the Rhine, or in the overcrowded parts of medieval Paris, as it still does in manya village of the Alps, in something merely morbid or grotesque, in theDanse Macabre of many French and German painters, or the grim inventionsof Duerer. From such a result the Florentine masters of the fifteenthcentury were saved by their high Italian dignity and culture, and stillmore by their tender pity for the thing itself. They must often haveleaned over the lifeless body, when all was at length quiet and smoothedout. After death, it is said, the traces of slighter and moresuperficial dispositions disappear; the lines become more simple anddignified; only the abstract lines remain, in a great indifference. They came thus to see death in its distinction; and following it perhapsone stage further, dwelling for a moment on the point where all thattransitory dignity must break up, and discerning with no clearness a newbody, they paused just in time, and abstained, with a sentiment ofprofound pity. 

Of all this sentiment Michelangelo is the achievement; and first of all, of pity. Pieta--pity--the pity of the Virgin Mother over the dead bodyof Christ, expanded into the pity of all mothers over all dead sons, theentombment, with its cruel "hard stones"--that is the subject of hispredilection. He has left it in many forms, sketches, half-finisheddesigns, finished and unfinished groups of sculpture; but always as ahopeless, rayless, almost heathen sorrow--no divine sorrow, but merepity and awe at the stiff limbs and colourless lips. There is a drawingof his at Oxford, in which the dead body has sunk to the earth betweenthe mother's feet, with the arms extended over her knees. The tombs inthe sacristy of San Lorenzo are memorials, not of any of the nobler andgreater Medici, but of Giuliano, and Lorenzo the younger, noticeablechiefly for their somewhat early death. It is mere human naturetherefore which has prompted the sentiment here. The titles assignedtraditionally to the four symbolical figures, Night and Day, TheTwilight and The Dawn, are far too definite for them; for these figurescome much nearer to the mind and spirit of their author, and are a moredirect expression of his thoughts, than any merely symbolicalconceptions could possibly have been. They concentrate and express, lessby way of definite conceptions than by the touches, the promptings of apiece of music, all those vague fancies, misgivings, presentiments, which shift and mix and define themselves and fade again, whenever thethoughts try to fix themselves with sincerity on the conditions andsurroundings of the disembodied spirit. I suppose no one would come tothe sacristy of San Lorenzo for consolation; for seriousness, forsolemnity, for dignity of impression, perhaps, but not for consolation. It is a place neither of terrible nor consoling thoughts, but of vagueand wistful speculation. Here, again, Michelangelo is the disciple notso much of Dante as of the Platonists. Dante's belief in immortality isformal, precise, and firm, as much so almost as that of a child, whothinks the dead will hear if you cry loud enough. But in Michelangeloyou have maturity, the mind of the grown man, dealing cautiously anddispassionately with serious things; and what hope he has is based onthe consciousness of ignorance--ignorance of man, ignorance of thenature of the mind, its origin and capacities. Michelangelo is soignorant of the spiritual world, of the new body and its laws, that hedoes not surely know whether the consecrated Host may not be the body ofChrist. And of all that range of sentiment he is the poet, a poet stillalive, and in possession of our inmost thoughts--dumb inquiry over therelapse after death into the formlessness which preceded life, thechange, the revolt from that change, then the correcting, hallowing, consoling rush of pity; at last, far off, thin and vague, yet not morevague than the most definite thoughts men have had through threecenturies on a matter that has been so near their hearts, the newbody--a passing light, a mere intangible, external effect, over thosetoo rigid, or too formless faces; a dream that lingers a moment, retreating in the dawn, incomplete, aimless, helpless; a thing withfaint hearing, faint memory, faint power of touch; a breath, a flame inthe doorway, a feather in the wind. 

The qualities of the great masters in art or literature, the combinationof those qualities, the laws by which they moderate, support, relieveeach other, are not peculiar to them; but most often typical standards, or revealing instances, of the laws by which certain aesthetic effectsare produced. The old masters indeed are simpler; their characteristicsare written larger, and are easier to read, than their analogues in allthe mixed, confused productions of the modern mind. But when once wehave succeeded in defining for ourselves those characteristics, and thelaw of their combination, we have acquired a standard or measure whichhelps us to put in its right place many a vagrant genius, many anunclassified talent, many precious though imperfect products of art. Itis so with the components of the true character of Michelangelo. Thatstrange interfusion of sweetness and strength is not to be found inthose who claimed to be his followers; but it is found in many of thosewho worked before him, and in many others down to our own time, inWilliam Blake, for instance, and Victor Hugo, who, though not of hisschool, and unaware, are his true sons, and help us to understand him, as he in turn interprets and justifies them. Perhaps this is the chiefuse in studying old masters. 

1871. 

LEONARDO DA VINCI

HOMO MINISTER ET INTERPRES NATURAE

In Vasari's life of Leonardo da Vinci as we now read it there are somevariations from the first edition. There, the painter who has fixed theoutward type of Christ for succeeding centuries was a bold speculator, holding lightly by other men's beliefs, setting philosophy aboveChristianity. Words of his, trenchant enough to justify this impression, are not recorded, and would have been out of keeping with a genius ofwhich one characteristic is the tendency to lose itself in a refined andgraceful mystery. The suspicion was but the time-honoured mode in whichthe world stamps its appreciation of one who has thoughts for himselfalone, his high indifference, his intolerance of the common forms ofthings; and in the second edition the image was changed into somethingfainter and more conventional. But it is still by a certain mystery inhis work, and something enigmatical beyond the usual measure of greatmen, that he fascinates, or perhaps half repels. His life is one ofsudden revolts, with intervals in which he works not at all, or apartfrom the main scope of his work. By a strange fortune the works on whichhis more popular fame rested disappeared early from the world, as theBattle of the Standard; or are mixed obscurely with the work of meanerhands, as the Last Supper. His type of beauty is so exotic that itfascinates a larger number than it delights, and seems more than that ofany other artist to reflect ideas and views and some scheme of the worldwithin; so that he seemed to his contemporaries to be the possessor ofsome unsanctified and sacred wisdom; as to Michelet and others to haveanticipated modern ideas. He trifles with his genius, and crowds all hischief work into a few tormented years of later life; yet he is sopossessed by his genius that he passes unmoved through the most tragicevents, overwhelming his country and friends, like one who comes acrossthem by chance on some secret errand. 

His legend, as the French say, with the anecdotes which every one knows, is one of the most brilliant in Vasari. Later writers merely copied it, until, in 1804, Carlo Amoretti applied to it a criticism which lefthardly a date fixed, and not one of those anecdotes untouched. Thevarious questions thus raised have since that time become, one afteranother, subjects of special study, and mere antiquarianism has in thisdirection little more to do. For others remain the editing of thethirteen books of his manuscripts, and the separation by technicalcriticism of what in his reputed works is really his, from what is onlyhalf his, or the work of his pupils. But a lover of strange souls maystill analyse for himself the impression made on him by those works, andtry to reach through it a definition of the chief elements of Leonardo'sgenius. The legend, corrected and enlarged by its critics, may now andthen intervene to support the results of this analysis. 

His life has three divisions--thirty years at Florence, nearly twentyyears at Milan, then nineteen years of wandering, till he sinks to restunder the protection of Francis the First at the Chateau de Clou. Thedishonour of illegitimacy hangs over his birth. Piero Antonio, hisfather, was of a noble Florentine house, of Vinci in the Val d'Arno, andLeonardo, brought up delicately among the true children of that house, was the love-child of his youth, with the keen, puissant nature suchchildren often have. We see him in his youth fascinating all men by hisbeauty, improvising music and songs, buying the caged birds and settingthem free, as he walked the streets of Florence, fond of odd brightdresses and spirited horses. 

From his earliest years he designed many objects, and constructed modelsin relief, of which Vasari mentions some of women smiling. His father, pondering over this promise in the child, took him to the workshop ofAndrea del Verrocchio, then the most famous artist in Florence. Beautiful objects lay about there--reliquaries, pyxes, silver images forthe pope's chapel at Rome, strange fancy-work of the middle age, keepingodd company with fragments of antiquity, then but lately discovered. Another student Leonardo may have seen there--a boy into whose soul thelevel light and aerial illusions of Italian sunsets had passed, in afterdays famous as Perugino. Verrocchio was an artist of the earlierFlorentine type, carver, painter, and worker in metals, in one;designer, not of pictures only, but of all things for sacred orhousehold use, drinking-vessels, ambries, instruments of music, makingthem all fair to look upon, filling the common ways of life with thereflexion of some far-off brightness; and years of patience had refinedhis hand till his work was now sought after from distant places. 

It happened that Verrocchio was employed by the brethren of Vallombrosato paint the Baptism of Christ, and Leonardo was allowed to finish anangel in the left hand corner. It was one of those moments in which theprogress of a great thing--here, that of the art of Italy--presses hardand sharp on the happiness of an individual, through whosediscouragement and decrease, humanity, in more fortunate persons, comesa step nearer to its final success. 

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

The angel may still be seen in Florence, a space of sunlight in thecold, laboured old picture; but the legend is true only in sentiment, for painting had always been the art by which Verrocchio set leaststore. And as in a sense he anticipates Leonardo, so to the lastLeonardo recalls the studio of Verrocchio, in the love of beautifultoys, such as the vessel of water for a mirror, and lovely needle-workabout the implicated hands in the Modesty and Vanity, and of reliefslike those cameos which in the Virgin of the Balances hang all round thegirdle of Saint Michael, and of bright variegated stones, such as theagates in the Saint Anne, and in a hieratic preciseness and grace, as ofa sanctuary swept and garnished. Amid all the cunning and intricacy ofhis Lombard manner this never left him. Much of it there must have beenin that lost picture of Paradise, which he prepared as a cartoon fortapestry, to be woven in the looms of Flanders. It was the perfection ofthe older Florentine style of miniature-painting, with patient puttingof each leaf upon the trees and each flower in the grass, where thefirst man and woman were standing. 

And because it was the perfection of that style, it awoke in Leonardosome seed of discontent which lay in the secret places of his nature. For the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts; and thispicture--all that he had done so far in his life at Florence--was afterall in the old slight manner. His art, if it was to be something in theworld, must be weighted with more of the meaning of nature and purposeof humanity. Nature was "the true mistress of higher intelligences. " Sohe plunged into the study of nature. And in doing this he followed themanner of the older students; he brooded over the hidden virtues ofplants and crystals, the lines traced by the stars as they moved in thesky, over the correspondences which exist between the different ordersof living things, through which, to eyes opened, they interpret eachother; and for years he seemed to those about him as one listening to avoice, silent for other men. 

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

And in such studies some interfusion of the extremes of beauty andterror shaped itself, as an image that might be seen and touched, in themind of this gracious youth, so fixed that for the rest of his life itnever left him; and as catching glimpses of it in the strange eyes orhair of chance people, he would follow such about the streets ofFlorence till the sun went down, of whom many sketches of his remain. Some of these are full of a curious beauty, that remote beautyapprehended only by those who have sought it carefully; who, startingwith acknowledged types of beauty, have refined as far upon these, asthese refine upon the world of common forms. But mingled inextricablywith this there is an element of mockery also; so that, whether insorrow or scorn, he caricatures Dante even. Legions of grotesques sweepunder his hand; for has not nature too her grotesques--the rent rock, the distorting light of evening on lonely roads, the unveiled structureof man in the embryo, or the skeleton?

All these swarming fancies unite in the Medusa of the Uffizii. Vasari'sstory of an earlier Medusa, painted on a wooden shield, is perhaps aninvention; and yet, properly told, has more of the air of truth about itthan any-thing else in the whole legend. For its real subject is not theserious work of a man, but the experiment of a child. The lizards andglow-worms and other strange small creatures which haunt an Italianvineyard bring before one the whole picture of a child's life in aTuscan dwelling--half castle, half farm--and are as true to nature asthe pretended astonishment of the father for whom the boy has prepared asurprise. It was not in play that he painted that other Medusa, the onegreat picture which he left behind him in Florence. The subject has beentreated in various ways; Leonardo alone cuts to its centre; he alonerealises it as the head of a corpse, exercising its powers through allthe circumstances of death. What may be called the fascination ofcorruption penetrates in every touch its exquisitely finished beauty. About the dainty lines of the cheek the bat flits unheeded. The delicatesnakes seem literally strangling each other in terrified struggle toescape from the Medusa brain. The hue which violent death always bringswith it is in the features: features singularly massive and grand, as wecatch them inverted, in a dexterous foreshortening, sloping upwards, almost sliding down upon us, crown foremost, like a great calm stoneagainst which the wave of serpents breaks. But it is a subject that maywell be left to the beautiful verses of Shelley. 

The science of that age was all divination, clairvoyance, unsubjected toour exact modern formulas, seeking in an instant of vision toconcentrate a thousand experiences. Later writers, thinking only of thewell-ordered treatise on painting which a Frenchman, Raffaelle duFresne, a hundred years afterwards, compiled from Leonardo's bewilderedmanuscripts, written strangely, as his manner was, from right to left, have imagined a rigid order in his inquiries. But this rigid order waslittle in accordance with the restlessness of his character; and if wethink of him as the mere reasoner who subjects design to anatomy, andcomposition to mathematical rules, we shall hardly have of him thatimpression which those about him received from him. Poring over hiscrucibles, making experiments with colour, trying, by a strangevariation of the alchemist's dream, to discover the secret, not of anelixir to make man's natural life immortal, but rather of givingimmortality to the subtlest and most delicate effects of painting, heseemed to them rather the sorcerer or the magician, possessed of curioussecrets and a hidden knowledge, living in a world of which he alonepossessed the key. What his philosophy seems to have been most like isthat of Paracelsus or Cardan; and much of the spirit of the olderalchemy still hangs about it, with its confidence in short cuts and oddbyways to knowledge. To him philosophy was to be something givingstrange swiftness and double sight, divining the sources of springsbeneath the earth or of expression beneath the human countenance, clairvoyant of occult gifts in common or uncommon things, in the reed atthe brook-side, or the star which draws near to us but once in acentury. How, in this way, the clear purpose was overclouded, the finechaser's hand perplexed, we but dimly see; the mystery which at no pointquite lifts from Leonardo's life is deepest here. But it is certain thatat one period of his life he had almost ceased to be an artist. 

The year 1483--the year of the birth of Raffaelle and the thirty-firstof Leonardo's life--is fixed as the date of his visit to Milan by theletter in which he recommends himself to Ludovico Sforza, and offers totell him, for a price, strange secrets in the art of war. It was thatSforza who murdered his young nephew by slow poison, yet was sosusceptible of religious impressions that he blended mere earthlypassions with a sort of religious sentimentalism, and who took for hisdevice the mulberry-tree--symbol, in its long delay and sudden yieldingof flowers and fruit together, of a wisdom which economises all forcesfor an opportunity of sudden and sure effect. The fame of Leonardo hadgone before him, and he was to model a colossal statue of Francesco, thefirst Duke of Milan. As for Leonardo himself, he came not as an artistat all, or careful of the fame of one; but as a player on the harp, astrange harp of silver of his own construction, shaped in some curiouslikeness to a horse's skull. The capricious spirit of Ludovico wassusceptible also of the charm of music, and Leonardo's nature had a kindof spell in it. Fascination is always the word descriptive of him. Noportrait of his youth remains; but all tends to make us believe that upto this time some charm of voice and aspect, strong enough to balancethe disadvantage of his birth, had played about him. His physicalstrength was great; it was said that he could bend a horse-shoe like acoil of lead. 

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

Curiosity and the desire of beauty--these are the two elementary forcesin Leonardo's genius; curiosity often in conflict with the desire ofbeauty, but generating, in union with it, a type of subtle and curiousgrace. 

The movement of the fifteenth century was twofold; partly theRenaissance, partly also the coming of what is called the "modernspirit, " with its realism, its appeal to experience: it comprehended areturn to antiquity, and a return to nature. Raffaelle represents thereturn to antiquity, and Leonardo the return to nature. In this returnto nature, he was seeking to satisfy a boundless curiosity by herperpetual surprises, a microscopic sense of finish by her finesse, ordelicacy of operation, that subtilitas naturae which Bacon notices. Sowe find him often in intimate relations with men of science, --with FraLuca Poccioli the mathematician, and the anatomist Marc Antonio dellaTorre. His observations and experiments fill thirteen volumes ofmanuscript; and those who can judge describe him as anticipating longbefore, by rapid intuition, the later ideas of science. He explained theobscure light of the unilluminated part of the moon, knew that the seahad once covered the mountains which contain shells, and the gatheringof the equatorial waters above the polar. 

He who thus penetrated into the most secret parts of nature preferredalways the more to the less remote, what, seeming exceptional, was aninstance of law more refined, the construction about things of apeculiar atmosphere and mixed lights. He paints flowers with suchcurious felicity that different writers have attributed to him afondness for particular flowers, as Clement the cyclamen, and Rio thejasmin; while, at Venice, there is a stray leaf from his portfoliodotted all over with studies of violets and the wild rose. In him firstappears the taste for what is bizarre or recherche in landscape; hollowplaces full of the green shadow of bituminous rocks, ridged reefs oftrap-rock which cut the water into quaint sheets of light--their exactantitype is in our own western seas; all the solemn effects of movingwater; you may follow it springing from its distant source among therocks on the heath of the Madonna of the Balances, passing, as a littlefall, into the treacherous calm of the Madonna of the Lake, next, as agoodly river, below the cliffs of the Madonna of the Rocks, washing thewhite walls of its distant villages, stealing out in a network ofdivided streams in La Gioconda to the seashore of the Saint Anne--thatdelicate place, where the wind passes like the hand of some fine etcherover the surface, and the untorn shells are lying thick upon the sand, and the tops of the rocks, to which the waves never rise, are green withgrass, grown fine as hair. It is the landscape, not of dreams or offancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousandwith a miracle of finesse. Through Leonardo's strange veil of sightthings reach him so; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint lightof eclipse, or in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, orthrough deep water. 

And not into nature only; but he plunged also into human personality, and became above all a painter of portraits; faces of a modelling moreskilful than has been seen before or since, embodied with a realitywhich almost amounts to illusion, on dark air. To take a character as itwas, and delicately sound its stops, suited one so curious inobservation, curious in invention. So he painted the portraits ofLudovico's mistresses, Lucretia Crivelli and Cecilia Galerani thepoetess, of Ludovico himself, and the Duchess Beatrice. The portrait ofCecilia Galerani is lost; but that of Lucretia Crivelli has beenidentified with La Belle Feroniere of the Louvre, and Ludovico's pale, anxious face still remains in the Ambrosian library. Opposite is theportrait of Beatrice d'Este, in whom Leonardo seems to have caught somepresentiment of early death, painting her precise and grave, full of therefinement of the dead, in sad earth-coloured raiment, set with palestones. 

Sometimes this curiosity came in conflict with the desire of beauty; ittended to make him go too far below that outside of things in which artbegins and ends. This struggle between the reason and its ideas, and thesenses, the desire of beauty, is the key to Leonardo's life atMilan--his restlessness, his endless re-touchings, his odd experimentswith colour. How much must he leave unfinished, how much recommence!His problem was the transmutation of ideas into images. What he hadattained so far had been the mastery of that earlier Florentine style, with its naive and limited sensuousness. Now he was to entertain in thisnarrow medium those divinations of a humanity too wide for it, thatlarger vision of the opening world, which is only not too much for thegreat, irregular art of Shakspere; and everywhere the effort is visiblein the work of his hands. This agitation, this perpetual delay, give himan air of weariness and ennui. To others he seems to be aiming at animpossible effect, to do something that art, that painting, can neverdo. Often the expression of physical beauty at this or that point seemsstrained and marred in the effort, as in those heavy Germanforeheads--too German and heavy for perfect beauty. 

For there was a touch of Germany in that genius which, as Goethe said, had "thought itself weary"--muede sich gedacht. What an anticipation ofmodern Germany, for instance, in that debate on the question whethersculpture or painting is the nobler art. * But there is this differencebetween him and the German, that, with all that curious science, theGerman would have thought nothing more was needed; and the name ofGoethe himself reminds one how great for the artist may be the danger ofovermuch science; how Goethe, who, in the Elective Affinities and thefirst part of Faust, does transmute ideas into images, who wrought manysuch transmutations, did not invariably find the spell-word, and in thesecond part of Faust presents us with a mass of science which has almostno artistic character at all. But Leonardo will never work till thehappy moment comes--that moment of bien-etre, which to imaginative menis a moment of invention. On this moment he waits; other moments are buta preparation, or after-taste of it. Few men distinguish between them asjealously as he did. Hence so many flaws even in the choicest work. Butfor Leonardo the distinction is absolute, and, in the moment ofbien-etre, the alchemy complete: the idea is stricken into colour andimagery: a cloudy mysticism is refined to a subdued and gracefulmystery, and painting pleases the eye while it satisfies the soul. 

*How princely, how characteristic of Leonardo, the answer, Quanto piu, un'arte porta seco fatica di corpo, tanto piu e vile!

This curious beauty is seen above all in his drawings, and in thesechiefly in the abstract grace of the bounding lines. Let us take some ofthese drawings, and pause over them awhile; and, first, one of those atFlorence--the heads of a woman and a little child, set side by side, buteach in its own separate frame. First of all, there is much pathos inthe reappearance in the fuller curves of the face of the child, of thesharper, more chastened lines of the worn and older face, which leavesno doubt that the heads are those of a little child and its mother. Afeeling for maternity is indeed always characteristic of Leonardo; andthis feeling is further indicated here by the half-humorous pathos ofthe diminutive, rounded shoulders of the child. You may note a likepathetic power in drawings of a young man seated in a stooping posture, his face in his hands, as in sorrow; of a slave sitting in an uneasyinclined posture, in some brief interval of rest; of a small Madonna andChild, peeping sideways in half-reassured terror, as a mighty griffinwith batlike wings, one of Leonardo's finest inventions, descendssuddenly from the air to snatch up a lion wandering near them. But notein these, as that which especially belongs to art, the contour of theyoung man's hair, the poise of the slave's arm above his head, and thecurves of the head of the child, following the little skull within, thinand fine as some seashell worn by the wind. 

Take again another head, still more full of sentiment, but of adifferent kind, a little drawing in red chalk which every one rememberswho has examined at all carefully the drawings by old masters at theLouvre. It is a face of doubtful sex, set in the shadow of its own hair, the cheek-line in high light against it, with something voluptuous andfull in the eyelids and the lips. Another drawing might pass for thesame face in childhood, with parched and feverish lips, but with muchsweetness in the loose, short-waisted childish dress, with necklace andbulla, and in the daintily bound hair. We might take the thread ofsuggestion which these two drawings offer, when thus set side by side, and, following it through the drawings at Florence, Venice, and Milan, construct a sort of series, illustrating better than anything elseLeonardo's type of womanly beauty. Daughters of Herodias, with theirfantastic head-dresses knotted and folded so strangely to leave thedainty oval of the face disengaged, they are not of the Christianfamily, or of Raffaelle's. They are the clairvoyants, through whom, asthrough delicate instruments, one becomes aware of the subtler forces ofnature, and the modes of their action, all that is magnetic in it, allthose finer conditions wherein material things rise to that subtlety ofoperation which constitutes them spiritual, where only the finer nerveand the keener touch can follow: it is as if in certain revealinginstances we actually saw them at their work on human flesh. Nervous, electric, faint always with some inexplicable faintness, they seem to besubject to exceptional conditions, to feel powers at work in the commonair unfelt by others, to become, as it were, receptacles of them, andpass them on to us in a chain of secret influences. 

But among the more youthful heads there is one at Florence which Lovechooses for its own--the head of a young man, which may well be thelikeness of Andrea Salaino, beloved of Leonardo for his curled andwaving hair--belli capelli ricci e inanellati--and afterwards hisfavourite pupil and servant. Of all the interests in living men andwomen which may have filled his life at Milan, this attachment alone isrecorded; and in return Salaino identified himself so entirely withLeonardo, that the picture of Saint Anne, in the Louvre, has beenattributed to him. It illustrates Leonardo's usual choice of pupils, menof some natural charm of person or intercourse like Salaino, or men ofbirth and princely habits of life like Francesco Melzi--men with justenough genius to be capable of initiation into his secret, for the sakeof which they were ready to efface their own individuality. Among them, retiring often to the Villa of the Melzi at Canonica al Vaprio, heworked at his fugitive manuscripts and sketches, working for the presenthour, and for a few only, perhaps chiefly for himself. Other artistshave been as careless of present or future applause, inself-forgetfulness, or because they set moral or political ends abovethe ends of art; but in him this solitary culture of beauty seems tohave hung upon a kind of self-love, and a carelessness in the work ofart of all but art itself. Out of the secret places of a uniquetemperament he brought strange blossoms and fruits hitherto unknown; andfor him, the novel impression conveyed, the exquisite effect woven, counted as an end in itself--a perfect end. 

And these pupils of his acquired his manner so thoroughly, that thoughthe number of Leonardo's authentic works is very small indeed, there isa multitude of other men's pictures through which we undoubtedly seehim, and come very near to his genius. Sometimes, as in the littlepicture of the Madonna of the Balances, in which, from the bosom of Hismother, Christ weighs the pebbles of the brooks against the sins of men, we have a hand, rough enough by contrast, working upon some fine hint orsketch of his. Sometimes, as in the subjects of the Daughter of Herodiasand the Head of John the Baptist, the lost originals have been re-echoedand varied upon again and again by Luini and others. At other times theoriginal remains, but has been a mere theme or motive, a type of whichthe accessories might be modified or changed; and these variations havebut brought out the more the purpose, or expression of the original. Itis so with the so-called Saint John the Baptist of the Louvre--one ofthe few naked figures Leonardo painted--whose delicate brown flesh andwoman's hair no one would go out into the wilderness to seek, and whosetreacherous smile would have us understand something far beyond theoutward gesture or circumstance. But the long, reedlike cross in thehand, which suggests Saint John the Baptist, becomes faint in a copy atthe Ambrosian Library, and disappears altogether in another, in thePalazzo Rosso at Genoa. Returning from the last to the original, we areno longer surprised by Saint John's strange likeness to the Bacchuswhich hangs near it, which set Theophile Gautier thinking of Heine'snotion of decayed gods, who, to maintain themselves, after the fall ofpaganism, took employment in the new religion. We recognise one of thosesymbolical inventions in which the ostensible subject is used, not asmatter for definite pictorial realisation, but as the starting-point ofa train of sentiment as subtle and vague as a piece of music. No oneever ruled over his subject more entirely than Leonardo, or bent it moredexterously to purely artistic ends. And so it comes to pass that thoughhe handles sacred subjects continually, he is the most profane ofpainters; the given person or subject, Saint John in the Desert, or theVirgin on the knees of Saint Anne, is often merely the pretext for akind of work which carries one quite out of the range of itsconventional associations. 

About the Last Supper, its decay and restorations, a whole literaturehas risen up, Goethe's pensive sketch of its sad fortunes being far thebest. The death in childbirth of the Duchess Beatrice was followed inLudovico by one of those paroxysms of religious feeling which in himwere constitutional. The low, gloomy Dominican church of Saint Mary ofthe Graces had been the favourite shrine of Beatrice. She had spent herlast days there, full of sinister presentiments; at last it had beenalmost necessary to remove her from it by force; and now it was herethat mass was said a hundred times a day for her repose. On the dampwall of the refectory, oozing with mineral salts, Leonardo painted theLast Supper. A hundred anecdotes were told about it, his retouchings anddelays. They show him refusing to work except at the moment ofinvention, scornful of whoever thought that art was a work of mereindustry and rule, often coming the whole length of Milan to give asingle touch. He painted it, not in fresco, where all must be impromptu, but in oils, the new method which he had been one of the first towelcome, because it allowed of so many afterthoughts, so refined aworking out of perfection. It turned out that on a plastered wall noprocess could have been less durable. Within fifty years it had falleninto decay. And now we have to turn back to Leonardo's own studies, above all to one drawing of the central head at the Brera, which, in aunion of tenderness and severity in the face-lines, reminds one of themonumental work of Mino da Fiesole, to trace it as it was. 

It was another effort to lift a given subject out of the range of itsconventional associations. Strange, after all the misrepresentations ofthe middle age, was the effort to see it, not as the pale Host of thealtar, but as one taking leave of his friends. Five years afterwards theyoung Raffaelle, at Florence, painted it with sweet and solemn effect inthe refectory of Saint Onofrio; but still with all the mysticalunreality of the school of Perugino. Vasari pretends that the centralhead was never finished; but finished or unfinished, or owing part ofits effect to a mellowing decay, this central head does but consummatethe sentiment of the whole company--ghosts through which you see thewall, faint as the shadows of the leaves upon the wall, on autumnafternoons; this figure is but the faintest, most spectral of them all. It is the image of what the history it symbolises has more and morebecome for the world, paler and paler as it recedes into the distance. Criticism came with its appeal from mystical unrealities to originals, and restored no lifelike reality but these transparent shadows, spiritswhich have not flesh and bones. 

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

The remaining years of Leonardo's life are more or less years ofwandering. From his brilliant life at court he had saved nothing, and hereturned to Florence a poor man. Perhaps necessity kept his spiritexcited: the next four years are one prolonged rapture or ecstasy ofinvention. He painted the pictures of the Louvre, his most authenticworks, which came there straight from the cabinet of Francis the First, at Fontainebleau. One picture of his, the Saint Anne--not the Saint Anneof the Louvre, but a mere cartoon, now in London--revived for a moment asort of appreciation more common in an earlier time, when good pictureshad still seemed miraculous; and for two days a crowd of people of allqualities passed in naive excitement through the chamber where it hung, and gave Leonardo a taste of Cimabue's triumph. But his work was lesswith the saints than with the living women of Florence; for he livedstill in the polished society that he loved, and in the houses ofFlorence, left perhaps a little subject to light thoughts by the deathof Savonarola--the latest gossip (1869) is of an undraped Monna Lisa, found in some out-of-the-way corner of the late Orleans collection--hesaw Ginevra di Benci, and Lisa, the young third wife of Francesco delGiocondo. As we have seen him using incidents of sacred story, not fortheir own sake, or as mere subjects for pictorial realisation, but as asymbolical language for fancies all his own, so now he found a vent forhis thoughts in taking one of these languid women, and raising her, asLeda or Pomona, Modesty or Vanity, to the seventh heaven of symbolicalexpression. 

La Gioconda is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, therevealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness, only the Melancholia of Duerer is comparable to it; and no crudesymbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. Weall know the face and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, inthat cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea. Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least. * As oftenhappens with works in which invention seems to reach its limits, thereis an element in it given to, not invented by, the master. In thatinestimable folio of drawings, once in the possession of Vasari, werecertain designs by Verrocchio, faces of such impressive beauty thatLeonardo in his boyhood copied them many times. It is hard not toconnect with these designs of the elder, by-past master, as with itsgerminal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch ofsomething sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work. Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this imagedefining itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for expresshistorical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last. What was the relationship of a livingFlorentine to this creature of his thought? By means of what strangeaffinities had the person and the dream grown up thus apart, and yet soclosely together? Present from the first incorporeally in Leonardo'sthought, dimly traced in the designs of Verrocchio, she is found presentat last in Il Giocondo's house. That there is much of mere portraiturein the picture is attested by the legend that by artificial means, thepresence of mimes and flute-players, that subtle expression wasprotracted on the face. Again, was it in four years and by renewedlabour never really completed, or in four months and as by stroke ofmagic, that the image was projected?

*Yet for Vasari there was some further magic of crimson in the lips andcheeks, lost for us. 

The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, isexpressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come todesire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world arecome, " and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought outfrom within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strangethoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for amoment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women ofantiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which thesoul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experienceof the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have ofpower to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism ofGreece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with itsspiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which shesits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned thesecrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps theirfallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Easternmerchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as SaintAnne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the soundof lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it hasmoulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousandexperiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea ofhumanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes ofthought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment ofthe old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea. 

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

One other great work was left for him to do, a work all trace of whichsoon vanished, The Battle of the Standard, in which he had Michelangelofor his rival. The citizens of Florence, desiring to decorate the wallsof the great council-chamber, had offered the work for competition, andany subject might be chosen from the Florentine wars of the fifteenthcentury. Michelangelo chose for his cartoon an incident of the war withPisa, in which the Florentine soldiers, bathing in the Arno, aresurprised by the sound of trumpets, and run to arms. His design hasreached us only in an old engraving, which perhaps helps us less thanwhat we remember of the background of his Holy Family in the Uffizii toimagine in what superhuman form, such as might have beguiled the heartof an earlier world, those figures may have risen from the water. Leonardo chose an incident from the battle of Anghiari, in which twoparties of soldiers fight for a standard. Like Michelangelo's, hiscartoon is lost, and has come to us only in sketches, and in a fragmentof Rubens. Through the accounts given we may discern some lust ofterrible things in it, so that even the horses tore each other withtheir teeth; and yet one fragment of it, in a drawing of his atFlorence, is far different--a waving field of lovely armour, the chasededgings running like lines of sunlight from side to side. Michelangelowas twenty-seven years old; Leonardo more than fifty; and Raffaelle, then nineteen years old, visiting Florence for the first time, came andwatched them as they worked. 

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

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

Two questions remain, after much busy antiquarianism, concerningLeonardo's death--the question of the precise form of his religion, andthe question whether Francis the First was present at the time. They areof about equally little importance in the estimate of Leonardo's genius. The directions in his will about the thirty masses and the great candlesfor the church of Saint Florentin are things of course, their realpurpose being immediate and practical; and on no theory of religioncould these hurried offices be of much consequence. We forget them inspeculating how one who had been always so desirous of beauty, butdesired it always in such definite and precise forms, as hands orflowers or hair, looked forward now into the vague land, and experiencedthe last curiosity. 

1869. 

THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE

It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, andPainting--all the various products of art--as but translations intodifferent languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginativethought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, inpainting--of sound, in music--of rhythmical words, in poetry. In thisway, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in artthat is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and aclear apprehension of the opposite principle--that the sensuous materialof each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressionsdistinct in kind--is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism. For, as art addresses not pure sense, still less the pure intellect, but the"imaginative reason" through the senses, there are differences of kindin aesthetic beauty, corresponding to the differences in kind of thegifts of sense themselves. Each art, therefore, having its own peculiarand incommunicable sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reachingthe imagination, its own special responsibilities to its material. Oneof the functions of aesthetic criticism is to define these limitations;to estimate the degree in which a given work of art fulfils itsresponsibilities to its special material; to note in a picture that truepictorial charm, which is neither a mere poetical thought nor sentiment, on the one hand, nor a mere result of communicable technical skill incolour or design, on the other; to define in a poem that true poeticalquality, which is neither descriptive nor meditative merely, but comesof an inventive handling of rhythmical language--the element of song inthe singing; to note in music the musical charm--that essential music, which presents no words, no matter of sentiment or thought, separablefrom the special form in which it is conveyed to us. 

To such a philosophy of the variations of the beautiful, Lessing'sanalysis of the spheres of sculpture and poetry, in the Laocoon, was avery important contribution. But a true appreciation of these things ispossible only in the light of a whole system of such art-casuistries. And it is in the criticism of painting that this truth most needsenforcing, for it is in popular judgments on pictures that that falsegeneralisation of all art into forms of poetry is most prevalent. Tosuppose that all is mere technical acquirement in delineation or touch, working through and addressing itself to the intelligence, on the oneside, or a merely poetical, or what may be called literary interest, addressed also to the pure intelligence, on the other;--this is the wayof most spectators, and of many critics, who have never caught sight, all the time, of that true pictorial quality which lies between (uniquepledge of the possession of the pictorial gift) the inventive orcreative handling of pure line and colour, which, as almost always inDutch painting, as often also in the works of Titian or Veronese, isquite independent of anything definitely poetical in the subject itaccompanies. It is the drawing--the design projected from that peculiarpictorial temperament or constitution, in which, while it may possiblybe ignorant of true anatomical proportions, all things whatever, allpoetry, every idea however abstract or obscure, floats up as a visiblescene, or image: it is the colouring--that weaving as of justperceptible gold threads of light through the dress, the flesh, theatmosphere, in Titian's Lace-girl--the staining of the whole fabric ofthe thing with a new, delightful physical quality. This drawing, then--the arabesque traced in the air by Tintoret's flying figures, byTitian's forest branches; this colouring--the magic conditions of lightand hue in the atmosphere of Titian's Lace-girl, or Rubens's Descentfrom the Cross--these essential pictorial qualities must first of alldelight the sense, delight it as directly and sensuously as a fragmentof Venetian glass; and through this delight only be the medium ofwhatever poetry or science may lie beyond them, in the intention of thecomposer. In its primary aspect, a great picture has no more definitemessage for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for amoment, on the wall or floor: is itself, in truth, a space of suchfallen light, caught as the colours are caught in an Eastern carpet, butrefined upon, and dealt with more subtly and exquisitely than by natureitself. And this primary and essential condition fulfilled, we may tracethe coming of poetry into painting, by fine gradations upwards; fromJapanese fan-painting, for instance, where we get, first, only abstractcolour; then, just a little interfused sense of the poetry of flowers;then, sometimes, perfect flower-painting; and so, onwards, until inTitian we have, as his poetry in the Ariadne, so actually a touch oftrue childlike humour in the diminutive, quaint figure with its silkgown, which ascends the temple stairs, in his picture of thePresentation of the Virgin, at Venice. 

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

Thus some of the most delightful music seems to be always approaching tofigure, to pictorial definition. Architecture, again, though it has itsown laws--laws esoteric enough, as the true architect knows only toowell--yet sometimes aims at fulfilling the conditions of a picture, asin the Arena chapel; or of sculpture, as in the flawless unity ofGiotto's tower at Florence; and often finds a true poetry, as in thosestrangely twisted staircases of the chateaux of the country of theLoire, as if it were intended that among their odd turnings the actorsin a wild life might pass each other unseen: there being a poetry alsoof memory and of the mere effect of time, by which it often profitsgreatly. Thus, again, sculpture aspires out of the hard limitation ofpure form towards colour, or its equivalent; poetry also, in many ways, finding guidance from the other arts, the analogy between a Greektragedy and a work of Greek sculpture, between a sonnet and a relief, ofFrench poetry generally with the art of engraving, being more than merefigures of speech; and all the arts in common aspiring towards theprinciple of music; music being the typical, or ideally consummate art, the object of the great Anders-streben of all art, of all that isartistic, or partakes of artistic qualities. 

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while inall other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from theform, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it isthe constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of apoem, for instance--its subject, its given incidents or situation; thatthe mere matter of a picture--the actual circumstances of an event, theactual topography of a landscape--should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling; that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of thematter:--this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves indifferent degrees. 

This abstract language becomes clear enough, if we think of actualexamples. In an actual landscape we see a long white road, lost suddenlyon the hill-verge. That is the matter of one of the etchings of M. Legros: only, in this etching, it is informed by an indwelling solemnityof expression, seen upon it or half-seen, within the limits of anexceptional moment, or caught from his own mood perhaps, but which hemaintains as the very essence of the thing, throughout his work. Sometimes a momentary tint of stormy light may invest a homely or toofamiliar scene with a character which might well have been drawn fromthe deep places of the imagination. Then we might say that thisparticular effect of light, this sudden inweaving of gold thread throughthe texture of the haystack, and the poplars, and the grass, gives thescene artistic qualities; that it is like a picture. And such tricks ofcircumstance are commonest in landscape which has little salientcharacter of its own; because, in such scenery, all the material detailsare so easily absorbed by that informing expression of passing light, and elevated, throughout their whole extent, to a new and delightfuleffect by it. And hence the superiority, for most conditions of thepicturesque, of a river-side in France to a Swiss valley, because, onthe French river-side, mere topography, the simple material, counts forso little, and, all being so pure, untouched, and tranquil in itself, mere light and shade have such easy work in modulating it to onedominant tone. The Venetian landscape, on the other hand, has in itsmaterial conditions much which is hard, or harshly definite; but themasters of the Venetian school have shown themselves little burdened bythem. Of its Alpine background they retain certain abstracted elementsonly, of cool colour and tranquillising line; and they use its actualdetails, the brown windy turrets, the straw-coloured fields, the forestarabesques, but as the notes of a music which duly accompanies thepresence of their men and women, presenting us with the spirit oressence only of a certain sort of landscape--a country of the purereason or half-imaginative memory. 

Poetry, again, works with words addressed in the first instance to themere intelligence; and it deals, most often, with a definite subject orsituation. Sometimes it may find a noble and quite legitimate functionin the expression of moral or political aspiration, as often in thepoetry of Victor Hugo. In such instances it is easy enough for theunderstanding to distinguish between the matter and the form, howevermuch the matter, the subject, the element which is addressed to the mereintelligence, has been penetrated by the informing, artistic spirit. But the ideal types of poetry are those in which this distinction isreduced to its minimum; so that lyrical poetry, precisely because in itwe are least able to detach the matter from the form, without adeduction of something from that matter itself, is, at leastartistically, the highest and most complete form of poetry. And the veryperfection of such poetry often seems to depend, in part, on a certainsuppression or vagueness of mere subject, so that the meaning reaches usthrough ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding, as in someof the most imaginative compositions of William Blake, and often inShakspere's songs, as pre-eminently in that song of Mariana's page inMeasure for Measure, in which the kindling force and poetry of the wholeplay seems to pass for a moment into an actual strain of music. 

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

Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mereintelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of itsresponsibilities to its subject or material; the ideal examples ofpoetry and painting being those in which the constituent elements of thecomposition are so welded together, that the material or subject nolonger strikes the intellect only; nor the form, the eye or the earonly; but form and matter, in their union or identity, present onesingle effect to the "imaginative reason, " that complex faculty forwhich every thought and feeling is twin-born with its sensible analogueor symbol. 

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

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

The beginnings of Venetian painting link themselves to the last, stiff, half-barbaric splendours of Byzantine decoration, and are but theintroduction into the crust of marble and gold on the walls of the Duomoof Murano, or of Saint Mark's, of a little more of human expression. Andthroughout the course of its later development, always subordinate toarchitectural effect, the work of the Venetian school never escaped fromthe influence of its beginnings. Unassisted, and therefore unperplexed, by naturalism, religious mysticism, philosophical theories, it had noGiotto, no Angelico, no Botticelli. Exempt from the stress of thoughtand sentiment, which taxed so severely the resources of the generationsof Florentine artists, those earlier Venetian painters, down toCarpaccio and the Bellini, seem never for a moment to have been temptedeven to lose sight of the scope of their art in its strictness, or toforget that painting must be, before all things decorative, a thing forthe eye; a space of colour on the wall, only more dexterously blent thanthe marking of its precious stone or the chance interchange of sun andshade upon it--this, to begin and end with--whatever higher matter ofthought, or poetry, or religious reverie might play its part therein, between. At last, with final mastery of all the technical secrets of hisart, and with somewhat more than "a spark of the divine fire" to hisshare, comes Giorgione. He is the inventor of genre, of those easilymovable pictures which serve neither for uses of devotion, nor ofallegorical or historic teaching--little groups of real men and women, amid congruous furniture or landscape--morsels of actual life, conversation or music or play, refined upon or idealised, till they cometo seem like glimpses of life from afar. Those spaces of more cunninglyblent colour, obediently filling their places, hitherto, in a merearchitectural scheme, Giorgione detaches from the wall; he frames themby the hands of some skilful carver, so that people may move themreadily and take with them where they go, like a poem in manuscript, ora musical instrument, to be used, at will, as a means of self-education, stimulus or solace, coming like an animated presence, into one'scabinet, to enrich the air as with some choice aroma, and, like persons, live with us, for a day or a lifetime. Of all art like this, art whichhas played so large a part in men's culture since that time, Giorgioneis the initiator. Yet in him too that old Venetian clearness or justice, in the apprehension of the essential limitations of the pictorial art, is still undisturbed; and, while he interfuses his painted work with ahigh-strung sort of poetry, caught directly from a singularly rich andhigh-strung sort of life, yet in his selection of subject, or phase ofsubject, in the subordination of mere subject to pictorial design, tothe main purpose of a picture, he is typical of that aspiration of allthe arts towards music, which I have endeavoured to explain, --towardsthe perfect identification of matter and form. 

Born so near to Titian, though a little before him, that these twocompanion pupils of the aged Giovanni Bellini may almost be calledcontemporaries, Giorgione stands to Titian in something like therelationship of Sordello to Dante, in Mr. Browning's poem. Titian, whenhe leaves Bellini, becomes, in turn, the pupil of Giorgione; he lives inconstant labour more than sixty years after Giorgione is in his grave;and with such fruit, that hardly one of the greater towns of Europe iswithout some fragment of it. But the slightly older man, with his solimited actual product (what remains to us of it seeming, when narrowlyexamined, to reduce itself to almost one picture, like Sordello's onefragment of lovely verse), yet expresses, in elementary motive andprinciple, that spirit--itself the final acquisition of all the longendeavours of Venetian art--which Titian spreads over his whole life'sactivity. 

And, as we might expect, something fabulous and illusive has alwaysmingled itself in the brilliancy of Giorgione's fame. The exactrelationship to him of many works--drawings, portraits, paintedidylls--often fascinating enough, which in various collections went byhis name, was from the first uncertain. Still, six or eight famouspictures at Dresden, Florence and the Louvre, were undoubtedlyattributed to him, and in these, if anywhere, something of the splendourof the old Venetian humanity seemed to have been preserved. But of thosesix or eight famous pictures it is now known that only one is certainlyfrom Giorgione's hand. The accomplished science of the subject has comeat last, and, as in other instances, has not made the past more real forus, but assured us that we possess of it less than we seemed to possess. Much of the work on which Giorgione's immediate fame depended, work donefor instantaneous effect, in all probability passed away almost withinhis own age, like the frescoes on the facade of the fondaco dei Tedeschiat Venice, some crimson traces of which, however, still give a strangeadditional touch of splendour to the scene of the Rialto. And then thereis a barrier or borderland, a period about the middle of the sixteenthcentury, in passing through which the tradition miscarries, and the trueoutlines of Giorgione's work and person become obscured. It becamefashionable for wealthy lovers of art, with no critical standard ofauthenticity, to collect so-called works of Giorgione, and a multitudeof imitations came into circulation. And now, in the "new Vasari, "* thegreat traditional reputation, woven with so profuse demand on men'sadmiration, has been scrutinised thread by thread; and what remains ofthe most vivid and stimulating of Venetian masters, a live flame, as itseemed, in those old shadowy times, has been reduced almost to a name byhis most recent critics. 

*Crowe and Cavalcaselle: History of Painting in North Italy. 

Yet enough remains to explain why the legend grew up, above the name, why the name attached itself, in many instances, to the bravest work ofother men. The Concert in the Pitti Palace, in which a monk, with cowland tonsure, touches the keys of a harpsichord, while a clerk, placedbehind him, grasps the handle of the viol, and a third, with hat andplume, seems to wait upon the true interval for beginning to sing, isundoubtedly Giorgione's. The outline of the lifted finger, the trace ofthe plume, the very threads of the fine linen, which fasten themselveson the memory, in the moment before they are lost altogether in thatcalm unearthly glow, the skill which has caught the waves of wanderingsound, and fixed them for ever on the lips and hands--these are indeedthe master's own; and the criticism which, while dismissing so muchhitherto believed to be Giorgione's, has established the claims of thisone picture, has left it among the most precious things in the world ofart. 

It is noticeable that the "distinction" of this Concert, its sustainedevenness of perfection, alike in design, in execution, and in choice ofpersonal type, becomes for the "new Vasari" the standard of Giorgione'sgenuine work. Finding here enough to explain his influence, and the trueseal of mastery, its authors assign to Pellegrino da San Daniele theHoly Family in the Louvre, for certain points in which it comes short ofthat standard, but which will hardly diminish the spectator's enjoymentof a singular charm of liquid air, with which the whole picture seemsinstinct, filling the eyes and lips, the very garments, of its sacredpersonages, with some wind-searched brightness and energy; of which fineair the blue peak, clearly defined in the distance, is, as it were, thevisible pledge. Similarly, another favourite picture in the Louvre, thesubject of a Sonnet by a poet whose own painted work often comes to mindas one ponders over these precious things--the Fete Champetre, isassigned to an imitator of Sebastian del Piombo; and the Tempest, in theAcademy at Venice (a slighter loss, perhaps, though not without itspleasant effect of clearing weather, towards the left, its one untouchedmorsel), to Paris Bordone, or perhaps to "some advanced craftsman of thesixteenth century. " From the gallery at Dresden, the Knight embracing aLady, where the knight's broken gauntlets seem to mark some well-knownpause in a story we would willingly hear the rest of; is conceded to "aBrescian hand, " and Jacob meeting Rachel to a pupil of Palma; and, whatever their charm, we are called on to give up the Ordeal and theFinding of Moses with its jewel-like pools of water, perhaps to Bellini. 

Nor has the criticism, which thus so freely diminishes the number of hisauthentic works, added anything important to the well-known outline ofthe life and personality of the man: only, it has fixed one or twodates, one or two circumstances, a little more exactly. Giorgione wasborn before the year 1477, and spent his childhood at Castelfranco, where the last crags of the Venetian Alps break down romantically, withsomething of parklike grace, to the plain. A natural child of the familyof the Barbarelli by a peasant-girl of Vedelago, he finds his way earlyinto the circle of notable persons--people of courtesy; and becomesinitiated into those differences of personal type, manner, and even ofdress, which are best understood there--that "distinction" of theConcert of the Pitti Palace. Not far from his home lives Catherine ofCornara, formerly Queen of Cyprus; and, up in the towers which stillremain, Tuzio Costanzo, the famous condottiere--a picturesque remnant ofmedieval manners, amid a civilisation rapidly changing. Giorgione paintstheir portraits; and when Tuzio's son, Matteo, dies in early youth, adorns in his memory a chapel in the church of Castelfranco, painting onthis occasion, perhaps, the altar-piece, foremost among his authenticworks, still to be seen there, with the figure of the warrior-saint, Liberale, of which the original little study in oil, with the delicatelygleaming, silver-grey armour, is one of the greater treasures of theNational Gallery, and in which, as in some other knightly personagesattributed to him, people have supposed the likeness of his ownpresumably gracious presence. Thither, at last, he is himself broughthome from Venice, early dead, but celebrated. It happened, about histhirty-fourth year, that in one of those parties at which he entertainedhis friends with music, he met a certain lady of whom he became greatlyenamoured, and "they rejoiced greatly, " says Vasari, "the one and theother, in their loves. " And two quite different legends concerning itagree in this, that it was through this lady he came by his death:Ridolfi relating that, being robbed of her by one of his pupils, he diedof grief at the double treason;--Vasari, that she being secretlystricken of the plague, and he making his visits to her as usual, hetook the sickness from her mortally, along with her kisses, and sobriefly departed. 

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

And now, finally, let me illustrate some of the characteristics of thisSchool of Giorgione, as we may call it, which, for most of us, notwithstanding all that negative criticism of the "new Vasari, " willstill identify itself with those famous pictures at Florence, Dresdenand Paris; and in which a certain artistic ideal is defined for us--theconception of a peculiar aim and procedure in art, which we mayunderstand as the Giorgionesque, wherever we find it, whether inVenetian work generally, or in work of our own time--and of which theConcert, that undoubted work of Giorgione in the Pitti Palace, is thetypical instance, and a pledge authenticating the connexion of theschool with the master. 

I have spoken of a certain interpretation of the matter or subject of awork of art with the form of it, a condition realised absolutely only inmusic, as the condition to which every form of art is perpetuallyaspiring. In the art of painting, the attainment of this idealcondition, this perfect interpretation of the subject with colour anddesign, depends, of course, in great measure, on dexterous choice ofthat subject, or phase of subject; and such choice is one of the secretsof Giorgione's school. It is the school of genre, and employs itselfmainly with "painted idylls, " but, in the production of this pictorialpoetry, exercises a wonderful tact in the selecting of such matter aslends itself most readily and entirely to pictorial form, to completeexpression by drawing and colour. For although its productions arepainted poems, they belong to a sort of poetry which tells itselfwithout an articulated story. The master is pre-eminent for theresolution, the ease and quickness, with which he reproducesinstantaneous motion--the lacing-on of armour, with the head bent backso stately--the fainting lady--the embrace, rapid as the kiss caught, with death itself, from dying lips--the momentary conjunction of mirrorsand polished armour and still water, by which all the sides of a solidimage are presented at once, solving that casuistical question whetherpainting can present an object as completely as sculpture. The suddenact, the rapid transition of thought, the passing expression--this hearrests with that vivacity which Vasari has attributed to him, il fuocoGiorgionesco, as he terms it. Now it is part of the ideality of thehighest sort of dramatic poetry, that it presents us with a kind ofprofoundly significant and animated instants, a mere gesture, a look, asmile, perhaps--some brief and wholly concrete moment--into which, however, all the motives, all the interests and effects of a longhistory, have condensed themselves, and which seem to absorb past andfuture in an intense consciousness of the present. Such ideal instantsthe school of Giorgione selects, with its admirable tact, from thatfeverish, tumultuously coloured life of the old citizens ofVenice--exquisite pauses in time, in which, arrested thus, we seem to bespectators of all the fulness of existence, and which are like someconsummate extract or quintessence of life. 

It is to the law or condition of music, as I said, that all art likethis is really aspiring and, in the school of Giorgione, the perfectmoments of music itself, the making or hearing of music, song or itsaccompaniment, are themselves prominent as subjects. On that backgroundof the silence of Venice, which the visitor there finds so impressive, the world of Italian music was then forming. In choice of subject, as inall besides, the Concert of the Pitti Palace is typical of all thatGiorgione, himself an admirable musician, touched with his influence;and in sketch or finished picture, in various collections, we may followit through many intricate variations--men fainting at music, music heardat the pool-side while people fish, or mingled with the sound of thepitcher in the well, or heard across running water, or among the flocks;the tuning of instruments--people with intent faces, as if listening, like those described by Plato in an ingenious passage, to detect thesmallest interval of musical sound, the smallest undulation in the air, or feeling for music in thought on a stringless instrument, ear andfinger refining themselves infinitely, in the appetite for sweetsound--a momentary touch of an instrument in the twilight, as one passesthrough some unfamiliar room, in a chance company. 

In such favourite incidents, then, of Giorgione's school, music ormusic-like intervals in our existence, life itself is conceived as asort of listening--listening to music, to the reading of Bandello'snovels, to the sound of water, to time as it flies. Often such momentsare really our moments of play, and we are surprised at the unexpectedblessedness of what may seem our least important part of time; notmerely because play is in many instances that to which people reallyapply their own best powers, but also because at such times, the stressof our servile, everyday attentiveness being relaxed, the happier powersin things without us are permitted free passage, and have their way withus. And so, from music, the school of Giorgione passes often to the playwhich is like music; to those masques in which men avowedly do but playat real life, like children "dressing up, " disguised in the strange oldItalian dresses, parti-coloured, or fantastic with embroidery and furs, of which the master was so curious a designer, and which, above all thespotless white linen at wrist and throat, he painted so dexterously. 

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

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

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

1877. 

JOACHIM DU BELLAY

In the middle of the sixteenth century, when the spirit of theRenaissance was everywhere, and people had begun to look back withdistaste on the works of the middle age, the old Gothic manner had stillone chance more, in borrowing something from the rival which was aboutto supplant it. In this way there was produced, chiefly in France, a newand peculiar phase of taste with qualities and a charm of its own, blending the somewhat attenuated grace of Italian ornament with thegeneral outlines of Northern design. It produced the Chateau de Gaillon, as you may still see it in the delicate engravings of IsraelSilvestre--a Gothic donjon veiled faintly by a surface of dainty Italiantraceries--Chenonceaux, Blois, Chambord, and the church of Brou. Inpainting, there came from Italy workmen like Maitre Roux and the mastersof the school of Fontainebleau, to have their later Italianvoluptuousness attempered by the naive and silvery qualities of thenative style; and it was characteristic of these painters that they weremost successful in painting on glass, an art so essentially medieval. Taking it up where the middle age had left it, they found their wholework among the last subtleties of colour and line; and keeping withinthe true limits of their material, they got quite a new order of effectsfrom it, and felt their way to refinements on colour never dreamed of bythose older workmen, the glass-painters of Chartres or Le Mans. What iscalled the Renaissance in France is thus not so much the introduction ofa wholly new taste ready-made from Italy, but rather the finest andsubtlest phase of the middle age itself, its last fleeting splendour andtemperate Saint Martin's summer. In poetry, the Gothic spirit in Francehad produced a thousand songs; and in the Renaissance, French poetry toodid but borrow something to blend with a native growth, and the poems ofRonsard, with their ingenuity, their delicately figured surfaces, theirslightness, their fanciful combinations of rhyme, are but thecorrelative of the traceries of the house of Jacques Coeur at Bourges, or the Maison de Justice at Rouen. 

There was indeed something in the native French taste naturally akin tothat Italian finesse. The characteristic of French work had always beena certain nicety, a remarkable daintiness of hand, une netteteremarquable d'execution. In the paintings of Francois Clouet, forexample, or rather of the Clouets--for there was a whole family ofthem--painters remarkable for their resistance to Italian influences, there is a silveriness of colour and a clearness of expression whichdistinguish them very definitely from their Flemish neighbours, Hemlingor the Van Eycks. And this nicety is not less characteristic of oldFrench poetry. A light, aerial delicacy, a simple elegance--une netteteremarquable d'execution:--these are essential characteristics alike ofVillon's poetry, and of the Hours of Anne of Brittany. They arecharacteristic too of a hundred French Gothic carvings and traceries. Alike in the old Gothic cathedrals, and in their counterpart, the oldGothic chansons de geste, the rough and ponderous mass becomes, as if bypassing for a moment into happier conditions, or through a more graciousstratum of air, graceful and refined, like the carved ferneries on thegranite church at Folgoat, or the lines which describe the fair priestlyhands of Archbishop Turpin, in the song of Roland; although below bothalike there is a fund of mere Gothic strength, or heaviness. *

*The purely artistic aspects of this subject have been interpreted, in awork of great taste and learning, by Mrs. Mark Pattison:--TheRenaissance of Art in France. 

And Villon's songs and Clouet's paintings are like these. It is thehigher touch making itself felt here and there, betraying itself, likenobler blood in a lower stock, by a fine line or gesture or expression, the turn of a wrist, the tapering of a finger. In Ronsard's time thatrougher element seemed likely to predominate. No one can turn over thepages of Rabelais without feeling how much need there was of softening, of castigation. To effect this softening is the object of the revolutionin poetry which is connected with Ronsard's name. Casting about for themeans of thus refining upon and saving the character of Frenchliterature, he accepted that influx of Renaissance taste, which, leavingthe buildings, the language, the art, the poetry of France, at bottom, what they were, old French Gothic still, gilds their surfaces with astrange, delightful, foreign aspect passing over all that Northern land, in itself neither deeper nor more permanent than a chance effect oflight. He reinforces, he doubles the French daintiness by Italianfinesse. Thereupon, nearly all the force and all the seriousness ofFrench work disappear; only the elegance, the aerial touch, the perfectmanner remain. But this elegance, this manner, this daintiness ofexecution are consummate, and have an unmistakable aesthetic value. 

So the old French chanson, which, like the old Northern Gothic ornament, though it sometimes refined itself into a sort of weird elegance, wasoften, in its essence, something rude and formless, became in the handsof Ronsard a Pindaric ode. He gave it structure, a sustained system, strophe and antistrophe, and taught it a changefulness and variety ofmetre which keep the curiosity always excited, so that the very aspectof it, as it lies written on the page, carries the eye lightly onwards, and of which this is a good instance:--

 Avril, la grace, et le ris De Cypris, Le flair et la douce haleine; Avril, le parfum des dieux, Qui, des cieux, Sentent l'odeur de la plaine;

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

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

The first note of this literary revolution was struck by Joachim duBellay in a little tract written at the early age of twenty-four, whichcoming to us through three centuries seems of yesterday, so full is itof those delicate critical distinctions which are sometimes supposedpeculiar to modern writers. The piece has for its title La Deffense etIllustration de la langue Francoyse; and its problem is how toillustrate or ennoble the French language, to give it lustre. We areaccustomed to speak of the varied critical and creative movement of thefifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the Renaissance, and because wehave a single name for it we may sometimes fancy that there was moreunity in the thing itself than there really was. Even the Reformation, that other great movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, hadfar less unity, far less of combined action, than is at first sightsupposed; and the Renaissance was infinitely less united, less consciousof combined action, than the Reformation. But if anywhere theRenaissance became conscious, as a German philosopher might say, if everit was understood as a systematic movement by those who took part in it, it is in this little book of Joachim du Bellay's, which it is impossibleto read without feeling the excitement, the animation, of change, ofdiscovery. "It is a remarkable fact, " says M. Sainte-Beuve, "and aninversion of what is true of other languages, that, in French, prose hasalways had the precedence over poetry. " Du Bellay's prose is perfectlytransparent, flexible, and chaste. In many ways it is a morecharacteristic example of the culture of the Pleiad than any of itsverse; and those who love the whole movement of which the Pleiad is apart, for a weird foreign grace in it, and may be looking about for atrue specimen of it, cannot have a better than Joachim du Bellay andthis little treatise of his. 

Du Bellay's object is to adjust the existing French culture to therediscovered classical culture; and in discussing this problem, anddeveloping the theories of the Pleiad, he has lighted upon manyprinciples of permanent truth and applicability. There were some whodespaired of the French language altogether, who thought it naturallyincapable of the fulness and elegance of Greek and Latin--cette eleganceet copie qui est en la langue Grecque et Romaine--that science could beadequately discussed, and poetry nobly written, only in the deadlanguages. "Those who speak thus, " says Du Bellay, "make me think ofthose relics which one may only see through a little pane of glass, andmust not touch with one's hands. That is what these people do with allbranches of culture, which they keep shut up in Greek and Latin books, not permitting one to see them otherwise, or transport them out of deadwords into those which are alive, and wing their way daily through themonths of men. " "Languages, " he says again, "are not born like plantsand trees, some naturally feeble and sickly, others healthy and strongand apter to bear the weight of men's conceptions, but all their virtueis generated in the world of choice and men's freewill concerning them. Therefore, I cannot blame too strongly the rashness of some of ourcountrymen, who being anything rather than Greeks or Latins, depreciateand reject with more than stoical disdain everything written in French;nor can I express my surprise at the odd opinion of some learned men whothink that our vulgar tongue is wholly incapable of erudition and goodliterature. "

It was an age of translations. Du Bellay himself translated two books ofthe Aeneid, and other poetry, old and new, and there were some whothought that the translation of the classical literature was the truemeans of ennobling the French language:--strangers are ever favouriteswith us--nous favorisons toujours les etrangers. Du Bellay moderatestheir expectations. "I do not believe that one can learn the right useof them"--he is speaking of figures and ornament in language--"fromtranslations, because it is impossible to reproduce them with the samegrace with which the original author used them. For each language has, Iknow not what peculiarity of its own; and if you force yourself toexpress the naturalness (le naif) of this, in another language, observing the law of translation, which is, not to expatiate beyond thelimits of the author himself; your words will be constrained, cold andungraceful. " Then he fixes the test of all good translation:--"To provethis, read me Demosthenes and Homer in Latin, Cicero and Virgil inFrench, and see whether they produce in you the same affections whichyou experience in reading those authors in the original. "

In this effort to ennoble the French language, to give it grace, number, perfection, and as painters do to their pictures, that last, sodesirable, touch--cette derniere main que nous desirons--what Du Bellayis pleading for is his mother-tongue, the language, that is, in whichone will have the utmost degree of what is moving and passionate. Herecognised of what force the music and dignity of languages are, howthey enter into the inmost part of things; and in pleading for thecultivation of the French language, he is pleading for no merelyscholastic interest, but for freedom, impulse, reality, not inliterature merely, but in daily communion of speech. After all, it wasimpossible to have this impulse in Greek and Latin, dead languages shutup in books as in reliquaries--peris et mises en reliquaires de livres. By aid of this starveling stock--pauvre plante et vergette--of theFrench language, he must speak delicately, movingly, if he is ever tospeak so at all: that, or none, must be for him the medium of what hecalls, in one of his great phrases, le discours fatal des chosesmondaines--that discourse about affairs which decides men's fates. Andit is his patriotism not to despair of it; he sees it already perfect inall elegance and beauty of words--parfait en toute elegance et venustede paroles. 

Du Bellay was born in the disastrous year 1525, the year of the battleof Pavia, and the captivity of Francis the First. . His parents diedearly, and to him, as the younger son, his mother's little estate, cepetit Lire, the beloved place of his birth, descended. He was brought upby a brother only a little older than himself; and left to themselves, the two boys passed their lives in day-dreams of military glory. Theireducation was neglected; "The time of my youth, " says Du Bellay, "waslost, like the flower which no shower waters, and no hand cultivates. "He was just twenty years old when the elder brother died, leavingJoachim to be the guardian of his child. It was with regret, with ashrinking feeling of incapacity, that he took upon him the burden ofthis responsibility. Hitherto he had looked forward to the profession ofa soldier, hereditary in his family. But at this time a sicknessattacked him which brought him cruel sufferings, and seemed likely to bemortal. It was then for the first time that he read the Greek and Latinpoets. These studies came too late to make him what he so much desiredto be, a trifler in Greek and Latin verse, like so many others of histime now forgotten; instead, they made him a lover of his own homelynative tongue, that poor starveling stock of the French language. It wasthrough this fortunate shortcoming in his education that he becamenational and modern; and he learned afterwards to look back on that wildgarden of his youth with only a half regret. A certain Cardinal duBellay was the successful member of the family, a man often employed inhigh official affairs. It was to him that the thoughts of Joachim turnedwhen it became necessary to choose a profession, and in 1552 heaccompanied the Cardinal to Rome. He remained there nearly five years, burdened with the weight of affairs, and languishing with home-sickness. Yet it was under these circumstances that his genius yielded its bestfruits. From Rome, which to most men of an imaginative temperament suchas his would have yielded so many pleasurable sensations, with all thecuriosities of the Renaissance still fresh there, his thoughts went backpainfully, longingly, to the country of the Loire, with its wideexpanses of waving corn, its homely pointed roofs of grey slate, and itsfar-off scent of the sea. He reached home at last, but only to diethere, quite suddenly, one wintry day, at the early age of thirty-five. 

Much of Du Bellay's poetry illustrates rather the age and school towhich he belonged than his own temper and genius. As with the writingsof Ronsard and the other poets of the Pleiad, its interest depends notso much on the impress of individual genius upon it, as on thecircumstance that it was once poetry a la mode, that it is part of themanner of a time--a time which made much of manner, and carried it to ahigh degree of perfection. It is one of the decorations of an age whichthrew much of its energy into the work of decoration. We feel a pensivepleasure in seeing these faded decorations, and observing how a group ofactual men and women pleased themselves long ago. Ronsard's poems are akind of epitome of his age. Of one side of that age, it is true, of thestrenuous, the progressive, the serious movement, which was then goingon, there is little; but of the catholic side, the losing side, theforlorn hope, hardly a figure is absent. The Queen of Scots, at whosedesire Ronsard published his odes, reading him in her northern prison, felt that he was bringing back to her the true flavour of her early daysin the court of Catherine at the Louvre, with its exotic Italiangaieties. Those who disliked that poetry, disliked it because they foundthat age itself distasteful. The poetry of Malherbe came, with itssustained style and weighty sentiment, but with nothing that set peoplesinging; and the lovers of such poetry saw in the poetry of the Pleiadonly the latest trumpery of the middle age. But the time came also whenthe school of Malherbe had had its day; and the Romanticists, who intheir eagerness for excitement, for strange music and imagery, went backto the works of the middle age, accepted the Pleiad too with the rest;and in that new middle age which their genius has evoked, the poetry ofthe Pleiad has found its place. At first, with Malherbe, you may findit, like the architecture, the whole mode of life, the very dresses ofthat time, fantastic, faded, rococo. But if you look long enough tounderstand it, to conceive its sentiment, you will find that thosewanton lines have a spirit guiding their caprices. For there is stylethere; one temper has shaped the whole; and everything that has style, that has been done as no other man or age could have done it, as itcould never, for all our trying, be done again, has its true value andinterest. Let us dwell upon it for a moment, and try to gather from itthat special flower, ce fleur particulier, which Ronsard himself tellsus every garden has. 

It is poetry not for the people, but for a confined circle, forcourtiers, great lords and erudite persons, people who desire to behumoured, to gratify a certain refined voluptuousness they have in them. Ronsard loves, or dreams that he loves, a rare and peculiar type ofbeauty, la petite pucelle Angevine, with golden hair and dark eyes. Buthe has the ambition not only of being a courtier and a lover, but agreat scholar also; he is anxious about orthography, about the letter eGrecque, the true spelling of Latin names in French writing, and therestoration of the letter i to its primitive liberty--del' i voyelle ensa premiere liberte. His poetry is full of quaint, remote learning. Heis just a little pedantic, true always to his own express judgment, thatto be natural is not enough for one who in poetry desires to producework worthy of immortality. And therewithal a certain number of Greekwords, which charmed Ronsard and his circle by their gaiety anddaintiness, and a certain air of foreign elegance about them, crept intothe French language: and there were other strange words which the poetsof the Pleiad forged for themselves, and which had only an ephemeralexistence. 

With this was mixed the desire to taste a more exquisite and variousmusic than that of the older French verse, or of the classical poets. The music of the measured, scanned verse of Latin and Greek poetry isone thing; the music of the rhymed, unscanned verse of Villon and theold French poets, la poesie chantee, is another. To unite together thesetwo kinds of music in a new school of French poetry, to make verse whichshould scan and rhyme as well, to search out and harmonise the measureof every syllable, and unite it to the swift, flitting, swallow-likemotion of rhyme, to penetrate their poetry with a double music--this wasthe ambition of the Pleiad. They are insatiable of music, they cannothave enough of it; they desire a music of greater compass perhaps thanwords can possibly yield, to drain out the last drops of sweetness whicha certain note or accent contains. 

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

Ronsard became deaf at sixteen; and it was this circumstance whichfinally determined him to be a man of letters instead of a diplomatist, significantly, one might fancy; of a certain premature agedness, and ofthe tranquil, temperate sweetness appropriate to that, in the school ofpoetry which he founded. Its charm is that of a thing not vigorous ororiginal, but full of the grace that comes of long study and reiteratedrefinements, and many steps repeated, and many angles worn down, with anexquisite faintness, une fadeur exquise, a certain tenuity and caducity, as for those who can bear nothing vehement or strong; for princes wearyof love, like Francis the First, or of pleasure, like Henry the Third, or of action, like Henry the Fourth. Its merits are those of theold, --grace and finish, perfect in minute detail. For these people are alittle jaded, and have a constant desire for a subdued and delicateexcitement, to warm their creeping fancy a little. They love a constantchange of rhyme in poetry, and in their houses that strange, fantasticinterweaving of thin, reed-like lines, which are a kind of rhetoric inarchitecture. 

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

It is in Du Bellay's Olive, a collection of sonnets in praise of ahalf-imaginary lady, Sonnetz a la louange d'Olive, that thesecharacteristics are most abundant. Here is a perfectly crystallisedspecimen:--

 D'amour, de grace, et de haulte valeur Les feux divins estoient ceinctz et les cieulx S'estoient vestuz d'un manteau precieux A raiz ardens di diverse couleur: Tout estoit plein de beaute, de bonheur, La mer tranquille, et le vent gracieulx, Quand celle la nasquit en ces bas lieux Qui a pille du monde tout l'honneur. Ell' prist son teint des beux lyz blanchissans, Son chef de l'or, ses deux levres des rozes, Et du soleil ses yeux resplandissans: Le ciel usant de liberalite, Mist en l'esprit ses semences encloses, Son nom des Dieux prist l'immortalite. 

That he is thus a characteristic specimen of the poetical taste of thatage, is indeed Du Bellay's chief interest. But if his work is to have thehighest sort of interest, if it is to do something more than satisfycuriosity, if it is to have an aesthetic as distinct from an historicalvalue, it is not enough for a poet to have been the true child of hisage, to have conformed to its aesthetic conditions, and by so conformingto have charmed and stimulated that age; it is necessary that thereshould be perceptible in his work something individual, inventive, unique, the impress there of the writer's own temper and personality. This impress M. Sainte-Beuve thought he found in the Antiquites de Rome, and the Regrets, which he ranks as what has been called poesie intime, that intensely modern sort of poetry in which the writer has for his aimthe portraiture of his own most intimate moods, and to take the readerinto his confidence. That generation had other instances of this intimacyof sentiment: Montaigne's Essays are full of it, the carvings of thechurch of Brou are full of it. M. Sainte-Beuve has perhaps exaggeratedthe influence of this quality in Du Bellay's Regrets; but the very nameof the book has a touch of Rousseau about it, and reminds one of a wholegeneration of self-pitying poets in modern times. It was in theatmosphere of Rome, to him so strange and mournful, that these paleflowers grew up; for that journey to Italy, which he deplored as thegreatest misfortune of his life, put him in full possession of histalent, and brought out all its originality. And in effect you do findintimacy, intimite, here. The trouble of his life is analysed, and thesentiment of it conveyed directly to our minds; not a great sorrow orpassion, but only the sense of loss in passing days, the ennui of adreamer who has to plunge into the world's affairs, the oppositionbetween actual life and the ideal, a longing for rest, nostalgia, home-sickness--that pre-eminently childish, but so suggestive sorrow, assignificant of the final regret of all human creatures for the familiarearth and limited sky. The feeling for landscape is often described as amodern one; still more so is that for antiquity, the sentiment of ruins. Du Bellay has this sentiment. The duration of the hard, sharp outlines ofthings is a grief to him, and passing his wearisome days among the ruinsof ancient Rome, he is consoled by the thought that all must one day end, by the sentiment of the grandeur of nothingness--la grandeur du rien. With a strange touch of far-off mysticism, he thinks that the greatwhole--le grand tout--into which all other things pass and losethemselves, ought itself sometimes to perish and pass away. Nothing lesscan relieve his weariness. From the stately aspects of Rome his thoughtswent back continually to France, to the smoking chimneys of his littlevillage, the longer twilight of the North, the soft climate of Anjou--ladouceur Angevine; yet not so much to the real France, we may be sure, with its dark streets and its roofs of rough-hewn slate, as to that othercountry, with slenderer towers, and more winding rivers, and trees likeflowers, and with softer sunshine on more gracefully-proportioned fieldsand ways, which the fancy of the exile, and the pilgrim, and of theschoolboy far from home, and of those kept at home unwillingly, everywhere builds up before or behind them. 

He came home at last, through the Grisons, by slow journeys; and there, in the cooler air of his own country, under its skies of milkier blue, the sweetest flower of his genius sprang up. There have been poets whosewhole fame has rested on one poem, as Gray's on the Elegy in a CountryChurchyard, or Ronsard's, as many critics have thought, on the eighteenlines of one famous ode. Du Bellay has almost been the poet of one poem;and this one poem of his is an Italian thing transplanted into that greencountry of Anjou; out of the Latin verses of Andrea Navagero, intoFrench: but it is a thing in which the matter is almost nothing, and theform almost everything; and the form of the poem as it stands, written inold French, is all Du Bellay's own. It is a song which the winnowers aresupposed to sing as they winnow the corn, and they invoke the winds tolie lightly on the grain. 

D'UN VANNEUR DE BLE AUX VENTS*

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

 J'offre ces violettes, Ces lis & ces fleurettes, Et ces roses icy, Ces vermeillettes roses Sont freschement ecloses, Et ces oelliets aussi. 

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

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

That has, in the highest degree, the qualities, the value, of the wholePleiad school of poetry, of the whole phase of taste from which thatschool derives--a certain silvery grace of fancy, nearly all thepleasures of which is in the surprise at the happy and dexterous way inwhich a thing slight in itself is handled. The sweetness of it is by nomeans to be got at by crushing, as you crush wild herbs to get at theirperfume. One seems to hear the measured falling of the fans, with achild's pleasure on coming across the incident for the first time, in oneof those great barns of Du Bellay's own country, La Beauce, the granaryof France. A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, awindmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door: a moment--and thething has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relishbehind it, a longing that the accident may happen again. 

1872. 

WINCKELMANN

ET EGO IN ARCADIA FUI

Goethe's fragments of art-criticism contain a few pages of strangepregnancy on the character of Winckelmann. He speaks of the teacher whohad made his career possible, but whom he had never seen, as of anabstract type of culture, consummate, tranquil, withdrawn already intothe region of ideals, yet retaining colour from the incidents of apassionate intellectual life. He classes him with certain works of art, possessing an inexhaustible gift of suggestion, to which criticism mayreturn again and again with renewed freshness. Hegel, in his lectures onthe Philosophy of Art, estimating the work of his predecessors, has alsopassed a remarkable judgment on Winckelmann's writings:--"Winckelmann, bycontemplation of the ideal works of the ancients, received a sort ofinspiration, through which he opened a new sense for the study of art. He is to be regarded as one of those who, in the sphere of art, haveknown how to initiate a new organ for the human spirit. " That it hasgiven a new sense, that it has laid open a new organ, is the highest thatcan be said of any critical effort. It is interesting then to ask whatkind of man it was who thus laid open a new organ. Under what conditionswas that effected?

Johann Joachim Winckelmann was born at Stendal, in Brandenburg, in theyear 1717. The child of a poor tradesman, he passed through manystruggles in early youth, the memory of which ever remained in him as afitful cause of dejection. In 1763, in the full emancipation of hisspirit, looking over the beautiful Roman prospect, he writes--"One getsspoiled here; but God owed me this; in my youth I suffered too much. "Destined to assert and interpret the charm of the Hellenic spirit, heserved first a painful apprenticeship in the tarnished intellectual worldof Germany in the earlier half of the eighteenth century. Passing out ofthat into the happy light of the antique, he had a sense of exhilarationalmost physical. We find him as a child in the dusky precincts of aGerman school, hungrily feeding on a few colourless books. The master ofthis school grows blind; Winckelmann becomes his famulus. The old manwould have had him study theology. Winckelmann, free of the master'slibrary, chooses rather to become familiar with the Greek classics. Herodotus and Homer win, with their "vowelled" Greek, his warmestenthusiasm; whole nights of fever are devoted to them; disturbing dreamsof an Odyssey of his own come to him. "He felt in himself, " says Madamede Stael, "an ardent attraction towards the South. " In Germanimaginations even now traces are often to be found of that love of thesun, that weariness of the North (cette fatigue du nord), which carriedthe northern peoples away into those countries of the South. A fine skybrings to birth sentiments not unlike the love of one's Fatherland. 

To most of us, after all our steps towards it, the antique world, inspite of its intense outlines, its perfect self-expression, still remainsfaint and remote. To him, closely limited except on the one side of theideal, building for his dark poverty "a house not made with hands, " itearly came to seem more real than the present. In the fantastic plans offoreign travel continually passing through his mind, to Egypt, forinstance, and to France, there seems always to be rather a wistful senseof something lost to be regained, than the desire of discovering anythingnew. Goethe has told us how, in his eagerness actually to handle theantique, he became interested in the insignificant vestiges of it whichthe neighbourhood of Strasburg contained. So we hear of Winckelmann'sboyish antiquarian wanderings among the ugly Brandenburg sandhills. Sucha conformity between himself and Winckelmann, Goethe would have gladlynoted. 

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

In 1743 he became master of a school at Seehausen. This was the mostwearisome period of his life. Notwithstanding a success in dealing withchildren, which seems to testify to something simple and primeval in hisnature, he found the work of teaching very depressing. Engaged in thiswork, he writes that he still has within him a longing desire to attainto the knowledge of beauty--sehnlich wuenschte zur Kenntniss des Schoenenzu gelangen. He had to shorten his nights, sleeping only four hours, togain time for reading. And here Winckelmann made a step forward inculture. He multiplied his intellectual force by detaching from it allflaccid interests. He renounced mathematics and law, in which his readinghad been considerable, --all but the literature of the arts. Nothing wasto enter into his life unpenetrated by its central enthusiasm. At thistime he undergoes the charm of Voltaire. Voltaire belongs to thatflimsier, more artificial, classical tradition, which Winckelmann was oneday to supplant, by the clear ring, the eternal outline of the genuineantique. But it proves the authority of such a gift as Voltaire's that itallures and wins even those born to supplant it. Voltaire's impression onWinckelmann was never effaced; and it gave him a consideration for Frenchliterature which contrasts with his contempt for the literary products ofGermany. German literature transformed, siderealised, as we see it inGoethe, reckons Winckelmann among its initiators. But Germany at thattime presented nothing in which he could have anticipated Iphigenie, andthe formation of an effective classical tradition in German literature. 

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

This new-found interest in Plato's dialogues could not fail to increasehis desire to visit the countries of the classical tradition. "It is mymisfortune, " he writes, "that I was not born to great place, wherein Imight have had cultivation, and the opportunity of following my instinctand forming myself. " A visit to Rome probably was already purposed, andhe silently preparing for it. Count Buenau, the author of an historicalwork then of note, had collected at Noethenitz a valuable library, nowpart of the library of Dresden. In 1784 Winckelmann wrote to Buenau inhalting French:--He is emboldened, he says, by Buenau's indulgence forneedy men of letters. He desires only to devote himself to study, havingnever allowed himself to be dazzled by favourable prospects of theChurch. He hints at his doubtful position "in a metaphysical age, whenhumane literature is trampled under foot. At present, " he goes on, "little value is set on Greek literature, to which I have devoted myselfso far as I could penetrate, when good books are so scarce andexpensive. " Finally, he desires a place in some corner of Buenau'slibrary. "Perhaps, at some future time, I shall become more useful to thepublic, if, drawn from obscurity in whatever way, I can find means tomaintain myself in the capital. "

Soon afterwards we find Winckelmann in the library at Noethenitz. Thencehe made many visits to the collection of antiquities at Dresden. Hebecame acquainted with many artists, above all with Oeser, Goethe'sfuture friend and master, who, uniting a high culture with the practicalknowledge of art, was fitted to minister to Winckelmann's culture. Andnow there opened for him a new way of communion with the Greek life. Hitherto he had handled the words only of Greek poetry, stirred indeedand roused by them, yet divining beyond the words an unexpressedpulsation of sensuous life. Suddenly he is in contact with that life, still fervent in the relics of plastic art. Filled as our culture is withthe classical spirit, we can hardly imagine how deeply the human mind wasmoved, when, at the Renaissance, in the midst of a frozen world, theburied fire of ancient art rose up from under the soil. Winckelmann herereproduces for us the earlier sentiment of the Renaissance. On a suddenthe imagination feels itself free. How facile and direct, it seems tosay, is this life of the senses and the understanding, when once we haveapprehended it! Here, surely, is the more liberal life we have beenseeking so long, so near to us all the while. How mistaken and roundabouthave been our efforts to reach it by mystic passion, and monasticreverie; how they have deflowered the flesh; how little they haveemancipated us! Hermione melts from her stony posture, and the lostproportions of life right themselves. Here, then, we see in vividrealisation the native tendency of Winckelmann to escape from abstracttheory to intuition, to the exercise of sight and touch. Lessing, in theLaocoon, has theorised finely on the relation of poetry to sculpture; andphilosophy can give us theoretical reasons why not poetry but sculptureshould be the most sincere and exact expression of the Greek ideal. By ahappy, unperplexed dexterity, Winckelmann solves the question in theconcrete. It is what Goethe calls his Gewahrwerden der griechischenKunst, his FINDING of Greek art. 

Through the tumultuous richness of Goethe's culture, the influence ofWinckelmann is always discernible, as the strong, regulativeunder-current of a clear, antique motive. "One learns nothing from him, "he says to Eckermann, "but one becomes something. " If we ask what thesecret of this influence was, Goethe himself will tell us--elasticity, wholeness, intellectual integrity. And yet these expressions, becausethey fit Goethe, with his universal culture, so well, seem hardly todescribe the narrow, exclusive interest of Winckelmann. DoubtlessWinckelmann's perfection is a narrow perfection: his feverish nursing ofthe one motive of his life is a contrast to Goethe's various energy. Butwhat affected Goethe, what instructed him and ministered to his culture, was the integrity, the truth to its type, of the given force. Thedevelopment of his force was the single interest of Winckelmann, unembarrassed by anything else in him. Other interests, practical orintellectual, those slighter talents and motives not supreme, which inmost men are the waste part of nature, and drain away their vitality, heplucked out and cast from him. The protracted longing of his youth is nota vague, romantic longing: he knows what he longs for, what he wills. Within its severe limits his enthusiasm burns like lava. "You know, " saysLavater, speaking of Winckelmann's countenance, "that I consider ardourand indifference by no means incompatible in the same character. If everthere was a striking instance of that union, it is in the countenancebefore us. " "A lowly childhood, " says Goethe, "insufficient instructionin youth, broken, distracted studies in early manhood, the burden ofschool-keeping! He was thirty years old before he enjoyed a single favourof fortune: but as soon as he had attained to an adequate condition offreedom, he appears before us consummate and entire, complete in theancient sense. "

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

Goethe boldly pleads that Winckelmann was a pagan, that the landmarks ofChristendom meant nothing to him. It is clear that he intended to deceiveno one by his disguise; fears of the inquisition are sometimes visibleduring his life in Rome; he entered Rome notoriously with the works ofVoltaire in his possession; the thought of what Count Buenau might bethinking of him seems to have been his greatest difficulty. On the otherhand, he may have had a sense of a certain antique, and as it were pagangrandeur in the Roman Catholic religion. Turning from the crabbedProtestantism, which had been the weariness of his youth, he mightreflect that while Rome had reconciled itself to the Renaissance, theProtestant principle in art had cut off Germany from the supremetradition of beauty. And yet to that transparent nature, with itssimplicity as of the earlier world, the loss of absolute sincerity musthave been a real loss. Goethe understands that Winckelmann had made thissacrifice. Yet at the bar of the highest criticism, perhaps, Winckelmannmay be absolved. The insincerity of his religious profession was only oneincident of a culture in which the moral instinct, like the religious orpolitical, was merged in the artistic. But then the artistic interest wasthat by desperate faithfulness to which Winckelmann was saved from themediocrity, which, breaking through no bounds, moves ever in a bloodlessroutine, and misses its one chance in the life of the spirit and theintellect. There have been instances of culture developed by every highmotive in turn, and yet intense at every point; and the aim of ourculture should be to attain not only as intense but as complete a life aspossible. But often the higher life is only possible at all, on conditionof the selection of that in which one's motive is native and strong; andthis selection involves the renunciation of a crown reserved for others. Which is better?--to lay open a new sense, to initiate a new organ forthe human spirit, or to cultivate many types of perfection up to a pointwhich leaves us still beyond the range of their transforming power?Savonarola is one type of success; Winckelmann is another; criticism canreject neither, because each is true to itself. Winckelmann himselfexplains the motive of his life when he says, "It will be my highestreward, if posterity acknowledges that I have written worthily. "

For a time he remained at Dresden. There his first book appeared, Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works of Art in Painting andSculpture. Full of obscurities as it was, obscurities which baffled butdid not offend Goethe when he first turned to art-criticism, its purposewas direct--an appeal from the artificial classicism of the day to thestudy of the antique. The book was well received, and a pension suppliedthrough the king's confessor. In September 1755 he started for Rome, inthe company of a young Jesuit. He was introduced to Raphael Mengs, apainter then of note, and found a home near him, in the artists' quarter, in a place where he could "overlook, far and wide, the eternal city. " Atfirst he was perplexed with the sense of being a stranger on what was tohim, spiritually, native soil. "Unhappily, " he cries in French, oftenselected by him as the vehicle of strong feeling, "I am one of those whomthe Greeks call opsimatheis. --I have come into the world and into Italytoo late. " More than thirty years afterwards, Goethe also, after manyaspirations and severe preparation of mind, visited Italy. In earlymanhood, just as he too was FINDING Greek art, the rumour of that highartist's life of Winckelmann in Italy had strongly moved him. At Rome, spending a whole year drawing from the antique, in preparation forIphigenie, he finds the stimulus of Winckelmann's memory ever active. Winckelmann's Roman life was simple, primeval, Greek. His delicateconstitution permitted him the use only of bread and wine. Condemned bymany as a renegade, he had no desire for places of honour, but only tosee his merits acknowledged, and existence assured to him. He was simplewithout being niggardly; he desired to be neither poor nor rich. 

Winckelmann's first years in Rome present all the elements of anintellectual situation of the highest interest. The beating of theintellect against its bars, the sombre aspect, the alien traditions, thestill barbarous literature of Germany, are afar off; before him areadequate conditions of culture, the sacred soil itself, the first tokensof the advent of the new German literature, with its broad horizons, itsboundless intellectual promise. Dante, passing from the darkness of theInferno, is filled with a sharp and joyful sense of light, which makeshim deal with it, in the opening of the Purgatorio, in a wonderfullytouching and penetrative way. Hellenism, which is the principlepre-eminently of intellectual light (our modern culture may have morecolour, the medieval spirit greater heat and profundity, but Hellenism ispre-eminent for light), has always been most effectively conceived bythose who have crept into it out of an intellectual world in which thesombre elements predominate. So it had been in the ages of theRenaissance. This repression, removed at last, gave force and glow toWinckelmann's native affinity to the Hellenic spirit. "There had beenknown before him, " says Madame de Stael, "learned men who might beconsulted like books; but no one had, if I may say so, made himself apagan for the purpose of penetrating antiquity. " "One is always a poorexecutant of conceptions not one's own. "--On execute mal ce qu'on n'a pasconcu soi-meme*--words spoken on so high an occasion--are true in theirmeasure of every genuine enthusiasm. Enthusiasm--that, in the broadPlatonic sense of the Phaedrus, was the secret of his divinatory powerover the Hellenic world. This enthusiasm, dependent as it is to a greatdegree on bodily temperament, has a power of re-enforcing the pureremotions of the intellect with an almost physical excitement. That hisaffinity with Hellenism was not merely intellectual, that the subtlerthreads of temperament were inwoven in it, is proved by his romantic, fervent friendships with young men. He has known, he says, many young menmore beautiful than Guido's archangel. These friendships, bringing him incontact with the pride of human form, and staining his thoughts with itsbloom, perfected his reconciliation with the spirit of Greek sculpture. A letter on taste, addressed from Rome to a young nobleman, Friedrich vonBerg, is the record of such a friendship. 

*Words of Charlotte Corday before the Convention. 

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

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

The following passage is characteristic--

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

Certainly, of that beauty of living form which regulated Winckelmann'sfriendships, it could not be said that it gave no pain. One notablefriendship, the fortune of which we may trace through his letters, beginswith an antique, chivalrous letter in French, and ends noisily in a burstof angry fire. Far from reaching the quietism, the bland indifference ofart, such attachments are nevertheless more susceptible than any othersof equal strength of a purely intellectual culture. Of passion, ofphysical excitement, they contain only just so much as stimulates the eyeto the finest delicacies of colour and form. These friendships, often thecaprices of a moment, make Winckelmann's letters, with their troubledcolouring, an instructive but bizarre addition to the History of Art, that shrine of grave and mellow light for the mute Olympian family. Theimpression which Winckelmann's literary life conveyed to those about himwas that of excitement, intuition, inspiration, rather than thecontemplative evolution of general principles. The quick, susceptibleenthusiast, betraying his temperament even in appearance, by his olivecomplexion, his deep-seated, piercing eyes, his rapid movements, apprehended the subtlest principles of the Hellenic manner, not throughthe understanding, but by instinct or touch. A German biographer ofWinckelmann has compared him to Columbus. That is not the aptest ofcomparisons; but it reminds one of a passage in which M. Edgar Quinetdescribes the great discoverer's famous voyage. His science was often atfault; but he had a way of estimating at once the slightest indication ofland, in a floating weed or passing bird; he seemed actually to comenearer to nature than other men. And that world in which others had movedwith so much embarrassment, seems to call out in Winckelmann new sensesfitted to deal with it. He is in touch with it; it penetrates him, andbecomes part of his temperament. He remodels his writings with constantrenewal of insight; he catches the thread of a whole sequence of laws insome hollowing of the hand, or dividing of the hair; he seems to realisethat fancy of the reminiscence of a forgotten knowledge hidden for a timein the mind itself; as if the mind of one, lover and philosopher at oncein some phase of pre-existence-philosophesas pote met' erotos--falleninto a new cycle, were beginning its intellectual culture over again, yetwith a certain power of anticipating its results. So comes the truth ofGoethe's judgments on his works; they are a life, a living thing, designed for those who are alive--ein Lebendiges fuer die Lebendigengeschrieben, ein Leben selbst. 

In 1785 Cardinal Albani, who possessed in his Roman villa a preciouscollection of antiquities, became Winckelmann's patron. Pompeii had justopened its treasures; Winckelmann gathered its first-fruits. But his planof a visit to Greece remained unfulfilled. From his first arrival in Romehe had kept the History of Ancient Art ever in view. All his otherwritings were a preparation for that. It appeared, finally, in 1764; buteven after its publication Winckelmann was still employed in perfectingit. It is since his time that many of the most significant examples ofGreek art have been submitted to criticism. He had seen little or nothingof what we ascribe to the age of Pheidias; and his conception of Greekart tends, therefore, to put the mere elegance of the imperial society ofancient Rome in place of the severe and chastened grace of the palaestra. For the most part he had to penetrate to Greek art through copies, imitations, and later Roman art itself; and it is not surprising thatthis turbid medium has left in Winckelmann's actual results much that amore privileged criticism can correct. 

He had been twelve years in Rome. Admiring Germany had many calls to him;at last, in 1768, he set out to revisit the country of his birth; and ashe left Rome, a strange, inverted home-sickness, a strange reluctance toleave it at all, came over him. He reached Vienna: there he was loadedwith honours and presents: other cities were awaiting him. Goethe, thennineteen years old, studying art at Leipsic, was expecting his coming, with that wistful eagerness which marked his youth, when the news ofWinckelmann's murder arrived. All that "weariness of the North" hadrevived with double force. He left Vienna, intending to hasten back toRome. At Trieste a delay of a few days occurred. With characteristicopenness, Winckelmann had confided his plans to a fellow-traveller, a mannamed Arcangeli, and had shown him the gold medals received at Vienna. Arcangeli's avarice was aroused. One morning he entered Winckelmann'sroom, under pretence of taking leave; Winckelmann was then writing"memoranda for the future editor of the History of Art, " still seekingthe perfection of his great work. Arcangeli begged to see the medals oncemore. As Winckelmann stooped down to take them from the chest, a cord wasthrown round his neck. Some time afterwards, a child whose friendshipWinckelmann had made to beguile the delay, knocked at the door, andreceiving no answer, gave an alarm. Winckelmann was found dangerouslywounded, and died a few hours later, after receiving the sacraments ofthe Romish Church. It seemed as if the gods, in reward for his devotionto them, had given him a death which, for its swiftness and itsopportunity, he might well have desired. "He has, " says Goethe, "theadvantage of figuring in the memory of posterity, as one eternally ableand strong; for the image in which one leaves the world is that in whichone moves among the shadows. " Yet, perhaps, it is not fanciful to regretthat the meeting with Goethe did not take place. Goethe, then in all thepregnancy of his wonderful youth, still unruffled by the press and stormof his earlier manhood, was awaiting Winckelmann with a curiosity of theworthiest kind. As it was, Winckelmann became to him something like whatVirgil was to Dante. And Winckelmann, with his fiery friendships, hadreached that age and that period of culture at which emotions hithertofitful, sometimes concentrate themselves in a vital, unchangeablerelationship. German literary history seems to have lost the chance ofone of those famous friendships, the very tradition of which becomes astimulus to culture, and exercises an imperishable influence. 

In one of the frescoes of the Vatican, Raffaelle has commemorated thetradition of the Catholic religion. Against a strip of peaceful sky, broken in upon by the beatific vision, are ranged the great personagesof. Christian history, with the Sacrament in the midst. Another fresco ofRaffaelle in the same apartment presents a very different company, Dantealone appearing in both. Surrounded by the muses of Greek mythology, under a thicket of myrtles, sits Apollo, with the sources of Castalia athis feet. On either side are grouped those on whom the spirit of Apollodescended, the classical and Renaissance poets, to whom the waters ofCastalia come down, a river making glad this other city of God. In thisfresco it is the classical tradition, the orthodoxy of taste, thatRaffaelle commemorates. Winckelmann's intellectual history authenticatesthe claims of this tradition in human culture. In the countries wherethat tradition arose, where it still lurked about its own artisticrelics, and changes of language had not broken its continuity, nationalpride might sometimes light up anew an enthusiasm for it. Aliens mightimitate that enthusiasm, and classicism become from time to time anintellectual fashion. But Winckelmann was not further removed bylanguage, than by local aspects and associations, from those vestiges ofthe classical spirit; and he lived at a time when, in Germany, classicalstudies were out of favour. Yet, remote in time and place, he feels afterthe Hellenic world, divines the veins of ancient art, in which its lifestill circulates, and, like Scyles, the half-barbarous yet Hellenisingking, in the beautiful story of Herodotus, is irresistibly attracted byit. This testimony to the authority of the Hellenic tradition, itsfitness to satisfy some vital requirement of the intellect, whichWinckelmann contributes as a solitary man of genius, is offered also bythe general history of culture. The spiritual forces of the past, whichhave prompted and informed the culture of a succeeding age, live, indeed, within that culture, but with an absorbed, underground life. The Hellenicelement alone has not been so absorbed, or content with this undergroundlife; from time to time it has started to the surface; culture has beendrawn back to its sources to be clarified and corrected. Hellenism is notmerely an absorbed element in our intellectual life; it is a conscioustradition in it. 

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

Greek art, when we first catch sight of it, is entangled with Greekreligion. We are accustomed to think of Greek religion as the religion ofart and beauty, the religion of which the Olympian Zeus and the AthenaPolias are the idols, the poems of Homer the sacred books. Thus CardinalNewman speaks of "the classical polytheism which was gay and graceful, aswas natural in a civilised age. " Yet such a view is only a partial one;in it the eye is fixed on the sharp, bright edge of high Hellenic culturebut loses sight of the sombre world across which it strikes. Greekreligion, where we can observe it most distinctly, is at once amagnificent ritualistic system, and a cycle of poetical conceptions. Religions, as they grow by natural laws out of man's life, are modifiedby whatever modifies his life. They brighten under a bright sky, theybecome liberal as the social range widens, they grow intense and shrillin the clefts of human life, where the spirit is narrow and confined, andthe stars are visible at noonday; and a fine analysis of thesedifferences is one of the gravest functions of religious criticism. Still, the broad foundation, in mere human nature, of all religions asthey exist for the greatest number, is a universal pagan sentiment, apaganism which existed before the Greek religion, and has lingered faronward into the Christian world, ineradicable, like some persistentvegetable growth, because its seed is an element of the very soil out ofwhich it springs. This pagan sentiment measures the sadness with whichthe human mind is filled, whenever its thoughts wander far from what ishere, and now. It is beset by notions of irresistible natural powers, forthe most part ranged against man, but the secret also of his fortune, making the earth golden and the grape fiery for him. He makes gods in hisown image, gods smiling and flower-crowned, or bleeding by some sadfatality, to console him by their wounds, never closed from generation togeneration. It is with a rush of home-sickness that the thought of deathpresents itself. He would remain at home for ever on the earth if hecould: as it loses its colour and the senses fail, he clings ever closerto it; but since the mouldering of bones and flesh must go on to the end, he is careful for charms and talismans, that may chance to have somefriendly power in them, when the inevitable shipwreck comes. Suchsentiment is a part of the eternal basis of all religions, modifiedindeed by changes of time and place, but indestructible, because its rootis so deep in the earth of man's nature. The breath of religiousinitiators passes over them; a few "rise up with wings as eagles, " butthe broad level of religious life is not permanently changed. Religiousprogress, like all purely spiritual progress, is confined to a few. Thissentiment fixes itself in the earliest times to certain usages ofpatriarchal life, the kindling of fire, the washing of the body, theslaughter of the flock, the gathering of harvest, holidays and dances. Here are the beginnings of a ritual, at first as occasional and unfixedas the sentiment which it expresses, but destined to become the permanentelement of religious life. The usages of patriarchal life change; butthis germ of ritual remains, developing, but always in a religiousinterest, losing its domestic character, and therefore becoming more andmore inexplicable with each generation. This pagan worship, in spite oflocal variations, essentially one, is an element in all religions. It isthe anodyne which the religious principle, like one administering opiatesto the incurable, has added to the law which makes life sombre for thevast majority of mankind. 

More definite religious conceptions come from other sources, and fixthemselves upon this ritual in various ways, changing it, and giving itnew meanings. In Greece they were derived from mythology, itself not dueto a religious source at all, but developing in the course of time into abody of religious conceptions, entirely human in form and character. Tothe unprogressive ritual element it brought these conceptions, itself--he pterou dunamis, the power of the wing--an element ofrefinement, of ascension, with the promise of an endless destiny. Whilethe ritual remains fixed, the aesthetic element, only accidentallyconnected with it, expands with the freedom and mobility of the things ofthe intellect. Always, the fixed element is the religious observance; thefluid, unfixed element is the myth, the religious conception. Thisreligion is itself pagan, and has in any broad view of it the pagansadness. It does not at once, and for the majority, become the higherHellenic religion. The country people, of course, cherish the unlovelyidols of an earlier time, such as those which Pausanias found stilldevoutly preserved in Arcadia. Athenaeus tells the story of one who, coming to a temple of Latona, had expected to find some worthypresentment of the mother of Apollo, and laughed on seeing only ashapeless wooden figure. The wilder people have wilder gods, which, however, in Athens, or Corinth, or Lacedaemon, changing ever with theworshippers in whom they live and move and have their being, borrowsomething of the lordliness and distinction of human nature there. Greekreligion too has its mendicants, its purifications, its antinomianmysticism, its garments offered to the gods, its statues worn withkissing, its exaggerated superstitions for the vulgar only, its worshipof sorrow, its addolorata, its mournful mysteries. Scarcely a wild ormelancholy note of the medieval church but was anticipated by Greekpolytheism! What should we have thought of the vertiginous prophetess atthe very centre of Greek religion? The supreme Hellenic culture is asharp edge of light across this gloom. The fiery, stupefying wine becomesin a happier region clear and exhilarating. The Dorian worship of Apollo, rational, chastened, debonair, with his unbroken daylight, always opposedto the sad Chthonian divinities, is the aspiring element, by force andspring of which Greek religion sublimes itself. Out of Greek religion, under happy conditions, arises Greek art, to minister to human culture. It was the privilege of Greek religion to be able to transform itselfinto an artistic ideal. 

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

But take a work of Greek art, --the Venus of Melos. That is in no sense asymbol, a suggestion of anything beyond its own victorious fairness. Themind begins and ends with the finite image, yet loses no part of thespiritual motive. That motive is not lightly and loosely attached to thesensuous form, as the meaning to the allegory, but saturates and isidentical with it. The Greek mind had advanced to a particular stage ofself-reflexion, but was careful not to pass beyond it. In orientalthought there is a vague conception of life everywhere, but no trueappreciation of itself by the mind, no knowledge of the distinction ofman's nature: in its consciousness of itself, humanity is still confusedwith the fantastic, indeterminate life of the animal and vegetable world. In Greek thought the "lordship of the soul" is recognised; that lordshipgives authority and divinity to human eyes and hands and feet; inanimatenature is thrown into the background. But there Greek thought finds itshappy limit; it has not yet become too inward; the mind has not begun toboast of its independence of the flesh; the spirit has not yet absorbedeverything with its emotions, nor reflected its own colour everywhere. It has indeed committed itself to a train of reflexion which must end ina defiance of form, of all that is outward, in an exaggerated idealism. But that end is still distant: it has not yet plunged into the depths ofreligious mysticism. 

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

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

So, from a few stray antiquarianisms, a few faces cast up sharply fromthe waves, Winckelmann, as his manner is, divines the temperament of theantique world, and that in which it had delight. It has passed away withthat distant age, and we may venture to dwell upon it. What sharpness andreality it has is the sharpness and reality of suddenly arrested life. The Greek system of gymnastics originated as part of a religious ritual. The worshipper was to recommend himself to the gods by becoming fleet andfair, white and red, like them. The beauty of the palaestra, and thebeauty of the artist's studio, reacted on each other. The youth tried torival his gods; and his increased beauty passed back into them. --"I takethe gods to witness, I had rather have a fair body than a king'scrown"--Omnumi pantas theous me helesthai an ten basileos arkhen anti toukalos einai. --That is the form in which one age of the world chose thehigher life--a perfect world, if the gods could have seemed for ever onlyfleet and fair, white and red. Let us not regret that this unperplexedyouth of humanity, seeing itself and satisfied, passed, at the duemoment, into a mournful maturity; for already the deep joy was in storefor the spirit, of finding the ideal of that youth still red with life inthe grave. 

It followed that the Greek ideal expressed itself pre-eminently insculpture. All art has a sensuous element, colour, form, sound--in poetrya dexterous recalling of these, together with the profound, joyfulsensuousness of motion: each of these may be a medium for the ideal: itis partly accident which in any individual case makes the born artist, poet, or painter rather than sculptor. But as the mind itself has had anhistorical development, one form of art, by the very limitations of itsmaterial, may be more adequate than another for the expression of any onephase of its experience. Different attitudes of the imagination have anative affinity with different types of sensuous form, so that theycombine, with completeness and ease. The arts may thus be ranged in aseries, which corresponds to a series of developments in the human minditself. Architecture, which begins in a practical need, can only expressby vague hint or symbol the spirit or mind of the artist. He closes hissadness over him, or wanders in the perplexed intricacies of things, orprojects his purpose from him clean-cut and sincere, or bares himself tothe sunlight. But these spiritualities, felt rather than seen, can butlurk about architectural form as volatile effects, to be gathered from itby reflexion; their expression is not really sensuous at all. As humanform is not the subject with which it deals, architecture is the mode inwhich the artistic effort centres, when the thoughts of man concerninghimself are still indistinct, when he is still little preoccupied withthose harmonies, storms, victories, of the unseen and intellectual world, which, wrought out into the bodily form, give it an interest andsignificance communicable to it alone. The art of Egypt, with its supremearchitectural effects, is, according to Hegel's beautiful comparison, aMemnon waiting for the day, the day of the Greek spirit, the humanisticspirit, with its power of speech. Again, painting, music, and poetry, with their endless power of complexity, are the special arts of theromantic and modern ages. Into these, with the utmost attenuation ofdetail, may be translated every delicacy of thought and feeling, incidental to a consciousness brooding with delight over itself. Throughtheir gradations of shade, their exquisite intervals, they project in anexternal form that which is most inward in humour, passion, sentiment. Between architecture and the romantic arts of painting, music, andpoetry, comes sculpture, which, unlike architecture, deals immediatelywith man, while it contrasts with the romantic arts, because it is notself-analytical. It has to do more exclusively than any other art withthe human form, itself one entire medium of spiritual expression, trembling, blushing, melting into dew, with inward excitement. Thatspirituality which only lurks about architecture as a volatile effect, insculpture takes up the whole given material, and penetrates it with animaginative motive; and at first sight sculpture, with its solidity ofform, seems a thing more real and full than the faint, abstract world ofpoetry or painting. Still the fact is the reverse. Discourse and actionshow man as he is, more directly than the springing of the muscles andthe moulding of the flesh; and over these poetry has command. Painting, by the flushing of colour in the face and dilatation of light in theeye--music, by its subtle range of tones--can refine most delicately upona single moment of passion, unravelling its finest threads. 

But why should sculpture thus limit itself to pure form? Because, by thislimitation, it becomes a perfect medium of expression for one peculiarmotive of the imaginative intellect. It therefore renounces all theseattributes of its material which do not help forward that motive. It hashad, indeed, from the beginning an unfixed claim to colour; but thiselement of colour in it has always been more or less conventional, withno melting or modulation of tones, never admitting more than a verylimited realism. It was maintained chiefly as a religious tradition. Inproportion as the art of sculpture ceased to be merely decorative, andsubordinate to architecture, it threw itself upon pure form. It renouncesthe power of expression by sinking or heightening tones. In it, no memberof the human form is more significant than the rest; the eye is wide, andwithout pupil; the lips and brow are hardly less significant than hands, and breasts, and feet. The limitation of its resources is part of itspride it has no backgrounds, no sky or atmosphere, to suggest andinterpret a train of feeling; a little of suggested motion, and much ofpure light on its gleaming surfaces, with pure form--only these. And itgains more than it loses by this limitation to its own distinguishingmotives; it unveils man in the repose of his unchanging characteristics. Its white light, purged from the angry, bloodlike stains of action andpassion, reveals, not what is accidental in man, but the god in him, asopposed to man's restless movement. The art of sculpture records thefirst naive, unperplexed recognition of man by himself; and it is a proofof the high artistic capacity of the Greeks, that they apprehended andremained true to these exquisite limitations, yet, in spite of them, gaveto their creations a vital and mobile individuality. 

Heiterkeit--blitheness or repose, and Allgemeinheit--generality orbreadth, are, then, the supreme characteristics of the Hellenic ideal. But that generality or breadth has nothing in common with the laxobservation, the unlearned thought, the flaccid execution, which havesometimes claimed superiority in art, on the plea of being "broad" or"general. " Hellenic breadth and generality come of a culture minute, severe, constantly renewed, rectifying and concentrating its impressionsinto certain pregnant types. The base of all artistic genius is the powerof conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting ahappy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of commondays, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power ofrefraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising thispower, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited. The range of characters or persons open to them is as various as lifeitself; no character, however trivial, misshapen, or unlovely, can resisttheir magic. That is because those arts can accomplish their function inthe choice and development of some special situation, which lifts orglorifies a character, in itself not poetical. To realise this situation, to define in a chill and empty atmosphere, the focus where rays, inthemselves pale and impotent, unite and begin to burn, the artist has toemploy the most cunning detail, to complicate and refine upon thought andpassion a thousand-fold. The poems of Robert Browning supply brilliantexamples of this power. His poetry is pre-eminently the poetry ofsituations. The characters themselves are always of secondary importance;often they are characters in themselves of little interest; they seem tocome to him by strange accidents from the ends of the world. His gift isshown by the way in which he accepts such a character, and throws it intosome situation, or apprehends it in some delicate pause of life, in whichfor a moment it becomes ideal. Take an instance from Dramatis Personae. In the poem entitled Le Byron de nos Jours, we have a single moment ofpassion thrown into relief in this exquisite way. Those two jadedParisians are not intrinsically interesting; they only begin to interestus when thrown into a choice situation. But to discriminate that moment, to make it appreciable by us, that we may "find" it, what a cobweb ofallusions, what double and treble reflexions of the mind upon itself, what an artificial light is constructed and broken over the chosensituation; on how fine a needle's point that little world of passion isbalanced! Yet, in spite of this intricacy, the poem has the clear ring ofa central motive; we receive from it the impression of one imaginativetone, of a single creative act. 

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

Works of art produced under this law, and only these, are reallycharacterised by Hellenic generality or breadth. In every direction it isa law of limitation; it keeps passion always below that degree ofintensity at which it must necessarily be transitory, never winding upthe features to one note of anger, or desire, or surprise. In some of thefeebler allegorical designs of the middle age, we find isolated qualitiesportrayed as by so many masks; its religious art has familiarised us withfaces fixed immovably into blank types of placid reverie; and men andwomen, in the hurry of life, often wear the sharp impress of oneabsorbing motive, from which it is said death sets their features free. All such instances may be ranged under the grotesque; and the Hellenicideal has nothing in common with the grotesque. It allows passion to playlightly over the surface of the individual form, losing thereby nothingof its central impassivity, its depth and repose. To all but the highestculture, the reserved faces of the gods will ever have something ofinsipidity. Again, in the best Greek sculpture, the archaic immobilityhas been thawed, its forms are in motion; but it is a motion ever kept inreserve, which is very seldom committed to any definite action. Endlessas are the attitudes of Greek sculpture, exquisite as is the invention ofthe Greeks in this direction, the actions or situations it permits aresimple and few. There is no Greek Madonna; the goddesses are alwayschildless. The actions selected are those which would be withoutsignificance, except in a divine person--binding on a sandal or preparingfor the bath. When a more complex and significant action is permitted, itis most often represented as just finished, so that eager expectancy isexcluded, as in the image of Apollo just after the slaughter of thePython, or of Venus with the apple of Paris already in her hand. TheLaocoon, with all that patient science through which it has triumphedover an almost unmanageable subject, marks a period in which sculpturehas begun to aim at effects legitimate, because delightful, only inpainting. The hair, so rich a source of expression in painting, because, relatively to the eye or to the lip, it is mere drapery, is withdrawnfrom attention; its texture, as well as the colour, is lost, itsarrangement faintly and severely indicated, with no enmeshed or brokenlight. The eyes are wide and directionless, not fixing anything withtheir gaze, or riveting the brain to any special external object; thebrows without hair. It deals almost exclusively with youth, where themoulding of the bodily organs is still as if suspended between growth andcompletion, indicated but not emphasised; where the transition from curveto curve is so delicate and elusive, that Winckelmann compares it to aquiet sea, which, although we understand it to be in motion, wenevertheless regard as an image of repose; where, therefore, the exactdegree of development is so hard to apprehend. If one had to choose asingle product of Hellenic art, to save in the wreck of all the rest, onewould choose from the "beautiful multitude" of the Panathenaic frieze, that line of youths on horseback, with their level glances, their proud, patient lips, their chastened reins, their whole bodies in exquisiteservice. This colourless, unclassified purity of life, with its blendingand interpenetration of intellectual, spiritual, and physical elements, still folded together, pregnant with the possibilities of a whole worldclosed within it, is the highest expression of that indifference whichlies beyond all that is relative or partial. Everywhere there is theeffect of an awaking, of a child's sleep just disturbed. All theseeffects are united in a single instance--the adorante of the museum ofBerlin, a youth who has gained the wrestler's prize, with hands liftedand open, in praise for the victory. Fresh, unperplexed, it is the imageof man as he springs first from the sleep of nature; his white lighttaking no colour from any one-sided experience, characterless, so far ascharacter involves subjection to the accidental influences of life. 

"This sense, " says Hegel, "for the consummate modelling of divine andhuman forms was pre-eminently at home in Greece. In its poets andorators, its historians and philosophers, Greece cannot be conceived froma central point, unless one brings, as a key to the understanding of it, an insight into the ideal forms of sculpture, and regards the images ofstatesmen and philosophers, as well as epic and dramatic heroes, from theartistic point of view; for those who act, as well as those who createand think, have, in those beautiful days of Greece, this plasticcharacter. They are great and free, and have grown up on the soil oftheir own individuality, creating themselves out of themselves, andmoulding themselves to what they were, and willed to be. The age ofPericles was rich in such characters; Pericles himself, Pheidias, Plato, above all Sophocles, Thucydides also, Xenophon and Socrates, each in hisown order, the perfection of one remaining undiminished by that of theothers. They are ideal artists of themselves, cast each in one flawlessmould, works of art, which stand before us as an immortal presentment ofthe gods. Of this modelling also are those bodily works of art, thevictors in the Olympic games; yes, and even Phryne, who, as the mostbeautiful of women, ascended naked out of the water, in the presence ofassembled Greece. "

This key to the understanding of the Greek spirit, Winckelmann possessedin his own nature, itself like a relic of classical antiquity, laid openby accident to our alien modern atmosphere. To the criticism of thatconsummate Greek modelling he brought not only his culture but histemperament. We have seen how definite was the leading motive of hisculture; how, like some central root-fibre, it maintained thewell-rounded unity of his life through a thousand distractions. Interests not his, nor meant for him, never disturbed him. In morals, asin criticism, he followed the clue of an unerring instinct. Penetratinginto the antique world by his passion, his temperament, he enunciates noformal principles, always hard and one-sided. Minute and anxious as hisculture was, he never became one-sidedly self-analytical. Occupied everwith himself, perfecting himself and cultivating his genius, he was notcontent, as so often happens with such natures, that the atmospherebetween him and other minds should be thick and clouded; he was everjealously refining his meaning into a form, express, clear, objective. This temperament he nurtured and invigorated by friendships which kepthim ever in direct contact with the spirit of youth. The beauty of theGreek statues was a sexless beauty; the statues of the gods had the leasttraces of sex. Here there is a moral sexlessness, a kind of ineffectualwholeness of nature, yet with a true beauty and significance of its own. 

One result of this temperament is a serenity--Heiterkeit--whichcharacterises Winckelmann's handling of the sensuous side of Greek art. This serenity is, perhaps, in great measure, a negative quality; it isthe absence of any sense of want, or corruption, or shame. With thesensuous element in Greek art he deals in the pagan manner; and what isimplied in that? It has been sometimes said that art is a means of escapefrom "the tyranny of the senses. " It may be so for the spectator; he mayfind that the spectacle of supreme works of art takes from the life ofthe senses something of its turbid fever. But this is possible for thespectator only because the artist, in producing those works, hasgradually sunk his intellectual and spiritual ideas in sensuous form. Hemay live, as Keats lived, a pure life; but his soul, like that of Plato'sfalse astronomer, becomes more and more immersed in sense, until nothingwhich lacks an appeal to sense has interest for him. How could such anone ever again endure the greyness of the ideal or spiritual world? Thespiritualist is satisfied in seeing the sensuous elements escape from hisconceptions; his interest grows, as the dyed garment bleaches in thekeener air. But the artist steeps his thought again and again into thefire of colour. To the Greek this immersion in the sensuous wasindifferent. Greek sensuousness, therefore, does not fever the blood; itis shameless and childlike. Christian asceticism, on the other hand, discrediting the slightest touch of sense, has from time to time provokedinto strong emphasis the contrast or antagonism to itself, of theartistic life, with its inevitable sensuousness. --I did but taste alittle honey with the end of the rod that was in mine hand, and lo, Imust die!--It has sometimes seemed hard to pursue that life withoutsomething of conscious disavowal of a spiritual world; and this impartsto genuine artistic interests a kind of intoxication. From thisintoxication Winckelmann is free; he fingers those pagan marbles withunsinged hands, with no sense of shame or loss. That is to deal with thesensuous side of art in the pagan manner. 

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

Into this stage of Greek achievement Winckelmann did not enter. Supremeas he is where his true interest lay, his insight into the typical unityand repose of the highest sort of sculpture seems to have involvedlimitation in another direction. His conception of art excludes thatbolder type of it which deals confidently and serenely with life, conflict, evil. Living in a world of exquisite but abstract andcolourless form, he could hardly have conceived of the subtle andpenetrative, but somewhat grotesque art of the modern world. What wouldhe have thought of Gilliatt, in Victor Hugo's Travailleurs de la Mer, orof the bleeding mouth of Fantine in the first part of Les Miserables, penetrated as it is with a sense of beauty, as lively and transparent asthat of a Greek? There is even a sort of preparation for the romantictemper within the limits of the Greek ideal itself, which Winckelmannfailed to see. For Greek religion has not merely its mournful mysteriesof Adonis, of Hyacinthus, of Demeter, but it is conscious also of thefall of earlier divine dynasties. Hyperion gives way to Apollo, Oceanusto Poseidon. Around the feet of that tranquil Olympian family still crowdthe weary shadows of an earlier, more formless, divine world. Even theirstill minds are troubled with thoughts of a limit to duration, ofinevitable decay, of dispossession. Again, the supreme and colourlessabstraction of those divine forms, which is the secret of their repose, is also a premonition of the fleshless, consumptive refinements of thepale medieval artists. That high indifference to the outward, thatimpassivity, has already a touch of the corpse in it; we see alreadyAngelico and the Master of the Passion in the artistic future. Thecrushing of the sensuous, the shutting of the door upon it, the asceticinterest, is already traceable. Those abstracted gods, "ready to melt outtheir essence fine into the winds, " who can fold up their flesh as agarment, and still remain themselves, seem already to feel that bleakair, in which, like Helen of Troy, they wander as the spectres of themiddle age. 

Gradually, as the world came into the church, an artistic interest, native in the human soul, reasserted its claims. But Christian art wasstill dependent on pagan examples, building the shafts of pagan templesinto its churches, perpetuating the form of the basilica, in later timesworking the disused amphitheatres as quarries. The sensuous expression ofconceptions which unreservedly discredit the world of sense, was thedelicate problem which Christian art had before it. If we think ofmedieval painting, as it ranges from the early German schools, still withsomething of the air of the charnel-house about them, to the clearloveliness of Perugino, we shall see how that problem was solved. Even inthe worship of sorrow the native blitheness of art asserted itself; thereligious spirit, as Hegel says, "smiled through its tears. " So perfectlydid the young Raffaelle infuse that Heiterkeit, that pagan blitheness, into religious works, that his picture of Saint Agatha at Bologna becameto Goethe a step in the evolution of Iphigenie. * But in proportion asthis power of smiling was found again, there came also an aspirationtowards that lost antique art, some relics of which Christian art hadburied in itself, ready to work wonders when their day came. 

*Italiaenische Reise. Bologna, 19 Oct. 1776. 

The history of art has suffered as much as any history by trenchant andabsolute divisions. Pagan and Christian art are sometimes harshlyopposed, and the Renaissance is represented as a fashion which set in ata definite period. That is the superficial view: the deeper view is thatwhich preserves the identity of European culture. The two are reallycontinuous; and there is a sense in which it may be said that theRenaissance was an uninterrupted effort of the middle age, that it wasever taking place. When the actual relics of the antique were restored tothe world, in the view of the Christian ascetic it was as if an ancientplague-pit had been opened: all the world took the contagion of the lifeof nature and of the senses. And now it was seen that the medieval spirittoo had done something for the destiny of the antique. By hastening thedecline of art, by withdrawing interest from it, and yet keeping unbrokenthe thread of its traditions, it had suffered the human mind to reposethat it might awake when day came, with eyes refreshed, to those antiqueforms. 

The aim of a right criticism is to place Winckelmann in an intellectualperspective, of which Goethe is the foreground. For, after all, he isinfinitely less than Goethe; it is chiefly because at certain points hecomes in contact with Goethe, that criticism entertains consideration ofhim. His relation to modern culture is a peculiar one. He is not of themodern world; nor is he of the eighteenth century, although so much ofhis outer life is characteristic of it. But that note of revolt againstthe eighteenth century, which we detect in Goethe, was struck byWinckelmann. Goethe illustrates that union of the Romantic spirit, in itsadventure, its variety, its profound subjectivity of soul, withHellenism, in its transparency, its rationality, its desire ofBeauty--that marriage of Faust and Helena--of which the art of thenineteenth century is the child, the beautiful lad Euphorion, as Goetheconceives him, on the crags, in the "splendour of battle and in harnessas for victory, " his brows bound with light. * Goethe illustrates, too, the preponderance in this marriage of the Hellenic element; and thatelement, in its true essence, was made known to him by Winckelmann. 

*Faust, Th. Ii. Act. 3. 

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

Certainly, for us of the modern world, with its conflicting claims, itsentangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, so manypreoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity withourselves, in blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for theGreek within the simple terms of antique life. Yet, not less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, centrality. It is this whichWinckelmann imprints on the imagination of Goethe, at the beginning ofhis culture, in its original and simplest form, as in a fragment of Greekart itself, stranded on that littered, indeterminate shore of Germany inthe eighteenth century. In Winckelmann, this type comes to him, not as ina book or a theory, but importunately, in a passionate life orpersonality. For Goethe, possessing all modern interests, ready to belost in the perplexed currents of modern thought, he defines, in clearestoutline, the problem of culture--balance, unity with oneself, consummateGreek modelling. 

It could no longer be solved, as in Phryne ascending naked out of thewater, by perfection of bodily form, or any joyful union with the worldwithout: the shadows had grown too long, the light too solemn, for that. It could hardly be solved, as in Pericles or Pheidias, by the directexercise of any single talent: amid the manifold claims of modernculture, that could only have ended in a thin, one-sided growth. Goethe'sHellenism was of another order, the Allgemeinheit and Heiterkeit, thecompleteness and serenity, of a watchful, exigent intellectualism. ImGanzen, Guten, Wahren, resolut zu leben--is Goethe's description of hisown higher life; and what is meant by life in the whole--im Ganzen? Itmeans the life of one for whom, over and over again, what was onceprecious has become indifferent. Every one who aims at the life ofculture is met by many forms of it, arising out of the intense, laborious, one-sided development of some special talent. They are thebrightest enthusiasms the world has to show. It is not their part toweigh the claims which this or that alien form of culture makes uponthem. But the pure instinct of self-culture cares not so much to reap allthat these forms of culture can give, as to find in them its ownstrength. The demand of the intellect is to feel itself alive. It mustsee into the laws, the operation, the intellectual reward of everydivided form of culture; but only that it may measure the relationbetween itself and them. It struggles with those forms till its secret iswon from each, and then lets each fall back into its place; in thesupreme, artistic view of life. With a kind of passionate coldness, suchnatures rejoice to be away from and past their former selves. Above all, they are jealous of that abandonment to one special gift which reallylimits their capabilities. It would have been easy for Goethe, with thegift of a sensuous nature, to let it overgrow him. It comes easily andnaturally, perhaps, to certain "other-worldly" natures to be even as theSchoene Seele, that ideal of gentle pietism, in Wilhelm Meister: but tothe large vision of Goethe, that seemed to be a phase of life that a manmight feel all round, and leave behind him. Again, it is easy to indulgethe commonplace metaphysical instinct. But a taste for metaphysics may beone of those things which we must renounce, if we mean to mould our livesto artistic perfection. Philosophy serves culture, not by the fanciedgift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questionswhich help one to detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramaticcontrasts of life. 

But Goethe's culture did not remain "behind the veil"; it ever emerged inthe practical functions of art, in actual production. For him the problemcame to be:--Can the blitheness and universality of the antique ideal becommunicated to artistic productions, which shall contain the fulness ofthe experience of the modern world? We have seen that the development ofthe various forms of art has corresponded to the development of thethoughts of man concerning himself, to the growing revelation of the mindto itself. Sculpture corresponds to the unperplexed, emphatic outlines ofHellenic humanism; painting to the mystic depth and intricacy of themiddle age; music and poetry have their fortune in the modern world. Letus understand by poetry all literary production which attains the powerof giving pleasure by its form, as distinct from its matter. Only in thisvaried literary form can art command that width, variety, delicacy ofresources, which will enable it to deal with the conditions of modernlife. What modern art has to do in the service of culture is so torearrange the details of modern life, so to reflect it, that it maysatisfy the spirit. And what does the spirit need in the face of modernlife? The sense of freedom. That naive, rough sense of freedom, whichsupposes man's will to be limited, if at all, only by a will strongerthan his, he can never have again. The attempt to represent it in artwould have so little verisimilitude that it would be flat anduninteresting. The chief factor in the thoughts of the modern mindconcerning itself is the intricacy, the universality of natural law, evenin the moral order. For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort ofmythological personage without us, with whom we can do warfare: it is amagic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system ofwhich modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network, subtler thanour subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world. Can art represent men and women in these bewildering toils so as to givethe spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom? Certainly, inGoethe's romances, and even more in the romances of Victor Hugo, thereare high examples of modern art dealing thus with modern life, regardingthat life as the modern mind must regard it, yet reflecting uponblitheness and repose. Natural laws we shall never modify, embarrass usas they may; but there is still something in the nobler or less nobleattitude with which we watch their fatal combinations. In those romancesof Goethe and Victor Hugo, in some excellent work done after them, thisentanglement, this network of law, becomes the tragic situation, in whichcertain groups of noble men and women work out for themselves a supremeDenouement. Who, if he saw through all, would fret against the chain ofcircumstance which endows one at the end with those great experiences?

1867. 

CONCLUSION*

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

Legei pou Herakleitos hoti panta khorei kai ouden menei. 

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes orfashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let usbegin with that which is without--our physical life. Fix upon it in oneof its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of deliciousrecoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physicallife in that moment but a combination of natural elements to whichscience gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime anddelicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect themin places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion ofthem--the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lensesof the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray oflight and sound--processes which science reduces to simpler and moreelementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the actionof these forces extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far outon every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven by many forces;and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from thegrave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. Thatclear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, underwhich we group them--a design in a web, the actual threads of which passout beyond it. This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is butthe concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooneror later on their ways. 

Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, thewhirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. Thereit is no longer the gradual darkening of the eye and fading of colourfrom the wall, --the movement of the shore-side, where the water flowsdown indeed, though in apparent rest, --but the race of the mid-stream, adrift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought. At first sightexperience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressingupon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselvesin a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to act uponthose objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive forceseems suspended like a trick of magic; each object is loosed into a groupof impressions--colour, odour, texture--in the mind of the observer. Andif we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in thesolidity with which language invests them, but of impressions unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with ourconsciousness of them, it contracts still further; the whole scope ofobservation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed roundfor each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which noreal voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which wecan only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is theimpression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as asolitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step fartherstill, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind towhich, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetualflight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time isinfinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all thatis actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be thanthat it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on thestream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more orless fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life finesitself down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolutionof impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off--thatcontinual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweavingof ourselves. 

Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren vivificiren. Theservice of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spiritis to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. Every momentsome form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or thesea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight orintellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us, --forthat moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, isthe end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them bythe finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vitalforces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure isto form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any twopersons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution toknowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for amoment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, andcurious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one'sfriend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude inthose about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividingof forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleepbefore evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and ofits awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to seeand touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things wesee and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing newopinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facileorthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories orideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gatherup what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is themicroscope of thought. " The theory or idea or system which requires of usthe sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of someinterest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have notidentified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no realclaim upon us. 

One of the most beautiful passages in the writings of Rousseau is that inthe sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening inhim of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had always clungabout him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortaldisease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of theinterval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in hisprevious life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well!we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence ofdeath but with a sort of indefinite reprieve--les hommes sont touscondamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and thenour place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of thisworld, " in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding thatinterval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy andsorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterestedor otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it ispassion--that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multipliedconsciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you professingfrankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as theypass, and simply for those moments' sake.