Walter Pater.............................................................................................................................................1

PREFACE ................................................................................................................................................1

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES........................................................................................................3

PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA ...............................................................................................................11

SANDRO BOTTICELLI .......................................................................................................................17

LUCA DELLA ROBBIA......................................................................................................................20

THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO................................................................................................23

LEONARDO DA VINCI .......................................................................................................................30

THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE.........................................................................................................39

JOACHIM DU BELLAY......................................................................................................................47

WINCKELMANN .................................................................................................................................53

CONCLUSION* ....................................................................................................................................69

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in

the most general terms, to find a universal formula for it. The value of these attempts has most often been in

the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way. Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has

been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to

use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.

Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes

unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract, but in the

most concrete terms possible, to find, not a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most

adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.

"To see the object as in itself it really is," has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and

in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression

as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism

dealsmusic, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human lifeare indeed receptacles of so many

powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or

picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to ME? What effect does it really produce on

me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its

presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions are the original facts with which the

aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primary

data for oneself, or not at all. And he who experiences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at the

discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is

in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experiencemetaphysical questions, as unprofitable as

metaphysical questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, answerable or not, of no interest to him.

The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms

of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less

peculiar or unique kind. This influence he feels, and wishes to explain, analysing it and reducing it to its

elements. To him, the picture, the landscape, the engaging personality in life or in a book, La Gioconda, the

hills of Carrara, Pico of Mirandola, are valuable for their virtues, as we say, in speaking of a herb, a wine, a

gem; for the property each has of affecting one with a special, a unique, impression of pleasure. Our

education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and

variety. And the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the

virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression

of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is

experienced. His end is reached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some

natural element, for himself and others; and the rule for those who would reach this end is stated with great

exactness in the words of a recent critic of SainteBeuve:De se borner a connaitre de pres les belles

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the

intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful

objects. He will remember always that beauty exists in many forms. To him all periods, types, schools of

taste, are in themselves equal. In all ages there have been some excellent workmen, and some excellent work

done. The question he asks is always:In whom did the stir, the genius, the sentiment of the period find

itself? where was the receptacle of its refinement, its elevation, its taste? "The ages are all equal," says

Often it will require great nicety to disengage this virtue from the commoner elements with which it may be

found in combination. Few artists, not Goethe or Byron even, work quite cleanly, casting off all debris, and

leaving us only what the heat of their imagination has wholly fused and transformed. Take, for instance, the

writings of Wordsworth. The heat of his genius, entering into the substance of his work, has crystallised a

part, but only a part, of it; and in that great mass of verse there is much which might well be forgotten. But

scattered up and down it, sometimes fusing and transforming entire compositions, like the Stanzas on

Resolution and Independence, and the Ode on the Recollections of Childhood, sometimes, as if at random,

depositing a fine crystal here or there, in a matter it does not wholly search through and transform, we trace

the action of his unique, incommunicable faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a life in natural things, and

of man's life as a part of nature, drawing strength and colour and character from local influences, from the

hills and streams, and from natural sights and sounds. Well! that is the virtue, the active principle in

Wordsworth's poetry; and then the function of the critic of Wordsworth is to follow up that active principle,

The subjects of the following studies are taken from the history of the Renaissance, and touch what I think

are the chief points in that complex, manysided movement. I have explained in the first of them what I

understand by the word, giving it a much wider scope than was intended by those who originally used it to

denote only that revival of classical antiquity in the fifteenth century which was but one of many results of a

general excitement and enlightening of the human mind, of which the great aim and achievements of what, as

Christian art, is often falsely opposed to the Renaissance, were another result. This outbreak of the human

spirit may be traced far into the middle age itself, with its qualities already clearly pronounced, the care for

physical beauty, the worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which the religious system of the

middle age imposed on the heart and the imagination. I have taken as an example of this movement, this

earlier Renaissance within the middle age itself, and as an expression of its qualities, two little compositions

in early French; not because they constitute the best possible expression of them, but because they help the

unity of my series, inasmuch as the Renaissance ends also in France, in French poetry, in a phase of which

the writings of Joachim du Bellay are in many ways the most perfect illustration; the Renaissance thus

putting forth in France an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, the products of which have to the full that

subtle and delicate sweetness which belongs to a refined and comely decadence; just as its earliest phases

have the freshness which belongs to all periods of growth in art, the charm of ascesis, of the austere and

But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that the interest of the Renaissance mainly lies,in that solemn

fifteenth century which can hardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results in the things of the

intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art, its special and prominent personalities, with their

profound aesthetic charm, but for its general spirit and character, for the ethical qualities of which it is a

The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age, move for the most

part from different startingpoints, and by unconnected roads. As products of the same generation they

partake indeed of a common character, and unconsciously illustrate each other; but of the producers

themselves, each group is solitary, gaining what advantage or disadvantage there may be in intellectual

isolation. Art and poetry, philosophy and the religious life, and that other life of refined pleasure and action in

the open places of the world, are each of them confined to its own circle of ideas, and those who prosecute

either of them are generally little curious of the thoughts of others. There come, however, from time to time,

eras of more favourable conditions, in which the thoughts of men draw nearer together than is their wont, and

the many interests of the intellectual world combine in one complete type of general culture. The fifteenth

century in Italy is one of these happier eras; and what is sometimes said of the age of Pericles is true of that of

Lorenzo:it is an age productive in personalities, manysided, centralised, complete. Here, artists and

philosophers and those whom the action of the world has elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but

breathe a common air, and catch light and heat from each other's thoughts. There is a spirit of general

elevation and enlightenment in which all alike communicate. It is the unity of this spirit which gives unity to

all the various products of the Renaissance; and it is to this intimate alliance with mind, this participation in

the best thoughts which that age produced, that the art of Italy in the fifteenth century owes much of its grave

I have added an essay on Winckelmann, as not incongruous with the studies which precede it, because

Winckelmann, coming in the eighteenth century, really belongs in spirit to an earlier age. By his enthusiasm

for the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, by his Hellenism, his lifelong struggle

to attain to the Greek spirit, he is in sympathy with the humanists of an earlier century. He is the last fruit of

The history of the Renaissance ends in France, and carries us away from Italy to the beautiful cities of the

country of the Loire. But it was in France also, in a very important sense, that the Renaissance had begun; and

French writers, who are so fond of connecting the creations of Italian genius with a French origin, who tell us

how Francis of Assisi took not his name only, but all those notions of chivalry and romantic love which so

deeply penetrated his thoughts, from a French source, how Boccaccio borrowed the outlines of his stories

from the old French fabliaux, and how Dante himself expressly connects the origin of the art of

miniaturepainting with the city of Paris, have often dwelt on this notion of a Renaissance in the end of the

twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, a Renaissance within the limits of the middle age

itselfa brilliant, but in part abortive effort to do for human life and the human mind what was afterwards

done in the fifteenth. The word Renaissance, indeed, is now generally used to denote not merely that revival

of classical antiquity which took place in the fifteenth century, and to which the word was first applied, but a

whole complex movement, of which that revival of classical antiquity was but one element or symptom. For

us the Renaissance is the name of a manysided but yet united movement, in which the love of the things of

the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, the desire for a more liberal and comely way of

conceiving life, make themselves felt, urging those who experience this desire to search out first one and then

another means of intellectual or imaginative enjoyment, and directing them not merely to the discovery of old

and forgotten sources of this enjoyment, but to the divination of fresh sources thereofnew experiences,

new subjects of poetry, new forms of art. Of such feeling there was a great outbreak in the end of the twelfth

and the beginning of the following century. Here and there, under rare and happy conditions, in Pointed

architecture, in the doctrines of romantic love, in the poetry of Provence, the rude strength of the middle age

turns to sweetness; and the taste for sweetness generated there becomes the seed of the classical revival in it,

prompting it constantly to seek after the springs of perfect sweetness in the Hellenic world. And coming after

a long period in which this instinct had been crushed, that true "dark age," in which so many sources of

intellectual and imaginative enjoyment had actually disappeared, this outbreak is rightly called a Renaissance,

Theories which bring into connexion with each other modes of thought and feeling, periods of taste, forms of

art and poetry, which the narrowness of men's minds constantly tends to oppose to each other, have a great

stimulus for the intellect, and are almost always worth understanding. It is so with this theory of a

Renaissance within the middle age, which seeks to establish a continuity between the most characteristic

work of the middle age, the sculpture of Chartres and the windows of Le Mans, and the work of the later

Renaissance, the work of Jean Cousin and Germain Pilon, and thus heals that rupture between the middle age

and the Renaissance which has so often been exaggerated. But it is not so much the ecclesiastical art of the

middle age, its sculpture and paintingwork certainly done in a great measure for pleasure's sake, in which

even a secular, a rebellious spirit often betrays itselfbut rather the profane poetry of the middle age, the

poetry of Provence, and the magnificent aftergrowth of that poetry in Italy and France, which those French

writers have in view, when they speak of this Renaissance within the middle age. In that poetry, earthly

passion, with its intimacy, its freedom, its varietythe liberty of the heartmakes itself felt; and the name

of Abelard, the great clerk and the great lover, connects the expression of this liberty of heart with the free

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

understood it. Every one knows the legend of Abelard, a legend hardly less passionate, certainly not less

characteristic of the middle age, than the legend of Tannhaeuser; how the famous and comely clerk, in whom

Wisdom herself, selfpossessed, pleasant, and discreet, seemed to sit enthroned, came to live in the house of

a canon of the church of NotreDame, where dwelt a girl Heloise, believed to be the old priest's orphan niece,

his love for whom he had testified by giving her an education then unrivalled, so that rumour even asserted

that, through the knowledge of languages, enabling her to penetrate into the mysteries of the older world, she

had become a sorceress, like the Celtic druidesses; and how as Abelard and Heloise sat together at home

there, to refine a little further on the nature of abstract ideas, "Love made himself of the party with them."

You conceive the temptations of the scholar, who, in such dreamy tranquillity, amid the bright and busy

spectacle of the "Island," lived in a world of something like shadows; and that for one who knew so well how

to assign its exact value to every abstract idea, those restraints which lie on the consciences of other men had

been relaxed. It appears that he composed many verses in the vulgar tongue: already the young men sang

them on the quay below the house. Those songs, says M. de Remusat, were probably in the taste of the

Trouveres, of whom he was one of the first in date, or, so to speak, the predecessor. It is the same spirit which

has moulded the famous "letters," written in the quaint Latin of the middle age. At the foot of that early

Gothic tower, which the next generation raised to grace the precincts of Abelard's school, on the "Mountain

of Saint Genevieve," the historian Michelet sees in thought "a terrible assembly; not the hearers of Abelard

alone, fifty bishops, twenty cardinals, two popes, the whole body of scholastic philosophy; not only the

learned Heloise, the teaching of languages, and the Renaissance; but Arnold of Bresciathat is to say, the

revolution." And so from the rooms of this shadowy house by the Seine side we see that spirit going abroad,

with its qualities already well defined, its intimacy, its languid sweetness, its rebellion, its subtle skill in

dividing the elements of human passion, its care for physical beauty, its worship of the body, which

That Abelard is not mentioned in the Divine Comedy may appear a singular omission to the reader of Dante,

who seems to have inwoven into the texture of his work whatever had impressed him as either effective in

colour or spiritually significant among the recorded incidents of actual life. Nowhere in his great poem do we

find the name, nor so much as an allusion to the story of one who had left so deep a mark on the philosophy

of which Dante was an eager student, of whom in the Latin Quarter, and from the lips of scholar or teacher in

the University of Paris, during his sojourn among them, he can hardly have failed to hear. We can only

suppose that he had indeed considered the story and the man, and had abstained from passing judgment as to

his place in the scheme of "eternal justice." In the famous legend of Tannhaeuser, the erring knight makes his

way to Rome, to seek absolution at what was then the centre of Christian religion. "So soon," thought and

said the Pope, "as the staff in his hand should bud and blossom, so soon might the soul of Tannhaeuser be

saved, and no sooner; and it came to pass not long after that the dry wood of a staff which the Pope had

carried in his hand was covered with leaves and flowers." So, in the cloister of Godstow a petrified tree was

shown, of which the nuns told that the fair Rosamond, who had died among them, had declared that, the tree

being then alive and green, it would be changed into stone at the hour of her salvation. When Abelard died,

like Tannhaeuser, he was on his way to Rome: what might have happened had he reached his journey's end is

uncertain; and it is in this uncertain twilight that his relation to the general beliefs of his age has always

remained. In this, as in other things, he prefigures the character of the Renaissance, that movement in which,

in various ways, the human mind wins for itself a new kingdom of feeling and sensation and thought, not

opposed to, but only beyond and independent of the spiritual system then actually realised. The opposition

into which Abelard is thrown, which gives its colour to his career, which breaks his soul to pieces, is a no less

subtle opposition than that between the merely professional, official, hireling ministers of that system, with

their ignorant worship of system for its own sake, and the true child of light, the humanist, with reason and

heart and senses quick, while theirs were almost dead. He reaches out towards, he attains, modes of ideal

living, beyond the prescribed limits of that system, though possibly contained in essential germ within it. As

always happens, the adherents of the poorer and narrower culture had no sympathy with, because no

understanding of, a culture richer and more ample than their own: after the discovery of wheat they would

still live upon acornsapres l'invention du ble ils voulaient encore vivre du gland; and would hear of no

But the human spirit, bold through those needs, was too strong for them. Abelard and Heloise write their

lettersletters with a wonderful outpouring of soulin medieval Latin; and Abelard, though he composes

songs in the vulgar tongue, writes also in Latin those treatises in which he tries to find a ground of reality

below the abstractions of philosophy, as one bent on trying all things by their congruity with human

experience, who had felt the hand of Heloise, and looked into her eyes, and tested the resources of humanity

in her great and energetic nature. Yet it is only a little later, early in the thirteenth century, that French prose

romance begins; and in one of the pretty volumes of the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne some of the most striking

fragments of it may be found, edited with much intelligence. In one of these thirteenthcentury stories, Li

Amitiez de Ami et Amile, that free play of human affection, of the claims of which Abelard's story is an

assertion, makes itself felt in the incidents of a great friendship, a friendship pure and generous, pushed to a

sort of passionate exaltation, and more than faithful unto death. Such comradeship, though instances of it are

to be found everywhere, is still especially a classical motive; Chaucer expressing the sentiment of it so

strongly in an antique tale, that one knows not whether the love of both Palamon and Arcite for Emelya, or of

those two for each other, is the chiefer subject of the Knight's Tale He cast his eyen upon Emelya, And

therewithal he bleynte and cried, ah! As that he stongen were unto the herte. What reader does not refer part

of the bitterness of that cry to the spoiling, already foreseen, of that fair friendship, which had hitherto made

the prison of the two lads sweet with its daily officesthough the friendship is saved at last?

The friendship of Amis and Amile is deepened by the romantic circumstance of an entire personal

resemblance between the two heroes, so that they pass for each other again and again, and thereby into many

strange adventures; that curious interest of the Doppelgaenger, which begins among the stars with the

Dioscuri, being entwined in and out through all the incidents of the story, like an outward token of the inward

similitude of their souls. With this, again, like a second reflexion of that inward similitude, is connected the

conceit of two marvellously beautiful cups, also exactly like each otherchildren's cups, of wood, but

adorned with gold and precious stones. These two cups, which by their resemblance help to bring the friends

together at critical moments, were given to them by the Pope, when he baptized them at Rome, whither the

parents had taken them for that purpose, in thankfulness for their birth, and cross and recross in the narrative,

serving the two heroes almost like living things, and with that wellknown effect of a beautiful object kept

constantly before the eye in a story or poem, of keeping sensation well awake, and giving a certain air of

refinement to all the scenes into which it enters; with a heightening also of that sense of fate, which hangs so

much of the shaping of human life on trivial objects, like Othello's strawberry handkerchief; and witnessing

to the enjoyment of beautiful handiwork by primitive people, almost dazzled by it, so that they give it an

Amis and Amile, then, are true to their comradeship through all trials; and in the end it comes to pass that at a

moment of great need Amis takes the place of Amile in a tournament for life or death. "After this it happened

that a leprosy fell upon Amis, so that his wife would not approach him, and wrought to strangle him; and he

departed from his home, and at last prayed his servants to carry him to the house of Amile"; and it is in what

"His servants, willing to do as he commanded, carried him to the place where Amile was: and they began to

sound their rattles before the court of Amile's house, as lepers are accustomed to do. And when Amile heard

the noise he commanded one of his servants to carry meat and bread to the sick man, and the cup which was

given to him at Rome filled with good wine. And when the servant had done as he was commanded, he

returned and said, Sir, if I had not thy cup in my hand, I should believe that the cup which the sick man has

was thine, for they are alike, the one to the other, in height and fashion. And Amile said, Go quickly and

bring him to me. And when Amis stood before his comrade Amile demanded of him who he was, and how he

had gotten that cup. I am of Briquam le Chastel, answered Amis, and the cup was given to me by the Bishop

of Rome, who baptized me. And when Amile heard that, he knew that it was his comrade Amis, who had

delivered him from death, and won for him the daughter of the King of France to be his wife. And

straightway he fell upon him, and began to weep greatly, and kissed him. And when his wife heard that, she

ran out with her hair in disarray, weeping and distressed exceedingly, for she remembered that it was he who

had slain the false Ardres. And thereupon they placed him in a fair bed, and said to him, Abide with us until

God's will be accomplished in thee, for all that we have is at thy service. So he and the two servants abode

"And it came to pass one night, when Amis and Amile lay in one chamber without other companions, that

God sent His angel Raphael to Amis, who said to him, Amis, art thou asleep? And he, supposing that Amile

had called him, answered and said, I am not asleep, fair comrade! And the angel said to him, Thou hast

answered well, for thou art the comrade of the heavenly citizens.I am Raphael, the angel of our Lord, and

am come to tell thee how thou mayest be healed; for thy prayers are heard. Thou shalt bid Amile, thy

comrade, that he slay his two children and wash thee in their blood, and so thy body shall be made whole.

And Amis said to him, Let not this thing be, that my comrade should become a murderer for my sake. But the

"And Amile also, as if in sleep, heard those words; and he awoke and said, Who is it, my comrade, that hath

spoken with thee? And Amis answered, No man; only I have prayed to our Lord, as I am accustomed. And

Amile said, Not so! but some one hath spoken with thee. Then he arose and went to the door of the chamber;

and finding it shut he said, Tell me, my brother, who it was said those words to thee tonight. And Amis

began to weep greatly, and told him that it was Raphael, the angel of the Lord, who had said to him, Amis,

our Lord commands thee that thou bid Amile slay his two children, and wash thee in their blood, and thou

shalt be healed of thy leprosy. And Amile was greatly disturbed at those words, and said, I would have given

to thee my manservants and my maidservants and all my goods, and thou feignest that an angel hath

spoken to thee that I should slay my two children. And immediately Amis began to weep, and said, I know

that I have spoken to thee a terrible thing, but constrained thereto; I pray thee cast me not away from the

shelter of thy house. And Amile answered that what he had covenanted with him, that he would perform, unto

the hour of his death: But I conjure thee, said he, by the faith which there is between me and thee, and by our

comradeship, and by the baptism we received together at Rome, that thou tell me whether it was man or angel

said that to thee. And Amis answered, So truly as an angel hath spoken to me this night, so may God deliver

"Then Amile began to weep in secret, and thought within himself: If this man was ready to die before the

king for me, shall I not for him slay my children? Shall I not keep faith with him who was faithful to me even

unto death? And Amile tarried no longer, but departed to the chamber of his wife, and bade her go hear the

Sacred Office. And he took a sword, and went to the bed where the children were lying, and found them

asleep. And he lay down over them and began to weep bitterly and said, Hath any man yet heard of a father

who of his own will slew his children? Alas, my children! I am no longer your father, but your cruel

"And the children awoke at the tears of their father, which fell upon them; and they looked up into his face

and began to laugh. And as they were of the age of about three years, he said, Your laughing will be turned

into tears, for your innocent blood must now be shed, and therewith he cut off their heads. Then he laid them

back in the bed, and put the heads upon the bodies, and covered them as though they were sleeping: and with

the blood which he had taken he washed his comrade, and said, Lord Jesus Christ! who hast commanded men

to keep faith on earth, and didst heal the leper by Thy word! cleanse now my comrade, for whose love I have

"Then Amis was cleansed of his leprosy. And Amile clothed his companion in his best robes; and as they

went to the church to give thanks, the bells, by the will of God, rang of their own accord. And when the

people of the city heard that, they ran together to see the marvel. And the wife of Amile, when she saw Amis

and Amile coming, began to ask which of the twain was her husband, and said, I know well the vesture of

them both, but I know not which of them is Amile. And Amile said to her, I am Amile, and my companion is

Amis, who is healed of his sickness. And she was full of wonder, and desired to know in what manner he was

healed. Give thanks to our Lord, answered Amile, but trouble not thyself as to the manner of the healing.

"Now neither the father nor the mother had yet entered where the children were; but the father sighed heavily

because of their death, and the mother asked for them, that they might rejoice together; but Amile said,

Dame! Let the children sleep. And it was already the hour of Tierce. And going in alone to the children to

weep over them, he found them at play in the bed; only, in the place of the swordcuts about their throats was

as it were a thread of crimson. And he took them in his arms and carried them to his wife and said, Rejoice

greatly, for thy children whom I had slain by the commandment of the angel are alive, and by their blood is

There, as I said, is the strength of the old French story. For the Renaissance has not only the sweetness which

it derives from the classical world, but also that curious strength of which there are great resources in the true

middle age. And as I have illustrated the early strength of the Renaissance by the story of Amis and Amile, a

story which comes from the North, in which even a certain racy Teutonic flavour is perceptible, so I shall

illustrate that other element of its early sweetness, a languid excess of sweetness even, by another story

printed in the same volume of the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne, and of about the same date, a story which

comes, characteristically, from the South, and connects itself with the literature of Provence.

The central lovepoetry of Provence, the poetry of the Tenson and the Aubade, of Bernard de Ventadour and

Pierre Vidal, is poetry for the few, for the elect and peculiar people of the kingdom of sentiment. But below

this intenser poetry there was probably a wide range of literature, less serious and elevated, reaching, by

lightness of form and comparative homeliness of interest, an audience which the concentrated passion of

those higher lyrics left untouched. This literature has long since perished, or lives only in later French or

Italian versions. One such version, the only representative of its species, M. Fauriel thought he detected in the

story of Aucassin and Nicolette, written in the French of the latter half of the thirteenth century, and

preserved in a unique manuscript, in the national library of Paris; and there were reasons which made him

divine for it a still more ancient ancestry, traces in it of an Arabian origin, as in a leaf lost out of some early

Arabian Nights.* The little book loses none of its interest through the criticism which finds in it only a

traditional subject, handed on by one people to another; for after passing thus from hand to hand, its outline is

still clear, its surface untarnished; and, like many other stories, books, literary and artistic conceptions of the

middle age, it has come to have in this way a sort of personal history, almost as full of risk and adventure as

that of its own heroes. The writer himself calls the piece a cantefable, a tale told in prose, but with its

incidents and sentiment helped forward by songs, inserted at irregular intervals. In the junctions of the story

itself there are signs of roughness and want of skill, which make one suspect that the prose was only put

together to connect a series of songsa series of songs so moving and attractive that people wished to

heighten and dignify their effect by a regular framework or setting. Yet the songs themselves are of the

simplest kind, not rhymed even, but only imperfectly assonant, stanzas of twenty or thirty lines apiece, all

ending with a similar vowel sound. And here, as elsewhere in that early poetry, much of the interest lies in the

spectacle of the formation of a new artistic sense. A new music is arising, the music of rhymed poetry, and in

the songs of Aucassin and Nicolette, which seem always on the point of passing into true rhyme, but which

halt somehow, and can never quite take flight, you see people just growing aware of the elements of a new

music in their possession, and anticipating how pleasant such music might become. The piece was probably

intended to be recited by a company of trained performers, many of whom, at least for the lesser parts, were

probably children. The songs are introduced by the rubric, Or se cante (ici on chante); and each division of

prose by the rubric, Or dient et content et fabloient (ici on conte). The musical notes of part of the songs have

been preserved; and some of the details are so descriptive that they suggested to M. Fauriel the notion that the

words had been accompanied throughout by dramatic action. That mixture of simplicity and refinement

which he was surprised to find in a composition of the thirteenth century, is shown sometimes in the turn

given to some passing expression or remark; thus, "the Count de Garins was old and frail, his time was

over"Li quens Garins de Beaucaire estoit vix et frales; si avoit son tans trespasse. And then, all is so

realised! One still sees the ancient forest, with its disused roads grown deep with grass, and the place where

seven roads meetu a forkeut set cemin qui s'en vont par le pais; we hear the lighthearted country people

calling each other by their rustic names, and putting forward, as their spokesman, one among them who is

more eloquent and ready than the restli un qui plus fu enparles des autres; for the little book has its

burlesque element also, so that one hears the faint, faroff laughter still. Rough as it is, the piece certainly

possesses this high quality of poetry, that it aims at a purely artistic effect. Its subject is a great sorrow, yet it

claims to be a thing of joy and refreshment, to be entertained not for its matter only, but chiefly for its

*Recently, Aucassin and Nicolette has been edited and translated into English, with much graceful

scholarship, by Mr. F. W. Bourdillon. More recently still we have had a translationa poet's

translationfrom the ingenious and versatile pen of Mr. Andrew Lang. The reader should consult also the

chapter on "The Outdoor Poetry," in Vernon Lee's most interesting Euphorion; being Studies of the Antique

and Mediaeval in the Renaissance, a work abounding in knowledge and insight on the subjects of which it

For the student of manners, and of the old language and literature, it has much interest of a purely antiquarian

order. To say of an ancient literary composition that it has an antiquarian interest, often means that it has no

distinct aesthetic interest for the reader of today. Antiquarianism, by a purely historical effort, by putting its

object in perspective, and setting the reader in a certain point of view, from which what gave pleasure to the

past is pleasurable for him also, may often add greatly to the charm we receive from ancient literature. But

the first condition of such aid must be a real, direct, aesthetic charm in the thing itself; unless it has that

charm, unless some purely artistic quality went to its original making, no merely antiquarian effort can ever

give it an aesthetic value, or make it a proper subject of aesthetic criticism. This quality, wherever it exists, it

is always pleasant to define, and discriminate from the sort of borrowed interest which an old play, or an old

story, may very likely acquire through a true antiquarianism. The story of Aucassin and Nicolette has

something of this quality. Aucassin, the only son of Count Garins of Beaucaire, is passionately in love with

Nicolette, a beautiful girl of unknown parentage, bought of the Saracens, whom his father will not permit him

to marry. The story turns on the adventures of these two lovers, until at the end of the piece their mutual

fidelity is rewarded. These adventures are of the simplest sort, adventures which seem to be chosen for the

happy occasion they afford of keeping the eye of the fancy, perhaps the outward eye, fixed on pleasant

objects, a garden, a ruined tower, the little hut of flowers which Nicolette constructs in the forest whither she

has escaped from her enemies, as a token to Aucassin that she has passed that way. All the charm of the piece

is in its details, in a turn of peculiar lightness and grace given to the situations and traits of sentiment,

All through it one feels the influence of that faint air of overwrought delicacy, almost of wantonness, which

was so strong a characteristic of the poetry of the Troubadours. The Troubadours themselves were often men

of great rank; they wrote for an exclusive audience, people of much leisure and great refinement, and they

came to value a type of personal beauty which has in it but little of the influence of the open air and sunshine.

There is a languid Eastern deliciousness in the very scenery of the story, the fullblown roses, the chamber

painted in some mysterious manner where Nicolette is imprisoned, the cool brown marble, the almost

nameless colours, the odour of plucked grass and flowers. Nicolette herself well becomes this scenery, and is

the best illustration of the quality I meanthe beautiful, weird, foreign girl, whom the shepherds take for a

fay, who has the knowledge of simples, the healing and beautifying qualities of leaves and flowers, whose

skilful touch heals Aucassin's sprained shoulder, so that he suddenly leaps from the ground; the mere sight of

whose white flesh, as she passed the place where he lay, healed a pilgrim stricken with sore disease, so that

he rose up, and returned to his own country. With this girl Aucassin is so deeply in love that he forgets all his

knightly duties. At last Nicolette is shut up to get her out of his way, and perhaps the prettiest passage in the

whole piece is the fragment of prose which describes her escape from this place:

"Aucassin was put in prison, as you have heard, and Nicolette remained shut up in her chamber. It was

summertime, in the month of May, when the days are warm and long and clear, and the nights coy and

"One night Nicolette, lying on her bed, saw the moon shine clear through the little window, and heard the

nightingale sing in the garden, and then came the memory of Aucassin, whom she so much loved. She

thought of the Count Garins of Beaucaire, who so mortally hated her, and, to be rid of her, might at any

moment cause her to be burned or drowned. She perceived that the old woman who kept her company was

asleep; she rose and put on the fairest gown she had; she took the bedclothes and the towels, and knotted

them together like a cord, as far as they would go. Then she tied the end to a pillar of the window, and let

herself slip down quite softly into the garden, and passed straight across it, to reach the town.

"Her hair was yellow in small curls, her smiling eyes bluegreen, her face clear and feat, the little lips very

red, the teeth small and white; and the daisies which she crushed in passing, holding her skirt high behind and

"She came to the gardengate and opened it, and walked through the streets of Beaucaire, keeping on the

dark side of the way to avoid the light of the moon, which shone quietly in the sky. She walked as fast as she

could, until she came to the tower where Aucassin was. The tower was set about with pillars, here and there.

She pressed herself against one of the pillars, wrapped herself closely in her mantle, and putting her face to a

chink of the tower, which was old and ruined, she heard Aucassin crying bitterly within, and when she had

But scattered up and down through this lighter matter, always tinged with humour and often passing into

burlesque, which makes up the general substance of the piece, there are morsels of a different quality, touches

of some intenser sentiment, coming it would seem from the profound and energetic spirit of the Provencal

poetry itself, to which the inspiration of the book has been referred. Let me gather up these morsels of deeper

colour, these expressions of the ideal intensity of love, the motive which really unites together the fragments

of the little composition. Dante, the perfect flower of ideal love, has recorded how the tyranny of that "Lord

of terrible aspect" became actually physical, blinding his senses, and suspending his bodily forces. In this

Dante is but the central expression and type of experiences known well enough to the initiated, in that

passionate age. Aucassin represents this ideal intensity of passion Aucassin, li biax, li blons, Li gentix, li

amorous; the slim, tall, debonair figure, dansellon, as the singers call him, with curled yellow hair, and eyes

of vair, who faints with love, as Dante fainted, who rides all day through the forest in search of Nicolette,

while the thorns tear his flesh, so that one night have traced him by the blood upon the grass, and who weeps

at evening because he has not found herwho has the malady of his love, so that he neglects all knightly

duties. Once he is induced to put himself at the head of his people, that they, seeing him before them, might

have more heart to defend themselves; then a song relates how the sweet, grave figure goes forth to battle, in

dainty, tightlaced armour. It is the very image of the Provencal lovegod, no longer a child, but grown to

pensive youth, as Pierre Vidal met him, riding on a white horse, fair as the morning, his vestment

embroidered with flowers. He rode on through the gates into the open plain beyond. But as he went, that great

malady of his love came upon him, so that the bridle fell from his hands; and like one who sleeps walking, he

was carried on into the midst of his enemies, and heard them talking together how they might most

One of the strongest characteristics of that outbreak of the reason and the imagination, of that assertion of the

liberty of the heart, in the middle age, which I have termed a medieval Renaissance, was its antinomianism,

its spirit of rebellion and revolt against the moral and religious ideas of the time. In their search after the

pleasures of the senses and the imagination, in their care for beauty, in their worship of the body, people were

impelled beyond the bounds of the Christian ideal; and their love became sometimes a strange idolatry, a

strange rival religion. It was the return of that ancient Venus, not dead, but only hidden for a time in the caves

of the Venusberg, of those old pagan gods still going to and fro on the earth, under all sorts of disguises. And

this element in the middle age, for the most part ignored by those writers who have treated it preeminently

as the "Age of Faith"this rebellious and antinomian element, the recognition of which has made the

delineation of the middle age by the writers of the Romantic school in France, by Victor Hugo for instance in

NotreDame de Paris, so suggestive and exciting, is found alike in the history of Abelard and the legend of

Tannhaeuser. More and more, as we come to mark changes and distinctions of temper in what is often in one

allembracing confusion called the middle age, this rebellious element, this sinister claim for liberty of heart

and thought, comes to the surface. The Albigensian movement, connected so strangely with the history of

Provencal poetry, is deeply tinged with it. A touch of it makes the Franciscan order, with its poetry, its

mysticism, its "illumination," from the point of view of religious authority, justly suspect. It influences the

thoughts of those obscure prophetical writers, like Joachim of Flora, strange dreamers in a world of flowery

rhetoric of that third and final dispensation of a "spirit of freedom," in which law shall have passed away. Of

this spirit Aucassin and Nicolette contains perhaps the most famous expression: it is the answer Aucassin

gives when he is threatened with the pains of hell, if he makes Nicolette his mistress. A creature wholly of

affection and the senses, he sees on the way to paradise only a feeble company of aged priests, "clinging day

and night to the chapel altars," barefoot or in patched sandals. With or even without Nicolette, "his sweet

mistress whom he so much loves," he, for his part, is ready to start on the way to hell, along with "the good

scholars," as he says, and the actors, and the fine horsemen dead in battle, and the men of fashion,* and "the

fair courteous ladies who had two or three chevaliers apiece beside their own true lords," all gay with music,

*Parage, peeragewhich came to signify all that ambitious youth affected most on the outside of life, in that

But in the House Beautiful the saints too have their place; and the student of the Renaissance has this

advantage over the student of the emancipation of the human mind in the Reformation, or the French

Revolution, that in tracing the footsteps of humanity to higher levels, he is not beset at every turn by the

inflexibilities and antagonisms of some wellrecognised controversy, with rigidly defined opposites,

exhausting the intelligence and limiting one's sympathies. The opposition of the professional defenders of a

mere system to that more sincere and general play of the forces of human mind and character, which I have

noted as the secret of Abelard's struggle, is indeed always powerful. But the incompatibility of souls really

"fair" is not essential; and within the enchanted region of the Renaissance, one needs not be for ever on one's

guard: here there are no fixed parties, no exclusions: all breathes of that unity of culture in which "whatsoever

things are comely" are reconciled, for the elevation and adorning of our spirits. And just in proportion as

those who took part in the Renaissance become centrally representative of it, just so much the more is this

condition realised in them. The wicked popes, and the loveless tyrants, who from time to time became its

patrons, or mere speculators in its fortunes, lend themselves easily to disputations, and, from this side or that,

the spirit of controversy lays just hold upon them. But the painter of the Last Supper, with his kindred, live in

a land where controversy has no breathingplace, and refuse to be classified. In the story of Aucassin and

Nicolette, in the literature which it represents, the note of defiance, of the opposition of one system to

another, is sometimes harsh: let me conclude with a morsel from Amis and Amile, in which the harmony of

human interests is still entire. For the story of the great traditional friendship, in which, as I said, the liberty of

the heart makes itself felt, seems, as we have it, to have been written by a monkLa vie des saints martyrs

Amis et Amile. It was not till the end of the seventeenth century that their names were finally excluded from

the martyrology; and their story ends with this monkish miracle of earthly comradeship, more than faithful

"For, as God had united them in their lives in one accord, so they were not divided in their death, falling

together side by side, with a host of other brave men, in battle for King Charles at Mortara, so called from

that great slaughter. And the bishops gave counsel to the king and queen that they should bury the dead, and

build a church in that place; and their counsel pleased the king greatly; and there were built there two

churches, the one by commandment of the king in honour of Saint Oseige, and the other by commandment of

"And the king caused the two chests of stone to be brought in the which the bodies of Amis and Amile lay;

and Amile was carried to the church of Saint Peter, and Amis to the church of Saint Oseige; and the other

corpses were buried, some in one place and some in the other. But lo! next morning, the body of Amile in his

coffin was found lying in the church of Saint Oseige, beside the coffin of Amis his comrade. Behold then this

"This miracle God did, who gave to His disciples power to remove mountains. And by reason of this miracle

the king and queen remained in that place for a space of thirty days, and performed the offices of the dead

who were slain, and honoured the said churches with great gifts: and the bishop ordained many clerks to

serve in the church of Saint Oseige, and commanded them that they should guard duly, with great devotion,

No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian

scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece. To reconcile

forms of sentiment which at first sight seem incompatible, to adjust the various products of the human mind

to each other in one manysided type of intellectual culture, to give humanity, for heart and imagination to

feed upon, as much as it could possibly receive, belonged to the generous instincts of that age. An earlier and

simpler generation had seen in the gods of Greece so many malignant spirits, the defeated but still living

centres of the religion of darkness, struggling, not always in vain, against the kingdom of light. Little by little,

as the natural charm of pagan story reasserted itself over minds emerging out of barbarism, the religious

significance which had once belonged to it was lost sight of, and it came to be regarded as the subject of a

purely artistic or poetical treatment. But it was inevitable that from time to time minds should arise, deeply

enough impressed by its beauty and power to ask themselves whether the religion of Greece was indeed a

rival of the religion of Christ; for the older gods had rehabilitated themselves, and men's allegiance was

divided. And the fifteenth century was an impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that it

consecrated everything with which art had to do as a religious object. The restored Greek literature had made

it familiar, at least in Plato, with a style of expression concerning the earlier gods, which had about it much of

the warmth and unction of a Christian hymn. It was too familiar with such language to regard mythology as a

"Let me briefly remind the reader"says Heine, in the Gods in Exile, an essay full of that strange blending

of sentiment which is characteristic of the traditions of the middle age concerning the pagan religions"how

the gods of the older world, at the time of the definite triumph of Christianity, that is, in the third century, fell

into painful embarrassments, which greatly resembled certain tragical situations of their earlier life. They

now found themselves beset by the same troublesome necessities to which they had once before been

exposed during the primitive ages, in that revolutionary epoch when the Titans broke out of the custody of

Orcus, and, piling Pelion on Ossa, scaled Olympus. Unfortunate Gods! They had then to take flight

ignominiously, and hide themselves among us here on earth, under all sorts of disguises. The larger number

betook themselves to Egypt, where for greater security they assumed the forms of animals, as is generally

known. Just in the same way, they had to take flight again, and seek entertainment in remote hidingplaces,

when those iconoclastic zealots, the black brood of monks, broke down all the temples, and pursued the gods

with fire and curses. Many of these unfortunate emigrants, now entirely deprived of shelter and ambrosia,

must needs take to vulgar handicrafts, as a means of earning their bread. Under these circumstances, many

whose sacred groves had been confiscated, let themselves out for hire as woodcutters in Germany, and were

forced to drink beer instead of nectar. Apollo seems to have been content to take service under graziers, and

as he had once kept the cows of Admetus, so he lived now as a shepherd in Lower Austria. Here, however,

having become suspected on account of his beautiful singing, he was recognised by a learned monk as one of

the old pagan gods, and handed over to the spiritual tribunal. On the rack he confessed that he was the god

Apollo; and before his execution he begged that he might be suffered to play once more upon the lyre, and to

sing a song. And he played so touchingly, and sang with such magic, and was withal so beautiful in form and

feature, that all the women wept, and many of them were so deeply impressed that they shortly afterwards fell

sick. And some time afterwards the people wished to drag him from the grave again, so that a stake might be

driven through his body, in the belief that he had been a vampire, and that the sick women would by this

The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed than by what it

achieved. Much which it aspired to do, and did but imperfectly or mistakenly, was accomplished in what is

called the eclaircissement of the eighteenth century, or in our own generation; and what really belongs to the

rival of the fifteenth century is but the leading instinct, the curiosity, the initiatory idea. It is so with this very

question of the reconciliation of the religion of antiquity with the religion of Christ. A modern scholar

occupied by this problem might observe that all religions may be regarded as natural products; that, at least in

their origin, their growth, and decay, they have common laws, and are not to be isolated from the other

movements of the human mind in the periods in which they respectively prevailed; that they arise

spontaneously out of the human mind, as expressions of the varying phases of its sentiment concerning the

unseen world; that every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people

in which it was produced. He might go on to observe that each has contributed something to the development

of the religious sense, and ranging them as so many stages in the gradual education of the human mind,

justify the existence of each. The basis of the reconciliation of the religions of the world would thus be the

inexhaustible activity and creativeness of the human mind itself, in which all religions alike have their root,

and in which all alike are reconciled; just as the fancies of childhood and the thoughts of old age meet and are

laid to rest, in the experience of the individual. Far different was the method followed by the scholars of the

fifteenth century. They lacked the very rudiments of the historic sense, which, by an imaginative act, throws

itself back into a world unlike one's own, and estimates every intellectual creation in its connexion with the

age from which it proceeded; they had no idea of development, of the differences of ages, of the gradual

education of the human race. In their attempts to reconcile the religions of the world, they were thus thrown

back upon the quicksand of allegorical interpretation. The religions of the world were to be reconciled, not as

successive stages, in a gradual development of the religious sense, but as subsisting side by side, and

substantially in agreement with each other. And here the first necessity was to misrepresent the language, the

conceptions, the sentiments, it was proposed to compare and reconcile. Plato and Homer must be made to

speak agreeably to Moses. Set side by side, the mere surfaces could never unite in any harmony of design.

Therefore one must go below the surface, and bring up the supposed secondary, or still more remote

meaning, that diviner signification held in reserve, in recessu divinius aliquid, latent in some stray touch of

And yet as a curiosity of the human mind, a "madhousecell," if you will, into which we peep for a moment,

and see it at work weaving strange fancies, the allegorical interpretation of the fifteenth century has its

interest. With its strange web of imagery, its quaint conceits, its unexpected combinations and subtle

moralising, it is an element in the local colour of a great age. It illustrates also the faith of that age in all

oracles, its desire to hear all voices, its generous belief that nothing which had ever interested the human

mind could wholly lose its vitality. It is the counterpart, though certainly the feebler counterpart, of that

practical truce and reconciliation of the gods of Greece with the Christian religion, which is seen in the art of

the time; and it is for his share in this work, and because his own story is a sort of analogue or visible

equivalent to the expression of this purpose in his writings, that something of a general interest still belongs

to the name of Pico della Mirandola, whose life, written by his nephew Francis, seemed worthy, for some

touch of sweetness in it, to be translated out of the original Latin by Sir Thomas More, that great lover of

Italian culture, among whose works this life of Pico, Earl of Mirandola, and a great lord of Italy, as he calls

Marsilio Ficino has told us how Pico came to Florence. It was the very daysome day probably in the year

1482on which Ficino had finished his famous translation of Plato into Latin, the work to which he had

been dedicated from childhood by Cosmo de' Medici, in furtherance of his desire to resuscitate the

knowledge of Plato among his fellowcitizens. Florence indeed, as M. Renan has pointed out, had always

had an affinity for the mystic and dreamy philosophy of Plato, while the colder and more practical philosophy

of Aristotle had flourished in Padua, and other cities of the north; and the Florentines, though they knew

perhaps very little about him, had had the name of the great idealist often on their lips. To increase this

knowledge, Cosmo had founded the Platonic academy, with periodical discussions at the villa of Careggi.

The fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the council in 1438 for the reconciliation of the Greek and Latin

Churches, had brought to Florence many a needy Greek scholar. And now the work was completed, the door

of the mystical temple lay open to all who could construe Latin, and the scholar rested from his labour; when

there was introduced into his study, where a lamp burned continually before the bust of Plato, as other men

burned lamps before their favourite saints, a young man fresh from a journey, "of feature and shape seemly

and beauteous, of stature goodly and high, of flesh tender and soft, his visage lovely and fair, his colour

white, intermingled with comely reds, his eyes grey, and quick of look, his teeth white and even, his hair

yellow and abundant," and trimmed with more than the usual artifice of the time. It is thus that Sir Thomas

More translates the words of the biographer of Pico, who, even in outward form and appearance, seems an

image of that inward harmony and completeness, of which he is so perfect an example. The word mystic has

been usually derived from a Greek word which signifies to shut, as if one shut one's lips, brooding on what

cannot be uttered; but the Platonists themselves derive it rather from the act of shutting the eyes, that one may

see the more, inwardly. Perhaps the eyes of the mystic Ficino, now long past the midway of life, had come to

be thus halfclosed; but when a young man, not unlike the archangel Raphael, as the Florentines of that age

depicted him in his wonderful walk with Tobit, or Mercury, as he might have appeared in a painting by

Sandro Botticelli or Piero di Cosimo, entered his chamber, he seems to have thought there was something not

wholly earthly about him; at least, he ever afterwards believed that it was not without the cooperation of the

stars that the stranger had arrived on that day. For it happened that they fell into a conversation, deeper and

more intimate than men usually fall into at first sight. During this conversation Ficino formed the design of

devoting his remaining years to the translation of Plotinus, that new Plato, in whom the mystical element in

the Platonic philosophy had been worked out to the utmost limit of vision and ecstasy; and it is in dedicating

this translation to Lorenzo de' Medici that Ficino has recorded these incidents.

It was after many wanderings, wanderings of the intellect as well as physical journeys, that Pico came to rest

at Florence. He was then about twenty years old, having been born in 1463. He was called Giovanni at

baptism; Pico, like all his ancestors, from Picus, nephew of the Emperor Constantine, from whom they

claimed to be descended; and Mirandola, from the place of his birth, a little town afterwards part of the duchy

of Modena, of which small territory his family had long been the feudal lords. Pico was the youngest of the

family, and his mother, delighting in his wonderful memory, sent him at the age of fourteen to the famous

school of law at Bologna. From the first, indeed, she seems to have had some presentiment of his future fame,

for, with a faith in omens characteristic of her time, she believed that a strange circumstance had happened at

the time of Pico's birththe appearance of a circular flame which suddenly vanished away, on the wall of the

chamber where she lay. He remained two years at Bologna; and then, with an inexhaustible, unrivalled thirst

for knowledge, the strange, confused, uncritical learning of that age, passed through the principal schools of

Italy and France, penetrating, as he thought, into the secrets of all ancient philosophies, and many eastern

languages. And with this flood of erudition came the generous hope, so often disabused, of reconciling the

philosophers with each other, and all alike with the Church. At last he came to Rome. There, like some

knighterrant of philosophy, he offered to defend nine hundred bold paradoxes, drawn from the most

opposite sources, against all comers. But the pontifical court was led to suspect the orthodoxy of some of

these propositions, and even the reading of the book which contained them was forbidden by the Pope. It was

not until 1493 that Pico was finally absolved, by a brief of Alexander the Sixth. Ten years before that date he

had arrived at Florence; an early instance of those who, after following the vain hope of an impossible

reconciliation from system to system, have at last fallen back unsatisfied on the simplicities of their

The oration which Pico composed for the opening of this philosophical tournament still remains; its subject is

the dignity of human nature, the greatness of man. In common with nearly all medieval speculation, much of

Pico's writing has this for its drift; and in common also with it, Pico's theory of that dignity is founded on a

misconception of the place in nature both of the earth and of man. For Pico the earth is the centre of the

universe: and around it, as a fixed and motionless point, the sun and moon and stars revolve, like diligent

servants or ministers. And in the midst of all is placed man, nodus et vinculum mundi, the bond or copula of

the world, and the "interpreter of nature": that famous expression of Bacon's really belongs to Pico. Tritum

est in scholis, he says, esse hominem minorem mundum, in quo mixtum ex elementis corpus et spiritus

coelestis et plantarum anima vegetalis et brutorum sensus et ratio et angelica mens et Dei similitudo

conspicitur."It is a commonplace of the schools that man is a little world, in which we may discern a body

mingled of earthy elements, and ethereal breath, and the vegetable life of plants, and the senses of the lower

animals, and reason, and the intelligence of angels, and a likeness to God."A commonplace of the schools!

But perhaps it had some new significance and authority, when men heard one like Pico reiterate it; and, false

as its basis was, the theory had its use. For this high dignity of man, thus bringing the dust under his feet into

sensible communion with the thoughts and affections of the angels, was supposed to belong to him, not as

renewed by a religious system, but by his own natural right. The proclamation of it was a counterpoise to the

increasing tendency of medieval religion to depreciate man's nature, to sacrifice this or that element in it, to

make it ashamed of itself, to keep the degrading or painful accidents of it always in view. It helped man

onward to that reassertion of himself, that rehabilitation of human nature, the body, the senses, the heart, the

intelligence, which the Renaissance fulfils. And yet to read a page of one of Pico's forgotten books is like a

glance into one of those ancient sepulchres, upon which the wanderer in classical lands has sometimes

stumbled, with the old disused ornaments and furniture of a world wholly unlike ours still fresh in them. That

whole conception of nature is so different from our own. For Pico the world is a limited place, bounded by

actual crystal walls, and a material firmament; it is like a painted toy, like that map or system of the world,

held, as a great target or shield, in the hands of the greyheaded father of all things, in one of the earlier

frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa. How different from this childish dream is our own conception of nature,

with its unlimited space, its innumerable suns, and the earth but a mote in the beam; how different the strange

new awe, or superstition, with which it fills our minds! "The silence of those infinite spaces," says Pascal,

contemplating a starlight night, "the silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me"Le silence eternel de ces

He was already almost wearied out when he came to Florence. He had loved much and been beloved by

women, "wandering over the crooked hills of delicious pleasure"; but their reign over him was over, and long

before Savonarola's famous "bonfire of vanities," he had destroyed those lovesongs in the vulgar tongue,

which would have been such a relief to us, after the scholastic prolixity of his Latin writings. It was in

another spirit that he composed a Platonic commentary, the only work of his in Italian which has come down

to us, on the "Song of Divine Love"secondo la mente ed opinione dei Platonici"according to the mind

and opinion of the Platonists," by his friend Hieronymo Beniveni, in which, with an ambitious array of every

sort of learning, and a profusion of imagery borrowed indifferently from the astrologers, the Cabala, and

Homer, and Scripture, and Dionysius the Areopagite, he attempts to define the stages by which the soul

passes from the earthly to the unseen beauty. A change indeed had passed over him, as if the chilling touch of

the abstract and disembodied beauty Platonists profess to long for was already upon him; and perhaps it was a

sense of this, coupled with that overbrightness which in the popular imagination always betokens an early

death, that made Camilla Rucellai, one of those prophetic women whom the preaching of Savonarola had

raised up in Florence, declare, seeing him for the first time, that he would depart in the time of

liliesprematurely, that is, like the fieldflowers which are withered by the scorching sun almost as soon as

they are sprung up. It was now that he wrote down those thoughts on the religious life which Sir Thomas

More turned into English, and which another English translator thought worthy to be added to the books of

the Imitation. "It is not hard to know God, provided one will not force oneself to define Him":has been

thought a great saying of Joubert's. "Love God," Pico writes to Angelo Politian, "we rather may, than either

know Him, or by speech utter Him. And yet had men liefer by knowledge never find that which they seek,

Yet he who had this fine touch for spiritual things did notand in this is the enduring interest of his

storyeven after his conversion, forget the old gods. He is one of the last who seriously and sincerely

entertained the claims on men's faith of the pagan religions; he is anxious to ascertain the true significance of

the obscurest legend, the lightest tradition concerning them. With many thoughts and many influences which

led him in that direction, he did not become a monk; only he became gentle and patient in disputation;

retaining "somewhat of the old plenty, in dainty viand and silver vessel," he gave over the greater part of his

property to his friend, the mystical poet Beniveni, to be spent by him in works of charity, chiefly in the sweet

charity of providing marriagedowries for the peasant girls of Florence. His end came in 1494, when, amid

the prayers and sacraments of Savonarola, he died of fever, on the very day on which Charles the Eighth

entered Florence, the seventeenth of November, yet in the time of liliesthe lilies of the shield of France, as

the people now said, remembering Camilla's prophecy. He was buried in the cloister at Saint Mark's, in the

It is because the life of Pico, thus lying down to rest in the Dominican habit, yet amid thoughts of the older

gods, himself like one of those comely divinities, reconciled indeed to the new religion, but still with a

tenderness for the earlier life, and desirous literally to "bind the ages each to each by natural piety"it is

because this life is so perfect a parallel to the attempt made in his writings to reconcile Christianity with the

ideas of paganism, that Pico, in spite of the scholastic character of those writings, is really interesting. Thus,

in the Heptaplus, or Discourse on the Seven Days of the Creation, he endeavours to reconcile the accounts

which pagan philosophy had given of the origin of the world with the account given in the books of

Mosesthe Timaeus of Plato with the book of Genesis. The Heptaplus is dedicated to Lorenzo the

Magnificent, whose interest, the preface tells us, in the secret wisdom of Moses is well known. If Moses

seems in his writings simple and even popular, rather than either a philosopher or a theologian, that is

because it was an institution with the ancient philosophers, either not to speak of divine things at all, or to

speak of them dissemblingly: hence their doctrines were called mysteries. Taught by them, Pythagoras

became so great a "master of silence," and wrote almost nothing, thus hiding the words of God in his heart,

and speaking wisdom only among the perfect. In explaining the harmony between Plato and Moses, Pico lays

hold on every sort of figure and analogy, on the double meanings of words, the symbols of the Jewish ritual,

the secondary meanings of obscure stories in the later Greek mythologists. Everywhere there is an unbroken

system of correspondences. Every object in the terrestrial world is an analogue, a symbol or counterpart, of

some higher reality in the starry heavens, and this again of some law of the angelic life in the world beyond

the stars. There is the element of fire in the material world; the sun is the fire of heaven; and in the

supercelestial world there is the fire of the seraphic intelligence. "But behold how they differ! The

elementary fire burns, the heavenly fire vivifies, the supercelestial fire loves." In this way, every natural

object, every combination of natural forces, every accident in the lives of men, is filled with higher meanings.

Omens, prophecies, supernatural coincidences, accompany Pico himself all through life. There are oracles in

every tree and mountaintop, and a significance in every accidental combination of the events of life.

This constant tendency to symbolism and imagery gives Pico's work a figured style, by which it has some

real resemblance to Plato's, and he differs from other mystical writers of his time by a real desire to know his

authorities at first hand. He reads Plato in Greek, Moses in Hebrew, and by this his work really belongs to the

higher culture. Above all, we have a constant sense in reading him, that his thoughts, however little their

positive value may be, are connected with springs beneath them of deep and passionate emotion; and when he

explains the grades or steps by which the soul passes from the love of a physical object to the love of unseen

beauty, and unfolds the analogies between this process and other movements upward of human thought, there

is a glow and vehemence in his words which remind one of the manner in which his own brief existence

I said that the Renaissance of the fifteenth century was in many things great, rather by what it designed or

aspired to do, than by what it actually achieved. It remained for a later age to conceive the true method of

effecting a scientific reconciliation of Christian sentiment with the imagery, the legends, the theories about

the world, of pagan poetry and philosophy. For that age the only possible reconciliation was an imaginative

one, and resulted from the efforts of artists, trained in Christian schools, to handle pagan subjects; and of this

artistic reconciliation work like Pico's was but the feebler counterpart. Whatever philosophers had to say on

one side or the other, whether they were successful or not in their attempts to reconcile the old to the new,

and to justify the expenditure of so much care and thought on the dreams of a dead faith, the imagery of the

Greek religion, the direct charm of its story, were by artists valued and cultivated for their own sake. Hence a

new sort of mythology, with a tone and qualities of its own. When the shipload of sacred earth from the soil

of Jerusalem was mingled with the common clay in the Campo Santo at Pisa, a new flower grew up from it,

unlike any flower men had seen before, the anemone with its concentric rings of strangely blended colour,

still to be found by those who search long enough for it, in the long grass of the Maremma. Just such a

strange flower was that mythology of the Italian Renaissance, which grew up from the mixture of two

traditions, two sentiments, the sacred and the profane. Classical story was regarded as so much imaginative

material to be received and assimilated. It did not come into men's minds to ask curiously of science

concerning its origin, its primary form and import, its meaning for those who projected it. It sank into their

minds, to issue forth again with all the tangle about it of medieval sentiment and ideas. In the Doni Madonna

in the Tribune of the Uffizii, Michelangelo actually brings the pagan religion, and with it the unveiled human

form, the sleepylooking fauns of a Dionysiac revel, into the presence of the Madonna, as simpler painters

had introduced there other products of the earth, birds or flowers; and he has given to that Madonna herself

It is because this picturesque union of contrasts, belonging properly to the art of the close of the fifteenth

century, pervades, in Pico della Mirandola, an actual person, that the figure of Pico is so attractive. He will

not let one go; he wins one on, in spite of oneself, to turn again to the pages of his forgotten books, although

we know already that the actual solution proposed in them will satisfy us as little as perhaps it satisfied him.

It is said that in his eagerness for mysterious learning he once paid a great sum for a collection of cabalistic

manuscripts, which turned out to be forgeries; and the story might well stand as a parable of all he ever

seemed to gain in the way of actual knowledge. He had sought knowledge, and passed from system to

system, and hazarded much; but less for the sake of positive knowledge than because he believed there was a

spirit of order and beauty in knowledge, which would come down and unite what men's ignorance had

divided, and renew what time had made dim. And so, while his actual work has passed away, yet his own

qualities are still active, and he himself remains, as one alive in the grave, caesiis et vigilibus oculis, as his

biographer describes him, and with that sanguine, clear skin, decenti rubore interspersa, as with the light of

morning upon it; and he has a true place in that group of great Italians who fill the end of the fifteenth century

with their names, he is a true HUMANIST. For the essence of humanism is that belief of which he seems

never to have doubted, that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its

vitalityno language they have spoken, nor oracle beside which they have hushed their voices, no dream

which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been

In Leonardo's treatise on painting only one contemporary is mentioned by NameSandro Botticelli. This

preeminence may be due to chance only, but to some will rather appear a result of deliberate judgment; for

people have begun to find out the charm of Botticelli's work, and his name, little known in the last century, is

quietly becoming important. In the middle of the fifteenth century he had already anticipated much of that

meditative subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to the great imaginative workmen of its close.

Leaving the simple religion which had occupied the followers of Giotto for a century, and the simple

naturalism which had grown out of it, a thing of birds and flowers only, he sought inspiration in what to him

were works of the modern world, the writings of Dante and Boccaccio, and in new readings of his own of

classical stories: or, if he painted religious incidents, painted them with an undercurrent of original

sentiment, which touches you as the real matter of the picture through the veil of its ostensible subject. What

is the peculiar sensation, what is the peculiar quality of pleasure, which his work has the property of exciting

in us, and which we cannot get elsewhere? For this, especially when he has to speak of a comparatively

In an age when the lives of artists were full of adventure, his life is almost colourless. Criticism indeed has

cleared away much of the gossip which Vasari accumulated, has touched the legend of Lippo and Lucrezia,

and rehabilitated the character of Andrea del Castagno; but in Botticelli's case there is no legend to dissipate.

He did not even go by his true name: Sandro is a nickname, and his true name is Filipepi, Botticelli being

only the name of the goldsmith who first taught him art. Only two things happened to him, two things which

he shared with other artists:he was invited to Rome to paint in the Sistine Chapel, and he fell in later life

under the influence of Savonarola, passing apparently almost out of men's sight in a sort of religious

melancholy, which lasted till his death in 1515, according to the received date. Vasari says that he plunged

into the study of Dante, and even wrote a comment on the Divine Comedy. But it seems strange that he

should have lived on inactive so long; and one almost wishes that some document might come to light,

which, fixing the date of his death earlier, might relieve one, in thinking of him, of his dejected old age.

He is before all things a poetical painter, blending the charm of story and sentiment, the medium of the art of

poetry, with the charm of line and colour, the medium of abstract painting. So he becomes the illustrator of

Dante. In a few rare examples of the edition of 1481, the blank spaces, left at the beginning of every canto for

the hand of the illuminator, have been filled, as far as the nineteenth canto of the Inferno, with impressions of

engraved plates, seemingly by way of experiment, for in the copy in the Bodleian Library, one of the three

impressions it contains has been printed upside down, and much awry, in the midst of the luxurious printed

page. Giotto, and the followers of Giotto, with their almost childish religious aim, had not learned to put that

weight of meaning into outward things, light, colour, everyday gesture, which the poetry of the Divine

Comedy involves, and before the fifteenth century Dante could hardly have found an illustrator. Botticelli's

illustrations are crowded with incident, blending, with a naive carelessness of pictorial propriety, three phases

of the same scene into one plate. The grotesques, so often a stumblingblock to painters who forget that the

words of a poet, which only feebly present an image to the mind, must be lowered in key when translated into

form, make one regret that he has not rather chosen for illustration the more subdued imagery of the

Purgatorio. Yet in the scene of those who "go down quick into hell," there is an invention about the fire

taking hold on the upturned soles of the feet, which proves that the design is no mere translation of Dante's

words, but a true painter's vision; while the scene of the Centaurs wins one at once, for, forgetful of the actual

circumstances of their appearance, Botticelli has gone off with delight on the thought of the Centaurs

themselves, bright, small creatures of the woodland, with arch baby face and mignon forms, drawing tiny

Botticelli lived in a generation of naturalists, and he might have been a mere naturalist among them. There

are traces enough in his work of that alert sense of outward things, which, in the pictures of that period, fills

the lawns with delicate living creatures, and the hillsides with pools of water, and the pools of water with

flowering reeds. But this was not enough for him; he is a visionary painter, and in his visionariness he

resembles Dante. Giotto, the tried companion of Dante, Masaccio, Ghirlandajo even, do but transcribe, with

more or less refining, the outward image; they are dramatic, not visionary painters; they are almost impassive

spectators of the action before them. But the genius of which Botticelli is the type usurps the data before it as

the exponent of ideas, moods, visions of its own; in this interest it plays fast and loose with those data,

rejecting some and isolating others, and always combining them anew. To him as to Dante, the scene, the

colour, the outward image or gesture, comes with all its incisive and importunate reality; but awakes in him,

moreover, by some subtle law of his own structure, a mood which it awakes in no one else, of which it is the

double or repetition, and which it clothes, that all may share it, with sensuous circumstance.

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

the simple formula of purgatory, heaven and hell, leaves an insoluble element of prose in the depths of

Dante's poetry. One picture of his, with the portrait of the donor, Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit or

discredit of attracting some shadow of ecclesiastical censure. This Matteo Palmieritwo dim figures move

under that name in contemporary historywas the reputed author of a poem, still unedited, La Citta Divina,

which represented the human race as an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer, were neither

for Jehovah nor for His enemies, a fantasy of that earlier Alexandrian philosophy about which the Florentine

intellect in that century was so curious. Botticelli's picture may have been only one of those familiar

compositions in which religious reverie has recorded its impressions of the various forms of beatified

existenceGlorias, as they were called, like that in which Giotto painted the portrait of Dante; but somehow

it was suspected of embodying in a picture the wayward dream of Palmieri, and the chapel where it hung was

closed. Artists so entire as Botticelli are usually careless about philosophical theories, even when the

philosopher is a Florentine of the fifteenth century, and his work a poem in terza rima. But Botticelli, who

wrote a commentary on Dante, and became the disciple of Savonarola, may well have let such theories come

and go across him. True or false, the story interprets much of the peculiar sentiment with which he infuses his

profane and sacred persons, comely, and in a certain sense like angels, but with a sense of displacement or

loss about themthe wistfulness of exiles, conscious of a passion and energy greater than any known issue

of them explains, which runs through all his varied work with a sentiment of ineffable melancholy.

So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of heaven and hell, Botticelli accepts, that middle world in

which men take no side in great conflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great refusals. He thus sets

for himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by any moral ambition, does its most sincere and surest

work. His interest is neither in the untempered goodness of Angelico's saints, nor the untempered evil of

Orcagna's Inferno; but with men and women, in their mixed and uncertain condition, always attractive,

clothed sometimes by passion with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually by the

shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink. His morality is all sympathy; and it is this

sympathy, conveying into his work somewhat more than is usual of the true complexion of humanity, which

It is this which gives to his Madonnas their unique expression and charm. He has worked out in them a

distinct and peculiar type, definite enough in his own mind, for he has painted it over and over again,

sometimes one might think almost mechanically, as a pastime during that dark period when his thoughts were

so heavy upon him. Hardly any collection of note is without one of these circular pictures, into which the

attendant angels depress their heads so naively. Perhaps you have sometimes wondered why those

peevishlooking Madonnas, conformed to no acknowledged or obvious type of beauty, attract you more and

more, and often come back to you when the Sistine Madonna and the Virgins of Fra Angelico are forgotten.

At first, contrasting them with those, you may have thought that there was something in them mean or abject

even, for the abstract lines of the face have little nobleness, and the colour is wan. For with Botticelli she too,

though she holds in her hands the "Desire of all nations," is one of those who are neither for Jehovah nor for

His enemies; and her choice is on her face. The white light on it is cast up hard and cheerless from below, as

when snow lies upon the ground, and the children look up with surprise at the strange whiteness of the

ceiling. Her trouble is in the very caress of the mysterious child, whose gaze is always far from her, and who

has already that sweet look of devotion which men have never been able altogether to love, and which still

makes the born saint an object almost of suspicion to his earthly brethren. Once, indeed, he guides her hand

to transcribe in a book the words of her exaltation, the Ave, and the Magnificat, and the Gaude Maria, and the

young angels, glad to rouse her for a moment from Her dejection, are eager to hold the inkhorn and to support

the book; but the pen almost drops from her hand, and the high cold words have no meaning for her, and her

true children are those others, among whom in her rude home, the intolerable honour came to her, with that

look of wistful inquiry on their irregular faces which you see in startled animalsgipsy children, such as

those who, in Apennine villages, still hold out their long brown arms to beg of you, but on Sundays become

enfants du choeur, with their thick black hair nicely combed, and fair white linen on their sunburnt throats.

What is strangest is that he carries this sentiment into classical subjects, its most complete expression being a

picture in the Uffizii, of Venus rising from the sea, in which the grotesque emblems of the middle age, and a

landscape full of its peculiar feeling, and even its strange draperies, powdered all over in the Gothic manner

with a quaint conceit of daisies, frame a figure that reminds you of the faultless nude studies of Ingres. At

first, perhaps, you are attracted only by a quaintness of design, which seems to recall all at once whatever you

have read of Florence in the fifteenth century; afterwards you may think that this quaintness must be

incongruous with the subject, and that the colour is cadaverous or at least cold. And yet, the more you come

to understand what imaginative colouring really is, that all colour is no mere delightful quality of natural

things, but a spirit upon them by which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you will like this

peculiar quality of colour; and you will find that quaint design of Botticelli's a more direct inlet into the

Greek temper than the works of the Greeks themselves even of the finest period. Of the Greeks as they really

were, of their difference from ourselves, of the aspects of their outward life, we know far more than

Botticelli, or his most learned contemporaries; but for us long familiarity has taken off the edge of the lesson,

and we are hardly conscious of what we owe to the Hellenic spirit. But in pictures like this of Botticelli's you

have a record of the first impression made by it on minds turned back towards it, in almost painful aspiration,

from a world in which it had been ignored so long; and in the passion, the energy, the industry of realisation,

with which Botticelli carries out his intention, is the exact measure of the legitimate influence over the human

mind of the imaginative system of which this is the central myth. The light is indeed coldmere sunless

dawn; but a later painter would have cloyed you with sunshine; and you can see the better for that quietness

in the morning air each long promontory, as it slopes down to the water's edge. Men go forth to their labours

until the evening; but she is awake before them, and you might think that the sorrow in her face was at the

thought of the whole long day of love yet to come. An emblematical figure of the wind blows hard across the

grey water, moving forward the daintylipped shell on which she sails, the sea "showing his teeth" as it

moves in thin lines of foam, and sucking in, one by one, the falling roses, each severe in outline, plucked off

short at the stalk but embrowned a little, as Botticelli's flowers always are. Botticelli meant all that imagery to

be altogether pleasurable; and it was partly an incompleteness of resources, inseparable from the art of that

time, that subdued and chilled it; but his predilection for minor tones counts also; and what is unmistakable is

the sadness with which he has conceived the goddess of pleasure, as the depositary of a great power over the

I have said that the peculiar character of Botticelli is the result of a blending in him of a sympathy for

humanity in its uncertain condition, its attractiveness, its investiture at rarer moments in a character of

loveliness and energy, with his consciousness of the shadow upon it of the great things from which it shrinks,

and that this conveys into his work somewhat more than painting usually attains of the true complexion of

humanity. He paints the story of the goddess of pleasure in other episodes besides that of her birth from the

sea, but never without some shadow of death in the grey flesh and wan flowers. He paints Madonnas, but

they shrink from the pressure of the divine child, and plead in unmistakable undertones for a warmer, lower

humanity. The same figuretradition connects it with Simonetta, the Mistress of Giuliano de'

Mediciappears again as Judith, returning home across the hill country, when the great deed is over, and the

moment of revulsion come, when the olive branch in her hand is becoming a burthen; as Justice, sitting on a

throne, but with a fixed look of selfhatred which makes the sword in her hand seem that of a suicide; and

again as Veritas, in the allegorical picture of Calumnia, where one may note in passing the suggestiveness of

an accident which identifies the image of Truth with the person of Venus. We might trace the same sentiment

through his engravings; but his share in them is doubtful, and the object of this brief study has been attained,

But, after all, it may be asked, is a painter like Botticellia secondary paintera proper subject for general

criticism? There are a few great painters, like Michelangelo or Leonardo, whose work has become a force in

general culture, partly for this very reason that they have absorbed into themselves all such workmen as

Sandro Botticelli; and, over and above mere technical or antiquarian criticism, general criticism may be very

well employed in that sort of interpretation which adjusts the position of these men to general culture,

whereas smaller men can be the proper subjects only of technical or antiquarian treatment. But, besides those

great men, there is a certain number of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey

to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; and these, too, have their place in general

culture, and must be interpreted to it by those who have felt their charm strongly, and are often the objects of

a special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate, just because there is not about them the stress of a

great name and authority. Of this select number Botticelli is one; he has the freshness, the uncertain and

diffident promise which belongs to the earlier Renaissance itself, and makes it perhaps the most interesting

period in the history of the mind: in studying his work one begins to understand to how great a place in

The Italian sculptors of the earlier half of the fifteenth century are more than mere forerunners of the great

masters of its close, and often reach perfection, within the narrow limits which they chose to impose on their

work. Their sculpture shares with the paintings of Botticelli and the churches of Brunelleschi that profound

expressiveness, that intimate impress of an indwelling soul, which is the peculiar fascination of the art of Italy

in that century. Their works have been much neglected, and often almost hidden away amid the frippery of

modern decoration, and we come with some surprise on the places where their fire still smoulders. One longs

to penetrate into the lives of the men who have given expression to so much power and sweetness; but it is

part of the reserve, the austere dignity and simplicity of their existence, that their histories are for the most

part lost, or told but briefly. From their lives, as from their work, all tumult of sound and colour has passed

away. Mino, the Raffaelle of sculpture, Maso del Rodario, whose works add a new grace to the church of

Como, Donatello evenone asks in vain for more than a shadowy outline of their actual days.

Something more remains of Luca della Robbia; something more of a history, of outward changes and

fortunes, is expressed through his work. I suppose nothing brings the real air of a Tuscan town so vividly to

mind as those pieces of pale blue and white earthenware, by which he is best known, like fragments of the

milky sky itself, fallen into the cool streets, and breaking into the darkened churches. And no work is less

imitable; like Tuscan wine, it loses its savour when moved from its birthplace, from the crumbling walls

where it was first placed. Part of the charm of this work, its grace and purity and finish of expression, is

common to all the Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century; for Luca was first of all a worker in marble, and

his works in earthenware only transfer to a different material the principles of his sculpture.

These Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century worked for the most part in low relief, giving even to their

monumental effigies something of its depression of surface, getting into them by this means a pathetic

suggestion of the wasting and etherealisation of death. They are haters of all heaviness and emphasis, of

stronglyopposed light and shade, and seek their means of expression among those last refinements of

shadow, which are almost invisible except in a strong light, and which the finest pencil can hardly follow.

The whole essence of their work is EXPRESSION, the passing of a smile over the face of a child, the ripple

What is the precise value of this system of sculpture, this low relief? Luca della Robbia, and the other

sculptors of the school to which he belongs, have before them the universal problem of their art; and this

system of low relief is the means by which they meet and overcome the special limitation of sculpturea

limitation resulting from the material and the essential conditions of all sculptured work, and which consists

in the tendency of this work to a hard realism, a onesided presentment of mere form, that solid material

frame which only motion can relieve, a thing of heavy shadows, and an individuality of expression pushed to

caricature. Against this tendency to the hard presentment of mere form trying vainly to compete with the

reality of nature itself, all noble sculpture constantly struggles: each great system of sculpture resisting it in

its own way, etherealising, spiritualising, relieving its hardness, its heaviness and death. The use of colour in

sculpture is but an unskilful contrivance to effect, by borrowing from another art, what the nobler sculpture

effects by strictly appropriate means. To get not colour, but the equivalent of colour; to secure the expression

and the play of life; to expand the too fixed individuality of pure, unrelieved, uncoloured formthis is the

problem which the three great styles in sculpture have solved in three different ways.

Allgemeinheitbreadth, generality, universalityis the word chosen by Winckelmann, and after him by

Goethe and many German critics, to express that law of the most excellent Greek sculptors, of Pheidias and

his pupils, which prompted them constantly to seek the type in the individual, to abstract and express only

what is structural and permanent, to purge from the individual all that belongs only to him, all the accidents,

the feelings, and actions of the special moment, all that (because in its own nature it endures but for a

In this way their works came to be like some subtle extract or essence, or almost like pure thoughts or ideas:

and hence the breadth of humanity in them, that detachment from the conditions of a particular place or

people, which has carried their influence far beyond the age which produced them, and insured them

That was the Greek way of relieving the hardness and unspirituality of pure form. But it involved to a certain

degree the sacrifice of what we call expression; and a system of abstraction which aimed always at the broad

and general type, at the purging away from the individual of what belonged only to him, and of the mere

accidents of a particular time and place, imposed upon the range of effects open to the Greek sculptor limits

somewhat narrowly defined; and when Michelangelo came, with a genius spiritualised by the reverie of the

middle age, penetrated by its spirit of inwardness and introspection, living not a mere outward life like the

Greek, but a life full of inward experiences, sorrows, consolations, a system which sacrificed so much of

what was inward and unseen could not satisfy him. To him, lover and student of Greek sculpture as he was,

work which did not bring what was inward to the surface, which was not concerned with individual

expression, with individual character and feeling, the special history of the special soul, was not worth doing

And so, in a way quite personal and peculiar to himself, which often is, and always seems, the effect of

accident, he secured for his work individuality and intensity of expression, while he avoided a too hard

realism, that tendency to harden into caricature which the representation of feeling in sculpture must always

have. What time and accident, its centuries of darkness under the furrows of the "little Melian farm," have

done with singular felicity of touch for the Venus of Melos, fraying its surface and softening its lines, so that

some spirit in the thing seems always on the point of breaking out, as though in it classical sculpture had

advanced already one step into the mystical Christian age, its expression being in the whole range of ancient

work most like that of Michelangelo's own:this effect Michelangelo gains by leaving nearly all his

sculpture in a puzzling sort of incompleteness, which suggests rather than realises actual form. Something of

the wasting of that snowimage which he moulded at the command of Piero de' Medici, when the snow lay

one night in the court of the Pitti palace, almost always lurks about it, as if he had determined to make the

quality of a task, exacted from him half in derision, the pride of all his work. Many have wondered at that

incompleteness, suspecting, however, that Michelangelo himself loved and was loath to change it, and feeling

at the same time that they too would lose something if the halfrealised form ever quite emerged from the

stone, so rough hewn here, so delicately finished there; and they have wished to fathom the charm of this

incompleteness. Well! that incompleteness is Michelangelo's equivalent for colour in sculpture; it is his way

of etherealising pure form, of relieving its hard realism, and communicating to it breath, pulsation, the effect

of life. It was a characteristic too which fell in with his peculiar temper and mode of life, his disappointments

and hesitations. And it was in reality perfect finish. In this way he combines the utmost amount of passion

and intensity with the sense of a yielding and flexible life: he gets not vitality merely, but a wonderful force

Midway between these two systemsthe system of the Greek sculptors and the system of

Michelangelocomes the system of Luca della Robbia. And the other Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth

century, partaking both of the Allgemeinheit of the Greeks, their way of extracting certain select elements

only of pure form and sacrificing all the rest, and the studied incompleteness of Michelangelo, relieving that

expression of intensity, passion, energy, which might otherwise have hardened into caricature. Like

Michelangelo, these sculptors fill their works with intense and individualised expression: their noblest works

are the studied sepulchral portraits of particular personsthe monument of Conte Ugo in the Badia of

Florence, of the youthful Medea Colleoni, with the wonderful, long throat, in the chapel on the cool north

side of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore at Bergamomonuments which abound in the churches of

Rome, inexhaustible in suggestions of repose, of a subdued Sabbatic joy, a kind of sacred grace and

refinement:and they unite these elements of tranquillity, of repose, to that intense and individual

expression by a system of conventionalism as skilful and subtle as that of the Greeks, subduing all such

The life of Luca, a life of labour and frugality, with no adventure and no excitement except what belongs to

the trial of new artistic processes, the struggle with new artistic difficulties, the solution of purely artistic

problems, fills the first seventy years of the fifteenth century. After producing many works in marble for the

Duomo and the Campanile of Florence, which place him among the foremost sculptors of that age, he became

desirous to realise the spirit and manner of that sculpture, in a humbler material, to unite its science, its

exquisite and expressive system of low relief, to the homely art of pottery, to introduce those high qualities

into common things, to adorn and cultivate daily household life. In this he is profoundly characteristic of the

Florence of that century, of that in it which lay below its superficial vanity and caprice, a certain oldworld

modesty and seriousness and simplicity. People had not yet begun to think that what was good art for

churches was not so good, or less fitted, for their own houses. Luca's new work was in plain white

earthenware at first, a mere rough imitation of the costly, laboriously wrought marble, finished in a few

hours. But on this humble path he found his way to a fresh success, to another artistic grace. The fame of the

oriental pottery, with its strange, bright colourscolours of art, colours not to be attained in the natural

stonemingled with the tradition of the old Roman pottery of the neighbourhood. The little red, corallike

jars of Arezzo, dug up in that district from time to time, are still famous. These colours haunted Luca's fancy.

"He still continued seeking something more," his biographer says of him; "and instead of making his figures

of baked earth simply white, he added the further invention of giving them colour, to the astonishment and

delight of all who beheld them"Cosa singolare, e multo utile per la state!a curious thing, and very useful

for summertime, full of coolness and repose for hand and eye. Luca loved the forms of various fruits, and

wrought them into all sorts of marvellous frames and garlands, giving them their natural colours, only

subdued a little, a little paler than nature. But in his nobler terracotta work he never introduces colour into

I said that the work of Luca della Robbia possessed in an unusual measure that special characteristic which

belongs to all the workmen of his school, a characteristic which, even in the absence of much positive

information about their actual history, seems to bring those workmen themselves very near to usthe

impress of a personal quality, a profound expressiveness, what the French call intimite, by which is meant

some subtler sense of originalitythe seal on a man's work of what is most inward and peculiar in his

moods, and manner of apprehension: it is what we call expression, carried to its highest intensity of degree.

That characteristic is rare in poetry, rarer still in art, rarest of all in the abstract art of sculpture; yet

essentially, perhaps, it is the quality which alone makes works in the imaginative and moral order really

worth having at all. It is because the works of the artists of the fifteenth century possess this quality in an

unmistakable way that one is anxious to know all that can be known about them, and explain to oneself the

Critics of Michelangelo have sometimes spoken as if the only characteristic of his genius were a wonderful

strength, verging, as in the things of the imagination great strength always does, on what is singular or

strange. A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works

of art; that they shall excite or surprise us is indispensable. But that they shall give pleasure and exert a charm

over us is indispensable too; and this strangeness must be sweet alsoa lovely strangeness. And to the true

admirers of Michelangelo this is the true type of the Michelangelesquesweetness and strength, pleasure

with surprise, an energy of conception which seems at every moment about to break through all the

conditions of comely form, recovering, touch by touch, a loveliness found usually only in the simplest natural

In this way he sums up for them the whole character of medieval art itself in that which distinguishes it most

clearly from classical work, the presence of a convulsive energy in it, becoming in lower hands merely

monstrous or forbidding, but felt, even in its most graceful products, as a subdued quaintness or grotesque.

Yet those who feel this grace or sweetness in Michelangelo might at the first moment be puzzled if they were

asked wherein precisely the quality resided. Men of inventive temperamentVictor Hugo, for instance, in

whom, as in Michelangelo, people have for the most part been attracted or repelled by the strength, while few

have understood his sweetnesshave sometimes relieved conceptions of merely moral or spiritual greatness,

but with little aesthetic charm of their own, by lovely accidents or accessories, like the butterfly which alights

on the bloodstained barricade in Les Miserables, or those seabirds for which the monstrous Gilliatt comes

to be as some wild natural thing, so that they are no longer afraid of him, in Les Travailleurs de la Mer. But

the austere genius of Michelangelo will not depend for its sweetness on any mere accessories like these. The

world of natural things has almost no existence for him; "When one speaks of him," says Grimm, "woods,

clouds, seas, and mountains disappear, and only what is formed by the spirit of man remains behind"; and he

quotes a few slight words from a letter of his to Vasari as the single expression in all he has left of a feeling

for nature. He has traced no flowers, like those with which Leonardo stars over his gloomiest rocks; nothing

like the fretwork of wings and flames in which Blake frames his most startling conceptions; no

forestscenery like Titian's fills his backgrounds, but only blank ranges of rock, and dim vegetable forms as

Of the whole story of the creation he has painted only the creation of the first man and woman, and, for him

at least, feebly, the creation of light. It belongs to the quality of his genius thus to concern itself almost

exclusively with the creation of man. For him it is not, as in the story itself, the last and crowning act of a

series of developments, but the first and unique act, the creation of life itself in its supreme form, offhand

and immediately, in the cold and lifeless stone. With him the beginning of life has all the characteristics of

resurrection; it is like the recovery of suspended health or animation, with its gratitude, its effusion, and

eloquence. Fair as the young men of the Elgin marbles, the Adam of the Sistine Chapel is unlike them in a

total absence of that balance and completeness which express so well the sentiment of a selfcontained,

independent life. In that languid figure there is something rude and satyrlike, something akin to the rugged

hillside on which it lies. His whole form is gathered into an expression of mere expectation and reception; he

has hardly strength enough to lift his finger to touch the finger of the creator; yet a touch of the fingertips

This creation of lifelife coming always as relief or recovery, and always in strong contrast with the

roughhewn mass in which it is kindledis in various ways the motive of all his work, whether its

immediate subject be Pagan or Christian, legend or allegory; and this, although at least onehalf of his work

was designed for the adornment of tombsthe tomb of Julius, the tombs of the Medici. Not the Judgment

but the Resurrection is the real subject of his last work in the Sistine Chapel; and his favourite Pagan subject

is the legend of Leda, the delight of the world breaking from the egg of a bird. As I have already pointed out,

he secures that ideality of expression which in Greek sculpture depends on a delicate system of abstraction,

and in early Italian sculpture on lowness of relief, by an incompleteness, which is surely not always

undesigned, and which I suppose no one regrets, and trusts to the spectator to complete the halfemergent

form. And as his persons have something of the unwrought stone about them, so, as if to realise the

expression by which the old Florentine records describe a sculptormaster of live stonewith him the very

rocks seem to have life; they have but to cast away the dust and scurf that they may rise and stand on their

feet. He loved the very quarries of Carrara, those strange grey peaks which even at midday convey into any

scene from which they are visible something of the solemnity and stillness of evening, sometimes wandering

among them month after month, till at last their pale ashen colours seem to have passed into his painting; and

on the crown of the head of the David there still remains a morsel of uncut stone, as if by one touch to

And it is in this penetrative suggestion of life that the secret of that sweetness of his is to be found. He gives

us indeed no lovely natural objects like Leonardo or Titian, but only the coldest, most elementary shadowing

of rock or tree; no lovely draperies and comely gestures of life, but only the austere truths of human nature;

"simple persons"as he replied in his rough way to the querulous criticism of Julius the Second, that there

was no gold on the figures of the Sistine Chapel"simple persons, who wore no gold on their garments"; but

he penetrates us with a sense of that power which we associate with all the warmth and fulness of the world,

and the sense of which brings into one's thoughts a swarm of birds and flowers and insects. The brooding

He was born in an interval of a rapid midnight journey in March, at a place in the neighbourhood of Arezzo,

the thin, clear air of which, as was then thought, being favourable to the birth of children of great parts. He

came of a race of grave and dignified men, who, claiming kinship with the family of Canossa, and some

colour of imperial blood in their veins, had, generation after generation, received honourable employment

under the government of Florence. His mother, a girl of nineteen years, put him out to nurse at a country

house among the hills of Settignano, where every other inhabitant is a worker in the marble quarries, and the

child early became familiar with that strange first stage in the sculptor's art. To this succeeded the influence

of the sweetest and most placid master Florence had yet seen, Domenico Ghirlandajo. At fifteen he was at

work among the curiosities of the garden of the Medici, copying and restoring antiques, winning the

condescending notice of the great Lorenzo. He knew too how to excite strong hatreds; and it was at this time

that in a quarrel with a fellowstudent he received a blow on the face which deprived him for ever of the

comeliness of outward form. It was through an accident that he came to study those works of the early Italian

sculptors which suggested much of his own grandest work, and impressed it with so deep a sweetness. He

believed in dreams and omens. One of his friends dreamed twice that Lorenzo, then lately dead, appeared to

him in grey and dusty apparel. To Michelangelo this dream seemed to portend the troubles which afterwards

really came, and with the suddenness which was characteristic of all his movements, he left Florence. Having

occasion to pass through Bologna, he neglected to procure the little seal of red wax which the stranger

entering Bologna must carry on the thumb of his right hand. He had no money to pay the fine, and would

have been thrown into prison had not one of the magistrates interposed. He remained in this man's house a

whole year, rewarding his hospitality by readings from the Italian poets whom he loved. Bologna, with its

endless colonnades and fantastic leaning towers, can never have been one of the lovelier cities of Italy. But

about the portals of its vast unfinished churches and its dark shrines, half hidden by votive flowers and

candles, lie some of the sweetest works of the early Tuscan sculptors, Giovanni da Pisa and Jacopo della

Quercia, things as winsome as flowers; and the year which Michelangelo spent in copying these works was

not a lost year. It was now, on returning to Florence, that he put forth that unique presentment of Bacchus,

which expresses, not the mirthfulness of the god of wine, but his sleepy seriousness, his enthusiasm, his

capacity for profound dreaming. No one ever expressed more truly than Michelangelo the notion of inspired

sleep, of faces charged with dreams. A vast fragment of marble had long lain below the Loggia of Orcagna,

and many a sculptor had had his thoughts of a design which should just fill this famous block of stone,

cutting the diamond, as it were, without loss. Under Michelangelo's hand it became the David which stood till

lately on the steps of the Palazzo Vecchio, when it was replaced below the Loggia. Michelangelo was now

thirty years old, and his reputation was established. Three great works fill the remainder of his lifethree

works often interrupted, carried on through a thousand hesitations, a thousand disappointments, quarrels with

his patrons, quarrels with his family, quarrels perhaps most of all with himselfthe Sistine Chapel, the

In the story of Michelangelo's life the strength, often turning to bitterness, is not far to seek; a discordant note

sounds throughout it which almost spoils the music. He "treats the Pope as the King of France himself would

not dare to treat him"; he goes along the streets of Rome "like an executioner," Raffaelle says of him. Once

he seems to have shut himself up with the intention of starving himself to death. As we come in reading his

life on its harsh, untempered incidents, the thought again and again arises that he is one of those who incur

the judgment of Dante, as having "wilfully lived in sadness." Even his tenderness and pity are embittered by

their strength. What passionate weeping in that mysterious figure which, in the Creation of Adam, crouches

below the image of the Almighty, as he comes with the forms of things to be, woman and her progeny, in the

fold of his garment! What a sense of wrong in those two captive youths, who feel the chains like scalding

water on their proud and delicate flesh! The idealist who became a reformer with Savonarola, and a

republican superintending the fortification of Florencethe nest where he was born, il nido ove naqqu'io, as

he calls it once, in a sudden throb of affectionin its last struggle for liberty, yet believed always that he had

imperial blood in his veins and was of the kindred of the great Matilda, had within the depths of his nature

some secret spring of indignation or sorrow. We know little of his youth, but all tends to make one believe in

the vehemence of its passions. Beneath the Platonic calm of the sonnets there is latent a deep delight in carnal

form and colour. There, and still more in the madrigals, he often falls into the language of less tranquil

affections; while some of them have the colour of penitence, as from a wanderer returning home. He who

spoke so decisively of the supremacy in the imaginative world of the unveiled human form had not been

always, we may think, a mere Platonic lover. Vague and wayward his loves may have been; but they partook

of the strength of his nature, and sometimes, it may be, would by no means become music, so that the comely

But his genius is in harmony with itself; and just as in the products of his art we find resources of sweetness

within their exceeding strength, so in his own story also, bitter as the ordinary sense of it may be, there are

select pages shut in among the restpages one might easily turn over too lightly, but which yet sweeten the

whole volume. The interest of Michelangelo's poems is that they make us spectators of this struggle; the

struggle of a strong nature to adorn and attune itself; the struggle of a desolating passion, which yearns to be

resigned and sweet and pensive, as Dante's was. It is a consequence of the occasional and informal character

of his poetry, that it brings us nearer to himself, his own mind and temper, than any work done only to

support a literary reputation could possibly do. His letters tell us little that is worth knowing about hima

few poor quarrels about money and commissions. But it is quite otherwise with these songs and sonnets,

written down at odd moments, sometimes on the margins of his sketches, themselves often unfinished

sketches, arresting some salient feeling or unpremeditated idea as it passed. And it happens that a true study

of these has become within the last few years for the first time possible. A few of the sonnets circulated

widely in manuscript, and became almost within Michelangelo's own lifetime a subject of academical

discourses. But they were first collected in a volume in 1623 by the greatnephew of Michelangelo,

Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger. He omitted much, rewrote the sonnets in part, and sometimes

compressed two or more compositions into one, always losing something of the force and incisiveness of the

original. So the book remained, neglected even by Italians themselves in the last century, through the

influence of that French taste which despised all compositions of the kind, as it despised and neglected Dante.

"His reputation will ever be on the increase, because he is so little read," says Voltaire of Dante.But in

1858 the last of the Buonarroti bequeathed to the municipality of Florence the curiosities of his family.

Among them was a precious volume containing the autograph of the sonnets. A learned Italian, Signor Cesare

Guasti, undertook to collate this autograph with other manuscripts at the Vatican and elsewhere, and in 1863

published a true version of Michelangelo's poems, with dissertations and a paraphrase.*

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

People have often spoken of these poems as if they were a mere cry of distress, a lover's complaint over the

obduracy of Vittoria Colonna. But those who speak thus forget that though it is quite possible that

Michelangelo had seen Vittoria, that somewhat shadowy figure, as early as 1537, yet their closer intimacy did

not begin till about the year 1542, when Michelangelo was nearly seventy years old. Vittoria herself, an

ardent neocatholic, vowed to perpetual widowhood since the news had reached her, seventeen years before,

that her husband, the youthful and princely Marquess of Pescara, lay dead of the wounds he had received in

the battle of Pavia, was then no longer an object of great passion. In a dialogue written by the painter,

Francesco d'Ollanda, we catch a glimpse of them together in an empty church at Rome, one Sunday

afternoon, discussing indeed the characteristics of various schools of art, but still more the writings of Saint

Paul, already following the ways and tasting the sunless pleasures of weary people, whose hold on outward

things is slackening. In a letter still extant he regrets that when he visited her after death he had kissed her

hands only. He made, or set to work to make, a crucifix for her use, and two drawings, perhaps in preparation

for it, are now in Oxford. From allusions in the sonnets, we may divine that when they first approached each

other he had debated much with himself whether this last passion would be the most unsoftening, the most

desolating of allun dolce amaro, un si e no mi muovi; is it carnal affection, or, del suo prestino stato

(Plato's antenatal state) il raggio ardente? The older, conventional criticism, dealing with the text of 1623,

had lightly assumed that all or nearly all the sonnets were actually addressed to Vittoria herself; but Signor

Guasti finds only four, or at most five, which can be so attributed on genuine authority. Still, there are reasons

which make him assign the majority of them to the period between 1542 and 1547, and we may regard the

volume as a record of this restingplace in Michelangelo's story. We know how Goethe escaped from the

stress of sentiments too strong for him by making a book about them; and for Michelangelo, to write down

his passionate thoughts at all, to make sonnets about them, was already in some measure to command, and

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

It was just because Vittoria raised no great passion that the space in his life where she reigns has such

peculiar suavity; and the spirit of the sonnets is lost if we once take them out of that dreamy atmosphere in

which men have things as they will, because the hold of all outward things upon them is faint and thin. Their

prevailing tone is a calm and meditative sweetness. The cry of distress is indeed there, but as a mere residue,

a trace of bracing chalybeate salt, just discernible in the song which rises as a clear, sweet spring from a

This charmed and temperate space in Michelangelo's life, without which its excessive strength would have

been so imperfect, which saves him from the judgment of Dante on those who "wilfully lived in sadness," is

then a welldefined period there, reaching from the year 1542 to the year 1547, the year of Vittoria's death. In

it the lifelong effort to tranquillise his vehement emotions by withdrawing them into the region of ideal

sentiment, becomes successful; and the significance of Vittoria there is, that she realises for him a type of

affection which even in disappointment may charm and sweeten his spirit. In this effort to tranquillise and

sweeten life by idealising its vehement sentiments, there were two great traditional types, either of which an

Italian of the sixteenth century might have followed. There was Dante, whose little book of the Vita Nuova

had early become a pattern of imaginative love, maintained somewhat feebly by the later followers of

Petrarch; and since Plato had become something more than a name in Italy by the publication of the Latin

translation of his works by Marsilio Ficino, there was the Platonic tradition also. Dante's belief in the

resurrection of the body, through which, even in heaven, Beatrice loses for him no tinge of fleshcolour, or

fold of raiment evenand the Platonic dream of the passage of the soul through one form of life after

another, with its passionate haste to escape from the burden of bodily form altogetherare, for all effects of

art or poetry, principles diametrically opposite; and it is the Platonic tradition rather than Dante's that has

moulded Michelangelo's verse. In many ways no sentiment could have been less like Dante's love for

Beatrice than Michelangelo's for Vittoria Colonna. Dante's comes in early youth: Beatrice is a child, with the

wistful, ambiguous vision of a child, with a character still unaccentuated by the influence of outward

circumstances, almost expressionless. Vittoria is a woman already weary, in advanced age, of grave

intellectual qualities. Dante's story is a piece of figured wood, inlaid with lovely incidents. In Michelangelo's

poems, frost and fire are almost the only imagesthe refining fire of the goldsmith; once or twice the

phoenix; ice melting at the fire; fire struck from the rock which it afterwards consumes. Except one doubtful

allusion to a journey, there are almost no incidents. But there is much of the bright, sharp, unerring skill, with

which in boyhood he gave the look of age to the head of a faun by chipping a tooth from its jaw with a single

stroke of the hammer. For Dante, the amiable and devout materialism of the middle age sanctifies all that is

presented by hand and eye. Michelangelo is always pressing forward from the outward beautyil bel del

fuor che agli occhi piaceto apprehend the unseen beauty; trascenda nella forma universalethat abstract

form of beauty, about which the Platonists reason. And this gives the impression in him of something flitting

and unfixed, of the houseless and complaining spirit, almost clairvoyant through the frail and yielding flesh.

He accounts for love at first sight by a previous state of existencela dove io t'amai prima.

And yet there are many points in which he is really like Dante, and comes very near to the original image,

beyond those later and feebler followers of Petrarch. He learns from Dante rather than from Plato, that for

lovers, the surfeiting of desireove gran desir gran copia affrena, is a state less happy than misery full of

hopeuna miseria di speranza piena. He recalls him in the repetition of the words gentile and cortesia, in the

personification of Amor, in the tendency to dwell minutely on the physical effects of the presence of a

beloved object on the pulses and the heart. Above all, he resembles Dante in the warmth and intensity of his

political utterances, for the lady of one of his noblest sonnets was from the first understood to be the city of

Florence; and he avers that all must be asleep in heaven, if she, who was created "of angelic form," for a

thousand lovers, is appropriated by one alone, some Piero, or Alessandro de' Medici. Once and again he

introduces Love and Death, who dispute concerning him; for, like Dante and all the nobler souls of Italy, he

is much occupied with thoughts of the grave, and his true mistress is death; death at first as the worst of all

sorrows and disgraces, with a clod of the field for its brain; afterwards, death in its high distinction, its

detachment from vulgar needs, the angry stains of life and action escaping fast.

Some of those whom the gods love die young. This man, because the gods loved him, lingered on to be of

immense, patriarchal age, till the sweetness it had taken so long to secrete in him was found at last. Out of the

strong came forth sweetness, ex forti dulcedo. The world had changed around him. The Newcatholicism had

taken the place of the Renaissance. The spirit of the Roman Church had changed: in the vast world's cathedral

which his skill had helped to raise for it, it looked stronger than ever. Some of the first members of the

Oratory were among his intimate associates. They were of a spirit as unlike as possible from that of Lorenzo,

or Savonarola even. The opposition of the Reformation to art has been often enlarged upon; far greater was

that of the Catholic revival. But in thus fixing itself in a frozen orthodoxy, the Roman Catholic Church has

passed beyond him, and he was a stranger to it. In earlier days, when its beliefs had been in a fluid state, he

too might have been drawn into the controversy; he might have been for spiritualising the papal sovereignty,

like Savonarola; or for adjusting the dreams of Plato and Homer with the words of Christ, like Pico of

Mirandola. But things had moved onward, and such adjustments were no longer possible. For himself, he had

long since fallen back on that divine ideal, which above the wear and tear of creeds has been forming itself

for ages as the possession of nobler souls. And now he began to feel the soothing influence which since that

time the Roman Church has often exerted over spirits too independent to be its subjects, yet brought within

the neighbourhood of its action; consoled and tranquillised, as a traveller might be, resting for one evening in

a strange city, by its stately aspect, and the sentiment of its many fortunes, just because with those fortunes he

has nothing to do. So he lingers on; a revenant, as the French say, a ghost out of another age, in a world too

coarse to touch his faint sensibilities too closely; dreaming, in a wornout society, theatrical in its life,

theatrical in its art, theatrical even in its devotion, on the morning of the world's history, on the primitive form

of man, on the images under which that primitive world had conceived of spiritual forces.

I have dwelt on the thought of Michelangelo as thus lingering beyond his time in a world not his own,

because, if one is to distinguish the peculiar savour of his work, he must be approached, not through his

followers, but through his predecessors; not through the marbles of Saint Peter's, but through the work of the

sculptors of the fifteenth century over the tombs and altars of Tuscany. He is the last of the Florentines, of

those on whom the peculiar sentiment of the Florence of Dante and Giotto descended: he is the consummate

representative of the form that sentiment took in the fifteenth century with men like Luca Signorelli and Mino

da Fiesole. Up to him the tradition of sentiment is unbroken, the progress towards surer and more mature

methods of expressing that sentiment continuous. But his professed disciples did not share this temper; they

are in love with his strength only, and seem not to feel his grave and temperate sweetness. Theatricality is

their chief characteristic; and that is a quality as little attributable to Michelangelo as to Mino or Luca

This discipleship of Michelangelo, this dependence of his on the tradition of the Florentine schools, is

nowhere seen more clearly than in his treatment of the Creation. The Creation of Man had haunted the mind

of the middle age like a dream; and weaving it into a hundred carved ornaments of capital or doorway, the

Italian sculptors had early impressed upon it that pregnancy of expression which seems to give it many veiled

meanings. As with other artistic conceptions of the middle age, its treatment became almost conventional,

handed on from artist to artist, with slight changes, till it came to have almost an independent, abstract

existence of its own. It was characteristic of the medieval mind thus to give an independent traditional

existence to a special pictorial conception, or to a legend, like that of Tristram or Tannhaeuser, or even to the

very thoughts and substance of a book, like the Imitation, so that no single workman could claim it as his

own, and the book, the image, the legend, had itself a legend, and its fortunes, and a personal history; and it is

a sign of the medievalism of Michelangelo, that he thus receives from tradition his central conception, and

does but add the last touches, in transferring it to the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.

But there was another tradition of those earlier more serious Florentines, of which Michelangelo is the

inheritor, to which he gives the final expression, and which centres in the sacristy of San Lorenzo, as the

tradition of the Creation centres in the Sistine Chapel. It has been said that all the great Florentines were

preoccupied with death. Outretombe! Outretombe !is the burden of their thoughts, from Dante to

Savonarola. Even the gay and licentious Boccaccio gives a keener edge to his stories by putting them in the

mouths of a party of people who had taken refuge from the danger of death by plague, in a countryhouse. It

was to this inherited sentiment, this practical decision that to be preoccupied with the thought of death was

in itself dignifying, and a note of high quality, that the seriousness of the great Florentines of the fifteenth

century was partly due; and it was reinforced in them by the actual sorrows of their times. How often, and in

what various ways, had they seen life stricken down, in their streets and houses! La bella Simonetta dies in

early youth, and is borne to the grave with uncovered face. The young Cardinal Jacopo di Portogallo dies on a

visit to Florenceinsignis forma fui et mirabili modestiahis epitaph dares to say. Antonio Rossellino

carves his tomb in the church of San Miniato, with care for the shapely hands and feet, and sacred attire; Luca

della Robbia puts his skyeyest works there; and the tomb of the youthful and princely prelate became the

strangest and most beautiful thing in that strange and beautiful place. After the execution of the Pazzi

conspirators, Botticelli is employed to paint their portraits. This preoccupation with serious thoughts and sad

images might easily have resulted, as it did, for instance, in the gloomy villages of the Rhine, or in the

overcrowded parts of medieval Paris, as it still does in many a village of the Alps, in something merely

morbid or grotesque, in the Danse Macabre of many French and German painters, or the grim inventions of

Duerer. From such a result the Florentine masters of the fifteenth century were saved by their high Italian

dignity and culture, and still more by their tender pity for the thing itself. They must often have leaned over

the lifeless body, when all was at length quiet and smoothed out. After death, it is said, the traces of slighter

and more superficial dispositions disappear; the lines become more simple and dignified; only the abstract

lines remain, in a great indifference. They came thus to see death in its distinction; and following it perhaps

one stage further, dwelling for a moment on the point where all that transitory dignity must break up, and

discerning with no clearness a new body, they paused just in time, and abstained, with a sentiment of

Of all this sentiment Michelangelo is the achievement; and first of all, of pity. Pietapitythe pity of the

Virgin Mother over the dead body of Christ, expanded into the pity of all mothers over all dead sons, the

entombment, with its cruel "hard stones"that is the subject of his predilection. He has left it in many forms,

sketches, halffinished designs, finished and unfinished groups of sculpture; but always as a hopeless,

rayless, almost heathen sorrowno divine sorrow, but mere pity and awe at the stiff limbs and colourless

lips. There is a drawing of his at Oxford, in which the dead body has sunk to the earth between the mother's

feet, with the arms extended over her knees. The tombs in the sacristy of San Lorenzo are memorials, not of

any of the nobler and greater Medici, but of Giuliano, and Lorenzo the younger, noticeable chiefly for their

somewhat early death. It is mere human nature therefore which has prompted the sentiment here. The titles

assigned traditionally to the four symbolical figures, Night and Day, The Twilight and The Dawn, are far too

definite for them; for these figures come much nearer to the mind and spirit of their author, and are a more

direct expression of his thoughts, than any merely symbolical conceptions could possibly have been. They

concentrate and express, less by way of definite conceptions than by the touches, the promptings of a piece of

music, all those vague fancies, misgivings, presentiments, which shift and mix and define themselves and

fade again, whenever the thoughts try to fix themselves with sincerity on the conditions and surroundings of

the disembodied spirit. I suppose no one would come to the sacristy of San Lorenzo for consolation; for

seriousness, for solemnity, for dignity of impression, perhaps, but not for consolation. It is a place neither of

terrible nor consoling thoughts, but of vague and wistful speculation. Here, again, Michelangelo is the

disciple not so much of Dante as of the Platonists. Dante's belief in immortality is formal, precise, and firm,

as much so almost as that of a child, who thinks the dead will hear if you cry loud enough. But in

Michelangelo you have maturity, the mind of the grown man, dealing cautiously and dispassionately with

serious things; and what hope he has is based on the consciousness of ignoranceignorance of man,

ignorance of the nature of the mind, its origin and capacities. Michelangelo is so ignorant of the spiritual

world, of the new body and its laws, that he does not surely know whether the consecrated Host may not be

the body of Christ. And of all that range of sentiment he is the poet, a poet still alive, and in possession of our

inmost thoughtsdumb inquiry over the relapse after death into the formlessness which preceded life, the

change, the revolt from that change, then the correcting, hallowing, consoling rush of pity; at last, far off, thin

and vague, yet not more vague than the most definite thoughts men have had through three centuries on a

matter that has been so near their hearts, the new bodya passing light, a mere intangible, external effect,

over those too rigid, or too formless faces; a dream that lingers a moment, retreating in the dawn, incomplete,

aimless, helpless; a thing with faint hearing, faint memory, faint power of touch; a breath, a flame in the

The qualities of the great masters in art or literature, the combination of those qualities, the laws by which

they moderate, support, relieve each other, are not peculiar to them; but most often typical standards, or

revealing instances, of the laws by which certain aesthetic effects are produced. The old masters indeed are

simpler; their characteristics are written larger, and are easier to read, than their analogues in all the mixed,

confused productions of the modern mind. But when once we have succeeded in defining for ourselves those

characteristics, and the law of their combination, we have acquired a standard or measure which helps us to

put in its right place many a vagrant genius, many an unclassified talent, many precious though imperfect

products of art. It is so with the components of the true character of Michelangelo. That strange interfusion of

sweetness and strength is not to be found in those who claimed to be his followers; but it is found in many of

those who worked before him, and in many others down to our own time, in William Blake, for instance, and

Victor Hugo, who, though not of his school, and unaware, are his true sons, and help us to understand him, as

he in turn interprets and justifies them. Perhaps this is the chief use in studying old masters.

In Vasari's life of Leonardo da Vinci as we now read it there are some variations from the first edition. There,

the painter who has fixed the outward type of Christ for succeeding centuries was a bold speculator, holding

lightly by other men's beliefs, setting philosophy above Christianity. Words of his, trenchant enough to justify

this impression, are not recorded, and would have been out of keeping with a genius of which one

characteristic is the tendency to lose itself in a refined and graceful mystery. The suspicion was but the

timehonoured mode in which the world stamps its appreciation of one who has thoughts for himself alone,

his high indifference, his intolerance of the common forms of things; and in the second edition the image was

changed into something fainter and more conventional. But it is still by a certain mystery in his work, and

something enigmatical beyond the usual measure of great men, that he fascinates, or perhaps half repels. His

life is one of sudden revolts, with intervals in which he works not at all, or apart from the main scope of his

work. By a strange fortune the works on which his more popular fame rested disappeared early from the

world, as the Battle of the Standard; or are mixed obscurely with the work of meaner hands, as the Last

Supper. His type of beauty is so exotic that it fascinates a larger number than it delights, and seems more than

that of any other artist to reflect ideas and views and some scheme of the world within; so that he seemed to

his contemporaries to be the possessor of some unsanctified and sacred wisdom; as to Michelet and others to

have anticipated modern ideas. He trifles with his genius, and crowds all his chief work into a few tormented

years of later life; yet he is so possessed by his genius that he passes unmoved through the most tragic events,

overwhelming his country and friends, like one who comes across them by chance on some secret errand.

His legend, as the French say, with the anecdotes which every one knows, is one of the most brilliant in

Vasari. Later writers merely copied it, until, in 1804, Carlo Amoretti applied to it a criticism which left hardly

a date fixed, and not one of those anecdotes untouched. The various questions thus raised have since that time

become, one after another, subjects of special study, and mere antiquarianism has in this direction little more

to do. For others remain the editing of the thirteen books of his manuscripts, and the separation by technical

criticism of what in his reputed works is really his, from what is only half his, or the work of his pupils. But a

lover of strange souls may still analyse for himself the impression made on him by those works, and try to

reach through it a definition of the chief elements of Leonardo's genius. The legend, corrected and enlarged

by its critics, may now and then intervene to support the results of this analysis.

His life has three divisionsthirty years at Florence, nearly twenty years at Milan, then nineteen years of

wandering, till he sinks to rest under the protection of Francis the First at the Chateau de Clou. The dishonour

of illegitimacy hangs over his birth. Piero Antonio, his father, was of a noble Florentine house, of Vinci in the

Val d'Arno, and Leonardo, brought up delicately among the true children of that house, was the lovechild of

his youth, with the keen, puissant nature such children often have. We see him in his youth fascinating all

men by his beauty, improvising music and songs, buying the caged birds and setting them free, as he walked

>From his earliest years he designed many objects, and constructed models in relief, of which Vasari

mentions some of women smiling. His father, pondering over this promise in the child, took him to the

workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, then the most famous artist in Florence. Beautiful objects lay about

therereliquaries, pyxes, silver images for the pope's chapel at Rome, strange fancywork of the middle

age, keeping odd company with fragments of antiquity, then but lately discovered. Another student Leonardo

may have seen therea boy into whose soul the level light and aerial illusions of Italian sunsets had passed,

in after days famous as Perugino. Verrocchio was an artist of the earlier Florentine type, carver, painter, and

worker in metals, in one; designer, not of pictures only, but of all things for sacred or household use,

drinkingvessels, ambries, instruments of music, making them all fair to look upon, filling the common ways

of life with the reflexion of some faroff brightness; and years of patience had refined his hand till his work

It happened that Verrocchio was employed by the brethren of Vallombrosa to paint the Baptism of Christ,

and Leonardo was allowed to finish an angel in the left hand corner. It was one of those moments in which

the progress of a great thinghere, that of the art of Italypresses hard and sharp on the happiness of an

individual, through whose discouragement and decrease, humanity, in more fortunate persons, comes a step

For beneath the cheerful exterior of the mere wellpaid craftsman, chasing brooches for the copes of Santa

Maria Novella, or twisting metal screens for the tombs of the Medici, lay the ambitious desire of expanding

the destiny of Italian art by a larger knowledge and insight into things, a purpose in art not unlike Leonardo's

still unconscious purpose; and often, in the modelling of drapery, or of a lifted arm, or of hair cast back from

the face, there came to him something of the freer manner and richer humanity of a later age. But in this

Baptism the pupil had surpassed the master; and Verrocchio turned away as one stunned, and as if his sweet

earlier work must thereafter be distasteful to him, from the bright animated angel of Leonardo's hand.

The angel may still be seen in Florence, a space of sunlight in the cold, laboured old picture; but the legend is

true only in sentiment, for painting had always been the art by which Verrocchio set least store. And as in a

sense he anticipates Leonardo, so to the last Leonardo recalls the studio of Verrocchio, in the love of

beautiful toys, such as the vessel of water for a mirror, and lovely needlework about the implicated hands in

the Modesty and Vanity, and of reliefs like those cameos which in the Virgin of the Balances hang all round

the girdle of Saint Michael, and of bright variegated stones, such as the agates in the Saint Anne, and in a

hieratic preciseness and grace, as of a sanctuary swept and garnished. Amid all the cunning and intricacy of

his Lombard manner this never left him. Much of it there must have been in that lost picture of Paradise,

which he prepared as a cartoon for tapestry, to be woven in the looms of Flanders. It was the perfection of the

older Florentine style of miniaturepainting, with patient putting of each leaf upon the trees and each flower

And because it was the perfection of that style, it awoke in Leonardo some seed of discontent which lay in the

secret places of his nature. For the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts; and this pictureall that

he had done so far in his life at Florencewas after all in the old slight manner. His art, if it was to be

something in the world, must be weighted with more of the meaning of nature and purpose of humanity.

Nature was "the true mistress of higher intelligences." So he plunged into the study of nature. And in doing

this he followed the manner of the older students; he brooded over the hidden virtues of plants and crystals,

the lines traced by the stars as they moved in the sky, over the correspondences which exist between the

different orders of living things, through which, to eyes opened, they interpret each other; and for years he

He learned here the art of going deep, of tracking the sources of expression to their subtlest retreats, the

power of an intimate presence in the things he handled. He did not at once or entirely desert his art; only he

was no longer the cheerful, objective painter, through whose soul, as through clear glass, the bright figures of

Florentine life, only made a little mellower and more pensive by the transit, passed on to the white wall. He

wasted many days in curious tricks of design, seeming to lose himself in the spinning of intricate devices of

lines and colours. He was smitten with a love of the impossiblethe perforation of mountains, changing the

course of rivers, raising great buildings, such as the church of San Giovanni, in the air; all those feats for the

performance of which natural magic professed to have the key. Later writers, indeed, see in these efforts an

anticipation of modern mechanics; in him they were rather dreams, thrown off by the overwrought and

labouring brain. Two ideas were especially fixed in him, as reflexes of things that had touched his brain in

childhood beyond the measure of other impressionsthe smiling of women and the motion of great waters.

And in such studies some interfusion of the extremes of beauty and terror shaped itself, as an image that

might be seen and touched, in the mind of this gracious youth, so fixed that for the rest of his life it never left

him; and as catching glimpses of it in the strange eyes or hair of chance people, he would follow such about

the streets of Florence till the sun went down, of whom many sketches of his remain. Some of these are full

of a curious beauty, that remote beauty apprehended only by those who have sought it carefully; who, starting

with acknowledged types of beauty, have refined as far upon these, as these refine upon the world of common

forms. But mingled inextricably with this there is an element of mockery also; so that, whether in sorrow or

scorn, he caricatures Dante even. Legions of grotesques sweep under his hand; for has not nature too her

grotesquesthe rent rock, the distorting light of evening on lonely roads, the unveiled structure of man in the

All these swarming fancies unite in the Medusa of the Uffizii. Vasari's story of an earlier Medusa, painted on

a wooden shield, is perhaps an invention; and yet, properly told, has more of the air of truth about it than

anything else in the whole legend. For its real subject is not the serious work of a man, but the experiment

of a child. The lizards and glowworms and other strange small creatures which haunt an Italian vineyard

bring before one the whole picture of a child's life in a Tuscan dwellinghalf castle, half farmand are as

true to nature as the pretended astonishment of the father for whom the boy has prepared a surprise. It was not

in play that he painted that other Medusa, the one great picture which he left behind him in Florence. The

subject has been treated in various ways; Leonardo alone cuts to its centre; he alone realises it as the head of a

corpse, exercising its powers through all the circumstances of death. What may be called the fascination of

corruption penetrates in every touch its exquisitely finished beauty. About the dainty lines of the cheek the

bat flits unheeded. The delicate snakes seem literally strangling each other in terrified struggle to escape from

the Medusa brain. The hue which violent death always brings with it is in the features: features singularly

massive and grand, as we catch them inverted, in a dexterous foreshortening, sloping upwards, almost sliding

down upon us, crown foremost, like a great calm stone against which the wave of serpents breaks. But it is a

The science of that age was all divination, clairvoyance, unsubjected to our exact modern formulas, seeking

in an instant of vision to concentrate a thousand experiences. Later writers, thinking only of the wellordered

treatise on painting which a Frenchman, Raffaelle du Fresne, a hundred years afterwards, compiled from

Leonardo's bewildered manuscripts, written strangely, as his manner was, from right to left, have imagined a

rigid order in his inquiries. But this rigid order was little in accordance with the restlessness of his character;

and if we think of him as the mere reasoner who subjects design to anatomy, and composition to

mathematical rules, we shall hardly have of him that impression which those about him received from him.

Poring over his crucibles, making experiments with colour, trying, by a strange variation of the alchemist's

dream, to discover the secret, not of an elixir to make man's natural life immortal, but rather of giving

immortality to the subtlest and most delicate effects of painting, he seemed to them rather the sorcerer or the

magician, possessed of curious secrets and a hidden knowledge, living in a world of which he alone

possessed the key. What his philosophy seems to have been most like is that of Paracelsus or Cardan; and

much of the spirit of the older alchemy still hangs about it, with its confidence in short cuts and odd byways

to knowledge. To him philosophy was to be something giving strange swiftness and double sight, divining

the sources of springs beneath the earth or of expression beneath the human countenance, clairvoyant of

occult gifts in common or uncommon things, in the reed at the brookside, or the star which draws near to us

but once in a century. How, in this way, the clear purpose was overclouded, the fine chaser's hand perplexed,

we but dimly see; the mystery which at no point quite lifts from Leonardo's life is deepest here. But it is

The year 1483the year of the birth of Raffaelle and the thirtyfirst of Leonardo's lifeis fixed as the date

of his visit to Milan by the letter in which he recommends himself to Ludovico Sforza, and offers to tell him,

for a price, strange secrets in the art of war. It was that Sforza who murdered his young nephew by slow

poison, yet was so susceptible of religious impressions that he blended mere earthly passions with a sort of

religious sentimentalism, and who took for his device the mulberrytreesymbol, in its long delay and

sudden yielding of flowers and fruit together, of a wisdom which economises all forces for an opportunity of

sudden and sure effect. The fame of Leonardo had gone before him, and he was to model a colossal statue of

Francesco, the first Duke of Milan. As for Leonardo himself, he came not as an artist at all, or careful of the

fame of one; but as a player on the harp, a strange harp of silver of his own construction, shaped in some

curious likeness to a horse's skull. The capricious spirit of Ludovico was susceptible also of the charm of

music, and Leonardo's nature had a kind of spell in it. Fascination is always the word descriptive of him. No

portrait of his youth remains; but all tends to make us believe that up to this time some charm of voice and

aspect, strong enough to balance the disadvantage of his birth, had played about him. His physical strength

The Duomo, the work of artists from beyond the Alps, so fantastic to the eye of a Florentine used to the

mellow, unbroken surfaces of Giotto and Arnolfo, was then in all its freshness; and below, in the streets of

Milan, moved a people as fantastic, changeful and dreamlike. To Leonardo least of all men could there be

anything poisonous in the exotic flowers of sentiment which grew there. It was a life of brilliant sins and

exquisite amusements: Leonardo became a celebrated designer of pageants: and it suited the quality of his

genius, composed in almost equal parts of curiosity and the desire of beauty, to take things as they came.

Curiosity and the desire of beautythese are the two elementary forces in Leonardo's genius; curiosity often

in conflict with the desire of beauty, but generating, in union with it, a type of subtle and curious grace.

The movement of the fifteenth century was twofold; partly the Renaissance, partly also the coming of what is

called the "modern spirit," with its realism, its appeal to experience: it comprehended a return to antiquity,

and a return to nature. Raffaelle represents the return to antiquity, and Leonardo the return to nature. In this

return to nature, he was seeking to satisfy a boundless curiosity by her perpetual surprises, a microscopic

sense of finish by her finesse, or delicacy of operation, that subtilitas naturae which Bacon notices. So we

find him often in intimate relations with men of science,with Fra Luca Poccioli the mathematician, and the

anatomist Marc Antonio della Torre. His observations and experiments fill thirteen volumes of manuscript;

and those who can judge describe him as anticipating long before, by rapid intuition, the later ideas of

science. He explained the obscure light of the unilluminated part of the moon, knew that the sea had once

covered the mountains which contain shells, and the gathering of the equatorial waters above the polar.

He who thus penetrated into the most secret parts of nature preferred always the more to the less remote,

what, seeming exceptional, was an instance of law more refined, the construction about things of a peculiar

atmosphere and mixed lights. He paints flowers with such curious felicity that different writers have

attributed to him a fondness for particular flowers, as Clement the cyclamen, and Rio the jasmin; while, at

Venice, there is a stray leaf from his portfolio dotted all over with studies of violets and the wild rose. In him

first appears the taste for what is bizarre or recherche in landscape; hollow places full of the green shadow of

bituminous rocks, ridged reefs of traprock which cut the water into quaint sheets of lighttheir exact

antitype is in our own western seas; all the solemn effects of moving water; you may follow it springing from

its distant source among the rocks on the heath of the Madonna of the Balances, passing, as a little fall, into

the treacherous calm of the Madonna of the Lake, next, as a goodly river, below the cliffs of the Madonna of

the Rocks, washing the white walls of its distant villages, stealing out in a network of divided streams in La

Gioconda to the seashore of the Saint Annethat delicate place, where the wind passes like the hand of

some fine etcher over the surface, and the untorn shells are lying thick upon the sand, and the tops of the

rocks, to which the waves never rise, are green with grass, grown fine as hair. It is the landscape, not of

dreams or of fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand with a miracle of finesse.

Through Leonardo's strange veil of sight things reach him so; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light

of eclipse, or in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or through deep water.

And not into nature only; but he plunged also into human personality, and became above all a painter of

portraits; faces of a modelling more skilful than has been seen before or since, embodied with a reality which

almost amounts to illusion, on dark air. To take a character as it was, and delicately sound its stops, suited

one so curious in observation, curious in invention. So he painted the portraits of Ludovico's mistresses,

Lucretia Crivelli and Cecilia Galerani the poetess, of Ludovico himself, and the Duchess Beatrice. The

portrait of Cecilia Galerani is lost; but that of Lucretia Crivelli has been identified with La Belle Feroniere of

the Louvre, and Ludovico's pale, anxious face still remains in the Ambrosian library. Opposite is the portrait

of Beatrice d'Este, in whom Leonardo seems to have caught some presentiment of early death, painting her

precise and grave, full of the refinement of the dead, in sad earthcoloured raiment, set with pale stones.

Sometimes this curiosity came in conflict with the desire of beauty; it tended to make him go too far below

that outside of things in which art begins and ends. This struggle between the reason and its ideas, and the

senses, the desire of beauty, is the key to Leonardo's life at Milanhis restlessness, his endless retouchings,

his odd experiments with colour. How much must he leave unfinished, how much recommence! His problem

was the transmutation of ideas into images. What he had attained so far had been the mastery of that earlier

Florentine style, with its naive and limited sensuousness. Now he was to entertain in this narrow medium

those divinations of a humanity too wide for it, that larger vision of the opening world, which is only not too

much for the great, irregular art of Shakspere; and everywhere the effort is visible in the work of his hands.

This agitation, this perpetual delay, give him an air of weariness and ennui. To others he seems to be aiming

at an impossible effect, to do something that art, that painting, can never do. Often the expression of physical

beauty at this or that point seems strained and marred in the effort, as in those heavy German foreheadstoo

For there was a touch of Germany in that genius which, as Goethe said, had "thought itself weary"muede

sich gedacht. What an anticipation of modern Germany, for instance, in that debate on the question whether

sculpture or painting is the nobler art.* But there is this difference between him and the German, that, with all

that curious science, the German would have thought nothing more was needed; and the name of Goethe

himself reminds one how great for the artist may be the danger of overmuch science; how Goethe, who, in the

Elective Affinities and the first part of Faust, does transmute ideas into images, who wrought many such

transmutations, did not invariably find the spellword, and in the second part of Faust presents us with a mass

of science which has almost no artistic character at all. But Leonardo will never work till the happy moment

comesthat moment of bienetre, which to imaginative men is a moment of invention. On this moment he

waits; other moments are but a preparation, or aftertaste of it. Few men distinguish between them as

jealously as he did. Hence so many flaws even in the choicest work. But for Leonardo the distinction is

absolute, and, in the moment of bienetre, the alchemy complete: the idea is stricken into colour and

imagery: a cloudy mysticism is refined to a subdued and graceful mystery, and painting pleases the eye while

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

This curious beauty is seen above all in his drawings, and in these chiefly in the abstract grace of the

bounding lines. Let us take some of these drawings, and pause over them awhile; and, first, one of those at

Florencethe heads of a woman and a little child, set side by side, but each in its own separate frame. First

of all, there is much pathos in the reappearance in the fuller curves of the face of the child, of the sharper,

more chastened lines of the worn and older face, which leaves no doubt that the heads are those of a little

child and its mother. A feeling for maternity is indeed always characteristic of Leonardo; and this feeling is

further indicated here by the halfhumorous pathos of the diminutive, rounded shoulders of the child. You

may note a like pathetic power in drawings of a young man seated in a stooping posture, his face in his hands,

as in sorrow; of a slave sitting in an uneasy inclined posture, in some brief interval of rest; of a small

Madonna and Child, peeping sideways in halfreassured terror, as a mighty griffin with batlike wings, one of

Leonardo's finest inventions, descends suddenly from the air to snatch up a lion wandering near them. But

note in these, as that which especially belongs to art, the contour of the young man's hair, the poise of the

slave's arm above his head, and the curves of the head of the child, following the little skull within, thin and

Take again another head, still more full of sentiment, but of a different kind, a little drawing in red chalk

which every one remembers who has examined at all carefully the drawings by old masters at the Louvre. It

is a face of doubtful sex, set in the shadow of its own hair, the cheekline in high light against it, with

something voluptuous and full in the eyelids and the lips. Another drawing might pass for the same face in

childhood, with parched and feverish lips, but with much sweetness in the loose, shortwaisted childish

dress, with necklace and bulla, and in the daintily bound hair. We might take the thread of suggestion which

these two drawings offer, when thus set side by side, and, following it through the drawings at Florence,

Venice, and Milan, construct a sort of series, illustrating better than anything else Leonardo's type of

womanly beauty. Daughters of Herodias, with their fantastic headdresses knotted and folded so strangely to

leave the dainty oval of the face disengaged, they are not of the Christian family, or of Raffaelle's. They are

the clairvoyants, through whom, as through delicate instruments, one becomes aware of the subtler forces of

nature, and the modes of their action, all that is magnetic in it, all those finer conditions wherein material

things rise to that subtlety of operation which constitutes them spiritual, where only the finer nerve and the

keener touch can follow: it is as if in certain revealing instances we actually saw them at their work on human

flesh. Nervous, electric, faint always with some inexplicable faintness, they seem to be subject to exceptional

conditions, to feel powers at work in the common air unfelt by others, to become, as it were, receptacles of

But among the more youthful heads there is one at Florence which Love chooses for its ownthe head of a

young man, which may well be the likeness of Andrea Salaino, beloved of Leonardo for his curled and

waving hairbelli capelli ricci e inanellatiand afterwards his favourite pupil and servant. Of all the

interests in living men and women which may have filled his life at Milan, this attachment alone is recorded;

and in return Salaino identified himself so entirely with Leonardo, that the picture of Saint Anne, in the

Louvre, has been attributed to him. It illustrates Leonardo's usual choice of pupils, men of some natural

charm of person or intercourse like Salaino, or men of birth and princely habits of life like Francesco

Melzimen with just enough genius to be capable of initiation into his secret, for the sake of which they

were ready to efface their own individuality. Among them, retiring often to the Villa of the Melzi at Canonica

al Vaprio, he worked at his fugitive manuscripts and sketches, working for the present hour, and for a few

only, perhaps chiefly for himself. Other artists have been as careless of present or future applause, in

selfforgetfulness, or because they set moral or political ends above the ends of art; but in him this solitary

culture of beauty seems to have hung upon a kind of selflove, and a carelessness in the work of art of all but

art itself. Out of the secret places of a unique temperament he brought strange blossoms and fruits hitherto

unknown; and for him, the novel impression conveyed, the exquisite effect woven, counted as an end in

And these pupils of his acquired his manner so thoroughly, that though the number of Leonardo's authentic

works is very small indeed, there is a multitude of other men's pictures through which we undoubtedly see

him, and come very near to his genius. Sometimes, as in the little picture of the Madonna of the Balances, in

which, from the bosom of His mother, Christ weighs the pebbles of the brooks against the sins of men, we

have a hand, rough enough by contrast, working upon some fine hint or sketch of his. Sometimes, as in the

subjects of the Daughter of Herodias and the Head of John the Baptist, the lost originals have been reechoed

and varied upon again and again by Luini and others. At other times the original remains, but has been a mere

theme or motive, a type of which the accessories might be modified or changed; and these variations have but

brought out the more the purpose, or expression of the original. It is so with the socalled Saint John the

Baptist of the Louvreone of the few naked figures Leonardo paintedwhose delicate brown flesh and

woman's hair no one would go out into the wilderness to seek, and whose treacherous smile would have us

understand something far beyond the outward gesture or circumstance. But the long, reedlike cross in the

hand, which suggests Saint John the Baptist, becomes faint in a copy at the Ambrosian Library, and

disappears altogether in another, in the Palazzo Rosso at Genoa. Returning from the last to the original, we

are no longer surprised by Saint John's strange likeness to the Bacchus which hangs near it, which set

Theophile Gautier thinking of Heine's notion of decayed gods, who, to maintain themselves, after the fall of

paganism, took employment in the new religion. We recognise one of those symbolical inventions in which

the ostensible subject is used, not as matter for definite pictorial realisation, but as the startingpoint of a train

of sentiment as subtle and vague as a piece of music. No one ever ruled over his subject more entirely than

Leonardo, or bent it more dexterously to purely artistic ends. And so it comes to pass that though he handles

sacred subjects continually, he is the most profane of painters; the given person or subject, Saint John in the

Desert, or the Virgin on the knees of Saint Anne, is often merely the pretext for a kind of work which carries

About the Last Supper, its decay and restorations, a whole literature has risen up, Goethe's pensive sketch of

its sad fortunes being far the best. The death in childbirth of the Duchess Beatrice was followed in Ludovico

by one of those paroxysms of religious feeling which in him were constitutional. The low, gloomy

Dominican church of Saint Mary of the Graces had been the favourite shrine of Beatrice. She had spent her

last days there, full of sinister presentiments; at last it had been almost necessary to remove her from it by

force; and now it was here that mass was said a hundred times a day for her repose. On the damp wall of the

refectory, oozing with mineral salts, Leonardo painted the Last Supper. A hundred anecdotes were told about

it, his retouchings and delays. They show him refusing to work except at the moment of invention, scornful

of whoever thought that art was a work of mere industry and rule, often coming the whole length of Milan to

give a single touch. He painted it, not in fresco, where all must be impromptu, but in oils, the new method

which he had been one of the first to welcome, because it allowed of so many afterthoughts, so refined a

working out of perfection. It turned out that on a plastered wall no process could have been less durable.

Within fifty years it had fallen into decay. And now we have to turn back to Leonardo's own studies, above

all to one drawing of the central head at the Brera, which, in a union of tenderness and severity in the

facelines, reminds one of the monumental work of Mino da Fiesole, to trace it as it was.

It was another effort to lift a given subject out of the range of its conventional associations. Strange, after all

the misrepresentations of the middle age, was the effort to see it, not as the pale Host of the altar, but as one

taking leave of his friends. Five years afterwards the young Raffaelle, at Florence, painted it with sweet and

solemn effect in the refectory of Saint Onofrio; but still with all the mystical unreality of the school of

Perugino. Vasari pretends that the central head was never finished; but finished or unfinished, or owing part

of its effect to a mellowing decay, this central head does but consummate the sentiment of the whole

companyghosts through which you see the wall, faint as the shadows of the leaves upon the wall, on

autumn afternoons; this figure is but the faintest, most spectral of them all. It is the image of what the history

it symbolises has more and more become for the world, paler and paler as it recedes into the distance.

Criticism came with its appeal from mystical unrealities to originals, and restored no lifelike reality but these

The Last Supper was finished in 1497; in 1498 the French entered Milan, and whether or not the Gascon

bowmen used it as a mark for their arrows, the model of Francesco Sforza certainly did not survive. What, in

that age, such work was capable of beingof what nobility, amid what racy truthfulness to factwe may

judge from the bronze statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni on horseback, modelled by Leonardo's master,

Verrocchio (he died of grief, it was said, because, the mould accidentally failing, he was unable himself to

complete it), still standing in the piazza of Saint John and Saint Paul at Venice. Some traces of the thing may

remain in certain of Leonardo's drawings, and also, perhaps, by a singular circumstance, in a faroff town of

France. For Ludovico became a prisoner, and ended his days at Loches in Touraine;allowed at last, it is

said, to breathe fresher air for awhile in one of the rooms of a high tower there, after many years of captivity

in the dungeons below, where all seems sick with barbarous feudal memories, and where his prison is still

shown, its walls covered with strange painted arabesques, ascribed by tradition to his hand, amused a little, in

this way, through the tedious years:vast helmets and faces and pieces of armour, among which, in great

letters, the motto Infelix Sum is woven in and out, and in which, perhaps, it is not too fanciful to see the fruit

of a wistful afterdreaming over all those experiments with Leonardo on the armed figure of the great duke,

that had occupied the two so often during the days of his good fortune at Milan.

The remaining years of Leonardo's life are more or less years of wandering. From his brilliant life at court he

had saved nothing, and he returned to Florence a poor man. Perhaps necessity kept his spirit excited: the next

four years are one prolonged rapture or ecstasy of invention. He painted the pictures of the Louvre, his most

authentic works, which came there straight from the cabinet of Francis the First, at Fontainebleau. One

picture of his, the Saint Annenot the Saint Anne of the Louvre, but a mere cartoon, now in

Londonrevived for a moment a sort of appreciation more common in an earlier time, when good pictures

had still seemed miraculous; and for two days a crowd of people of all qualities passed in naive excitement

through the chamber where it hung, and gave Leonardo a taste of Cimabue's triumph. But his work was less

with the saints than with the living women of Florence; for he lived still in the polished society that he loved,

and in the houses of Florence, left perhaps a little subject to light thoughts by the death of Savonarolathe

latest gossip (1869) is of an undraped Monna Lisa, found in some outoftheway corner of the late Orleans

collectionhe saw Ginevra di Benci, and Lisa, the young third wife of Francesco del Giocondo. As we have

seen him using incidents of sacred story, not for their own sake, or as mere subjects for pictorial realisation,

but as a symbolical language for fancies all his own, so now he found a vent for his thoughts in taking one of

these languid women, and raising her, as Leda or Pomona, Modesty or Vanity, to the seventh heaven of

La Gioconda is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and

work. In suggestiveness, only the Melancholia of Duerer is comparable to it; and no crude symbolism

disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. We all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its

marble chair, in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea. Perhaps of all ancient pictures

time has chilled it least.* As often happens with works in which invention seems to reach its limits, there is

an element in it given to, not invented by, the master. In that inestimable folio of drawings, once in the

possession of Vasari, were certain designs by Verrocchio, faces of such impressive beauty that Leonardo in

his boyhood copied them many times. It is hard not to connect with these designs of the elder, bypast

master, as with its germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it,

which plays over all Leonardo's work. Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image

defining itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for express historical testimony, we might fancy that this

was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last. What was the relationship of a living Florentine to this

creature of his thought? By means of what strange affinities had the person and the dream grown up thus

apart, and yet so closely together? Present from the first incorporeally in Leonardo's thought, dimly traced in

the designs of Verrocchio, she is found present at last in Il Giocondo's house. That there is much of mere

portraiture in the picture is attested by the legend that by artificial means, the presence of mimes and

fluteplayers, that subtle expression was protracted on the face. Again, was it in four years and by renewed

labour never really completed, or in four months and as by stroke of magic, that the image was projected?

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

The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand

years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the

eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell,

of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those

white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into

which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and

moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the

animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and

imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among

which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has

been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern

merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary ; and all

this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has

moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life,

sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of

humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa

During these years at Florence Leonardo's history is the history of his art; he himself is lost in the bright

cloud of it. The outward history begins again in 1502, with a wild journey through central Italy, which he

makes as the chief engineer of Caesar Borgia. The biographer, putting together the stray jottings of his

manuscripts, may follow him through every day of it, up the strange tower of Siena, which looks towards

Rome, elastic like a bent bow, down to the seashore at Piombino, each place appearing as fitfully as in a fever

One other great work was left for him to do, a work all trace of which soon vanished, The Battle of the

Standard, in which he had Michelangelo for his rival. The citizens of Florence, desiring to decorate the walls

of the great councilchamber, had offered the work for competition, and any subject might be chosen from

the Florentine wars of the fifteenth century. Michelangelo chose for his cartoon an incident of the war with

Pisa, in which the Florentine soldiers, bathing in the Arno, are surprised by the sound of trumpets, and run to

arms. His design has reached us only in an old engraving, which perhaps helps us less than what we

remember of the background of his Holy Family in the Uffizii to imagine in what superhuman form, such as

might have beguiled the heart of an earlier world, those figures may have risen from the water. Leonardo

chose an incident from the battle of Anghiari, in which two parties of soldiers fight for a standard. Like

Michelangelo's, his cartoon is lost, and has come to us only in sketches, and in a fragment of Rubens.

Through the accounts given we may discern some lust of terrible things in it, so that even the horses tore each

other with their teeth; and yet one fragment of it, in a drawing of his at Florence, is far differenta waving

field of lovely armour, the chased edgings running like lines of sunlight from side to side. Michelangelo was

twentyseven years old; Leonardo more than fifty; and Raffaelle, then nineteen years old, visiting Florence

We catch a glimpse of him again, at Rome in 1514, surrounded by his mirrors and vials and furnaces, making

strange toys that seemed alive of wax and quicksilver. The hesitation which had haunted him all through life,

and made him like one under a spell, was upon him now with double force. No one had ever carried political

indifferentism farther; it had always been his philosophy to "fly before the storm"; he is for the Sforzas, or

against them, as the tide of their fortune turns. Yet now in the political society of Rome, he came to be

suspected of concealed French sympathies. It paralysed him to find himself among enemies; and he turned

France was about to become an Italy more Italian than Italy itself. Francis the First, like Lewis the Twelfth

before him, was attracted by the finesse of Leonardo's work; La Gioconda was already in his cabinet, and he

offered Leonardo the little Chateau de Clou, with its vineyards and meadows, in the pleasant valley of the

Masse, just outside the walls of the town of Amboise, where, especially in the hunting season, the court then

frequently resided. A Monsieur Lyonard, peinteur du Roy pour Amboyseso the letter of Francis the First is

headed. It opens a prospect, one of the most interesting in the history of art, where, under a strange mixture of

Two questions remain, after much busy antiquarianism, concerning Leonardo's deaththe question of the

precise form of his religion, and the question whether Francis the First was present at the time. They are of

about equally little importance in the estimate of Leonardo's genius. The directions in his will about the thirty

masses and the great candles for the church of Saint Florentin are things of course, their real purpose being

immediate and practical; and on no theory of religion could these hurried offices be of much consequence.

We forget them in speculating how one who had been always so desirous of beauty, but desired it always in

such definite and precise forms, as hands or flowers or hair, looked forward now into the vague land, and

It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and Paintingall the various products of

artas but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought,

supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in paintingof sound, in musicof rhythmical words,

in poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially

artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principlethat the

sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms

of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kindis the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism. For, as

art addresses not pure sense, still less the pure intellect, but the "imaginative reason" through the senses, there

are differences of kind in aesthetic beauty, corresponding to the differences in kind of the gifts of sense

themselves. Each art, therefore, having its own peculiar and incommunicable sensuous charm, has its own

special mode of reaching the imagination, its own special responsibilities to its material. One of the functions

of aesthetic criticism is to define these limitations; to estimate the degree in which a given work of art fulfils

its responsibilities to its special material; to note in a picture that true pictorial charm, which is neither a mere

poetical thought nor sentiment, on the one hand, nor a mere result of communicable technical skill in colour

or design, on the other; to define in a poem that true poetical quality, which is neither descriptive nor

meditative merely, but comes of an inventive handling of rhythmical languagethe element of song in the

singing; to note in music the musical charmthat essential music, which presents no words, no matter of

sentiment or thought, separable from the special form in which it is conveyed to us.

To such a philosophy of the variations of the beautiful, Lessing's analysis of the spheres of sculpture and

poetry, in the Laocoon, was a very important contribution. But a true appreciation of these things is possible

only in the light of a whole system of such artcasuistries. And it is in the criticism of painting that this truth

most needs enforcing, for it is in popular judgments on pictures that that false generalisation of all art into

forms of poetry is most prevalent. To suppose that all is mere technical acquirement in delineation or touch,

working through and addressing itself to the intelligence, on the one side, or a merely poetical, or what may

be called literary interest, addressed also to the pure intelligence, on the other;this is the way of most

spectators, and of many critics, who have never caught sight, all the time, of that true pictorial quality. which

lies between (unique pledge of the possession of the pictorial gift) the inventive or creative handling of pure

line and colour, which, as almost always in Dutch painting, as often also in the works of Titian or Veronese,

is quite independent of anything definitely poetical in the subject it accompanies. It is the drawingthe

design projected from that peculiar pictorial temperament or constitution, in which, while it may possibly be

ignorant of true anatomical proportions, all things whatever, all poetry, every idea however abstract or

obscure, floats up as a visible scene, or image: it is the colouringthat weaving as of just perceptible gold

threads of light through the dress, the flesh, the atmosphere, in Titian's Lacegirlthe staining of the whole

fabric of the thing with a new, delightful physical quality. This drawing, thenthe arabesque traced in the air

by Tintoret's flying figures, by Titian's forest branches; this colouringthe magic conditions of light and hue

in the atmosphere of Titian's Lacegirl, or Rubens's Descent from the Crossthese essential pictorial

qualities must first of all delight the sense, delight it as directly and sensuously as a fragment of Venetian

glass; and through this delight only be the medium of whatever poetry or science may lie beyond them, in the

intention of the composer. In its primary aspect, a great picture has no more definite message for us than an

accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a moment, on the wall or floor: is itself, in truth, a space of such

fallen light, caught as the colours are caught in an Eastern carpet, but refined upon, and dealt with more

subtly and exquisitely than by nature itself. And this primary and essential condition fulfilled, we may trace

the coming of poetry into painting, by fine gradations upwards; from Japanese fanpainting, for instance,

where we get, first, only abstract colour; then, just a little interfused sense of the poetry of flowers; then,

sometimes, perfect flowerpainting; and so, onwards, until in Titian we have, as his poetry in the Ariadne, so

actually a touch of true childlike humour in the diminutive, quaint figure with its silk gown, which ascends

But although each art has thus its own specific order of impressions, and an untranslatable charm, while a just

apprehension of the ultimate differences of the arts is the beginning of aesthetic criticism; yet it is noticeable

that, in its special mode of handling its given material, each art may be observed to pass into the condition of

some other art, by what German critics term an Andersstrebena partial alienation from its own

limitations, by which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend

Thus some of the most delightful music seems to be always approaching to figure, to pictorial definition.

Architecture, again, though it has its own lawslaws esoteric enough, as the true architect knows only too

wellyet sometimes aims at fulfilling the conditions of a picture, as in the Arena chapel; or of sculpture, as

in the flawless unity of Giotto's tower at Florence; and often finds a true poetry, as in those strangely twisted

staircases of the chateaux of the country of the Loire, as if it were intended that among their odd turnings the

actors in a wild life might pass each other unseen: there being a poetry also of memory and of the mere effect

of time, by which it often profits greatly. Thus, again, sculpture aspires out of the hard limitation of pure form

towards colour, or its equivalent; poetry also, in many ways, finding guidance from the other arts, the analogy

between a Greek tragedy and a work of Greek sculpture, between a sonnet and a relief, of French poetry

generally with the art of engraving, being more than mere figures of speech; and all the arts in common

aspiring towards the principle of music; music being the typical, or ideally consummate art, the object of the

great Andersstreben of all art, of all that is artistic, or partakes of artistic qualities.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other works of art it is possible to

distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the

constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instanceits subject, its given

incidents or situation; that the mere matter of a picturethe actual circumstances of an event, the actual

topography of a landscapeshould be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling; that this form,

this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter:this is

This abstract language becomes clear enough, if we think of actual examples. In an actual landscape we see a

long white road, lost suddenly on the hillverge. That is the matter of one of the etchings of M. Legros: only,

in this etching, it is informed by an indwelling solemnity of expression, seen upon it or halfseen, within the

limits of an exceptional moment, or caught from his own mood perhaps, but which he maintains as the very

essence of the thing, throughout his work. Sometimes a momentary tint of stormy light may invest a homely

or too familiar scene with a character which might well have been drawn from the deep places of the

imagination. Then we might say that this particular effect of light, this sudden inweaving of gold thread

through the texture of the haystack, and the poplars, and the grass, gives the scene artistic qualities; that it is

like a picture. And such tricks of circumstance are commonest in landscape which has little salient character

of its own; because, in such scenery, all the material details are so easily absorbed by that informing

expression of passing light, and elevated, throughout their whole extent, to a new and delightful effect by it.

And hence the superiority, for most conditions of the picturesque, of a riverside in France to a Swiss valley,

because, on the French riverside, mere topography, the simple material, counts for so little, and, all being so

pure, untouched, and tranquil in itself, mere light and shade have such easy work in modulating it to one

dominant tone. The Venetian landscape, on the other hand, has in its material conditions much which is hard,

or harshly definite; but the masters of the Venetian school have shown themselves little burdened by them. Of

its Alpine background they retain certain abstracted elements only, of cool colour and tranquillising line; and

they use its actual details, the brown windy turrets, the strawcoloured fields, the forest arabesques, but as the

notes of a music which duly accompanies the presence of their men and women, presenting us with the spirit

or essence only of a certain sort of landscapea country of the pure reason or halfimaginative memory.

Poetry, again, works with words addressed in the first instance to the mere intelligence; and it deals, most

often, with a definite subject or situation. Sometimes it may find a noble and quite legitimate function in the

expression of moral or political aspiration, as often in the poetry of Victor Hugo. In such instances it is easy

enough for the understanding to distinguish between the matter and the form, however much the matter, the

subject, the element which is addressed to the mere intelligence, has been penetrated by the informing, artistic

spirit. But the ideal types of poetry are those in which this distinction is reduced to its minimum; so that

lyrical poetry, precisely because in it we are least able to detach the matter from the form, without a

deduction of something from that matter itself, is, at least artistically, the highest and most complete form of

poetry. And the very perfection of such poetry often seems to depend, in part, on a certain suppression or

vagueness of mere subject, so that the meaning reaches us through ways not distinctly traceable by the

understanding, as in some of the most imaginative compositions of William Blake, and often in Shakspere's

songs, as preeminently in that song of Mariana's page in Measure for Measure, in which the kindling force

and poetry of the whole play seems to pass for a moment into an actual strain of music.

And this principle holds good of all things that partake in any degree of artistic qualities, of the furniture of

our houses, and of dress, for instance, of life itself, of gesture and speech, and the details of daily intercourse;

these also, for the wise, being susceptible of a suavity and charm, caught from the way in which they are

done, which gives them a worth in themselves; wherein, indeed, lies what is valuable and justly attractive, in

what is called the fashion of a time, which elevates the trivialities of speech, and manner, and dress, into

"ends in themselves," and gives them a mysterious grace and attractiveness in the doing of them.

Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure

perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material; the ideal examples of poetry and painting

being those in which the constituent elements of the composition are so welded together, that the material or

subject no longer strikes the intellect only; nor the form, the eye or the ear only; but form and matter, in their

union or identity, present one single effect to the "imaginative reason," that complex faculty for which every

It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of form and

matter. In its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter,

the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other; and to it, therefore, to the

condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be supposed constantly to tend and aspire. Music, then, and

not poetry, as is so often supposed, is the true type or measure of perfected art. Therefore, although each art

has its incommunicable element, its untranslatable order of impressions, its unique mode of reaching the

"imaginative reason," yet the arts may be represented as continually struggling after the law or principle of

music, to a condition which music alone completely realises; and one of the chief functions of aesthetic

criticism, dealing with the products of art, new or old, is to estimate the degree in which each of those

By no school of painters have, the necessary limitations of the art of painting been so unerringly though

instinctively apprehended, and the essence of what is pictorial in a picture so justly conceived, as by the

school of Venice; and the train of thought suggested in what has been now said is, perhaps, a not unfitting

introduction to a few pages about Giorgione, who, though much has been taken by recent criticism from what

was reputed to be his work, yet, more entirely than any other painter, sums up, in what we know of himself

The beginnings of Venetian painting link themselves to the last, stiff, halfbarbaric splendours of Byzantine

decoration, and are but the introduction into the crust of marble and gold on the walls of the Duomo of

Murano, or of Saint Mark's, of a little more of human expression. And throughout the course of its later

development, always subordinate to architectural effect, the work of the Venetian school never escaped from

the influence of its beginnings. Unassisted, and therefore unperplexed, by naturalism, religious mysticism,

philosophical theories, it had no Giotto, no Angelico, no Botticelli. Exempt from the stress of thought and

sentiment, which taxed so severely the resources of the generations of Florentine artists, those earlier

Venetian painters, down to Carpaccio and the Bellini, seem never for a moment to have been tempted even to

lose sight of the scope of their art in its strictness, or to forget that painting must be, before all things

decorative, a thing for the eye; a space of colour on the wall, only more dexterously blent than the marking of

its precious stone or the chance interchange of sun and shade upon itthis, to begin and end withwhatever

higher matter of thought, or poetry, or religious reverie might play its part therein, between. At last, with final

mastery of all the technical secrets of his art, and with somewhat more than "a spark of the divine fire" to his

share, comes Giorgione. He is the inventor of genre, of those easily movable pictures which serve neither for

uses of devotion, nor of allegorical or historic teachinglittle groups of real men and women, amid

congruous furniture or landscapemorsels of actual life, conversation or music or play, refined upon or

idealised, till they come to seem like glimpses of life from afar. Those spaces of more cunningly blent colour,

obediently filling their places, hitherto, in a mere architectural scheme, Giorgione detaches from the wall; he

frames them by the hands of some skilful carver, so that people may move them readily and take with them

where they go, like a poem in manuscript, or a musical instrument, to be used, at will, as a means of

selfeducation, stimulus or solace, coming like an animated presence, into one's cabinet, to enrich the air as

with some choice aroma, and, like persons, live with us, for a day or a lifetime. Of all art like this, art which

has played so large a part in men's culture since that time, Giorgione is the initiator. Yet in him too that old

Venetian clearness or justice, in the apprehension of the essential limitations of the pictorial art, is still

undisturbed; and, while he interfuses his painted work with a highstrung sort of poetry, caught directly from

a singularly rich and highstrung sort of life, yet in his selection of subject, or phase of subject, in the

subordination of mere subject to pictorial design, to the main purpose of a picture, he is typical of that

aspiration of all the arts towards music, which I have endeavoured to explain,towards the perfect

Born so near to Titian, though a little before him, that these two companion pupils of the aged Giovanni

Bellini may almost be called contemporaries, Giorgione stands to Titian in something like the relationship of

Sordello to Dante, in Mr. Browning's poem. Titian, when he leaves Bellini, becomes, in turn, the pupil of

Giorgione; he lives in constant labour more than sixty years after Giorgione is in his grave; and with such

fruit, that hardly one of the greater towns of Europe is without some fragment of it. But the slightly older

man, with his so limited actual product (what remains to us of it seeming, when narrowly examined, to reduce

itself to almost one picture, like Sordello's one fragment of lovely verse), yet expresses, in elementary motive

and principle, that spirititself the final acquisition of all the long endeavours of Venetian artwhich Titian

And, as we might expect, something fabulous and illusive has always mingled itself in the brilliancy of

Giorgione's fame. The exact relationship to him of many worksdrawings, portraits, painted idyllsoften

fascinating enough, which in various collections went by his name, was from the first uncertain. Still, six or

eight famous pictures at Dresden, Florence and the Louvre, were undoubtedly attributed to him, and in these,

if anywhere, something of the splendour of the old Venetian humanity seemed to have been preserved. But of

those six or eight famous pictures it is now known that only one is certainly from Giorgione's hand. The

accomplished science of the subject has come at last, and, as in other instances, has not made the past more

real for us, but assured us that we possess of it less than we seemed to possess. Much of the work on which

Giorgione's immediate fame depended, work done for instantaneous effect, in all probability passed away

almost within his own age, like the frescoes on the facade of the fondaco dei Tedeschi at Venice, some

crimson traces of which, however, still give a strange additional touch of splendour to the scene of the Rialto.

And then there is a barrier or borderland, a period about the middle of the sixteenth century, in passing

through which the tradition miscarries, and the true outlines of Giorgione's work and person become

obscured. It became fashionable for wealthy lovers of art, with no critical standard of authenticity, to collect

socalled works of Giorgione, and a multitude of imitations came into circulation. And now, in the "new

Vasari,"* the great traditional reputation, woven with so profuse demand on men's admiration, has been

scrutinised thread by thread; and what remains of the most vivid and stimulating of Venetian masters, a live

flame, as it seemed, in those old shadowy times, has been reduced almost to a name by his most recent critics.

Yet enough remains to explain why the legend grew up, above the name, why the name attached itself, in

many instances, to the bravest work of other men. The Concert in the Pitti Palace, in which a monk, with

cowl and tonsure, touches the keys of a harpsichord, while a clerk, placed behind him, grasps the handle of

the viol, and a third, with hat and plume, seems to wait upon the true interval for beginning to sing, is

undoubtedly Giorgione's. The outline of the lifted finger, the trace of the plume, the very threads of the fine

linen, which fasten themselves on the memory, in the moment before they are lost altogether in that calm

unearthly glow, the skill which has caught the waves of wandering sound, and fixed them for ever on the lips

and handsthese are indeed the master's own; and the criticism which, while dismissing so much hitherto

believed to be Giorgione's, has established the claims of this one picture, has left it among the most precious

It is noticeable that the "distinction" of this Concert, its sustained evenness of perfection, alike in design, in

execution, and in choice of personal type, becomes for the "new Vasari" the standard of Giorgione's genuine

work. Finding here enough to explain his influence, and the true seal of mastery, its authors assign to

Pellegrino da San Daniele the Holy Family in the Louvre, for certain points in which it comes short of that

standard, but which will hardly diminish the spectator's enjoyment of a singular charm of liquid air, with

which the whole picture seems instinct, filling the eyes and lips, the very garments, of its sacred personages,

with some windsearched brightness and energy; of which fine air the blue peak, clearly defined in the

distance, is, as it were, the visible pledge. Similarly, another favourite picture in the Louvre, the subject of a

Sonnet by a poet whose own painted work often comes to mind as one ponders over these precious

thingsthe Fete Champetre, is assigned to an imitator of Sebastian del Piombo; and the Tempest, in the

Academy at Venice (a slighter loss, perhaps, though not without its pleasant effect of clearing weather,

towards the left, its one untouched morsel), to Paris Bordone, or perhaps to "some advanced craftsman of the

sixteenth century." From the gallery at Dresden, the Knight embracing a Lady, where the knight's broken

gauntlets seem to mark some wellknown pause in a story we would willingly hear the rest of; is conceded to

"a Brescian hand," and Jacob meeting Rachel to a pupil of Palma; and, whatever their charm, we are called

on to give up the Ordeal and the Finding of Moses with its jewellike pools of water, perhaps to Bellini.

Nor has the criticism, which thus so freely diminishes the number of his authentic works, added anything

important to the wellknown outline of the life and personality of the man: only, it has fixed one or two

dates, one or two circumstances, a little more exactly. Giorgione was born before the year 1477, and spent his

childhood at Castelfranco, where the last crags of the Venetian Alps break down romantically, with

something of parklike grace, to the plain. A natural child of the family of the Barbarelli by a peasantgirl of

Vedelago, he finds his way early into the circle of notable personspeople of courtesy; and becomes

initiated into those differences of personal type, manner, and even of dress, which are best understood

therethat "distinction" of the Concert of the Pitti Palace. Not far from his home lives Catherine of Cornara,

formerly Queen of Cyprus; and, up in the towers which still remain, Tuzio Costanzo, the famous

condottierea picturesque remnant of medieval manners, amid a civilisation rapidly changing. Giorgione

paints their portraits; and when Tuzio's son, Matteo, dies in early youth, adorns in his memory a chapel in the

church of Castelfranco, painting on this occasion, perhaps, the altarpiece, foremost among his authentic

works, still to be seen there, with the figure of the warriorsaint, Liberale, of which the original little study in

oil, with the delicately gleaming, silvergrey armour, is one of the greater treasures of the National Gallery,

and in which, as in some other knightly personages attributed to him, people have supposed the likeness of

his own presumably gracious presence. Thither, at last, he is himself brought home from Venice, early dead,

but celebrated. It happened, about his thirtyfourth year, that in one of those parties at which he entertained

his friends with music, he met a certain lady of whom he became greatly enamoured, and "they rejoiced

greatly," says Vasari, "the one and the other, in their loves." And two quite different legends concerning it

agree in this, that it was through this lady he came by his death: Ridolfi relating that, being robbed of her by

one of his pupils, he died of grief at the double treason;Vasari, that she being secretly stricken of the

plague, and he making his visits to her as usual, he took the sickness from her mortally, along with her kisses,

But, although the number of Giorgione's extant works has been thus limited by recent criticism, all is not

done when the real and the traditional elements in what concerns him have been discriminated; for, in what is

connected with a great name, much that is not real is often very stimulating; and, for the aesthetic

philosopher, over and above the real Giorgione and his authentic extant works, there remains the

Giorgionesque alsoan influence, a spirit or type in art, active in men so different as those to whom many of

his supposed works are really assignablea veritable school, which grew together out of all those fascinating

works rightly or wrongly attributed to him; out of many copies from, or variations on him, by unknown or

uncertain workmen, whose drawings and designs were, for various reasons, prized as his; out of the

immediate impression he made upon his contemporaries, and with which he continued in men's minds; out of

many traditions of subject and treatment, which really descend from him to our own time, and by retracing

which we fill out the original image; Giorgione thus becoming a sort of impersonation of Venice itself, its

projected reflex or ideal, all that was intense or desirable in it thus crystallising about the memory of this

And now, finally, let me illustrate some of the characteristics of this School of Giorgione, as we may call it,

which, for most of us, notwithstanding all that negative criticism of the "new Vasari," will still identify itself

with those famous pictures at Florence, Dresden and Paris; and in which a certain artistic ideal is defined for

usthe conception of a peculiar aim and procedure in art, which we may understand as the Giorgionesque,

wherever we find it, whether in Venetian work generally, or in work of our own timeand of which the

Concert, that undoubted work of Giorgione in the Pitti Palace, is the typical instance, and a pledge

I have spoken of a certain interpretation of the matter or subject of a work of art with the form of it, a

condition realised absolutely only in music, as the condition to which every form of art is perpetually

aspiring. In the art of painting, the attainment of this ideal condition, this perfect interpretation of the subject

with colour and design, depends, of course, in great measure, on dexterous choice of that subject, or phase of

subject; and such choice is one of the secrets of Giorgione's school. It is the school of genre, and employs

itself mainly with "painted idylls," but, in the production of this pictorial poetry, exercises a wonderful tact in

the selecting of such matter as lends itself most readily and entirely to pictorial form, to complete expression

by drawing and colour. For although its productions are painted poems, they belong to a sort of poetry which

tells itself without an articulated story. The master is preeminent for the resolution, the ease and quickness,

with which he reproduces instantaneous motionthe lacingon of armour, with the head bent back so

statelythe fainting ladythe embrace, rapid as the kiss caught, with death itself, from dying lipsthe

momentary conjunction of mirrors and polished armour and still water, by which all the sides of a solid

image are presented at once, solving that casuistical question whether painting can present an object as

completely as sculpture. The sudden act, the rapid transition of thought, the passing expressionthis he

arrests with that vivacity which Vasari has attributed to him, il fuoco Giorgionesco, as he terms it. Now it is

part of the ideality of the highest sort of dramatic poetry, that it presents us with a kind of profoundly

significant and animated instants, a mere gesture, a look, a smile, perhapssome brief and wholly concrete

momentinto which, however, all the motives, all the interests and effects of a long history, have condensed

themselves, and which seem to absorb past and future in an intense consciousness of the present. Such ideal

instants the school of Giorgione selects, with its admirable tact, from that feverish, tumultuously coloured life

of the old citizens of Veniceexquisite pauses in time, in which, arrested thus, we seem to be spectators of

all the fulness of existence, and which are like some consummate extract or quintessence of life.

It is to the law or condition of music, as I said, that all art like this is really aspiring and, in the school of

Giorgione, the perfect moments of music itself, the making or hearing of music, song or its accompaniment,

are themselves prominent as subjects. On that background of the silence of Venice, which the visitor there

finds so impressive, the world of Italian music was then forming. In choice of subject, as in all besides, the

Concert of the Pitti Palace is typical of all that Giorgione, himself an admirable musician, touched with his

influence; and in sketch or finished picture, in various collections, we may follow it through many intricate

variationsmen fainting at music, music heard at the poolside while people fish, or mingled with the sound

of the pitcher in the well, or heard across running water, or among the flocks; the tuning of

instrumentspeople with intent faces, as if listening, like those described by Plato in an ingenious passage,

to detect the smallest interval of musical sound, the smallest undulation in the air, or feeling for music in

thought on a stringless instrument, ear and finger refining themselves infinitely, in the appetite for sweet

sounda momentary touch of an instrument in the twilight, as one passes through some unfamiliar room, in

In such favourite incidents, then, of Giorgione's school, music or musiclike intervals in our existence, life

itself is conceived as a sort of listeninglistening to music, to the reading of Bandello's novels, to the sound

of water, to time as it flies. Often such moments are really our moments of play, and we are surprised at the

unexpected blessedness of what may seem our least important part of time; not merely because play is in

many instances that to which people really apply their own best powers, but also because at such times, the

stress of our servile, everyday attentiveness being relaxed, the happier powers in things without us are

permitted free passage, and have their way with us. And so, from music, the school of Giorgione passes often

to the play which is like music; to those masques in which men avowedly do but play at real life, like children

"dressing up," disguised in the strange old Italian dresses, particoloured, or fantastic with embroidery and

furs, of which the master was so curious a designer, and which, above all the spotless white linen at wrist and

And when people are happy in this thirsty land water will not be far off; and in the school of Giorgione, the

presence of waterthe well, or marblerimmed pool, the drawing or pouring of water, as the woman pours it

from a pitcher with her jewelled hand in the Fete Champetre, listening, perhaps, to the cool sound as it falls,

blent with the music of the pipesis as characteristic, and almost as suggestive, as that of music itself. And

the landscape feels, and is glad of it alsoa landscape full of clearness, of the effects of water, of fresh rain

newly passed through the air, and collected into the grassy channels; the air, too, in the school of Giorgione,

seeming as vivid as the people who breathe it, and literally empyrean, all impurities being burnt out of it, and

no taint, no floating particle of anything but its own proper elements allowed to subsist within it.

Its scenery is such as in England we call "park scenery," with some elusive refinement felt about the rustic

buildings, the choice grass, the grouped trees, the undulations deftly economised for graceful effect. Only, in

Italy all natural things are, as it were, woven through and through with gold thread, even the cypress

revealing it among the folds of its blackness. And it is with gold dust, or gold thread, that these Venetian

painters seem to work, spinning its fine filaments, through the solemn human flesh, away into the white

plastered walls of the thatched huts. The harsher details of the mountains recede to a harmonious distance, the

one peak of rich blue above the horizon remaining but as the visible warrant of that due coolness which is all

we need ask here of the Alps, with their dark rains and streams. Yet what real, airy space, as the eye passes

from level to level, through the longdrawn valley in which Jacob embraces Rachel among the flocks!

Nowhere is there a truer instance of that balance, that modulated unison of landscape and personsof the

human image and its accessoriesalready noticed as characteristic of the Venetian school, so that, in it,

Something like this seems to me to be the vraie verite about Giorgione, if I may adopt a serviceable

expression, by which the French recognise those more liberal and durable impressions which, in respect of

any really considerable person or subject, anything that has at all intricately occupied men's attention, lie

beyond, and must supplement, the narrower range of the strictly ascertained facts about it. In this, Giorgione

is but an illustration of a valuable general caution we may abide by in all criticism. As regards Giorgione

himself, we have indeed to take note of all those negations and exceptions, by which, at first sight, a "new

Vasari" seems merely to have confused our apprehension of a delightful object, to have explained away out

of our inheritance from past time what seemed of high value there. Yet it is not with a full understanding even

of those exceptions that one can leave off just at this point. Properly qualified, such exceptions are but a salt

of genuineness in our knowledge; and beyond all those strictly ascertained facts, we must take note of that

indirect influence by which one like Giorgione, for instance, enlarges his permanent efficacy and really

makes himself felt in our culture. In a just impression of that, is the essential truth, the vraie verite concerning

In the middle of the sixteenth century, when the spirit of the Renaissance was everywhere, and people had

begun to look back with distaste on the works of the middle age, the old Gothic manner had still one chance

more, in borrowing something from the rival which was about to supplant it. In this way there was produced,

chiefly in France, a new and peculiar phase of taste with qualities and a charm of its own, blending the

somewhat attenuated grace of Italian ornament with the general outlines of Northern design. It produced the

Chateau de Gaillon, as you may still see it in the delicate engravings of Israel Silvestrea Gothic donjon

veiled faintly by a surface of dainty Italian traceriesChenonceaux, Blois, Chambord, and the church of

Brou. In painting, there came from Italy workmen like Maitre Roux and the masters of the school of

Fontainebleau, to have their later Italian voluptuousness attempered by the naive and silvery qualities of the

native style; and it was characteristic of these painters that they were most successful in painting on glass, an

art so essentially medieval. Taking it up where the middle age had left it, they found their whole work among

the last subtleties of colour and line; and keeping within the true limits of their material, they got quite a new

order of effects from it, and felt their way to refinements on colour never dreamed of by those older

workmen, the glasspainters of Chartres or Le Mans. What is called the Renaissance in France is thus not so

much the introduction of a wholly new taste readymade from Italy, but rather the finest and subtlest phase

of the middle age itself, its last fleeting splendour and temperate Saint Martin's summer. In poetry, the Gothic

spirit in France had produced a thousand songs; and in the Renaissance, French poetry too did but borrow

something to blend with a native growth, and the poems of Ronsard, with their ingenuity, their delicately

figured surfaces, their slightness, their fanciful combinations of rhyme, are but the correlative of the traceries

There was indeed something in the native French taste naturally akin to that Italian finesse. The characteristic

of French work had always been a certain nicety, a remarkable daintiness of hand, une nettete remarquable

d'execution. In the paintings of Francois Clouet, for example, or rather of the Clouetsfor there was a whole

family of thempainters remarkable for their resistance to Italian influences, there is a silveriness of colour

and a clearness of expression which distinguish them very definitely from their Flemish neighbours, Hemling

or the Van Eycks. And this nicety is not less characteristic of old French poetry. A light, aerial delicacy, a

simple eleganceune nettete remarquable d'execution:these are essential characteristics alike of Villon's

poetry, and of the Hours of Anne of Brittany. They are characteristic too of a hundred French Gothic carvings

and traceries. Alike in the old Gothic cathedrals, and in their counterpart, the old Gothic chansons de geste,

the rough and ponderous mass becomes, as if by passing for a moment into happier conditions, or through a

more gracious stratum of air, graceful and refined, like the carved ferneries on the granite church at Folgoat,

or the lines which describe the fair priestly hands of Archbishop Turpin, in the song of Roland; although

*The purely artistic aspects of this subject have been interpreted, in a work of great taste and learning, by

And Villon's songs and Clouet's paintings are like these. It is the higher touch making itself felt here and

there, betraying itself, like nobler blood in a lower stock, by a fine line or gesture or expression, the turn of a

wrist, the tapering of a finger. In Ronsard's time that rougher element seemed likely to predominate. No one

can turn over the pages of Rabelais without feeling how much need there was of softening, of castigation. To

effect this softening is the object of the revolution in poetry which is connected with Ronsard's name. Casting

about for the means of thus refining upon and saving the character of French literature, he accepted that

influx of Renaissance taste, which, leaving the buildings, the language, the art, the poetry of France, at

bottom, what they were, old French Gothic still, gilds their surfaces with a strange, delightful, foreign aspect

passing over all that Northern land, in itself neither deeper nor more permanent than a chance effect of light.

He reinforces, he doubles the French daintiness by Italian finesse. Thereupon, nearly all the force and all the

seriousness of French work disappear; only the elegance, the aerial touch, the perfect manner remain. But this

elegance, this manner, this daintiness of execution are consummate, and have an unmistakable aesthetic

So the old French chanson, which, like the old Northern Gothic ornament, though it sometimes refined itself

into a sort of weird elegance, was often, in its essence, something rude and formless, became in the hands of

Ronsard a Pindaric ode. He gave it structure, a sustained system, strophe and antistrophe, and taught it a

changefulness and variety of metre which keep the curiosity always excited, so that the very aspect of it, as it

lies written on the page, carries the eye lightly onwards, and of which this is a good instance:

Avril, la grace, et le ris De Cypris, Le flair et la douce haleine; Avril, le parfum des dieux, Qui, des cieux,

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

That is not by Ronsard, but by Remy Belleau, for Ronsard soon came to have a school. Six other poets threw

in their lot with him in his literary revolutionthis Remy Belleau, Antoine de Baif, Pontus de Tyard, Etienne

Jodelle, Jean Daurat, and lastly Joachim du Bellay; and with that strange love of emblems which is

characteristic of the time, which covered all the works of Francis the First with the salamander, and all the

works of Henry the Second with the double crescent, and all the works of Anne of Brittany with the knotted

cord, they called themselves the Pleiad; seven in all, although, as happens with the celestial Pleiad, if you

scrutinise this constellation of poets more carefully you may find there a great number of minor stars.

The first note of this literary revolution was struck by Joachim du Bellay in a little tract written at the early

age of twentyfour, which coming to us through three centuries seems of yesterday, so full is it of those

delicate critical distinctions which are sometimes supposed peculiar to modern writers. The piece has for its

title La Deffense et Illustration de la langue Francoyse; and its problem is how to illustrate or ennoble the

French language, to give it lustre. We are accustomed to speak of the varied critical and creative movement

of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the Renaissance, and because we have a single name for it we may

sometimes fancy that there was more unity in the thing itself than there really was. Even the Reformation,

that other great movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had far less unity, far less of combined

action, than is at first sight supposed; and the Renaissance was infinitely less united, less conscious of

combined action, than the Reformation. But if anywhere the Renaissance became conscious, as a German

philosopher might say, if ever it was understood as a systematic movement by those who took part in it, it is

in this little book of Joachim du Bellay's, which it is impossible to read without feeling the excitement, the

animation, of change, of discovery. "It is a remarkable fact," says M. SainteBeuve, "and an inversion of

what is true of other languages, that, in French, prose has always had the precedence over poetry." Du

Bellay's prose is perfectly transparent, flexible, and chaste. In many ways it is a more characteristic example

of the culture of the Pleiad than any of its verse; and those who love the whole movement of which the Pleiad

is a part, for a weird foreign grace in it, and may be looking about for a true specimen of it, cannot have a

Du Bellay's object is to adjust the existing French culture to the rediscovered classical culture; and in

discussing this problem, and developing the theories of the Pleiad, he has lighted upon many principles of

permanent truth and applicability. There were some who despaired of the French language altogether, who

thought it naturally incapable of the fulness and elegance of Greek and Latincette elegance et copie qui est

en la langue Grecque et Romainethat science could be adequately discussed, and poetry nobly written,

only in the dead languages. "Those who speak thus," says Du Bellay, "make me think of those relics which

one may only see through a little pane of glass, and must not touch with one's hands. That is what these

people do with all branches of culture, which they keep shut up in Greek and Latin books, not permitting one

to see them otherwise, or transport them out of dead words into those which are alive, and wing their way

daily through the months of men." "Languages," he says again, "are not born like plants and trees, some

naturally feeble and sickly, others healthy and strong and apter to bear the weight of men's conceptions, but

all their virtue is generated in the world of choice and men's freewill concerning them. Therefore, I cannot

blame too strongly the rashness of some of our countrymen, who being anything rather than Greeks or Latins,

depreciate and reject with more than stoical disdain everything written in French; nor can I express my

surprise at the odd opinion of some learned men who think that our vulgar tongue is wholly incapable of

It was an age of translations. Du Bellay himself translated two books of the Aeneid, and other poetry, old and

new, and there were some who thought that the translation of the classical literature was the true means of

ennobling the French language:strangers are ever favourites with usnous favorisons toujours les

etrangers. Du Bellay moderates their expectations. "I do not believe that one can learn the right use of

them"he is speaking of figures and ornament in language"from translations, because it is impossible to

reproduce them with the same grace with which the original author used them. For each language has, I know

not what peculiarity of its own; and if you force yourself to express the naturalness (le naif) of this, in another

language, observing the law of translation, which is, not to expatiate beyond the limits of the author himself;

your words will be constrained, cold and ungraceful." Then he fixes the test of all good translation:"To

prove this, read me Demosthenes and Homer in Latin, Cicero and Virgil in French, and see whether they

produce in you the same affections which you experience in reading those authors in the original."

In this effort to ennoble the French language, to give it grace, number, perfection, and as painters do to their

pictures, that last, so desirable, touchcette derniere main que nous desironswhat Du Bellay is pleading

for is his mothertongue, the language, that is, in which one will have the utmost degree of what is moving

and passionate. He recognised of what force the music and dignity of languages are, how they enter into the

inmost part of things; and in pleading for the cultivation of the French language, he is pleading for no merely

scholastic interest, but for freedom, impulse, reality, not in literature merely, but in daily communion of

speech. After all, it was impossible to have this impulse in Greek and Latin, dead languages shut up in books

as in reliquariesperis et mises en reliquaires de livres. By aid of this starveling stockpauvre plante et

vergetteof the French language, he must speak delicately, movingly, if he is ever to speak so at all: that, or

none, must be for him the medium of what he calls, in one of his great phrases, le discours fatal des choses

mondainesthat discourse about affairs which decides men's fates. And it is his patriotism not to despair of

it; he sees it already perfect in all elegance and beauty of wordsparfait en toute elegance et venuste de

Du Bellay was born in the disastrous year 1525, the year of the battle of Pavia, and the captivity of Francis

the First. . His parents died early, and to him, as the younger son, his mother's little estate, ce petit Lire, the

beloved place of his birth, descended. He was brought up by a brother only a little older than himself; and left

to themselves, the two boys passed their lives in daydreams of military glory. Their education was

neglected; "The time of my youth," says Du Bellay, "was lost, like the flower which no shower waters, and

no hand cultivates." He was just twenty years old when the elder brother died, leaving Joachim to be the

guardian of his child. It was with regret, with a shrinking feeling of incapacity, that he took upon him the

burden of this responsibility. Hitherto he had looked forward to the profession of a soldier, hereditary in his

family. But at this time a sickness attacked him which brought him cruel sufferings, and seemed likely to be

mortal. It was then for the first time that he read the Greek and Latin poets. These studies came too late to

make him what he so much desired to be, a trifler in Greek and Latin verse, like so many others of his time

now forgotten; instead, they made him a lover of his own homely native tongue, that poor starveling stock of

the French language. It was through this fortunate shortcoming in his education that he became national and

modern; and he learned afterwards to look back on that wild garden of his youth with only a half regret. A

certain Cardinal du Bellay was the successful member of the family, a man often employed in high official

affairs. It was to him that the thoughts of Joachim turned when it became necessary to choose a profession,

and in 1552 he accompanied the Cardinal to Rome. He remained there nearly five years, burdened with the

weight of affairs, and languishing with homesickness. Yet it was under these circumstances that his genius

yielded its best fruits. From Rome, which to most men of an imaginative temperament such as his would have

yielded so many pleasurable sensations, with all the curiosities of the Renaissance still fresh there, his

thoughts went back painfully, longingly, to the country of the Loire, with its wide expanses of waving corn,

its homely pointed roofs of grey slate, and its faroff scent of the sea. He reached home at last, but only to die

Much of Du Bellay's poetry illustrates rather the age and school to which he belonged than his own temper

and genius. As with the writings of Ronsard and the other poets of the Pleiad, its interest depends not so

much on the impress of individual genius upon it, as on the circumstance that it was once poetry a la mode,

that it is part of the manner of a timea time which made much of manner, and carried it to a high degree of

perfection. It is one of the decorations of an age which threw much of its energy into the work of decoration.

We feel a pensive pleasure in seeing these faded decorations, and observing how a group of actual men and

women pleased themselves long ago. Ronsard's poems are a kind of epitome of his age. Of one side of that

age, it is true, of the strenuous, the progressive, the serious movement, which was then going on, there is

little; but of the catholic side, the losing side, the forlorn hope, hardly a figure is absent. The Queen of Scots,

at whose desire Ronsard published his odes, reading him in her northern prison, felt that he was bringing back

to her the true flavour of her early days in the court of Catherine at the Louvre, with its exotic Italian gaieties.

Those who disliked that poetry, disliked it because they found that age itself distasteful. The poetry of

Malherbe came, with its sustained style and weighty sentiment, but with nothing that set people singing; and

the lovers of such poetry saw in the poetry of the Pleiad only the latest trumpery of the middle age. But the

time came also when the school of Malherbe had had its day; and the Romanticists, who in their eagerness for

excitement, for strange music and imagery, went back to the works of the middle age, accepted the Pleiad too

with the rest; and in that new middle age which their genius has evoked, the poetry of the Pleiad has found its

place. At first, with Malherbe, you may find it, like the architecture, the whole mode of life, the very dresses

of that time, fantastic, faded, rococo. But if you look long enough to understand it, to conceive its sentiment,

you will find that those wanton lines have a spirit guiding their caprices. For there is style there; one temper

has shaped the whole; and everything that has style, that has been done as no other man or age could have

done it, as it could never, for all our trying, be done again, has its true value and interest. Let us dwell upon it

for a moment, and try to gather from it that special flower, ce fleur particulier, which Ronsard himself tells us

It is poetry not for the people, but for a confined circle, for courtiers, great lords and erudite persons, people

who desire to be humoured, to gratify a certain refined voluptuousness they have in them. Ronsard loves, or

dreams that he loves, a rare and peculiar type of beauty, la petite pucelle Angevine, with golden hair and dark

eyes. But he has the ambition not only of being a courtier and a lover, but a great scholar also; he is anxious

about orthography, about the letter e Grecque, the true spelling of Latin names in French writing, and the

restoration of the letter i to its primitive libertydel' i voyelle en sa premiere liberte. His poetry is full of

quaint, remote learning. He is just a little pedantic, true always to his own express judgment, that to be

natural is not enough for one who in poetry desires to produce work worthy of immortality. And therewithal a

certain number of Greek words, which charmed Ronsard and his circle by their gaiety and daintiness, and a

certain air of foreign elegance about them, crept into the French language: and there were other strange words

which the poets of the Pleiad forged for themselves, and which had only an ephemeral existence.

With this was mixed the desire to taste a more exquisite and various music than that of the older French

verse, or of the classical poets. The music of the measured, scanned verse of Latin and Greek poetry is one

thing; the music of the rhymed, unscanned verse of Villon and the old French poets, la poesie chantee, is

another. To unite together these two kinds of music in a new school of French poetry, to make verse which

should scan and rhyme as well, to search out and harmonise the measure of every syllable, and unite it to the

swift, flitting, swallowlike motion of rhyme, to penetrate their poetry with a double musicthis was the

ambition of the Pleiad. They are insatiable of music, they cannot have enough of it; they desire a music of

greater compass perhaps than words can possibly yield, to drain out the last drops of sweetness which a

This eagerness for music is almost the only serious thing in the poetry of the Pleiad; and it was Goudimel, the

severe and protestant Goudimel, who set Ronsard's songs to music. But except in this matter these poets seem

never quite in earnest. The old Greek and Roman mythology, which for the great Italians had been a motive

so weighty and severe, becomes with them a mere toy. That "Lord of terrible aspect," Amor, has become

Love, the boy or the babe. They are full of fine railleries; they delight in diminutives, ondelette, fontelette,

doucelette, Cassandrette. Their loves are only half real, a vain effort to prolong the imaginative loves of the

middle age beyond their natural lifetime. They write lovepoems for hire. Like that party of people who tell

the tales in Boccaccio's Decameron, they form a circle which in an age of great troubles, losses, anxieties,

amuses itself with art, poetry, intrigue. But they amuse themselves with wonderful elegance; and sometimes

their gaiety becomes satiric, for, as they play, real passions insinuate themselves, and at least the reality of

death; their dejection at the thought of leaving this fair abode of our common daylightle beau sejour du

commun jouris expressed by them with almost wearisome reiteration. But with this sentiment too they are

able to trifle: the imagery of death serves for delicate ornament, and they weave into the airy nothingness of

their verses their trite reflexions on the vanity of life; just as the grotesques of the charnelhouse nest

themselves, together with birds and flowers and the fancies of the pagan mythology, in the traceries of the

architecture of that time, which wantons in its delicate arabesques with the images of old age and death.

Ronsard became deaf at sixteen; and it was this circumstance which finally determined him to be a man of

letters instead of a diplomatist, significantly, one might fancy; of a certain premature agedness, and of the

tranquil, temperate sweetness appropriate to that, in the school of poetry which he founded. Its charm is that

of a thing not vigorous or original, but full of the grace that comes of long study and reiterated refinements,

and many steps repeated, and many angles worn down, with an exquisite faintness, une fadeur exquise, a

certain tenuity and caducity, as for those who can bear nothing vehement or strong; for princes weary of love,

like Francis the First, or of pleasure, like Henry the Third, or of action, like Henry the Fourth. Its merits are

those of the old,grace and finish, perfect in minute detail. For these people are a little jaded, and have a

constant desire for a subdued and delicate excitement, to warm their creeping fancy a little. They love a

constant change of rhyme in poetry, and in their houses that strange, fantastic interweaving of thin, reedlike

But the poetry of the Pleiad is true not only to the physiognomy of its age, but also to its countryce pays du

Vendomoisthe names and scenery of which so often recur in it; the great Loire, with its long spaces of

white sand; the little river Loir; the heathy, upland country, with its scattered pools of water and waste

roadsides,, and retired manors, with their crazy old feudal defences half fallen into decay; La Beauce, the

granary of France, where the vast rolling fields of corn seem to anticipate the great western sea itself. It is full

of the traits of that country. We see Du Bellay and Ronsard gardening, or hunting with their dogs, or watch

the pastimes of a rainy day; and with this is connected a domesticity, a homeliness and simple goodness, by

which this Northern country gains upon the South. They have the love of the aged for warmth, and

understand the poetry of winter; for they are not far from the Atlantic, and the west wind which comes up

from it, turning the poplars white, spares not this new Italy in France. So the fireside often appears, with the

pleasures of winter, about the vast emblazoned chimneys of the time, and with a bonhomie as of little

It is in Du Bellay's Olive, a collection of sonnets in praise of a halfimaginary lady, Sonnetz a la louange

d'Olive, that these characteristics are most abundant. Here is a perfectly crystallised specimen:

D'amour, de grace, et de haulte valeur Les feux divins estoient ceinctz et les cieulx S'estoient vestuz d'un

manteau precieux A raiz ardens di diverse couleur: Tout estoit p1ein 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

That he is thus a characteristic specimen of the poetical taste of that age, is indeed Du Bellay's chief interest.

But if his work is to have the highest sort of interest, if it is to do something more than satisfy curiosity, if it is

to have an aesthetic as distinct from an historical value, it is not enough for a poet to have been the true child

of his age, to have conformed to its aesthetic conditions, and by so conforming to have charmed and

stimulated that age; it is necessary that there should be perceptible in his work something individual,

inventive, unique, the impress there of the writer's own temper and personality. This impress M.

SainteBeuve thought he found in the Antiquites de Rome, and the Regrets, which he ranks as what has been

called poesie intime, that intensely modern sort of poetry in which the writer has for his aim the portraiture of

his own most intimate moods, and to take the reader into his confidence. That generation had other instances

of this intimacy of sentiment: Montaigne's Essays are full of it, the carvings of the church of Brou are full of

it. M. SainteBeuve has perhaps exaggerated the influence of this quality in Du Bellay's Regrets; but the very

name of the book has a touch of Rousseau about it, and reminds one of a whole generation of selfpitying

poets in modern times. It was in the atmosphere of Rome, to him so strange and mournful, that these pale

flowers grew up; for that journey to Italy, which he deplored as the greatest misfortune of his life, put him in

full possession of his talent, and brought out all its originality. And in effect you do find intimacy, intimite,

here. The trouble of his life is analysed, and the sentiment of it conveyed directly to our minds; not a great

sorrow or passion, but only the sense of loss in passing days, the ennui of a dreamer who has to plunge into

the world's affairs, the opposition between actual life and the ideal, a longing for rest, nostalgia,

homesicknessthat preeminently childish, but so suggestive sorrow, as significant of the final regret of

all human creatures for the familiar earth and limited sky. The feeling for landscape is often described as a

modern one; still more so is that for antiquity, the sentiment of ruins. Du Bellay has this sentiment. The

duration of the hard, sharp outlines of things is a grief to him, and passing his wearisome days among the

ruins of ancient Rome, he is consoled by the thought that all must one day end, by the sentiment of the

grandeur of nothingnessla grandeur du rien. With a strange touch of faroff mysticism, he thinks that the

great wholele grand toutinto which all other things pass and lose themselves, ought itself sometimes to

perish and pass away. Nothing less can relieve his weariness. From the stately aspects of Rome his thoughts

went back continually to France, to the smoking chimneys of his little village, the longer twilight of the

North, the soft climate of Anjoula douceur Angevine; yet not so much to the real France, we may be sure,

with its dark streets and its roofs of roughhewn slate, as to that other country, with slenderer towers, and

more winding rivers, and trees like flowers, and with softer sunshine on more gracefullyproportioned fields

and ways, which the fancy of the exile, and the pilgrim, and of the schoolboy far from home, and of those

He came home at last, through the Grisons, by slow journeys; and there, in the cooler air of his own country,

under its skies of milkier blue, the sweetest flower of his genius sprang up. There have been poets whose

whole fame has rested on one poem, as Gray's on the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, or Ronsard's, as many

critics have thought, on the eighteen lines of one famous ode. Du Bellay has almost been the poet of one

poem; and this one poem of his is an Italian thing transplanted into that green country of Anjou; out of the

Latin verses of Andrea Navagero, into French: but it is a thing in which the matter is almost nothing, and the

form almost everything; and the form of the poem as it stands, written in old French, is all Du Bellay's own. It

is a song which the winnowers are supposed to sing as they winnow the corn, and they invoke the winds to lie

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

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

De vostre doulce haleine, Eventez ceste plaine Eventez ce sejour; Ce pendant que j'ahanne A mon ble que je

*A graceful translation of this and some other poems of the Pleiad may be found in Ballads and Lyrics of old

That has, in the highest degree, the qualities, the value, of the whole Pleiad school of poetry, of the whole

phase of taste from which that school derivesa certain silvery grace of fancy, nearly all the pleasures of

which is in the surprise at the happy and dexterous way in which a thing slight in itself is handled. The

sweetness of it is by no means to be got at by crushing, as you crush wild herbs to get at their perfume. One

seems to hear the measured falling of the fans, with a child's pleasure on coming across the incident for the

first time, in one of those great barns of Du Bellay's own country, La Beauce, the granary of France. A

sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weathervane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn

door: a momentand the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a

Goethe's fragments of artcriticism contain a few pages of strange pregnancy on the character of

Winckelmann. He speaks of the teacher who had made his career possible, but whom he had never seen, as of

an abstract type of culture, consummate, tranquil, withdrawn already into the region of ideals, yet retaining

colour from the incidents of a passionate intellectual life. He classes him with certain works of art, possessing

an inexhaustible gift of suggestion, to which criticism may return again and again with renewed freshness.

Hegel, in his lectures on the Philosophy of Art, estimating the work of his predecessors, has also passed a

remarkable judgment on Winckelmann's writings:"Winckelmann, by contemplation of the ideal works of

the ancients, received a sort of inspiration, through which he opened a new sense for the study of art. He is to

be regarded as one of those who, in the sphere of art, have known how to initiate a new organ for the human

spirit." That it has given a new sense, that it has laid open a new organ, is the highest that can be said of any

critical effort. It is interesting then to ask what kind of man it was who thus laid open a new organ. Under

Johann Joachim Winckelmann was born at Stendal, in Brandenburg, in the year 1717. The child of a poor

tradesman, he passed through many struggles in early youth, the memory of which ever remained in him as a

fitful cause of dejection. In 1763, in the full emancipation of his spirit, looking over the beautiful Roman

prospect, he writes"One gets spoiled here; but God owed me this; in my youth I suffered too much."

Destined to assert and interpret the charm of the Hellenic spirit, he served first a painful apprenticeship in the

tarnished intellectual world of Germany in the earlier half of the eighteenth century. Passing out of that into

the happy light of the antique, he had a sense of exhilaration almost physical. We find him as a child in the

dusky precincts of a German school, hungrily feeding on a few colourless books. The master of this school

grows blind; Winckelmann becomes his famulus. The old man would have had him study theology.

Winckelmann, free of the master's library, chooses rather to become familiar with the Greek classics.

Herodotus and Homer win, with their "vowelled" Greek, his warmest enthusiasm; whole nights of fever are

devoted to them; disturbing dreams of an Odyssey of his own come to him. "He felt in himself," says

Madame de Stael, "an ardent attraction towards the South." In German imaginations even now traces are

often to be found of that love of the sun, that weariness of the North (cette fatigue du nord), which carried the

northern peoples away into those countries of the South. A fine sky brings to birth sentiments not unlike the

To most of us, after all our steps towards it, the antique world, in spite of its intense outlines, its perfect

selfexpression, still remains faint and remote. To him, closely limited except on the one side of the ideal,

building for his dark poverty "a house not made with hands," it early came to seem more real than the

present. In the fantastic plans of foreign travel continually passing through his mind, to Egypt, for instance,

and to France, there seems always to be rather a wistful sense of something lost to be regained, than the

desire of discovering anything new. Goethe has told us how, in his eagerness actually to handle the antique,

he became interested in the insignificant vestiges of it which the neighbourhood of Strasburg contained. So

we hear of Winckelmann's boyish antiquarian wanderings among the ugly Brandenburg sandhills. Such a

At twenty one he enters the University at Halle, to study theology, as his friends desire; instead, he becomes

the enthusiastic translator of Herodotus. The condition of Greek learning in German schools and universities

had fallen, and there were no professors at Halle who could satisfy his sharp, intellectual craving. Of his

professional education he always speaks with scorn, claiming to have been his own teacher from first to last.

His appointed teachers did not perceive that a new source of culture was within their hands. Homo vagus et

inconstans!one of them pedantically reports of the future pilgrim to Rome, unaware on which side his

irony was whetted. When professional education confers nothing but irritation on a Schiller, no one ought to

be surprised; for Schiller, and such as he, are primarily spiritual adventurers. But that Winckelmann, the

votary of the gravest of intellectual traditions, should get nothing but an attempt at suppression from the

In 1743 he became master of a school at Seehausen. This was the most wearisome period of his life.

Notwithstanding a success in dealing with children, which seems to testify to something simple and primeval

in his nature, he found the work of teaching very depressing. Engaged in this work, he writes that he still has

within him a longing desire to attain to the knowledge of beautysehnlich wuenschte zur Kenntniss des

Schoenen zu gelangen. He had to shorten his nights, sleeping only four hours, to gain time for reading. And

here Winckelmann made a step forward in culture. He multiplied his intellectual force by detaching from it

all flaccid interests. He renounced mathematics and law, in which his reading had been considerable,all but

the literature of the arts. Nothing was to enter into his life unpenetrated by its central enthusiasm. At this time

he undergoes the charm of Voltaire. Voltaire belongs to that flimsier, more artificial, classical tradition,

which Winckelmann was one day to supplant, by the clear ring, the eternal outline of the genuine antique. But

it proves the authority of such a gift as Voltaire's that it allures and wins even those born to supplant it.

Voltaire's impression on Winckelmann was never effaced; and it gave him a consideration for French

literature which contrasts with his contempt for the literary products of Germany. German literature

transformed, siderealised, as we see it in Goethe, reckons Winckelmann among its initiators. But Germany at

that time presented nothing in which he could have anticipated Iphigenie, and the formation of an effective

Under this purely literary influence, Winckelmann protests against Christian Wolff and the philosophers.

Goethe, in speaking of this protest, alludes to his own obligations to Emmanuel Kant. Kant's influence over

the culture of Goethe, which he tells us could not have been resisted by him without loss, consisted in a

severe limitation to the concrete. But he adds, that in born antiquaries, like Winckelmann, constant handling

of the antique, with its eternal outline, maintains that limitation as effectually as a critical philosophy. Plato,

however, saved so often for his redeeming literary manner, is excepted from Winckelmann's proscription of

the philosophers. The modern student most often meets Plato on that side which seems to pass beyond Plato

into a world no longer pagan, based on the conception of a spiritual life. But the element of affinity which he

presents to Winckelmann is that which is wholly Greek, and alien from the Christian world, represented by

that group of brilliant youths in the Lysis, still uninfected by any spiritual sickness, finding the end of all

endeavour in the aspects of the human form, the continual stir and motion of a comely human life.

This newfound interest in Plato's dialogues could not fail to increase his desire to visit the countries of the

classical tradition. "It is my misfortune," he writes, "that I was not born to great place, wherein I might have

had cultivation, and the opportunity of following my instinct and forming myself." A visit to Rome probably

was already purposed, and he silently preparing for it. Count Buenau, the author of an historical work then of

note, had collected at Noethenitz a valuable library, now part of the library of Dresden. In 1784 Winckelmann

wrote to Buenau in halting French:He is emboldened, he says, by Buenau's indulgence for needy men of

letters. He desires only to devote himself to study, having never allowed himself to be dazzled by favourable

prospects of the Church. He hints at his doubtful position "in a metaphysical age, when humane literature is

trampled under foot. At present," he goes on, "little value is set on Greek literature, to which I have devoted

myself so far as I could penetrate, when good books are so scarce and expensive." Finally, he desires a place

in some corner of Buenau's library. "Perhaps, at some future time, I shall become more useful to the public,

if, drawn from obscurity in whatever way, I can find means to maintain myself in the capital."

Soon afterwards we find Winckelmann in the library at Noethenitz. Thence he made many visits to the

collection of antiquities at Dresden. He became acquainted with many artists, above all with Oeser, Goethe's

future friend and master, who, uniting a high culture with the practical knowledge of art, was fitted to

minister to Winckelmann's culture. And now there opened for him a new way of communion with the Greek

life. Hitherto he had handled the words only of Greek poetry, stirred indeed and roused by them, yet divining

beyond the words an unexpressed pulsation of sensuous life. Suddenly he is in contact with that life, still

fervent in the relics of plastic art. Filled as our culture is with the classical spirit, we can hardly imagine how

deeply the human mind was moved, when, at the Renaissance, in the midst of a frozen world, the buried fire

of ancient art rose up from under the soil. Winckelmann here reproduces for us the earlier sentiment of the

Renaissance. On a sudden the imagination feels itself free. How facile and direct, it seems to say, is this life

of the senses and the understanding, when once we have apprehended it! Here, surely, is the more liberal life

we have been seeking so long, so near to us all the while. How mistaken and roundabout have been our

efforts to reach it by mystic passion, and monastic reverie; how they have deflowered the flesh; how little

they have emancipated us! Hermione melts from her stony posture, and the lost proportions of life right

themselves. Here, then, we see in vivid realisation the native tendency of Winckelmann to escape from

abstract theory to intuition, to the exercise of sight and touch. Lessing, in the Laocoon, has theorised finely on

the relation of poetry to sculpture; and philosophy can give us theoretical reasons why not poetry but

sculpture should be the most sincere and exact expression of the Greek ideal. By a happy, unperplexed

dexterity, Winckelmann solves the question in the concrete. It is what Goethe calls his Gewahrwerden der

Through the tumultuous richness of Goethe's culture, the influence of Winckelmann is always discernible, as

the strong, regulative undercurrent of a clear, antique motive. "One learns nothing from him," he says to

Eckermann, "but one becomes something." If we ask what the secret of this influence was, Goethe himself

will tell uselasticity, wholeness, intellectual integrity. And yet these expressions, because they fit Goethe,

with his universal culture, so well, seem hardly to describe the narrow, exclusive interest of Winckelmann.

Doubtless Winckelmann's perfection is a narrow perfection: his feverish nursing of the one motive of his life

is a contrast to Goethe's various energy. But what affected Goethe, what instructed him and ministered to his

culture, was the integrity, the truth to its type, of the given force. The development of his force was the single

interest of Winckelmann, unembarrassed by anything else in him. Other interests, practical or intellectual,

those slighter talents and motives not supreme, which in most men are the waste part of nature, and drain

away their vitality, he plucked out and cast from him. The protracted longing of his youth is not a vague,

romantic longing: he knows what he longs for, what he wills. Within its severe limits his enthusiasm burns

like lava. "You know," says Lavater, speaking of Winckelmann's countenance, "that I consider ardour and

indifference by no means incompatible in the same character. If ever there was a striking instance of that

union, it is in the countenance before us." "A lowly childhood," says Goethe, "insufficient instruction in

youth, broken, distracted studies in early manhood, the burden of schoolkeeping! He was thirty years old

before he enjoyed a single favour of fortune: but as soon as he had attained to an adequate condition of

freedom, he appears before us consummate and entire, complete in the ancient sense."

But his hair is turning grey, and he has not yet reached the south. The Saxon court had become Roman

Catholic, and the way to favour at Dresden was through Romish ecclesiastics. Probably the thought of a

profession of the Romish religion was not new to Winckelmann. At one time he had thought of begging his

way to Rome, from cloister to cloister, under the pretence of a disposition to change his faith. In 1751, the

papal nuncio, Archinto, was one of the visitors at Noethenitz. He suggested Rome as the fitting stage for

Winckelmann's attainments, and held out the hope of a place in the papal library. Cardinal Passionei,

charmed with Winckelmann's beautiful Greek writing, was ready to play the part of Maecenas, on condition

that the necessary change should be made. Winckelmann accepted the bribe, and visited the nuncio at

Dresden. Unquiet still at the word "profession," not without a struggle, he joined the Romish Church, July the

Goethe boldly pleads that Winckelmann was a pagan, that the landmarks of Christendom meant nothing to

him. It is clear that he intended to deceive no one by his disguise; fears of the inquisition are sometimes

visible during his life in Rome; he entered Rome notoriously with the works of Voltaire in his possession; the

thought of what Count Buenau might be thinking of him seems to have been his greatest difficulty. On the

other hand, he may have had a sense of a certain antique, and as it were pagan grandeur in the Roman

Catholic religion. Turning from the crabbed Protestantism, which had been the weariness of his youth, he

might reflect that while Rome had reconciled itself to the Renaissance, the Protestant principle in art had cut

off Germany from the supreme tradition of beauty. And yet to that transparent nature, with its simplicity as of

the earlier world, the loss of absolute sincerity must have been a real loss. Goethe understands that

Winckelmann had made this sacrifice. Yet at the bar of the highest criticism, perhaps, Winckelmann may be

absolved. The insincerity of his religious profession was only one incident of a culture in which the moral

instinct, like the religious or political, was merged in the artistic. But then the artistic interest was that by

desperate faithfulness to which Winckelmann was saved from the mediocrity, which, breaking through no

bounds, moves ever in a bloodless routine, and misses its one chance in the life of the spirit and the intellect.

There have been instances of culture developed by every high motive in turn, and yet intense at every point;

and the aim of our culture should be to attain not only as intense but as complete a life as possible. But often

the higher life is only possible at all, on condition of the selection of that in which one's motive is native and

strong; and this selection involves the renunciation of a crown reserved for others. Which is better?to lay

open a new sense, to initiate a new organ for the human spirit, or to cultivate many types of perfection up to a

point which leaves us still beyond the range of their transforming power? Savonarola is one type of success;

Winckelmann is another; criticism can reject neither, because each is true to itself. Winckelmann himself

explains the motive of his life when he says, "It will be my highest reward, if posterity acknowledges that I

For a time he remained at Dresden. There his first book appeared, Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works

of Art in Painting and Sculpture. Full of obscurities as it was, obscurities which baffled but did not offend

Goethe when he first turned to artcriticism, its purpose was directan appeal from the artificial classicism

of the day to the study of the antique. The book was well received, and a pension supplied through the king's

confessor. In September 1755 he started for Rome, in the company of a young Jesuit. He was introduced to

Raphael Mengs, a painter then of note, and found a home near him, in the artists' quarter, in a place where he

could "overlook, far and wide, the eternal city." At first he was perplexed with the sense of being a stranger

on what was to him, spiritually, native soil. "Unhappily," he cries in French, often selected by him as the

vehicle of strong feeling, "I am one of those whom the Greeks call opsimatheis.I have come into the world

and into Italy too late." More than thirty years afterwards, Goethe also, after many aspirations and severe

preparation of mind, visited Italy. In early manhood, just as he too was FINDING Greek art, the rumour of

that high artist's life of Winckelmann in Italy had strongly moved him. At Rome, spending a whole year

drawing from the antique, in preparation for Iphigenie, he finds the stimulus of Winckelmann's memory ever

active. Winckelmann's Roman life was simple, primeval, Greek. His delicate constitution permitted him the

use only of bread and wine. Condemned by many as a renegade, he had no desire for places of honour, but

only to see his merits acknowledged, and existence assured to him. He was simple without being niggardly;

Winckelmann's first years in Rome present all the elements of an intellectual situation of the highest interest.

The beating of the intellect against its bars, the sombre aspect, the alien traditions, the still barbarous

literature of Germany, are afar off; before him are adequate conditions of culture, the sacred soil itself, the

first tokens of the advent of the new German literature, with its broad horizons, its boundless intellectual

promise. Dante, passing from the darkness of the Inferno, is filled with a sharp and joyful sense of light,

which makes him deal with it, in the opening of the Purgatorio, in a wonderfully touching and penetrative

way. Hellenism, which is the principle preeminently of intellectual light (our modern culture may have

more colour, the medieval spirit greater heat and profundity, but Hellenism is preeminent for light), has

always been most effectively conceived by those who have crept into it out of an intellectual world in which

the sombre elements predominate. So it had been in the ages of the Renaissance. This repression, removed at

last, gave force and glow to Winckelmann's native affinity to the Hellenic spirit. "There had been known

before him," says Madame de Stael, "learned men who might be consulted like books; but no one had, if I

may say so, made himself a pagan for the purpose of penetrating antiquity." "One is always a poor executant

of conceptions not one's own."On execute mal ce qu'on n'a pas concu soimeme*words spoken on so

high an occasionare true in their measure of every genuine enthusiasm. Enthusiasmthat, in the broad

Platonic sense of the Phaedrus, was the secret of his divinatory power over the Hellenic world. This

enthusiasm, dependent as it is to a great degree on bodily temperament, has a power of reenforcing the purer

emotions of the intellect with an almost physical excitement. That his affinity with Hellenism was not merely

intellectual, that the subtler threads of temperament were inwoven in it, is proved by his romantic, fervent

friendships with young men. He has known, he says, many young men more beautiful than Guido's

archangel. These friendships, bringing him in contact with the pride of human form, and staining his thoughts

with its bloom, perfected his reconciliation with the spirit of Greek sculpture. A letter on taste, addressed

from Rome to a young nobleman, Friedrich von Berg, is the record of such a friendship.

"I shall excuse my delay," he begins, "in fulfilling my promise of an essay on the taste for beauty in works of

art, in the words of Pindar. He says to Agesidamus, a youth of Locriideai te kalon, horai te

kekramenonwhom he had kept waiting for an intended ode, that a debt paid with usury is the end of

reproach. This may win your goodnature on behalf of my present essay, which has turned out far more

"It is from yourself that the subject is taken. Our intercourse has been short, too short both for you and me;

but the first time I saw you, the affinity of our spirits was revealed to me: your culture proved that my hope

was not groundless; and I found in a beautiful body a soul created for nobleness, gifted with the sense of

beauty. My parting from you was therefore one of the most painful in my life; and that this feeling continues

our common friend is witness, for your separation from me leaves me no hope of seeing you again. Let this

essay be a memorial of our friendship, which, on my side, is free from every selfish motive, and ever remains

"As it is confessedly the beauty of man which is to be conceived under one general idea, so I have noticed

that those who are observant of beauty only in women, and are moved little or not at all by the beauty of men,

seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for beauty in art. To such persons the beauty of Greek art will

ever seem wanting, because its supreme beauty is rather male than female. But the beauty of art demands a

higher sensibility than the beauty of nature, because the beauty of art, like tears shed at a play, gives no pain,

is without life, and must be awakened and repaired by culture. Now, as the spirit of culture is much more

ardent in youth than in manhood, the instinct of which I am speaking must be exercised and directed to what

is beautiful, before that age is reached, at which one would be afraid to confess that one had no taste for it."

Certainly, of that beauty of living form which regulated Winckelmann's friendships, it could not be said that

it gave no pain. One notable friendship, the fortune of which we may trace through his letters, begins with an

antique, chivalrous letter in French, and ends noisily in a burst of angry fire. Far from reaching the quietism,

the bland indifference of art, such attachments are nevertheless more susceptible than any others of equal

strength of a purely intellectual culture. Of passion, of physical excitement, they contain only just so much as

stimulates the eye to the finest delicacies of colour and form. These friendships, often the caprices of a

moment, make Winckelmann's letters, with their troubled colouring, an instructive but bizarre addition to the

History of Art, that shrine of grave and mellow light for the mute Olympian family. The impression which

Winckelmann's literary life conveyed to those about him was that of excitement, intuition, inspiration, rather

than the contemplative evolution of general principles. The quick, susceptible enthusiast, betraying his

temperament even in appearance, by his olive complexion, his deepseated, piercing eyes, his rapid

movements, apprehended the subtlest principles of the Hellenic manner, not through the understanding, but

by instinct or touch. A German biographer of Winckelmann has compared him to Columbus. That is not the

aptest of comparisons; but it reminds one of a passage in which M. Edgar Quinet describes the great

discoverer's famous voyage. His science was often at fault; but he had a way of estimating at once the

slightest indication of land, in a floating weed or passing bird; he seemed actually to come nearer to nature

than other men. And that world in which others had moved with so much embarrassment, seems to call out in

Winckelmann new senses fitted to deal with it. He is in touch with it; it penetrates him, and becomes part of

his temperament. He remodels his writings with constant renewal of insight; he catches the thread of a whole

sequence of laws in some hollowing of the hand, or dividing of the hair; he seems to realise that fancy of the

reminiscence of a forgotten knowledge hidden for a time in the mind itself; as if the mind of one, lover and

philosopher at once in some phase of preexistencephilosophesas pote met' erotosfallen into a new cycle,

were beginning its intellectual culture over again, yet with a certain power of anticipating its results. So

comes the truth of Goethe's judgments on his works; they are a life, a living thing, designed for those who are

In 1785 Cardinal Albani, who possessed in his Roman villa a precious collection of antiquities, became

Winckelmann's patron. Pompeii had just opened its treasures; Winckelmann gathered its firstfruits. But his

plan of a visit to Greece remained unfulfilled. From his first arrival in Rome he had kept the History of

Ancient Art ever in view. All his other writings were a preparation for that. It appeared, finally, in 1764; but

even after its publication Winckelmann was still employed in perfecting it. It is since his time that many of

the most significant examples of Greek art have been submitted to criticism. He had seen little or nothing of

what we ascribe to the age of Pheidias; and his conception of Greek art tends, therefore, to put the mere

elegance of the imperial society of ancient Rome in place of the severe and chastened grace of the palaestra.

For the most part he had to penetrate to Greek art through copies, imitations, and later Roman art itself; and it

is not surprising that this turbid medium has left in Winckelmann's actual results much that a more privileged

He had been twelve years in Rome. Admiring Germany had many calls to him; at last, in 1768, he set out to

revisit the country of his birth; and as he left Rome, a strange, inverted homesickness, a strange reluctance

to leave it at all, came over him. He reached Vienna: there he was loaded with honours and presents: other

cities were awaiting him. Goethe, then nineteen years old, studying art at Leipsic, was expecting his coming,

with that wistful eagerness which marked his youth, when the news of Winckelmann's murder arrived. All

that "weariness of the North" had revived with double force. He left Vienna, intending to hasten back to

Rome. At Trieste a delay of a few days occurred. With characteristic openness, Winckelmann had confided

his plans to a fellowtraveller, a man named Arcangeli, and had shown him the gold medals received at

Vienna. Arcangeli's avarice was aroused. One morning he entered Winckelmann's room, under pretence of

taking leave; Winckelmann was then writing "memoranda for the future editor of the History of Art," still

seeking the perfection of his great work. Arcangeli begged to see the medals once more. As Winckelmann

stooped down to take them from the chest, a cord was thrown round his neck. Some time afterwards, a child

whose friendship Winckelmann had made to beguile the delay, knocked at the door, and receiving no answer,

gave an alarm. Winckelmann was found dangerously wounded, and died a few hours later, after receiving the

sacraments of the Romish Church. It seemed as if the gods, in reward for his devotion to them, had given him

a death which, for its swiftness and its opportunity, he might well have desired. "He has," says Goethe, "the

advantage of figuring in the memory of posterity, as one eternally able and strong; for the image in which one

leaves the world is that in which one moves among the shadows." Yet, perhaps, it is not fanciful to regret that

the meeting with Goethe did not take place. Goethe, then in all the pregnancy of his wonderful youth, still

unruffled by the press and storm of his earlier manhood, was awaiting Winckelmann with a curiosity of the

worthiest kind. As it was, Winckelmann became to him something like what Virgil was to Dante. And

Winckelmann, with his fiery friendships, had reached that age and that period of culture at which emotions

hitherto fitful, sometimes concentrate themselves in a vital, unchangeable relationship. German literary

history seems to have lost the chance of one of those famous friendships, the very tradition of which becomes

In one of the frescoes of the Vatican, Raffaelle has commemorated the tradition of the Catholic religion.

Against a strip of peaceful sky, broken in upon by the beatific vision, are ranged the great personages of.

Christian history, with the Sacrament in the midst. Another fresco of Raffaelle in the same apartment presents

a very different company, Dante alone appearing in both. Surrounded by the muses of Greek mythology,

under a thicket of myrtles, sits Apollo, with the sources of Castalia at his feet. On either side are grouped

those on whom the spirit of Apollo descended, the classical and Renaissance poets, to whom the waters of

Castalia come down, a river making glad this other city of God. In this fresco it is the classical tradition, the

orthodoxy of taste, that Raffaelle commemorates. Winckelmann's intellectual history authenticates the claims

of this tradition in human culture. In the countries where that tradition arose, where it still lurked about its

own artistic relics, and changes of language had not broken its continuity, national pride might sometimes

light up anew an enthusiasm for it. Aliens might imitate that enthusiasm, and classicism become from time to

time an intellectual fashion. But Winckelmann was not further removed by language, than by local aspects

and associations, from those vestiges of the classical spirit; and he lived at a time when, in Germany, classical

studies were out of favour. Yet, remote in time and place, he feels after the Hellenic world, divines the veins

of ancient art, in which its life still circulates, and, like Scyles, the halfbarbarous yet Hellenising king, in the

beautiful story of Herodotus, is irresistibly attracted by it. This testimony to the authority of the Hellenic

tradition, its fitness to satisfy some vital requirement of the intellect, which Winckelmann contributes as a

solitary man of genius, is offered also by the general history of culture. The spiritual forces of the past, which

have prompted and informed the culture of a succeeding age, live, indeed, within that culture, but with an

absorbed, underground life. The Hellenic element alone has not been so absorbed, or content with this

underground life; from time to time it has started to the surface; culture has been drawn back to its sources to

be clarified and corrected. Hellenism is not merely an absorbed element in our intellectual life; it is a

Again, individual genius works ever under conditions of time and place: its products are coloured by the

varying aspects of nature, and type of human form, and outward manners of life. There is thus an element of

change in art; criticism must never for a moment forget that "the artist is the child of his time." But besides

these conditions of time and place, and independent of them, there is also an element of permanence, a

standard of taste, which genius confesses. This standard is maintained in a purely intellectual tradition; it acts

upon the artist, not as one of the influences of his own age, but by means of the artistic products of the

previous generation, which in youth have excited, and at the same time directed into a particular channel, his

sense of beauty. The supreme artistic products of each generation thus form a series of elevated points, taking

each from each the reflexion of a strange light, the source of which is not in the atmosphere around and above

them, but in a stage of society remote from ours. This standard takes its rise in Greece, at a definite historical

period. A tradition for all succeeding generations, it originates in a spontaneous growth out of the influences

of Greek society. What were the conditions under which this ideal, this standard of artistic orthodoxy, was

Greek art, when we first catch sight of it, is entangled with Greek religion. We are accustomed to think of

Greek religion as the religion of art and beauty, the religion of which the Olympian Zeus and the Athena

Polias are the idols, the poems of Homer the sacred books. Thus Cardinal Newman speaks of "the classical

polytheism which was gay and graceful, as was natural in a civilised age." Yet such a view is only a partial

one; in it the eye is fixed on the sharp, bright edge of high Hellenic culture but loses sight of the sombre

world across which it strikes. Greek religion, where we can observe it most distinctly, is at once a

magnificent ritualistic system, and a cycle of poetical conceptions. Religions, as they grow by natural laws

out of man's life, are modified by whatever modifies his life. They brighten under a bright sky, they become

liberal as the social range widens, they grow intense and shrill in the clefts of human life, where the spirit is

narrow and confined, and the stars are visible at noonday; and a fine analysis of these differences is one of the

gravest functions of religious criticism. Still, the broad foundation, in mere human nature, of all religions as

they exist for the greatest number, is a universal pagan sentiment, a paganism which existed before the Greek

religion, and has lingered far onward into the Christian world, ineradicable, like some persistent vegetable

growth, because its seed is an element of the very soil out of which it springs. This pagan sentiment measures

the sadness with which the human mind is filled, whenever its thoughts wander far from what is here, and

now. It is beset by notions of irresistible natural powers, for the most part ranged against man, but the secret

also of his fortune, making the earth golden and the grape fiery for him. He makes gods in his own image,

gods smiling and flowercrowned, or bleeding by some sad fatality, to console him by their wounds, never

closed from generation to generation. It is with a rush of homesickness that the thought of death presents

itself. He would remain at home for ever on the earth if he could: as it loses its colour and the senses fail, he

clings ever closer to it; but since the mouldering of bones and flesh must go on to the end, he is careful for

charms and talismans, that may chance to have some friendly power in them, when the inevitable shipwreck

comes. Such sentiment is a part of the eternal basis of all religions, modified indeed by changes of time and

place, but indestructible, because its root is so deep in the earth of man's nature. The breath of religious

initiators passes over them; a few "rise up with wings as eagles," but the broad level of religious life is not

permanently changed. Religious progress, like all purely spiritual progress, is confined to a few. This

sentiment fixes itself in the earliest times to certain usages of patriarchal life, the kindling of fire, the washing

of the body, the slaughter of the flock, the gathering of harvest, holidays and dances. Here are the beginnings

of a ritual, at first as occasional and unfixed as the sentiment which it expresses, but destined to become the

permanent element of religious life. The usages of patriarchal life change; but this germ of ritual remains,

developing, but always in a religious interest, losing its domestic character, and therefore becoming more and

more inexplicable with each generation. This pagan worship, in spite of local variations, essentially one, is an

element in all religions. It is the anodyne which the religious principle, like one administering opiates to the

incurable, has added to the law which makes life sombre for the vast majority of mankind.

More definite religious conceptions come from other sources, and fix themselves upon this ritual in various

ways, changing it, and giving it new meanings. In Greece they were derived from mythology, itself not due to

a religious source at all, but developing in the course of time into a body of religious conceptions, entirely

human in form and character. To the unprogressive ritual element it brought these conceptions, itselfhe

pterou dunamis, the power of the wingan element of refinement, of ascension, with the promise of an

endless destiny. While the ritual remains fixed, the aesthetic element, only accidentally connected with it,

expands with the freedom and mobility of the things of the intellect. Always, the fixed element is the

religious observance; the fluid, unfixed element is the myth, the religious conception. This religion is itself

pagan, and has in any broad view of it the pagan sadness. It does not at once, and for the majority, become

the higher Hellenic religion. The country people, of course, cherish the unlovely idols of an earlier time, such

as those which Pausanias found still devoutly preserved in Arcadia. Athenaeus tells the story of one who,

coming to a temple of Latona, had expected to find some worthy presentment of the mother of Apollo, and

laughed on seeing only a shapeless wooden figure. The wilder people have wilder gods, which, however, in

Athens, or Corinth, or Lacedaemon, changing ever with the worshippers in whom they live and move and

have their being, borrow something of the lordliness and distinction of human nature there. Greek religion too

has its mendicants, its purifications, its antinomian mysticism, its garments offered to the gods, its statues

worn with kissing, its exaggerated superstitions for the vulgar only, its worship of sorrow, its addolorata, its

mournful mysteries. Scarcely a wild or melancholy note of the medieval church but was anticipated by Greek

polytheism! What should we have thought of the vertiginous prophetess at the very centre of Greek religion?

The supreme Hellenic culture is a sharp edge of light across this gloom. The fiery, stupefying wine becomes

in a happier region clear and exhilarating. The Dorian worship of Apollo, rational, chastened, debonair, with

his unbroken daylight, always opposed to the sad Chthonian divinities, is the aspiring element, by force and

spring of which Greek religion sublimes itself. Out of Greek religion, under happy conditions, arises Greek

art, to minister to human culture. It was the privilege of Greek religion to be able to transform itself into an

For the thoughts of the Greeks about themselves, and their relation to the world generally, were ever in the

happiest readiness to be transformed into objects for the senses. In this lies the main distinction between

Greek art and the mystical art of the Christian middle age, which is always struggling to express thoughts

beyond itself. Take, for instance, a characteristic work of the middle age, Angelico's Coronation of the

Virgin, in the cloister of Saint Mark's at Florence. In some strange halo of a moon Christ and the Virgin Mary

are sitting, clad in mystical white raiment, half shroud, half priestly linen. Our Lord, with rosy nimbus and

the long pale hairtanquam lana alba et tanquam nixof the figure in the Apocalypse, sets with slender

fingertips a crown of pearl on the head of his mother, who, corpselike in her refinement, is bending

forward to receive it, the light lying like snow upon her forehead. Certainly, it cannot be said of Angelico's

fresco that it throws into a sensible form our highest thoughts about man and his relation to the world; but it

did not do this adequately even for Angelico. For him, all that is outward or sensible in his workthe hair

like wool, the rosy nimbus, the crown of pearlis only the symbol or type of an inexpressible world, to

which he wishes to direct the thoughts; he would have shrunk from the notion that what the eye apprehended

was all. Such forms of art, then, are inadequate to the matter they clothe; they remain ever below its level.

Something of this kind is true also of oriental art. As in the middle age from an exaggerated inwardness, so in

the East from a vagueness, a want of definition, in thought, the matter presented to art is unmanageable:

forms of sense struggle vainly with it. The manyheaded gods of the East, the orientalised Diana of Ephesus,

with its numerous breasts, like Angelico's fresco, are at best overcharged symbols, a means of hinting at an

idea which art cannot adequately express, which still remains in the world of shadows.

But take a work of Greek art,the Venus of Melos. That is in no sense a symbol, a suggestion of anything

beyond its own victorious fairness. The mind begins and ends with the finite image, yet loses no part of the

spiritual motive. That motive is not lightly and loosely attached to the sensuous form, as the meaning to the

allegory, but saturates and is identical with it. The Greek mind had advanced to a particular stage of

selfreflexion, but was careful not to pass beyond it. In oriental thought there is a vague conception of life

everywhere, but no true appreciation of itself by the mind, no knowledge of the distinction of man's nature: in

its consciousness of itself, humanity is still confused with the fantastic, indeterminate life of the animal and

vegetable world. In Greek thought the "lordship of the soul" is recognised; that lordship gives authority and

divinity to human eyes and hands and feet; inanimate nature is thrown into the background. But there Greek

thought finds its happy limit; it has not yet become too inward; the mind has not begun to boast of its

independence of the flesh; the spirit has not yet absorbed everything with its emotions, nor reflected its own

colour everywhere. It has indeed committed itself to a train of reflexion which must end in a defiance of

form, of all that is outward, in an exaggerated idealism. But that end is still distant: it has not yet plunged into

This ideal art, in which the thought does not outstrip or lie beyond its sensible embodiment, could not have

arisen out of a phase of life that was uncomely or poor. That delicate pause in Greek reflexion was joined, by

some supreme good luck, to the perfect animal nature of the Greeks. Here are the two conditions of an artistic

ideal. The influences which perfected the animal nature of the Greeks are part of the process by which the

ideal was evolved. Those "Mothers" who, in the second part of Faust, mould and remould the typical forms

which appear in human history, preside, at the beginning of Greek culture, over such a concourse of happy

physical conditions as ever generates by natural laws some rare type of intellectual or spiritual life. That

delicate air, "nimbly and sweetly recommending itself" to the senses, the finer aspects of nature, the finer

lime and clay of the human form, and modelling of the dainty framework of the human countenance:these

are the good luck of the Greek when he enters upon life. Beauty becomes a distinction, like genius, or noble

"By no people," says Winckelmann, "has beauty been so highly esteemed as by the Greeks. The priests of a

youthful Jupiter at Aegae, of the Ismenian Apollo, and the priest who at Tanagra led the procession of

Mercury, bearing a lamb upon his shoulders, were always youths to whom the prize of beauty had been

awarded. The citizens of Egesta, in Sicily, erected a monument to a certain Philip, who was not their

fellowcitizen, but of Croton, for his distinguished beauty; and the people made offerings at it. In an ancient

song, ascribed to Simonides or Epicharmus, of four wishes, the first was health, the second beauty. And as

beauty was so longed for and prized by the Greeks, every beautiful person sought to become known to the

whole people by this distinction, and above all to approve himself to the artists, because they awarded the

prize; and this was for the artists an opportunity of having supreme beauty ever before their eyes. Beauty

even gave a right to fame; and we find in Greek histories the most beautiful people distinguished. Some were

famous for the beauty of one single part of their form; as Demetrius Phalereus, for his beautiful eyebrows,

was called Charitoblepharos. It seems even to have been thought that the procreation of beautiful children

might be promoted by prizes: this is shown by the existence of contests for beauty, which in ancient times

were established by Cypselus, King of Arcadia, by the river Alpheus; and, at the feast of Apollo of Philae, a

prize was offered to the youths for the deftest kiss. This was decided by an umpire; as also at Megara, by the

grave of Diodes. At Sparta, and at Lesbos, in the temple of Juno, and among the Parrhasii, there were contests

for beauty among women. The general esteem for beauty went so far, that the Spartan women set up in their

bedchambers a Nireus, a Narcissus, or a Hyacinth, that they might bear beautiful children."

So, from a few stray antiquarianisms, a few faces cast up sharply from the waves, Winckelmann, as his

manner is, divines the temperament of the antique world, and that in which it had delight. It has passed away

with that distant age, and we may venture to dwell upon it. What sharpness and reality it has is the sharpness

and reality of suddenly arrested life. The Greek system of gymnastics originated as part of a religious ritual.

The worshipper was to recommend himself to the gods by becoming fleet and fair, white and red, like them.

The beauty of the palaestra, and the beauty of the artist's studio, reacted on each other. The youth tried to

rival his gods; and his increased beauty passed back into them."I take the gods to witness, I had rather have

a fair body than a king's crown"Omnumi pantas theous me helesthai an ten basileos arkhen anti tou kalos

einai.That is the form in which one age of the world chose the higher lifea perfect world, if the gods

could have seemed for ever only fleet and fair, white and red. Let us not regret that this unperplexed youth of

humanity, seeing itself and satisfied, passed, at the due moment, into a mournful maturity; for already the

deep joy was in store for the spirit, of finding the ideal of that youth still red with life in the grave.

It followed that the Greek ideal expressed itself preeminently in sculpture. All art has a sensuous element,

colour, form, soundin poetry a dexterous recalling of these, together with the profound, joyful

sensuousness of motion: each of these may be a medium for the ideal: it is partly accident which in any

individual case makes the born artist, poet, or painter rather than sculptor. But as the mind itself has had an

historical development, one form of art, by the very limitations of its material, may be more adequate than

another for the expression of any one phase of its experience. Different attitudes of the imagination have a

native affinity with different types of sensuous form, so that they combine, with completeness and ease. The

arts may thus be ranged in a series, which corresponds to a series of developments in the human mind itself.

Architecture, which begins in a practical need, can only express by vague hint or symbol the spirit or mind of

the artist. He closes his sadness over him, or wanders in the perplexed intricacies of things, or projects his

purpose from him cleancut and sincere, or bares himself to the sunlight. But these spiritualities, felt rather

than seen, can but lurk about architectural form as volatile effects, to be gathered from it by reflexion; their

expression is not really sensuous at all. As human form is not the subject with which it deals, architecture is

the mode in which the artistic effort centres, when the thoughts of man concerning himself are still indistinct,

when he is still little preoccupied with those harmonies, storms, victories, of the unseen and intellectual

world, which, wrought out into the bodily form, give it an interest and significance communicable to it alone.

The art of Egypt, with its supreme architectural effects, is, according to Hegel's beautiful comparison, a

Memnon waiting for the day, the day of the Greek spirit, the humanistic spirit, with its power of speech.

Again, painting, music, and poetry, with their endless power of complexity, are the special arts of the

romantic and modern ages. Into these, with the utmost attenuation of detail, may be translated every delicacy

of thought and feeling, incidental to a consciousness brooding with delight over itself. Through their

gradations of shade, their exquisite intervals, they project in an external form that which is most inward in

humour, passion, sentiment. Between architecture and the romantic arts of painting, music, and poetry, comes

sculpture, which, unlike architecture, deals immediately with man, while it contrasts with the romantic arts,

because it is not selfanalytical. It has to do more exclusively than any other art with the human form, itself

one entire medium of spiritual expression, trembling, blushing, melting into dew, with inward excitement.

That spirituality which only lurks about architecture as a volatile effect, in sculpture takes up the whole given

material, and penetrates it with an imaginative motive; and at first sight sculpture, with its solidity of form,

seems a thing more real and full than the faint, abstract world of poetry or painting. Still the fact is the

reverse. Discourse and action show man as he is, more directly than the springing of the muscles and the

moulding of the flesh; and over these poetry has command. Painting, by the flushing of colour in the face and

dilatation of light in the eyemusic, by its subtle range of tonescan refine most delicately upon a single

But why should sculpture thus limit itself to pure form? Because, by this limitation, it becomes a perfect

medium of expression for one peculiar motive of the imaginative intellect. It therefore renounces all these

attributes of its material which do not help forward that motive. It has had, indeed, from the beginning an

unfixed claim to colour; but this element of colour in it has always been more or less conventional, with no

melting or modulation of tones, never admitting more than a very limited realism. It was maintained chiefly

as a religious tradition. In proportion as the art of sculpture ceased to be merely decorative, and subordinate

to architecture, it threw itself upon pure form. It renounces the power of expression by sinking or heightening

tones. In it, no member of the human form is more significant than the rest; the eye is wide, and without

pupil; the lips and brow are hardly less significant than hands, and breasts, and feet. The limitation of its

resources is part of its pride it has no backgrounds, no sky or atmosphere, to suggest and interpret a train of

feeling; a little of suggested motion, and much of pure light on its gleaming surfaces, with pure formonly

these. And it gains more than it loses by this limitation to its own distinguishing motives; it unveils man in

the repose of his unchanging characteristics. Its white light, purged from the angry, bloodlike stains of action

and passion, reveals, not what is accidental in man, but the god in him, as opposed to man's restless

movement. The art of sculpture records the first naive, unperplexed recognition of man by himself; and it is a

proof of the high artistic capacity of the Greeks, that they apprehended and remained true to these exquisite

limitations, yet, in spite of them, gave to their creations a vital and mobile individuality.

Heiterkeitblitheness or repose, and Allgemeinheitgenerality or breadth, are, then, the supreme

characteristics of the Hellenic ideal. But that generality or breadth has nothing in common with the lax

observation, the unlearned thought, the flaccid execution, which have sometimes claimed superiority in art,

on the plea of being "broad" or "general." Hellenic breadth and generality come of a culture minute, severe,

constantly renewed, rectifying and concentrating its impressions into certain pregnant types. The base of all

artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy

world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an

atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits,

according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a

choice of subject almost unlimited. The range of characters or persons open to them is as various as life itself;

no character, however trivial, misshapen, or unlovely, can resist their magic. That is because those arts can

accomplish their function in the choice and development of some special situation, which lifts or glorifies a

character, in itself not poetical. To realise this situation, to define in a chill and empty atmosphere, the focus

where rays, in themselves pale and impotent, unite and begin to burn, the artist has to employ the most

cunning detail, to complicate and refine upon thought and passion a thousandfold. The poems of Robert

Browning supply brilliant examples of this power. His poetry is preeminently the poetry of situations. The

characters themselves are always of secondary importance; often they are characters in themselves of little

interest; they seem to come to him by strange accidents from the ends of the world. His gift is shown by the

way in which he accepts such a character, and throws it into some situation, or apprehends it in some delicate

pause of life, in which for a moment it becomes ideal. Take an instance from Dramatis Personae. In the poem

entitled Le Byron de nos Jours, we have a single moment of passion thrown into relief in this exquisite way.

Those two jaded Parisians are not intrinsically interesting; they only begin to interest us when thrown into a

choice situation. But to discriminate that moment, to make it appreciable by us, that we may "find" it, what a

cobweb of allusions, what double and treble reflexions of the mind upon itself, what an artificial light is

constructed and broken over the chosen situation; on how fine a needle's point that little world of passion is

balanced! Yet, in spite of this intricacy, the poem has the clear ring of a central motive; we receive from it the

To produce such effects at all requires all the resources of painting, with its power of indirect expression, of

subordinate but significant detail, its atmosphere, its foregrounds and backgrounds. To produce them in a

preeminent degree requires all the resources of poetry, language in its most purged form, its remote

associations and suggestions, its double and treble lights. These appliances sculpture cannot command. In it,

therefore, not the special situation, but the type, the general character of the subject to be delineated, is

allimportant. In poetry and painting, the situation predominates over the character; in sculpture, the

character over the situation. Excluded by the limitations of its material from the development of exquisite

situations, it has to choose from a select number of types intrinsically interestinginteresting, that is,

independently of any special situation into which they may be thrown. Sculpture finds the secret of its power

in presenting these types, in their broad, central, incisive lines. This it effects not by accumulation of detail,

but by abstracting from it. All that is accidental, all that distracts the simple effect upon us of the supreme

types of humanity, all traces in them of the commonness of the world, it gradually purges away.

Works of art produced under this law, and only these, are really characterised by Hellenic generality or

breadth. In every direction it is a law of limitation; it keeps passion always below that degree of intensity at

which it must necessarily be transitory, never winding up the features to one note of anger, or desire, or

surprise. In some of the feebler allegorical designs of the middle age, we find isolated qualities portrayed as

by so many masks; its religious art has familiarised us with faces fixed immovably into blank types of placid

reverie; and men and women, in the hurry of life, often wear the sharp impress of one absorbing motive, from

which it is said death sets their features free. All such instances may be ranged under the grotesque; and the

Hellenic ideal has nothing in common with the grotesque. It allows passion to play lightly over the surface of

the individual form, losing thereby nothing of its central impassivity, its depth and repose. To all but the

highest culture, the reserved faces of the gods will ever have something of insipidity. Again, in the best Greek

sculpture, the archaic immobility has been thawed, its forms are in motion; but it is a motion ever kept in

reserve, which is very seldom committed to any definite action. Endless as are the attitudes of Greek

sculpture, exquisite as is the invention of the Greeks in this direction, the actions or situations it permits are

simple and few. There is no Greek Madonna; the goddesses are always childless. The actions selected are

those which would be without significance, except in a divine personbinding on a sandal or preparing for

the bath. When a more complex and significant action is permitted, it is most often represented as just

finished, so that eager expectancy is excluded, as in the image of Apollo just after the slaughter of the Python,

or of Venus with the apple of Paris already in her hand. The Laocoon, with all that patient science through

which it has triumphed over an almost unmanageable subject, marks a period in which sculpture has begun to

aim at effects legitimate, because delightful, only in painting. The hair, so rich a source of expression in

painting, because, relatively to the eye or to the lip, it is mere drapery, is withdrawn from attention; its

texture, as well as the colour, is lost, its arrangement faintly and severely indicated, with no enmeshed or

broken light. The eyes are wide and directionless, not fixing anything with their gaze, or riveting the brain to

any special external object; the brows without hair. It deals almost exclusively with youth, where the

moulding of the bodily organs is still as if suspended between growth and completion, indicated but not

emphasised; where the transition from curve to curve is so delicate and elusive, that Winckelmann compares

it to a quiet sea, which, although we understand it to be in motion, we nevertheless regard as an image of

repose; where, therefore, the exact degree of development is so hard to apprehend. If one had to choose a

single product of Hellenic art, to save in the wreck of all the rest, one would choose from the "beautiful

multitude" of the Panathenaic frieze, that line of youths on horseback, with their level glances, their proud,

patient lips, their chastened reins, their whole bodies in exquisite service. This colourless, unclassified purity

of life, with its blending and interpenetration of intellectual, spiritual, and physical elements, still folded

together, pregnant with the possibilities of a whole world closed within it, is the highest expression of that

indifference which lies beyond all that is relative or partial. Everywhere there is the effect of an awaking, of a

child's sleep just disturbed. All these effects are united in a single instancethe adorante of the museum of

Berlin, a youth who has gained the wrestler's prize, with hands lifted and open, in praise for the victory.

Fresh, unperplexed, it is the image of man as he springs first from the sleep of nature; his white light taking

no colour from any onesided experience, characterless, so far as character involves subjection to the

"This sense," says Hegel, "for the consummate modelling of divine and human forms was preeminently at

home in Greece. In its poets and orators, its historians and philosophers, Greece cannot be conceived from a

central point, unless one brings, as a key to the understanding of it, an insight into the ideal forms of

sculpture, and regards the images of statesmen and philosophers, as well as epic and dramatic heroes, from

the artistic point of view; for those who act, as well as those who create and think, have, in those beautiful

days of Greece, this plastic character. They are great and free, and have grown up on the soil of their own

individuality, creating themselves out of themselves, and moulding themselves to what they were, and willed

to be. The age of Pericles was rich in such characters; Pericles himself, Pheidias, Plato, above all Sophocles,

Thucydides also, Xenophon and Socrates, each in his own order, the perfection of one remaining

undiminished by that of the others. They are ideal artists of themselves, cast each in one flawless mould,

works of art, which stand before us as an immortal presentment of the gods. Of this modelling also are those

bodily works of art, the victors in the Olympic games; yes, and even Phryne, who, as the most beautiful of

This key to the understanding of the Greek spirit, Winckelmann possessed in his own nature, itself like a relic

of classical antiquity, laid open by accident to our alien modern atmosphere. To the criticism of that

consummate Greek modelling he brought not only his culture but his temperament. We have seen how

definite was the leading motive of his culture; how, like some central rootfibre, it maintained the

wellrounded unity of his life through a thousand distractions. Interests not his, nor meant for him, never

disturbed him. In morals, as in criticism, he followed the clue of an unerring instinct. Penetrating into the

antique world by his passion, his temperament, he enunciates no formal principles, always hard and

onesided. Minute and anxious as his culture was, he never became onesidedly selfanalytical. Occupied

ever with himself, perfecting himself and cultivating his genius, he was not content, as so often happens with

such natures, that the atmosphere between him and other minds should be thick and clouded; he was ever

jealously refining his meaning into a form, express, clear, objective. This temperament he nurtured and

invigorated by friendships which kept him ever in direct contact with the spirit of youth. The beauty of the

Greek statues was a sexless beauty; the statues of the gods had the least traces of sex. Here there is a moral

sexlessness, a kind of ineffectual wholeness of nature, yet with a true beauty and significance of its own.

One result of this temperament is a serenityHeiterkeitwhich characterises Winckelmann's handling of

the sensuous side of Greek art. This serenity is, perhaps, in great measure, a negative quality; it is the absence

of any sense of want, or corruption, or shame. With the sensuous element in Greek art he deals in the pagan

manner; and what is implied in that? It has been sometimes said that art is a means of escape from "the

tyranny of the senses." It may be so for the spectator; he may find that the spectacle of supreme works of art

takes from the life of the senses something of its turbid fever. But this is possible for the spectator only

because the artist, in producing those works, has gradually sunk his intellectual and spiritual ideas in

sensuous form. He may live, as Keats lived, a pure life; but his soul, like that of Plato's false astronomer,

becomes more and more immersed in sense, until nothing which lacks an appeal to sense has interest for him.

How could such an one ever again endure the greyness of the ideal or spiritual world? The spiritualist is

satisfied in seeing the sensuous elements escape from his conceptions; his interest grows, as the dyed garment

bleaches in the keener air. But the artist steeps his thought again and again into the fire of colour. To the

Greek this immersion in the sensuous was indifferent. Greek sensuousness, therefore, does not fever the

blood; it is shameless and childlike. Christian asceticism, on the other hand, discrediting the slightest touch of

sense, has from time to time provoked into strong emphasis the contrast or antagonism to itself, of the artistic

life, with its inevitable sensuousness.I did but taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in mine

hand, and lo, I must die!It has sometimes seemed hard to pursue that life without something of conscious

disavowal of a spiritual world; and this imparts to genuine artistic interests a kind of intoxication. From this

intoxication Winckelmann is free; he fingers those pagan marbles with unsinged hands, with no sense of

shame or loss. That is to deal with the sensuous side of art in the pagan manner.

The longer we contemplate that Hellenic ideal, in which man is at unity with himself, with his physical

nature, with the outward world, the more we may be inclined to regret that he should ever have passed

beyond it, to contend for a perfection that makes the blood turbid, and frets the flesh, and discredits the actual

world about us. But if he was to be saved from the ennui which ever attaches itself to realisation, even the

realisation of perfection, it was necessary that a conflict should come, and some sharper note grieve the

perfect harmony, to the end that the spirit chafed by it might beat out at last a larger and profounder music. In

Greek tragedy this conflict has begun; man finds himself face to face with rival claims. Greek tragedy shows

how such a conflict may be treated with serenity, how the evolution of it may be a spectacle of the dignity,

not of the impotence, of the human spirit. But it is not only in tragedy that the Greek spirit showed itself

capable of thus winning joy out of matter in itself full of discouragements. Theocritus, too, often strikes a

note of romantic sadness. But what a blithe and steady poise, above these discouragements, in a clear and

Into this stage of Greek achievement Winckelmann did not enter. Supreme as he is where his true interest lay,

his insight into the typical unity and repose of the highest sort of sculpture seems to have involved limitation

in another direction. His conception of art excludes that bolder type of it which deals confidently and serenely

with life, conflict, evil. Living in a world of exquisite but abstract and colourless form, he could hardly have

conceived of the subtle and penetrative, but somewhat grotesque art of the modern world. What would he

have thought of Gilliatt, in Victor Hugo's Travailleurs de la Mer, or of the bleeding mouth of Fantine in the

first part of Les Miserables, penetrated as it is with a sense of beauty, as lively and transparent as that of a

Greek? There is even a sort of preparation for the romantic temper within the limits of the Greek ideal itself,

which Winckelmann failed to see. For Greek religion has not merely its mournful mysteries of Adonis, of

Hyacinthus, of Demeter, but it is conscious also of the fall of earlier divine dynasties. Hyperion gives way to

Apollo, Oceanus to Poseidon. Around the feet of that tranquil Olympian family still crowd the weary

shadows of an earlier, more formless, divine world. Even their still minds are troubled with thoughts of a

limit to duration, of inevitable decay, of dispossession. Again, the supreme and colourless abstraction of

those divine forms, which is the secret of their repose, is also a premonition of the fleshless, consumptive

refinements of the pale medieval artists. That high indifference to the outward, that impassivity, has already a

touch of the corpse in it; we see already Angelico and the Master of the Passion in the artistic future. The

crushing of the sensuous, the shutting of the door upon it, the ascetic interest, is already traceable. Those

abstracted gods, "ready to melt out their essence fine into the winds," who can fold up their flesh as a

garment, and still remain themselves, seem already to feel that bleak air, in which, like Helen of Troy, they

Gradually, as the world came into the church, an artistic interest, native in the human soul, reasserted its

claims. But Christian art was still dependent on pagan examples, building the shafts of pagan temples into its

churches, perpetuating the form of the basilica, in later times working the disused amphitheatres as quarries.

The sensuous expression of conceptions which unreservedly discredit the world of sense, was the delicate

problem which Christian art had before it. If we think of medieval painting, as it ranges from the early

German schools, still with something of the air of the charnelhouse about them, to the clear loveliness of

Perugino, we shall see how that problem was solved. Even in the worship of sorrow the native blitheness of

art asserted itself; the religious spirit, as Hegel says, "smiled through its tears." So perfectly did the young

Raffaelle infuse that Heiterkeit, that pagan blitheness, into religious works, that his picture of Saint Agatha at

Bologna became to Goethe a step in the evolution of Iphigenie.* But in proportion as this power of smiling

was found again, there came also an aspiration towards that lost antique art, some relics of which Christian

The history of art has suffered as much as any history by trenchant and absolute divisions. Pagan and

Christian art are sometimes harshly opposed, and the Renaissance is represented as a fashion which set in at a

definite period. That is the superficial view: the deeper view is that which preserves the identity of European

culture. The two are really continuous; and there is a sense in which it may be said that the Renaissance was

an uninterrupted effort of the middle age, that it was ever taking place. When the actual relics of the antique

were restored to the world, in the view of the Christian ascetic it was as if an ancient plaguepit had been

opened: all the world took the contagion of the life of nature and of the senses. And now it was seen that the

medieval spirit too had done something for the destiny of the antique. By hastening the decline of art, by

withdrawing interest from it, and yet keeping unbroken the thread of its traditions, it had suffered the human

mind to repose that it might awake when day came, with eyes refreshed, to those antique forms.

The aim of a right criticism is to place Winckelmann in an intellectual perspective, of which Goethe is the

foreground. For, after all, he is infinitely less than Goethe; it is chiefly because at certain points he comes in

contact with Goethe, that criticism entertains consideration of him. His relation to modern culture is a

peculiar one. He is not of the modern world; nor is he of the eighteenth century, although so much of his

outer life is characteristic of it. But that note of revolt against the eighteenth century, which we detect in

Goethe, was struck by Winckelmann. Goethe illustrates that union of the Romantic spirit, in its adventure, its

variety, its profound subjectivity of soul, with Hellenism, in its transparency, its rationality, its desire of

Beautythat marriage of Faust and Helenaof which the art of the nineteenth century is the child, the

beautiful lad Euphorion, as Goethe conceives him, on the crags, in the "splendour of battle and in harness as

for victory," his brows bound with light.* Goethe illustrates, too, the preponderance in this marriage of the

Hellenic element; and that element, in its true essence, was made known to him by Winckelmann.

Breadth, centrality, with blitheness and repose, are the marks of Hellenic culture. Is that culture a lost art?

The local, accidental colouring of its own age has passed from it; the greatness that is dead looks greater

when every link with what is slight and vulgar has been severed; we can only see it at all in the reflected,

refined light which a high education creates for us. Can we bring down that ideal into the gaudy, perplexed

Certainly, for us of the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so

many sorrows, so many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity with ourselves, in

blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms of antique life. Yet, not

less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, centrality. It is this which Winckelmann imprints on the

imagination of Goethe, at the beginning of his culture, in its original and simplest form, as in a fragment of

Greek art itself, stranded on that littered, indeterminate shore of Germany in the eighteenth century. In

Winckelmann, this type comes to him, not as in a book or a theory, but importunately, in a passionate life or

personality. For Goethe, possessing all modern interests, ready to be lost in the perplexed currents of modern

thought, he defines, in clearest outline, the problem of culturebalance, unity with oneself, consummate

It could no longer be solved, as in Phryne ascending naked out of the water, by perfection of bodily form, or

any joyful union with the world without: the shadows had grown too long, the light too solemn, for that. It

could hardly be solved, as in Pericles or Pheidias, by the direct exercise of any single talent: amid the

manifold claims of modern culture, that could only have ended in a thin, onesided growth. Goethe's

Hellenism was of another order, the Allgemeinheit and Heiterkeit, the completeness and serenity, of a

watchful, exigent intellectualism. Im Ganzen, Guten, Wahren, resolut zu lebenis Goethe's description of

his own higher life; and what is meant by life in the wholeim Ganzen? It means the life of one for whom,

over and over again, what was once precious has become indifferent. Every one who aims at the life of

culture is met by many forms of it, arising out of the intense, laborious, onesided development of some

special talent. They are the brightest enthusiasms the world has to show. It is not their part to weigh the

claims which this or that alien form of culture makes upon them. But the pure instinct of selfculture cares

not so much to reap all that these forms of culture can give, as to find in them its own strength. The demand

of the intellect is to feel itself alive. It must see into the laws, the operation, the intellectual reward of every

divided form of culture; but only that it may measure the relation between itself and them. It struggles with

those forms till its secret is won from each, and then lets each fall back into its place; in the supreme, artistic

view of life. With a kind of passionate coldness, such natures rejoice to be away from and past their former

selves. Above all, they are jealous of that abandonment to one special gift which really limits their

capabilities. It would have been easy for Goethe, with the gift of a sensuous nature, to let it overgrow him. It

comes easily and naturally, perhaps, to certain "otherworldly" natures to be even as the Schoene Seele, that

ideal of gentle pietism, in Wilhelm Meister: but to the large vision of Goethe, that seemed to be a phase of

life that a man might feel all round, and leave behind him. Again, it is easy to indulge the commonplace

metaphysical instinct. But a taste for metaphysics may be one of those things which we must renounce, if we

mean to mould our lives to artistic perfection. Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift of absolute or

transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the passion, and strangeness,

But Goethe's culture did not remain "behind the veil"; it ever emerged in the practical functions of art, in

actual production. For him the problem came to be:Can the blitheness and universality of the antique ideal

be communicated to artistic productions, which shall contain the fulness of the experience of the modern

world? We have seen that the development of the various forms of art has corresponded to the development

of the thoughts of man concerning himself, to the growing revelation of the mind to itself. Sculpture

corresponds to the unperplexed, emphatic outlines of Hellenic humanism; painting to the mystic depth and

intricacy of the middle age; music and poetry have their fortune in the modern world. Let us understand by

poetry all literary production which attains the power of giving pleasure by its form, as distinct from its

matter. Only in this varied literary form can art command that width, variety, delicacy of resources, which

will enable it to deal with the conditions of modern life. What modern art has to do in the service of culture is

so to rearrange the details of modern life, so to reflect it, that it may satisfy the spirit. And what does the spirit

need in the face of modern life? The sense of freedom. That naive, rough sense of freedom, which supposes

man's will to be limited, if at all, only by a will stronger than his, he can never have again. The attempt to

represent it in art would have so little verisimilitude that it would be flat and uninteresting. The chief factor in

the thoughts of the modern mind concerning itself is the intricacy, the universality of natural law, even in the

moral order. For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we

can do warfare: it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern

science speaks, penetrating us with a network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central

forces of the world. Can art represent men and women in these bewildering toils so as to give the spirit at

least an equivalent for the sense of freedom? Certainly, in Goethe's romances, and even more in the romances

of Victor Hugo, there are high examples of modern art dealing thus with modern life, regarding that life as

the modern mind must regard it, yet reflecting upon blitheness and repose. Natural laws we shall never

modify, embarrass us as they may; but there is still something in the nobler or less noble attitude with which

we watch their fatal combinations. In those romances of Goethe and Victor Hugo, in some excellent work

done after them, this entanglement, this network of law, becomes the tragic situation, in which certain groups

of noble men and women work out for themselves a supreme Denouement. Who, if he saw through all, would

fret against the chain of circumstance which endows one at the end with those great experiences?

*This brief "Conclusion" was omitted in the second edition of this book, as I conceived it might possibly

mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall. On the whole, I have thought it best to

reprint it here, with some slight changes which bring it closer to my original meaning. I have dealt more fully

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the

tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is withoutour physical life. Fix upon it in one of

its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer

heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science

gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human

body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of

themthe passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the

tissues of the brain by every ray of light and soundprocesses which science reduces to simpler and more

elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond

us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven by many

forces; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten

thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under

which we group thema design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of

flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting

Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more

eager and devouring. There it is no longer the gradual darkening of the eye and fading of colour from the

wall,the movement of the shoreside, where the water flows down indeed, though in apparent rest,but

the race of the midstream, a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought. At first sight

experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate

reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to act upon those

objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like a trick of magic; each

object is loosed into a group of impressionscolour, odour, texturein the mind of the observer. And if we

continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them,

but of impressions unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness

of them, it contracts still further; the whole scope of observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the

individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us

by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to

that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the

individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a

step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us,

experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is

infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone

while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To

such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense

in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. It is

with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves

offthat continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.

Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren vivificiren. The service of philosophy, of speculative

culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. Every moment

some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some

mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us,for that

moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only

is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the

finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might

even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and

meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While

all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that

seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes,

strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to

discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts

some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.

With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one

desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and

touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions,

never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas,

as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded

by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the

sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some

abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

One of the most beautiful passages in the writings of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions,

where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had always clung

about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how

he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his

previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear,

fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of

death but with a sort of indefinite reprieveles hommes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis

indefinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness,

some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one

chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great

passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of

enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is

passionthat it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic

passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to

give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.