XX

There is a picture of Rossetti's, very badly painted, I think, from the

technical point of view, of Lucrezia Borgia. There are apologists who

say that the wickedness of the Borgia family is grossly exaggerated,

and that they were in reality very harmless and respectable people. But

Rossetti thought of them, in painting this picture, as people stained

with infamous and unspeakable crime, and he has contrived to invest the

scene with a horror of darkness. Lucrezia sits in what is meant to be

an attitude of stately beauty, and the figure contrives somehow to

symbolise that; though she appears to be both stout and even blowsy in

appearance. Her evil father, the Pope Alexander, sits leering beside

her, while her brother Caesar leans over her and blows rose-leaves from

her hair. There certainly hangs a hideous suggestiveness of evil over

the group. In the foreground, a page of ten or twelve is dancing,

together with a little girl of perhaps nine or ten. The page is slim

and delicate, and watches his small companion with a tender and

brotherly sort of air; both children are entirely absorbed in their

performance, which they seem to have been bidden to enact for the

pleasure of the three watchers. The children look innocent enough,

though they too are rather dimly and clumsily painted; but one feels

that they are somehow in the net, that they are growing up in a

pestilential and corrupting atmosphere, and that the flowers of evil

will soon burst into premature bloom in their tender souls. The whole

scene is overhung with a close and enervating gloom; one apprehends

somehow that the air swims with a heavy fragrance; and though one feels

that the artist's hand failed to represent his thought, he was painting

with a desperate intentness, and the dark quality of the conception

contrives to struggle out. The art of it is great rather than good; it

is the art of a man who realises the scene with a terrible insight, and

in spite of a clumsy and smudgy handling, manages to bring it home

perhaps even more impressively than if he had been fully master of his

medium. There is a mingling of horror and pathos over it all, and the

pretty, innocent gaiety of the children seems obscured as by a

gathering thunder-cloud; as when the air grows close and still over

some scene of rustic merriment, and the blitheness of the revellers

sinks into torpor and faintness, not knowing what ails them. One feels

that the performers of the dance will be rewarded with kisses and

sweetmeats, and that they will draw the poison into their souls.

It is surely very difficult to analyse what this shadow of sin upon the

world may be, because there is so large an element of subjectivity

mingled with it. So much of it seems to depend upon the temper and

beliefs of the time, so much of the shadow of conscience to be the fear

of social and even legal penalty. Not to travel far for instances, one

finds Plato speaking in a guileless and romantic fashion of a whole

range of passions and emotions that we have grown to consider as

inherently degrading and repulsive. Yet no shadow of the sense of sin

seems to have brooded over that bright and clear Greek life, the

elements of which, except in the regions which our morality condemns,

seem so intensely desirable and ennobling. In ages, too, when life was

more precarious, and men were so much less sensitive to the idea of

human suffering, one finds a light-hearted cruelty practised which is

insupportable to modern ideals. Those wars of extermination among the

Israelites, when man and woman, boy and girl, were ruthlessly and

sternly slain, because they were held to belong to some tribe abhorred

by the God of Sabaoth; or when, in their own polity, some notorious

sinner was put to death with all his unhappy family, however

innocent--no shadow of conscience seems to have brooded over those

destroyers: they rather had the inspiriting and ennobling sense of

having performed a sacred duty, and carried out the commands of a

jealous God. Viewing the matter, indeed, as dispassionately and

philosophically as possible, it is hard to justify the ways of a

Creator who slowly developed and matured a race, keeping them

deliberately ignorant of light and truth, in order that they might at

last be exterminated, in blood and pain, by a dominant and righteous

race of invaders.

It would seem, indeed, as though the sense of sin did not reside in the

act at all, but only in the sense that the act is committed in defiance

of light and higher instinct. Even our own morality, on which we pride

ourselves, how confused and topsy-turvy it is in many respects! How

monstrous it is that a hungry man should be punished legally for theft,

while an ill-tempered and unjust parent or schoolmaster should be

allowed, year after year, to make the lives of the children about them

into misery and heaviness. Life is full of such examples, where no

agency whatever is, or can be, brought to bear by society upon a

notorious wrecker of human happiness, so long as he is prudent and

wary.

It is the slowness of it all that is so disheartening; the

impossibility that dogs the efforts of the high-minded, the kind, the

just, of prevailing against tradition and prejudice and stupidity; the

grim acquiescence in sanctioned oppression that characterises a certain

type of respectable virtue; the melancholy ineffectiveness of kindly

persons, the lamentable lack of proportion that mars the work of the

enthusiastic faddist--these things tempt one at times, in moments of

despair and dreariness, to believe that the one lesson of life is meant

to be a hopeless patience, a dull acquiescence in deeply-rooted evil.

It is bewildering to see a world so out of joint, and to feel that the

one force that has worked wonders is the discontent with things as they

are. And even so the lesson is a hard one, because it has been the lot

of so few of the great conquerors of humanity ever to see the hour of

their triumph, which comes long after and late, when they have breathed

out their ardent spirit in agony and despair.

But, after all, however much we may philosophise about sin or attempt

to analyse its essence, there is some dark secret there, of which from

time to time we are grievously conscious. Who does not know the sense

of failure to overcome, of lapsing from a hope or a purpose, the burden

of the thought of some cowardice or unkindness which we cannot undo and

which we need not have committed? No resolute determinism can ever

avail us against the stern verdict of that inner tribunal of the soul,

which decides, too, by some instinct that we cannot divine, to sting

and torture us with the memory of deeds, the momentousness and

importance of which we should utterly fail to explain to others. There

are things in my own past, which would be met with laughter and

ridicule if I attempted to describe them, that still make me blush to

recollect with a sense of guilt and shame, and seem indelibly branded

upon the mind. There are things, too, of which I do not feel ashamed,

which, if I were to describe them to others, would be received with a

sort of incredulous consternation, to think that I could have performed

them. That is the strange part of the inner conscience, that it seems

so wholly independent of tradition or convention.

And it is from this sense of a burden, borne without hope of

redemption, that we would all of us give our most prized possessions to

be free; it is this which has cast such an awful power into the hands

of the unscrupulous people who have claimed to be able to atone for, to

loose, to set free the ailing soul. Face to face with the terror of

darkness, there is hardly anything of which mankind will not repent;

and I have sometimes thought that the darkest and heaviest temptation

in the whole world is the temptation to yield to a craven fear, when

the sincere conscience does not condemn.