It is to this period of incipient but ill-understood classicism that

belongs the only work of Domenico Neroni--at least the only work still

extant nowadays--which possesses, over and above its artistic or

scientific merit, that indefinable quality which we must simply call

_charm_; to this time, with the one exception of the famous woodcuts

done for Filarete. Domenico began about this time, and probably under

the stress of necessity, to make frontispieces for the books with which

Florentine printers were rapidly superseding the manuscripts of twenty

years before: collections of sermons, of sonnets, lives of saints,

editions of Virgil and Terence, quaint versified encyclopaedias, and even

books on medicine and astrology. From these little woodcuts, groups of

saints round the Cross, with Giotto's tower and Brunellesco's dome in

the distance, pictures of Fathers of the Church or ancient poets seated

at desks in neatly panelled closets--always with their globes, books,

and pot of lilies, and a vista of cloisters; or battles between chaste

viragos, in flying Botticellian draperies, and slim, naked Cupids; from

such frontispieces Domenico passed on to larger woodcuts, destined to

illustrate books never printed, or perhaps, like the so-called _playing

cards of Mantegna_ and certain prints of Robetta, to be bought as cheap

ornaments for walls. Some of those that remain to us have a classical

stiffness, reminding one of the Paduan school; others, and these his

best, remind one of the work of Botticelli. There is, for instance, the

figure of a Muse, elaborately modelled under her ample drapery, seated

cross-legged by a playing fountain, on a carpet of exquisitely designed

ground-ivy, a little bare trellis behind her, a tortoise lyre in her

hand; which has in it somewhat of that odd, vague, questioning character,

half of eagerness, half of extreme lassitude, which we find in

Botticelli. Only that in Neroni's work it seems not the outcome of a

certain dreamy spiritual dissatisfaction--the dissatisfaction which

makes us feel that Botticelli's flower-wreathed nymphs may end in the

pool under the willows like Ophelia--but rather of a torturing of line

and attitude in search of grace. Grace! Unclutchable phantom, which

had appeared tantalisingly in Neroni's recollections of the antique, a

something ineffable, which he could not even see clearly when it was

there before him, accustomed as he had been to all the hideousness of

anatomised reality. In these woodcuts he seems hunting it for ever; and

there is one of them which is peculiarly significant, of a nymph in

elaborately wound robes and veils, striding, with an odd, mad, uncertain

swing, through fields of stiff grass and stunted rushes, a baby faun in

her bosom, another tiny goat-legged creature led by the hand, while

she carries uncomfortably, in addition to this load, a silly trophy of

wild-flowers tied to a stick; the personification almost, this lady with

the wide eyes and crazy smile, of the artist's foolishly and charmingly

burdened journey in quest of the unattainable. The imaginative quality,

never intended or felt by the painter himself, here depends on his

embodying longings after the calm and stalwart goddesses on sarcophagus

and vase, in the very thing he most seeks to avoid, a creature borrowed

from a Botticelli allegory, or one of the sibyls of the unspeakable

Perugino himself! The circumstances of this quest, and the accidental

meeting in it of the antique and the mediaeval, the straining, the

Quixote-riding or Three-King pilgrimaging after a phantom, gives to

such work of Domenico's that indefinable quality of _charm_; the man

does not indeed become a poet, but in a measure a subject for poetry.

III

In order to understand what must have passed in the mind of one of those

Florentines of the fifteenth century, we must realise the fact that,

unlike ourselves, they had not been brought up under the influence of

the antique, and, unlike the ancients, they had not lived in intimacy

with Nature. The followers of Giotto had studied little beyond the head

and hands, and as much of the body as could be guessed at under drapery

or understood from movement; and this achievement, with no artistic

traditions save those of the basest Byzantine decay, was far greater

than we easily appreciate. It remained for the men of the fifteenth

century, Donatello, Ghiberti, Masaccio, and their illustrious followers,

to become familiar with the human body. To do so is easy for every one

in our day, when we are born, so to speak, with an unconscious habit

of antique form, diffused not merely by ancient works of art in marble

or plaster, but by more recent schools of art, painting as well as

sculpture, themselves the outcome of classical imitation. The early

Italian Renaissance had little or none of these facilitations. Fragments

of Greek and Roman sculpture were still comparatively uncommon before

the great excavations of the sixteenth century; nor was it possible for

men so unfamiliar, not merely with the antique, but with Nature itself,

to profit very rapidly by the knowledge and taste stored up even in

those fragments. It was necessary to learn from reality to appreciate

the antique, however much the knowledge of the antique might later

supplement, and almost supplant, the study of reality. So these men of

the fifteenth century had to teach themselves, in the first instance,

the very elements of this knowledge. And here their position, while

yet so unlike ours, was even more utterly unlike that of the ancients

themselves. The great art of Greece undoubtedly had its days of

ignorance; but for those ancient painters and sculptors, who for

generations had watched naked lads exercising in the school or

racecourse, and draped, half-naked men and women walking in the

streets and working in the fields, their ignorance was of the means

of representation, not of the object represented. It is the hand, the

tool which is at fault in those constrained, simpering warriors of the

schools of AEgina, in those slim-waisted daemonic dancers of the Apulian

vases; the eye is as familiar with the human body, the mind as accustomed

to select its beauty from its ugliness, as the eye and mind of such of us

as cannot paint are familiar nowadays with the shapes and colours, with

the charm of the trees and meadows that we love. The contemporaries, on

the contrary, of Donatello had received from the sculptors of the very

farthest Middle Ages, those who carved the magnificent patterns of

Byzantine coffins and the exquisite leafage of Longobard churches, a

remarkable mastery over the technical part of their craft. The hand

was cunning, but the eye unfamiliar. Hence it comes that the sculpture

of the earlier Renaissance displays perfection of workmanship, which

occasionally blinds us to its poverty of form, and even to its

deficiency of science. And hence also the rapidity with which every

additional item of knowledge is put into practice that seems to argue

perfect familiarity. But these men were not really familiar with their

work. The dullest modern student, brought up among casts and manuals,

would not be guilty of the actual anatomical mistakes committed every

now and then by these great anatomists, so passionately curious of

internal structure, so exquisitely faithful to minute peculiarity, let

alone the bunglings of men so certain of their pencil, so exquisitely

keen to form, as Botticelli. As a matter of fact, every statue or drawn

figure of this period represents a hard fight with ignorance and with

unfamiliarity worse than ignorance. The grosser the failure hard-by, the

more splendid the real achievement. For every limb modelled truthfully

from the life, every gesture rendered correctly, every bone or muscle

making itself felt under the skin, every crease or lump in the surface,

is so much conquered from the unknown.

So long as this study, or rather this ignorance, continued, the antique

could be appreciated only very partially, and almost exclusively in the

points in which it differed least from the works of these modern men.

It must have struck them by its unerring science, its great truthfulness

to nature, but its superior beauty could not have appealed to artists

too unfamiliar with form to think of selecting it.

The study of antique proportion, the reproduction of antique types, so

visible in the sculptures of Michelangelo, of Cellini, and of Sansovino,

and no less in the painting of Raphael, of Andrea, and even of the later

Venetians, was very unimportant in the school of Donatello; and it is

probable that he and his pupils did not even perceive the difference

between their own works and the old marbles, which they studied merely

as so many realistic documents.

During his Florentine days Domenico Neroni, like his masters, was

unconscious of the real superiority of the antique, and blind to its

difference from what his contemporaries and himself were striving to

produce. He did not perceive that the David of Donatello and that of

Verrocchio were unlike the marble gods and heroes with whom he would

complacently compare them, nor that the bas-reliefs of the divine

Ghiberti were far more closely connected with the Gothic work of

Orcagna, even of the Pisans, than with those sculptured sarcophagi

collected by Cosimo and Piero dei Medici. It was only when his insatiate

curiosity had exhausted those problems of anatomy which had still

troubled his teachers that he was able to see what the antique really

was, or rather to see that the modern was not the same thing. Ghirlandaio,

Filippino, Signorelli, and Botticelli undoubtedly were affected by

a similar intuition of the Antique; but they were diverted from its

thorough investigation by the manifold other problems of painting as

distinguished from sculpture, and by the vagueness, the unconsciousness

of great creative activity: the antique became one of the influences

in their development, helping very quietly to enlarge and refine their

work.

It was different with Domenico, in whom the man of science was much more

powerful than the artist. His nature required definite decisions and

distinct formulas. It took him some time to understand that the school

of Donatello differed absolutely from the antique, but the difference

once felt, it appeared to him with extraordinary clearness.

He never put his thoughts into words, and probably never admitted even

to himself that the works he had most admired were lacking in beauty;

he merely asserted that the statues of the old Romans and Greeks were

astonishingly beautiful. In reality, however, he was perpetually

comparing the two, and always to the disadvantage of the moderns. It is

possible in our day to judge justly the comparative merits of antique

sculpture and of that of the early Renaissance; or rather to appreciate

them as two separate sorts of art, delightful in quite different ways,

letting ourselves be charmed not more by the actual beauty of form,

and nobility of movement of the one than by the simplicity, the very

homeliness, the essentially human quality of the other. To us there

is something delightful in the very fact that the Davids of Donatello

and Verrocchio are mere ordinary striplings from the street and the

workshop, that the singers of Luca della Robbia are simple unfledged

choir-boys, and the Virgins of Mino Florentine fine ladies; we have

enough of antique perfection, we have had too much of pseudo-antique

faultlessness, and we feel refreshed by this unconsciousness of beauty

and ugliness. A contemporary could not enter into such feelings, he

could not enjoy his own and his fellows' _naivete_; besides, the antique

was only just becoming manifest, and therefore triumphant. To Domenico,

Donatello's David became more and more unsatisfactory, faulty above the

waist, positively ungainly below, weak and lubberly; how could so divine

an artist have been satisfied with that flat back, those narrow shoulders

and thick thighs? He felt freer to dislike the work of Verrocchio, his

own teacher, and a man without Donatello's overwhelming genius; that

David of his, with his immense head and wizen face, his pitiful child's

arms and projecting clavicles, straddling with hand on hip; was it

possible that a great hero, the slayer of a giant (Domenico's notions

of giants were taken rather from the romances of chivalry recited in

the market than from study of Scripture) should have been made like

that? And so, like his great contemporary Mantegna in far-off Lombardy,

Domenico turned that eager curiosity with which he had previously sought

for the secret of flayed limbs and fleshless skeletons, to studying the

mystery of proportion and beauty which was hidden, more subtly and

hopelessly, in the broken marbles of the Pagans.

It happened one day, somewhere about the year 1485, that he was called

to examine a group of Bacchus and a Faun, recently brought from Naples

by the banker Neri Altoviti, of the family which once owned a charming

house, recently destroyed, whose triple row of pillared balconies used

to put an odd Florentine note into the Papal Rome, turning the swirl of

the Tiber opposite Saint Angelo's into a reach of the Arno. The houses

of the Altovitis in Florence were in that portion of the town most

favoured by the fifteenth century, already a little way from the market:

the lion on the tower of the Podesta, and the Badia steeple printing the

sky close by; while not far off was the shop where the good bookseller

Vespasiano received orders for manuscripts, and conversed with the

humanists whose lives he was to write. The Albizis and Pandolfinis,

illustrious and numerous families, struck in so many of their members by

the vindictiveness of the Medicis, had their houses in the same quarter,

and at the corner of the narrow street hung the carved escutcheon--two

fishes rampant--of the Pazzis: their house shut up and avoided by the

citizens, who had so recently seen the conspirators dangling in hood and

cape from the windows of the public palace. The house of the Altovitis

was occupied on the ground floor by great warehouses, whose narrow,

grated windows were attainable only by a steep flight of steps. The

court was surrounded on three sides by a cloister or portico, which

repeated itself on the first and second floors, with the difference that

the lowest arches were supported by rude square pillars, ornamented

with only a carved marigold, while the uppermost weighed on stout oaken

shafts, between which ropes were stretched for the drying of linen; and

the middle colonnade consisted of charming Tuscan columns, where Sirens

and Cupids and heraldic devices replaced the acanthus or rams' horns of

the capitals. It was to this middle portion of the house that Domenico

ascended up a noble steep-stepped staircase, protected from the rain

by a vaulted and rosetted roof, for it was external and occupied the

side of the yard left free from cloisters. The great banker had bidden

Domenico to his midday meal, which was served with a frugality now fast

disappearing, but once habitual even among the richest Florentines. But

though the food was simple and almost scanty, nearly forty persons sat

down to meat together, for Neri Altoviti held to the old plan, commended

by Alberti in his dialogue on the governing of a household, that the

clerks and principal servants of a merchant were best chosen among his

own kinsfolk, living under his roof, and learning obedience from the

example of his children. Despite this frugality, the dining-room was,

though bare, magnificent. There were none of those carpets and Eastern

stuffs which surprised strangers from the North in the voluptuous little

palaces of contemporary Venetians, and the benches were hard and narrow.

But the ceiling overhead was magnificently arranged in carved compartments,

great gold sunflowers and cherubs projecting from a dark blue ground

among the brown raftering; in the middle of the stencilled wall was one

of those high sideboards so frequently shown in old paintings, covered

with gold and silver dishes and platters embossed by the most skilful

craftsmen; and at one end a great washing trough and fountain, such as

still exist in sacristies, ornamented with groups of dancing children

by Benedetto da Maiano; while behind the high seat of the father of

the family a great group of saints, emerging from blooming lilies and

surrounded by a glory of angels, was hanging in a frame divided into

carved compartments: the work, panel and frame, of the late Brother

Filippo Lippi. At one end of the board sat all the men, arranged

hierarchically, from the father in his black loose robe to lads in short

plaited tunic and striped hose; the womankind were seated together, and

the daughters, even the mother of the house, modest and almost nunlike

in apparel and head-dress, would rise and help to wait on the men, with

that silent and grave courtesy which, according to Vespasiano, had

disappeared from Florence with Alessandra dei Bardi. There was little

speech, and only in undertones; a Franciscan said a long grace, and

afterwards, and in the middle of the meal, a young student, educated by

the frequent munificence of the Altovitis, read out loud a chapter of

Cicero's "De Senectute;" for Neri, although a busy banker, with but

little time for study, was not behind his generation in the love of

letters and philosophy.

After meat Messer Neri dismissed the rest of the company to their various

avocations; the ladies silently retired to superintend the ironing and

mending of the house linen, and Domenico was escorted by his host to see

the newly arrived piece of statuary. It had been placed already in the

banker's closet, where he could feast his eyes on its perfection while

attending to his business or improving his mind by study. This closet,

compared to the rest of the house, was small and low-roofed. At its

end, as we see in the pictures of Van Eyck and Memling, opened out the

conjugal chamber, reflecting its vast, red-covered bed, raised several

steps, its crucifix and praying-stool, and its latticed window in a

circular mirror framed in cut facets, which hung opposite on the wall of

the closet. The latter was dark, a single trefoiled window admitting on

either side of its column and through its greenish bottle-glass but

little light from the narrow street. The chief furniture consisted of

shelves carrying books, small antique bronzes, some globes, a sand-glass,

and panel cupboards, ornamented with pictures of similar objects, and

with ingenious perspectives of inlaid wood. An elaborate iron safe,

painted blue and studded with beautiful metal roses, stood in a corner.

There were two or three arm chairs of carved oak for visitors. The

master sat upon a bench behind an oaken counter or desk, very much like

St. Jerome in his study. On the wall behind, and above his head, hung a

precious Flemish painting (Flemish paintings were esteemed for their

superior devoutness) representing the Virgin at the foot of the Cross,

with a Nativity and a Circumcision on either of the opened shutters. It

made a glowing patch of vivid geranium and wine colour, of warm yellow

glazing on the oak of the wall. On the counter or writing-table stood a

majolica pot with three lilies in it, a pile of manuscript and ledgers,

and a human skull alongside of a crucifix, beautifully wrought of bronze

by Desiderio da Settignano. A Latin translation of Plato's "Phaedo" was

spread open on the desk, together with one of the earliest printed

copies of the "Divine Comedy."

Messer Neri did not take his seat at the counter, but, after a pause,

and with some solemnity, drew a curtain of dark brocade which had been

spread across one end of the closet, and displayed his new purchase.

"I have it from the king, for the settling of a debt of a thousand

crowns contracted with my father, when he was Duke of Calabria," said

the banker, with due appreciation of the sum. "'Tis said they found it

among the ruins of that famous palace of the Emperor Tiberius of which

Tacitus has told us."

The two marble figures, to which time and a long sojourn underground

had given a brownish yellow colour, reddish in places with rust stains,

stood out against a background of Flemish tapestry, whose emaciated

heads of kings and thin bodies of warrior saints made a confused pattern

on the general dusky blue and green. The group was in wonderful

preservation: the figure of Bacchus intact, that of the young faun

lacking only the arm, which had evidently been freely extended.

It exists in many repetitions and variations in most of our museums; a

work originally of the school of Praxiteles, but in none of the copies

handed to us of excellence sufficient to display the hand of the

original sculptor. Besides, we have been spoilt by familiarity with an

older and more powerful school, by knowledge of a few great masterpieces,

for complete appreciation of such a work. But it was different four

hundred years ago; and Domenico Neroni stood long and entranced before

the group. The principal figure embodied all those beauties which he had

been striving so hard to understand: it was, in the most triumphant

manner, the absolute reverse of the figures of Donatello.

The young god was represented walking with leisurely but vigorous step,

supporting himself upon the shoulder of the little satyr as the vine

supports itself, with tendrils trailed about branches and trunk, on the

propping tree from which the child Ampelos took his name. Like the head

with its elaborately dressed curls, the beautiful body had an ampleness

and tenderness that gave an impression almost womanly till you noticed

the cuirass-like sit of the chest on the loins, and the compressed

strength of the long light thighs. The creature, as you looked at him,

seemed to reveal more and more, beneath the roundness and fairness of

surface, the elasticity and strength of an athlete in training. But when

the eye was not exploring the delicate, hard, and yet supple depressions

and swellings of the muscles, the slender shapeliness of the long legs

and springy feet, the back bulging with strong muscles above, and going

in, tight, with a magnificent dip at the waist; all impressions were

merged in a sense of ease, of suavity, of full-blown harmony. Here was

no pomp of anatomical lore, of cunning handicraft, but the life seemed

to circulate strong and gentle in this exquisite effortless body. And

the creature was not merely alive with a life more harmonious than

that of living men or carved marbles, but beautiful, equally in simple

outline if you chose that, and in subtle detail when that came under

your notice, with a beauty that seemed to multiply itself, existing in

all manners, as it can only in things that have life, in perfect flowers

and fruits, or high-bred Oriental horses. Of such things did the

under-strata of consciousness consist in Neroni--vague impressions

of certain bunches of grapes with their great rounded leaves hanging

against the blue sky, of the flame-like tapered petals of wild tulips in

the fields, of the golden brown flanks of certain horses, and the broad

white foreheads of the Umbrian bullocks; forming as it were a background

for the perception of this god, for no man or woman had ever been like

unto him.

Domenico remained silent, his arms folded on his breast; it was not a

case for talking.

But the young man who had read Cicero aloud at table had come up behind

him, and thought it more seemly to praise his patron's new toy, while

at the same time displaying his learning; so he cleared his throat, and

said in a pompous manner:--

"It is stated in the fifth chapter of the Geography of Strabo that the

painter Parrhasius, having been summoned by the inhabitants of Lindos to

make them an image of their tutelary hero Hercules, obtained from the

son of Jupiter that he should appear to him in a dream, and thus enable

him worthily to portray the perfections of a demigod. Might we not be

tempted to believe that the divine son of Semele had vouchsafed a

similar boon to the happy sculptor of this marble?"

But Domenico only bit his thumb and sighed very heavily.

IV

To the men of those days, which have taken their name from the revival

of classical studies, Antiquity, although studied and aped till its

phrases, feelings, and thoughts had entered familiarly into all life,

remained, nevertheless, a period of permanent miracle. It was natural,

therefore, to the contemporaries of Poggius and AEneas Sylvius, of

Ficinus and Politian, that the art of the Romans and Greeks should, like

their poetry, philosophy, and even their virtues, be of transcendent and

unqualified splendour. Why it should be thus they asked as little as why

the sun shines, mediaeval men as they really were, and accepting quite

simply certain phenomena as the result of inscrutable virtues. Even later,

when Machiavelli began to examine why the ancients had been more valorous

and patriotic than his contemporaries, nay, when Montaigne expounded

with sceptical cynicism the superior sanity and wisdom of Pagan days,

people were satisfied to think--when they thought at all--that antique

art was excellent because it belonged to antiquity. And it was not till

the middle of the eighteenth century that the genius of Winkelmann brought

into fruitful contact the study of ancient works of art, and that of the

manners and notions of antiquity, showing the influence of a civilisation

which cultivated bodily beauty as an almost divine quality, and making

us see behind that beautiful nation of marble the generations of living

athletes, among whom the sculptor had found his critics and his models.

To a man like Domenico Neroni, devoid of classical learning and

accustomed to struggling with anatomy and perspective, the problem of

ancient art was not settled by the fact of its antiquity. He had gone

once more to Rome on purpose to see as many old marbles as possible,

and he brought to their study the feverish curiosity with which in

former years he had flayed and cut up corpses and spent his nights in

calculations of perspective. To such a mind, where modern scientific

methods were arising among mediaeval habits of allegory and mysticism,

the statues and reliefs which he was perpetually analysing became a sort

of subsidiary nature, whose riddles might be read by other means than

mere investigation; for do not the forces of Nature, its elemental

spirits, give obedience to wonderful words and potent combinations of

numbers?

Certain significant facts had flashed across his mind in his studies

of that almost abstract, nay, almost cabalistic thing, the science of

bodily proportions. It was plain that the mystery of antique beauty--the

ancient symmetry, _symmetria prisca_ as a humanist designs it in his

epitaph for Leonardo da Vinci--was but a matter of numbers. For a man's

length, if he stand with outstretched arms, is the same from finger tip

to finger tip as his length when erect from head to feet, namely, eight

times the length of his head. Now eight heads, if divided into halves,

give four as the measure of throat and thorax; and four heads to the

length of the leg from the acetabulum to the heel, divided themselves

into two heads going to the thigh and two heads to the shank; while in

the cross measurement two heads equal the breadth of the chest, and

three measure the length from the shoulder to the middle finger. These

measures--a mere rough rule of thumb in our eyes--contained to this

mediaeval mind the promise of some great mystery. To him, accustomed to

hear all the occurrences of Nature, and all human concerns referred to

astrological calculations, and conceiving the universe as governed by

spirits--in shape, perhaps, like the Primum Mobile, the Mercurius and

Jupiter of Mantegna's playing cards, crowned with stars and poised upon

globes--it was as if the divining rod were turning pertinaciously to one

spot in the earth, where, had he but the necessary tools, he must strike

upon veins of the purest gold, or cause water to spirt high in the air.

This number _eight_, and the pertinacity of its recurrence, puzzled him

intensely. It seemed to point so clearly, much as in music the sensitive

seventh points to the tonic, to a sort of resolution on the number nine.

And if only nine could be established, it would seem to explain so

much.... For five being man's numeral in creation (and is not the

measurement of his face also _five eyes_?), it makes, when added to

four, the number of the material elements over which he dominates,

_nine_, which would thus represent the supremacy or perfection of man.

Man's power of reproduction being represented by three, its multiple

nine would be still more obviously important. How to turn this eight

into nine became Domenico's study, and he took measurement after

measurement for this purpose. At length he remembered that man's body

is a unity, therefore represented by the number one, and that will,

judgment, and supremacy are also comprised in the unit. Now one and

eight make nine beyond all possibility of doubt, and the formula--"man's

body is a unity--or one"--composed of harmonies of eight, would give

the formula _nine_ meaning _man's supremacy is expressed in his body_.

The importance of working round to this famous nine will be clear when

we reflect that, according to the Kabbala and the lost sacred book of

Hermes Trismegistus--the Pimandra, doubtless, which he is represented,

on the floor of Siena Cathedral, as offering to a Jew and a Gentile--nine

represents the sun and all beautiful bright things that draw their

influence from it, as the gleam of beaten gold, the rustle of silken

stuffs, the smell of the flower heliotrope, and all such men as

delineate human beings with colours, or make their effigy in stone or

metal; moreover, Phoebus Apollo, whom the poets describe as the most

beautiful of the gods, as indeed he is represented in all statues and

reliefs.

Domenico would often discuss these matters with a learned man who

greatly frequented his company. This was the humanist Niccolo Feo, known

as Filarete. Filarete was a native of Southern Apulia, a bastard of the

house of the Counts of Sulmona, who, in order to prevent any plots

against the legitimate branch, had handsomely provided for him in an

abbey of which they enjoyed the patronage. But his restless spirit

drove him from the cloister, and impelled him to long and adventurous

journeys. He had travelled in India and the East, and in Greece,

returning to Italy only when Constantinople fell before the Turks.

During these years he had acquired immense learning, considerable

wealth, and a vaguely sinister reputation. He had been persecuted by

Paul II. for taking part in the famous banquets, savouring oddly of

Paganism, of Pomponius Laetus; but the late Pontiff Sixtus IV. had taken

him into his favour together with Platina, one of his fellow-sufferers

in the castle of Saint Angelo. He was now old, and, after a life of

study, adventure, and possibly of sin, was living in affluence in a

house given him by the illustrious Cardinal at St. Peter ad Vincula, who

had also obtained him a canonry of St. John Lateran. He was busying his

last year in a great work of fancy and erudition, for which he required

the assistance of a skilful draughtsman and connoisseur of antiquities,

than whom none could suit him so well as Domenico Neroni.

The book of Filarete, of which the rare copies are among the most

precious relics of the Renaissance, was a strange mixture of romance,

allegory, and encyclopaedic knowledge, such as had been common in the

Middle Ages, and was still fashionable during the revival of letters,

which merely added the element of classical learning. Like the

_Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_ of Francesco Colonna, of which it was

doubtless the prototype, the _Alcandros_ of Filarete, though never

carried beyond the first volume, is an amazing and wearisome display of

the author's archaeological learning. It contains exact descriptions of

all the rarities of ancient art, and of things Oriental which he had

seen, and pages of transcripts from obscure Latin and Greek authors,

descriptive of religious ceremonies; varied with Platonic philosophy,

Decameronian obscenities, in laboured pseudo-Florentine style, and

Dantesque visions, all held together by the confused narrative of an

allegorical journey performed by the author. It is profusely ornamented

with woodcuts, representing architectural designs of a fantastic, rather

Oriental description, restorations of ancient buildings, reproductions

of antique inscriptions and designs, and last, but far from least, a

certain number of small compositions, of Mantegnesque quality, but

Botticellian charm, showing the various adventures of the hero in

terrible woods, delicious gardens, and in the company of nymphs, demigods,

and allegorical personages. These latter are undoubtedly from the hand

of Domenico Neroni; and it was while discussing these delightful damsels

seated with lutes and psalteries under vine-trellises, these scholars

in cap and gown, weeping in quaint chambers with canopied beds and

carnations growing on the window, these processions--suggesting

Mantegna's Triumph of Julius Caesar--of priests and priestesses with

victories and trophies, that the painter from Volterra and the Apulian

humanist would discuss the secret of antique beauty--discuss it for

hours, surrounded by the precious manuscripts and inscriptions, the

fragments of sculpture, the Eastern rarities, of Filarete's little house

on the Quirinal hill, or among the box-hedges, clipped cypresses, and

fountains of his garden; while the riots and massacres, the fanatical

processions and feudal wars, of mediaeval Rome raged unnoticed below. For

Pope Sixtus and his Riarios, and Pope Innocent and his Cybos, thirsting

for power and gold, drunken with lust and bloodshed, were benign and

courteous patrons of all art and all learning.

V

But that number nine, attained with so much difficulty, although it put

the human proportion into visible connection with the sun, with beaten

gold, the smell of the heliotrope, and the god Apollo, and opened a vista

of complicated astral influences, did not in reality bring Domenico one

step nearer the object of his desires. It had enabled those ancient men

to make statues that were perfectly beautiful, that was obvious; but it

did not make his own figures one tittle less hideous, for he felt them

now to be absolutely hideous. One wintry day, as he was roaming amongst

the fallen pillars and arches, thickly covered with myrtle and ilex, of

the desolate region beyond what had once been the Forum and was now the

cattle-market, there came across Domenico's mind, while he watched a

snake twisting in the grass, the remembrance of a certain anecdote about

a Greek painter, to whom Hercules had shown himself in a vision. He had

heard it, without taking any notice, two years before, from the young

scholar who read Cicero at table for Messer Neri Altoviti; and although

he had thought of it several times, it had never struck him except as

one of the usual impudent displays of learning of the parasitic tribe

of humanists.

But at this moment the remembrance of this fact came as a great light

into Domenico's soul. For what were these statues save the idols of the

heathens; and what wonder they should be divinely beautiful, when those

who made them might see the gods in visions?

This explanation, which to us must sound far-fetched and fantastic,

knowing, as we do, the real reason that made a people of athletes into a

people of sculptors, savoured of no strangeness to a man of the Middle

Ages. Visions of superhuman creatures were among the most undisputed

articles of his belief, and among the commonest subjects of his art. Had

not the Blessed Virgin appeared to St. Bernard, the Saviour among His

cherubim to St. Francis--the very stones shown at La Vernia where it

had happened--the Divine Bridegroom to Catherine of Siena? Had not St.

Anthony of Padua held the Divine Child in his arms? And all not so long

ago? Besides, every year there was some nun or monk claiming to have

conversed with Christ and His court; and the heavens were opening quite

frequently in the walls of cells and the clefts of hermitages. And did

not Dante relate a journey into Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise? It was

perfectly natural that what was constantly happening to holy men and

women nowadays should have happened in Pagan times also; and what men

could so well have deserved a visit from gods as those who spent their

lives faithfully portraying them? The story of Parrhasius and his vision

was familiar ground to a man accustomed to see, in all corners of Italy,

portraits of the Saviour painted by St. Luke, or finished, like the

famous Holy Face of Lucca, by angels. For an absolute contempt for the

artistic value of such miraculous images did not, in the mind of Neroni,

throw any doubt on their authenticity; in the same way that the passion

for antiquity, the hankering after Pagan beliefs, did not probably

interfere with the orthodoxy of so many of the humanists. Domenico,

besides, remembered that Virgil and Ovid, whom he had not read, but

whose fables he had sometimes been asked to illustrate, were constantly

talking of visions of gods and goddesses, nay, of their descending upon

earth to unite themselves with mortals in love or friendship, for he had

had to furnish designs for woodcuts representing Diana and Endymion,

Jupiter and Ganymede, the gods coming to Philemon and Baucis, and Apollo

tending the herds of Admetus. Neither did it occur to Domenico's mind

that the existence of the old gods might be a mere invention, or a mere

delusion of the heathen. For all their classic culture, the men of

the fifteenth century, as the men of the thirteenth for all their

scholasticism, were in an intellectual condition such as we rarely

meet with nowadays among educated persons; and Domenico, a mere

handicraftsman, had not learned from the study of Cicero and Plato to

examine and understand the difference between reality and fiction.

To him a scene which was frequently painted, an adventure which was

written down and could be read, was necessarily a reality. Dante had

spoken of the gods, and what Dante said was evidently true, the

allegorical meaning, the metaphor, entirely escaping this simple mind;

and Virgil, Homer, Ovid told the most minute details about gods and

goddesses, and they themselves were grave and learned men. Domenico did

not even think that the ancient gods were dead. Of course heaven was now

occupied by Christ and His saints, those heavenly hosts of whom he would

think, when he thought of them at all, as seated stepwise on a great

stand, blue and pink and green in dress, golden discs about their heads,

and an atmosphere of fretted gold, of swirling stencilled golden angels'

wings all round them, and God the Father, a great triangle blazing with

Alpha and Omega, above Jesus enthroned, and His mother; and it was they

who ruled things here, and to them he said his prayers night and

morning, and knelt in church. But _here_, somehow did not cover the

whole universe, nor did that pink and blue and gold miniature painter's

heaven extend everywhere, although, of course, somehow or other it did.

Anyhow, it was certain that not so very far off there were Saracens

and Turks--why he had seen some of the Duke of Calabria's Turkish

garrison--who believed in Macomet, Trevigant, and Apollinis; these to be

sure were false gods (the word _false_ carried no clear meaning to his

mind, or if any, one rather equivalent to _wrong, objectionable_ rather

than to non-existent), but they certainly worked wonderful miracles for

their people. And indeed--here Domenico's placid contemplation of the

kingdom of Macomet, Trevigant, and Apollinis was exchanged for a vague

horror, shot with gleams of curiosity--the devil also had his place in

the world, a place much nearer and universal, and did marvellous things,

pointing out treasures, teaching the future, lending invulnerable

strength to the men and women who worshipped him, of whom some might

be pointed out to you in every town--yes, grave and respectable men,

priests and monks among them, and even Cardinals of Holy Church, as

every one knew quite well.... So that, in a confused manner, rather

negative than positive, Domenico considered that the Pagan gods must

be somewhere or other, the past and present not very clearly separated

in his mind, or rather the past existing in a peculiar simultaneous

manner with the present, as a sort of St. Brandan's isle, in distant,

unattainable seas; or as Dante's mountain of Purgatory, a very solid

mountain indeed, yet which, for some mysterious and unquestioned reason,

people never stumbled upon except after death. All this was scarcely an

actual series of arguments; it was rather the arguments which, with much

effort, Domenico might have fished out of his obscure consciousness

had you summoned him to explain how the ancient gods could possibly

be immortal. As to him, he had always heard of them as immortal, and

although he had not been taught any respect or love for them as for

Christ, the Madonna, and the saints, they must be existing somewhere

since _immortal_ means that which cannot die.

But now he began to feel a certain shyness about immortal gods, for they

had begun to occupy his thoughts, and it was with much cunning that he

put questions to his friend Filarete, desirous to gain information on

certain points without actually seeming to ask it. The humanist, summoned

to explain what the Fathers of the Church--those worthies crowned with

mitres and offering rolls of manuscript, whom Domenico had occasionally

to portray for his customers--said about the ancient gods, answered with

much glibness but considerable contempt, for the Greek and Latin of

these saintly philosophers inspired the learned man with a feeling of

nausea. He got out of a chest several volumes covered with dust, and

began to quote the "Apology" of Justin Martyr, the "Legation" of

Athenagoras, the "Apology" of Tertullian and Lactantius, whose very name

caused him to writhe with philological loathing. And he told Domenico

that it was the opinion of these holy but ill-educated persons that

daemons assumed the name and attributes of Jupiter, of Venus, of Apollo

and Bacchus, lurking in temples, instituting festivals and sacrifices,

and were often allowed by Heaven to distract the faithful by a display

of miracles.

"Then they are devils?" asked Domenico, trying to follow.

A smile passed over the beautifully cut mouth, the noble, wrinkled

face--like that of the marble Seneca--of the old humanist.

"Talk of devils to the barefoot friar who preaches in the midst of the

market-place," he said, "not to Filarete. The whole world, air, fire,

earth, water, the entire universe is governed by daemons, and they

inspire our noblest thoughts. Hast never heard of the familiar daemon

of Socrates, whispering to him superhuman wisdom? Yes, indeed, Venus,

Apollo, AEsculapius, Jove, the stars and planets, the winds and tides are

daemons. But thou canst not understand such matters, my poor Domenico.

So get thee to Brother Baldassare of Palermo, and ask him questions."

But Filarete's expression was very different when, one day, Domenico

shyly inquired concerning the truth of that story of Parrhasius and

the Hercules of Lindos. Strange rumours were current in Rome of unholy

festivities in which Filarete and other learned men--some of those

whom Paul II. had thrown into prison--had once taken part. They had

not merely laid their tables and spread their couches according to

descriptions contained in ancient authors; but, crowned with roses,

laurel, myrtle, or parsley, had sung hymns to the heathen gods, and, it

was whispered, poured out libations and burned incense in their honour.

Their friends, indeed, had answered scornfully that these were but

amusements of learned men; not to be taken more seriously than the

invocations to the gods and muses in their poems, than the mythological

subjects which the Popes themselves selected to adorn their dwellings.

And doubtless this explanation was correct. Yet the pleasure of these

little pedantic and artistic mummeries, which took place in suburban

gardens, while the townsfolk streamed in the hot June nights, decked

with bunches of cloves and of lavender, to make bonfires in the empty

places near the Lateran, little guessing that their ancestors had

once done the same in honour of the neighbouring Venus--the innocent

childishness of these learned men was perhaps spiced, for some

individuals at least, by a momentary belief in the gods of the old

poets, by a sudden forbidden fervour for the exiled divinities of Virgil

and Ovid, under whose reign the world had been young, men had been free

to love and think, and Rome, now the object of the world's horror and

contempt, had been the world's triumphant mistress. But these had been

mere mummeries, mere child's play, and the soul of Filarete had thirsted

for a reality. He could not have answered had you asked whether he

believed in the absolute existence and power of the old gods, any more

than whether he disbelieved in the power of Christ and His avenging

angels; his cultivated and sceptical mind was, after all, in a state of

disorder similar to that of Domenico's ignorance. All that he knew with

certainty was that Christ and His worship represented to him all that

was unnatural, cruel, foolish, and hypocritical; while the gods were

associated with every thought of liberty, of beauty, and of glory. And

so, one evening, after working up still further the enthusiasm, the

passionate desire of his friend, he told Domenico that, if he chose, he

too perhaps might see a god.

In his antiquarian rambles Filarete had discovered, a mile or two

outside the southern gates of Rome, a subterranean chamber, richly

adorned with stuccoes--known nowadays as the tomb of certain members of

the Flavian family, but which, thanks to the defective knowledge of his

day and the habit of seeing people buried in churches, the humanist had

mistaken for a temple--intact, and scarcely desecrated, of the Eleusinian

Bacchus. Above its vaults, barely indicated by a higher mound in the

waving ground of the pasture land, had once stood a Christian church, as

ancient almost as the supposed temple below, whose Byzantine columns lay

half hidden by the high grass, and the walls of whose apse had become

overgrown by ivy and weeds, the nest of lazy snakes. The Gothic soldiers,

Arians or heathens, who had burned down, in some drunken bout, the

little church above-ground, had penetrated at the same time into the

tomb beneath in search of treasure, and finding none, dispersed the

bones in the sarcophagi they had opened. They had left open the aperture

leading downward, which had been matted over by a thick growth of ivy

and wild clematis. One day, while surveying the remains of the Christian

church, always in hopes of discovering in it a former temple of the

Pagans, Filarete had walked into that tuft of solid green, and found

himself, buried and half stunned, in the mouth of the tomb below. It

was through this that he bade Domenico follow him, bearing a certain

mysterious package in his cloak, one January day of the year fourteen

hundred and eighty-eight.

Above-ground it had frozen in the night; here below, when they had

descended the rugged sepulchral stairs, the air had a damp warmth, an

odd feel of inhabitation. Above-ground, also, everything lay in ruins,

while here all was intact. As the light of the torches moved slowly

along the vaulted and stuccoed ceilings, it showed the delicate lines

of a profusion of little reliefs and ornaments, fresh as if cast and

coloured yesterday. Slender garlands of leaves, and long knotted ribbons

and veils in lowest relief partitioned the space; and framed by them, now

round, now oval, now oblong, were medallions of naked gods banqueting

and playing games, of satyrs and nymphs dancing, nereids swinging on

the backs of hippocamps, tritons curling their tails and blowing their

horns, Cupids fluttering among griffins and chimaeras; a life of laughter

and love, which mocked the eye, starting into vividness in one place,

dying away in a mere film where the torchlight pressed on too closely

in others. All along the walls, below the line of the stuccoes, were

excavated shelves, on which stood numbers of small cinerary boxes, each

bearing a name. In the middle of the vaulted chamber was a huge stone

coffin, carved with revelling Bacchantes, and grim tragic masks at its

corners; and all round the coffin, broken in one of its flanks by the

tools of the treasure-seeker, lay bones and skulls, dispersed on the

damp ground even as the Goths had left them.

It was this sarcophagus which, with its Dionysiac revels, and the name

of one Dionysius carved on it, a freedman of the Flavians, had led

Filarete to consider the tomb as a kind of temple consecrated to

Bacchus.

Filarete bade Domenico stick the pointed end of his torch into the mouth

of an amphora standing erect in a corner, and began to unpack the load

they had brought on a mule. It looked like the preparation for a feast:

there were loaves of bread, fruit, a flask of choice wine; and Domenico,

for a moment, thought the old man mad. But his feelings changed when

Filarete produced a set of silver lamps, and bade him trim and light

them, placing them on the ledges alongside of the cinerary urns; and

when he lit some strange incense and filled the place with its smoke.

Despite the many descriptions of ancient sacrifices with which the

humanist had entertained him, Domenico had brought a vague notion of a

raising of devils, and felt relieved at the absence of brimstone fumes,

and of the magic books that accompanied them.

Although more passionately longing--he knew not, he dared not tell

himself for what--Domenico did not come with the curious exaltation of

spirits of his companion, all whose antiquarian lore had gone to his

head, and who really imagined himself to be a genuine Pagan engaged in

Pagan rites. For Filarete the ceremony was everything; for Domenico it

was merely a means, a sort of sacrilegious juggling, into which he had

not inquired more particularly, which was to give him the object of his

wishes at the price of great peril to his soul. But when the subterranean

chamber was filled with a cloud of incense, through which, in the dim

yellow light of the lamp, the naked gods and goddesses on the vault, the

satyrs and nymphs, the Tritons and Bacchantes seemed to float in and out

of sight, a feeling of awe, of an unknown kind of reverence and rapture,

began to fill his soul, and his eyes became fixed on the lid of the

carved sarcophagus--vague images of Christian resurrections mingling

with his hopes--Would the god appear?

Filarete, meanwhile, had enveloped his head in a long linen veil,

and, after washing his hands thrice in a golden basin brought for the

purpose, he placed some faggots on the sarcophagus, lit them, and

throwing grains of incense and of salt alternately into the flames,

began to chant in an unknown tongue, which Domenico guessed to be Greek.

Then beckoning to the painter, who was kneeling, as at church, in a

corner, he bade him unpack a basket matted over with leaves, whose

movements and sounds had puzzled Domenico as he carried it down. In

great surprise, and with a vague sense of he knew not what, he handed

its contents to Filarete. It was a miserable little lamb, newly born,

its long, soft legs tied together, its almost sightless, pale eyes

half-started from its sockets. As the humanist took it, it bleated with

sudden shrill strength, and Domenico could not help thinking of certain

images he had seen on monastery walls of the Good Shepherd carrying the

lame lamb on his shoulders. This was very different. For, with an odd

ferocity, Filarete placed the miserable young creature on the stone

before the fire, and slit its throat and chest with a long knife.

The god did not appear. They extinguished the lamps, left the carcase

of the lamb half charred in a pool of blood on the stone, and slowly

reascended into the daylight, leaving behind them, in the vaulted

chamber, a stifling fume of incense, of burnt flesh, and mingled damp.

Up above, among the ruins of the Christian church, where they had left

their mules, it was cold and sunny, and the light seemed curiously blue,

almost grey and dusty, after the yellow illumination below. Before them,

interrupted here and there by a mass of ruined masonry, or a few arches

of aqueduct, waved the grey-green, billowy plain, where the wind, which

rolled the great winter cloud-balls overhead, danced and sang with the

tall, dry hemlocks and sere white thistles, shining and rattling like

skeletons. And on to it seemed to descend cloud-mountains, vague

blueness and darkness--cloud or hill, you could not tell which--out of

whose flank, ever and anon, a sunbeam conjured up a visionary white

resplendent city.

The short winter day was beginning to draw in when they approached

silently the city walls, solemn with their towers and gates, endless

as it seemed, and enclosing, one felt vaguely, an endless, distant,

invisible city.

The sound of its bells came as from afar to meet the sacrilegious men.

VI

The culminating sacrilege was yet to come. The place that witnessed it

remains unchanged--a half-deserted church among the silent grass-grown

lanes, the crumbling convent walls, and ill-tended vineyards of the

Aventine; a hill that has retained in Christian times a look of its

sinister fame in Pagan ones. Among the cypresses, which seem to wander

up the hillside, rises the square belfry, among whose brickwork, flushed

in the sunset, are inlaid discs of porphyry torn from some temple

pavement, and plates of green majolica brought from the East, it is

said, by pilgrims or Crusaders. The arum-fringed lane widens before the

outer wall of the church, overtopped by its triangular gable. Behind

this wall is a yard or atrium, the pavement grass-grown, the walls

stained with great patches of mildew, and showing here and there in

their dilapidation the shaft and capital of a bricked-up Ionic pillar.

The place tells of centuries of neglect, of the gradual invasion of

resistless fever; and it was fitly chosen, some fifty years ago, for the

abode of a community of Trappists. In the reign of Innocent VIII. it

was still nominally in the hands of certain Cistercians; but the fever

had long driven these monks to the more wholesome end of the hill, where

they had erected a smaller church; and the convent had served for years

as a fortress of the turbulent family of the Capranicas, one of whose

members was always the nominal abbot, with the Cardinal's hat, and title

Jervase and Protasius. And now, at the end of the fifteenth century, a

Cardinal Ascanio Capranica, famous for his struggle in magnificence and

sinfulness with the magnificent and sinful young nephews of Pope Sixtus,

had determined to restore the fortified monastery, to combat the fever

by abundant plantations, and to make the church a monument of his

splendour. And, in order to secure some benefit by his own munificence,

he had begun by commissioning Domenico Neroni to design and execute

a sepulchre three storeys high, full of carvings, and covered with

statues, so that his soul, if sent untimely to heaven, might not be

dishonoured by the unworthy resting-place of its trusty companion, the

Cardinal's handsome and well-tended body.

This church of SS. Jervase and Protasius, which imitated, like most

churches of the early Christian period, the form of a basilica or court

of law, was constructed out of fragments of Pagan edifices, and occupied

the site of a Pagan edifice, whose columns had been employed to carry

the roof of the church, or, when of porphyry or serpentine, had been

sawed into discs for the pavement. On the slant of the hill, supporting

the apse, encircled by pillarets, is a round mass of masonry, overgrown

with ivy and ilex scrub, the remains of some antique bath or grotto;

and under the battlemented walls, the cloistered courts of the convent,

there stretches, it is said, a network of subterranean passages running

down to the Tiber. Four hundred years ago they were not to be discovered

if looked for, being completely hidden by the fallen masonry and the

cypress roots and growths of poisonous plants--nightshade, and hemlock,

and green-flowered hellebore; but wicked monks had sometimes been sucked

into them while digging the ground, or decoyed into their labyrinths by

devils. Was it possible that there had lingered on through the ages a

vague and horrified remembrance of those rites, the discovery of whose

mysterious and wide-spread abominations had frozen Rome with horror in

her most high and palmy days; and was there a connection between those

neophytes, wandering with blood-stained limbs and dishevelled locks

among the groves of the Aventine, then rushing to quench their burning

torches in the Tiber, two centuries before Christ, and the devils who

troubled the Benedictines of SS. Jervase and Protasius? These evil

spirits would appear, it had been said, in the cloisters of the convent,

processions carrying lights and garlands; and on certain nights, when

the monks were in prayer in their cells, strange sounds would issue

from the church itself, of flutes and timbrels, and demon laughter, and

demon voices chanting some unknown litany, and clearly aping the mass;

and Cardinal Capranica was blamed by many pious persons for his rash

intention of filling once more the deserted convent, and exposing holy

men to the wrath of such very pertinacious devils. Meanwhile mass upon

mass was said to clear the place of this demoniac infection. It was in

this church that the sacrilege of Domenico and Filarete rose to its

highest, and that an event took place which the men of the fifteenth

century could scarce find words to designate.

Domenico had grown tired of his friend's archaeological impieties.

It gave him no satisfaction to pour out wine, burn incense, arrange

garlands, and even cut the throats of animals according to a correct

Pagan ritual. It was nothing to him that Horace and Ovid and Tibullus

should have done alike. He was a good Christian, never doubting for

a moment the power of the Blessed Virgin, the saints, and even the

smallest and meanest priest, nor the heat of hell-fire. But he wanted to

have the secret of antique proportions, and he was convinced that this

secret could be communicated only by a Pagan divinity, just as certain

theological mysteries, such as the use of the rosary, had been revealed

to the saints by Christ or the Virgin. The Pagan gods were devils, and

to hold communication with devils was mortal sin and sure damnation. But

lots of people communicated with devils for much more paltry motives, for

greed of gold or love of woman, and were yet saved by the intercession

of some heavenly patron, or found it worth while not to be saved at all.

Domenico, like them, put the question of salvation behind him. He might

think of that afterwards, when he had possessed himself of the proportion

of the ancients. At all events, at present he was willing to risk

everything in order to attain that. He was determined to see that god of

the heathens, not as he had seen him once in the house of Messer Neri

Altoviti, cut out of marble, but alive, moving, speaking; for _that_ was

the god.

The god was a devil. Now it is well known that there is a way of

compelling every devil to show himself, providing you use sufficiently

strong spells. They had sacrificed goats and lambs enough, also doves,

and had burned perfumes, and spilt wine sufficient for one of Cardinal

Riario's suppers. It was evidently not that sort of sacrifice which

would rejoice the god or compel him to show himself. For weeks and weeks

Domenico ruminated over the subject. And little by little the logical,

inevitable answer dawned upon his horrified but determined mind. For

what was the sacrifice which witches and warlocks notoriously offered

their Master?

The place could not be better chosen. This church was full, every one

knew, of demons, who were certainly none other than the gods of the

heathen, as Tertullian, Lactantius, Athenagoras, Justin Martyr, and all

those other holy doctors had written. It was deserted, its keys in the

hands of Cardinal Capranica's confidential architect and decorator; and

there were masses being said every holiday to scare the evil spirits.

The sacrament was frequently left on the altar.

All this Domenico expounded frequently to Filarete. But Filarete's

classic taste did not approve of Domenico's methods, which savoured of

vulgar witchcraft; perhaps also the learned man, who did not want the

secret of antique proportion, recoiled from a degree of profanity and of

danger, both to body and soul, which his companion willingly incurred in

such a quest as his. So Filarete demurred for a time, until at length

his feebler nature took fire at Domenico's determination, and the guilty

pair fixed upon the day and place for this unspeakable sacrilege.

The Church of SS. Jervase and Protasius has undergone no change since

the feast of Corpus Christi of the year 1488. The damp that lies in the

atrium outside, making the grass and poppies sprout round the Byzantine

pillar which carries a cross over a pine-cone, has invaded the flat-roofed

nave and the wide aisles, separated from it by a single colonnade. A

greenish mildew marks the fissures in the walls, rent here and there

by landslips and earthquakes. The cipolline columns carrying the round

arches on their square capitals are lustreless, and their green-veined

marble looks like long-buried wood. The mosaic pavement stretches its

discs and volutes of porphyry and serpentine or yellowed Parian marble,

a tarnished and uneven carpet, to the greenish-white marble steps of

the chancel. The mosaics have long fallen out of the circle of the apse;

and the frescoes, painted by some obscure follower of Giotto, have left

only a green vague stain over the arches of the aisle. Pictures or

statues there are none, and no conspicuous sepulchre. Only, over the low

entrance, a colossal wooden crucifix of the thirteenth century hangs at

an angle from the wall, a painted Christ, stretching his writhing livid

limbs in agony opposite the high altar. It was in this stately and

desolate church, under the misty light that pours in through the wide

windows of grey coarse glass, and on the marble altar, facing that

effigy of the dying Saviour, that, in derision as it were of the miracle

which the church commemorates on that feast-day, Domenico and Filarete

were about to offer up to the demons Apollo, Bacchus, and Jove the

freshly consecrated wafer, the very body and blood of Christ.

But an accomplice of theirs, a certain monk well versed in magic, whom

they employed in sundry details of devil-raising, on the score that they

were seeking treasure hidden in the church, had suddenly been seized

with qualms of conscience. Instead of appearing at the appointed time

alone, and bearing certain necessaries of his art, he kept them waiting

a full hour, until they began their proceedings without his assistance.

And even as Domenico was reaching his companion the ostensorium, which

had remained on the altar after the morning's mass, the church was

surrounded by the officers of the Podesta, on horseback, and by a crowd

of monks and priests, and rabble who had followed them. Of these persons,

not a few affirmed in after years, that, as they arrived at the church

door, they had heard sounds of flutes and timbrels, and mocking songs

filling the place; and that the devil, dressed in skins and garlands

like a wild man of the woods, had cleft the roof with his head, and

disappeared with many blasphemous yells as they entered.

VII

In those last years of the fifteenth century, Rome was a city of the

Middle Ages. The cupola of the Pantheon, the circular hulk of the

Colosseum, and the twin columns of Trajan and Antoninus projected, like

the fantastic antiquities of some fresco of Benozzo Gozzoli, above

domeless church roofs, battlemented palace walls, and innumerable

Gothic belfries and feudal towers. In the theatre of Marcellus rose the

fortress of the Orsinis; against the tower whence Nero, as the legend

ran, had watched the city burning, were clustered the fortifications of

the Colonnas; and in every quarter the stern palaces of their respective

partisans frowned with their rough-hewn fronts, their holes for barricade

beams, and hooks for chains. The bridge of St. Angelo was covered with

the shops of armourers, as the old bridge of more peaceful Florence with

those of silversmiths. Walls and towers encircled the Leonine City where

the Pope sat unquietly in the big battlemented donjon by the Sixtine

Chapel; and in its midst was still old St. Peter's, half Lombard, half

Byzantine. In Rome there was no industry, no order, no safety. Through

its gates rushed raids of Colonnas and Orsinis, sold to or betrayed by

the Popes, from their castles of Umbria or the Campagna to their castles

in town; and their feuds meant battles also between the citizens who

obeyed or thwarted them. Houses were sacked and burnt, and occasionally

razed to the ground, for the ploughshare and the salt-sower to go over

their site. A few years later, when Pope Borgia dredged the Tiber for

the body of his son, the boatmen of Ripetta reported that so many

bodies were thrown over every night that they no longer heeded such

occurrences. And when, two centuries later, the Corsinis dug the

foundations of their house on the Longara, there were discovered

quantities of human bones in what had been the palace of Pope della

Rovere's nephew. Meanwhile Ghirlandaio and Perugino were painting the

walls of the Sixtine; Pinturicchio was designing the blue and gold

allegorical ceilings of the library; Bramante building the Chancellor's

palace, and the Pollaiolas and Mino da Fiesole carving the tombs in St.

Peter's, while learned men translated Plato and imitated Horace.

Of this Rome there remains nowadays nothing, or next to nothing.

Sometimes, indeed, looking up the green lichened sides of some mediaeval

tower, with its hooks for chains, and its holes for beams, a vague vision

thereof rises in our mind. And in the presence of certain groups by

Signorelli, representing murderous scuffles or supernatural destruction,

we feel as if we had come in contact with the other reality of those

times, the thing which serene art and literature and the love of antiquity

have driven into the background. But the complete vision of the time and

place, the certain knowledge of that Rome of Sixtus IV. and Innocent

VIII., we can now no longer grasp, a dreadful phantom passing too

rapidly across the centuries.

It is with this feeling of impotence in my attempt to follow the

thoughts of an illiterate artist of the Renaissance, that I prefer

to conclude this strange story of the quest after antique beauty and

antique gods by quoting a page from one of the barbarous chroniclers

of mediaeval Rome. The entry in the continuation of Infessura's diary

is headed "Pictor Sacrilegus":--

"On the 20th July of the year of salvation fourteen hundred and

eighty-eight, there were placed for three days in a cage on high in

the Campo dei Fiori, Messer Niccolo Filarete, Canon of Sancto Joanne;

also Domenico, the Volterran, painter and architect to the magnificent

Cardinal Ascanio, and Frate Garofalo of Valmontone, they having been

discovered in the act of desecrating the Church of SS. Jervase and

Protasius, and stealing for magic purposes the ostensorium and many gold

chalices and reliquaries with precious stones; and it was Frate Garofalo

who, being versed in witchcraft and treasure finding, was the accomplice

of the above, and denounced them on the feast of Corpus Domini. And the

twenty-third of the said month of July they were justiced, and in this

manner. _Videlicet_, Filarete and Domenico, having been removed from the

cage, were dragged on hurdles as far as the square of San Joanni, and

Frate Garofalo went on an ass, all of them crowned with paper mitres.

Frate Garofalo was hanged to the elm-tree of the square. Of Filarete and

Domenico, the right hand was chopped off, after which they were burned

in the said square. And their chopped off right hands were taken to the

Capitol and nailed up above the gate, alongside of the She-wolf of

metal. Laus Deo."

VALEDICTORY

I

While gathering together the foregoing pages, written at different

periods and in different phases of thought, the knowledge has grown on

me that I was saying farewell to some of the ambitions and to most of

the plans of my youth.

All writers start with the hope of solving a problem or establishing a

formula, however fragmentary or humble; and many, the most fortunate,

and probably the most useful, continue to work out their program, or at

least to think that they do so. Life to them is but the framework for

work; and that is why they manage to leave a fair amount of work behind

them,--work for other workers to employ or to undo. But with some

persons, life somehow gets the better of work, becomes, whether in the

form of circumstance or of new problems, infinitely the stronger; and

scatters work, tossing about such fragments as itself, in its irregular,

irresistible fashion, has torn into insignificance, or (once in a blue

moon!) shaped into more complete meaning.

As regards my own case, I began by believing I should be an historian

and a philosopher, as most young people have done before me; then,

coming in contact with the concrete miseries of others, called social

and similar problems, I sought to apply some of my historical or

philosophic lore (such as it was) to their removal; and finally, life

having manifested itself as offering problems (unexpected occurrence!)

not merely concerning the Past, nor even the abstract Present, but

respecting my own comfort and discomfort, I have found myself at last

wondering in what manner thoughts and impressions could make the world,

the Past and Present, the near and the remote, more satisfying and

useful to myself. Circumstances of various kinds, and particularly

ill-health, have thus put me, although a writer, into the position of a

reader; and have made me ask myself, as I collected these fragments of

my former studies, what can the study of history, particularly of the

history of art and of other manifestations of past conditions of soul,

do for us in the present?

All knowledge is bound to be useful. Apart from this truism, I believe

that all study of past conditions and activities will eventually result,

if not in the better management of present conditions and activities (as

all partisan historians have hoped, from Machiavelli to Macaulay), at

all events in a greater familiarity with the various kinds of character

expressed in historical events and in the way of looking at them; for

even if we cannot learn to guide and employ such multifold forces as

make, for instance, a French revolution, we may learn to use for the

best the individual minds and temperaments of those who describe them:

a Carlyle, a Michelet, a Taine, are natural forces also, which may serve

or may damage us.

Moreover, I hold by the belief, expressed years ago, in my previous

volume of Renaissance studies, to wit, that historical reading (and in

historical I include the history of thoughts and feelings as much as of

events and persons) is a useful exercise for our sympathies, bringing us

wider and more wholesome notions of justice and charity. And I feel sure

that other uses for historical studies could be pointed out by other

persons, apart from the satisfaction they afford to those who pursue

them, which, considered merely as so much spiritual gymnastics, or

cricket, or football, or alpineering, is surely not to be despised.

But now, having dropped long since out of the ranks of those who study

in order to benefit others, or even to benefit only themselves, I would

say a few words about the advantage which mere readers, as distinguished

from writers, may get from familiarity with the Past.

This advantage is that they may find in the Past not merely a fine field

for solitary and useless delusions (though that also seems necessary),

but an additional world for real companionship and congenial activity.

Our individual activities and needs of this kind are innumerable, and of

infinite delicate variety; and there is reason to suppose that the place

in which our lot is cast does not necessarily fit them to perfection. For

things in this world are very roughly averaged; and although averaging

is a useful, rapid way of despatching business, it does undoubtedly

waste a great deal which is too good for wasting. Hence, it seems to me,

the need which many of us feel, which most of us would feel, if secured

of food and shelter, of spending a portion of their life of the spirit

in places and climates beyond that River Oceanus which bounds the land

of the living.

As I write these words, I am conscious that this will strike many

readers as the expression of a superfine and selfish dilettantism,

arising no doubt from morbid lack of sympathy with the world into which

Heaven has put us. What! become absentees from the poor, much troubled

Present; turn your backs to Realities, become idle strollers in the

Past? And why not, dear friends? why not recognise the need for a holiday?

why not admit, just because work has to be done and loads to be borne,

that we cannot grind and pant on without interruption? Nay, that the

bearing of the load, the grinding of the work, is useless save to diminish

the total grinding and panting on this earth. Moreover, I maintain

that we have but a narrow conception of life if we confine it to the

functions which are obviously practical, and a narrow conception of

reality if we exclude from it the Past. And not because the Past has

been, has actually existed outside some one, but because it may, and

often does, actually exist within ourselves. The things in our mind,

due to the mind's constitution and its relation with the universe, are,

after all, realities; and realities to count with, as much as the tables

and chairs, and hats and coats, and other things subject to gravitation

outside it. It would seem, indeed, as if the chief outcome of the

spiritualising philosophy which maintains the immaterial and independent

quality of mind had been to make mind, the contents of our consciousness,

ideas, images, and feelings, into something quite separate from this

real material universe, and hence unworthy of practical consideration.

But granted that mind is not a sort of independent and foreign entity,

we must admit that what exists in it has a place in reality, and

requires, like the rest of reality, to be dealt with. But to return to

my thesis: that we require occasionally to live in the Past (and I shall

go on to state that it may be a Past of our own making); Do we not

require to travel in foreign parts which know us not, to sojourn for

our welfare in cities where we can neither elect members nor exercise

professions, but whence we bring back, not merely wider views, but

sounder nerves, tempers more serene and elastic? Nor is this all. We

think poorly of a man or woman who, besides practical cases for self

or others, does not require to come in contact also with the tangible,

breathable, visible, audible universe for its own sake; require to

wander in fields and on moors, to steep in sunshine or be battered by

winds, for the sake of a certain specific emotion of participation

in, of closer union with, the universal. Now the Past--the joys and

sufferings of the men long dead, their efforts, ideals, emotions,

nay, their very sensations and temperaments as registered in words

or expressed in art, are but another side of the universe, of that

universal life, to participate ever deeper in which is the condition of

our strength and serenity, the imperious necessity of our ever giving,

ever taking soul.

And so, for our greater nobility and happiness, we require, all of us,

to live to some extent in the Past, as to live to some extent in what

we significantly call _nature_. We require, as we require mountain air

or sea scents, hayfields or wintry fallows, sun, storm, or rain, each

individual according to individual subtle affinities, certain emotions,

ideals, persons, or works of art from out of the Past. For one it will

be Socrates; for another St. Francis; for every one something somewhat

different, or at all events something differently conceived and

differently felt: some portion of the universe in time, as of the

universe in space, which answers in closest and most intimate way to

the complexion and habits of that individual soul.

II

The satisfaction which it can bring to every individual soul: this is,

therefore, one of the uses of the Past to the Present, and surely not

one of the smallest. It is, I venture to insist, the special, the

essential use of all art and all poetry; any additional knowledge

of Nature's proceedings, any additional discipline of thought and

observation which may accrue in the study of art as an historic or

psychological phenomenon being, after all, valuable eventually for

the amount of such mere satisfaction of the spirit as that additional

knowledge or additional discipline can conduce towards. Scientific

results are important for the maintenance of life, doubtless; but the

sense of satisfaction, whether simple or complex, high or low, is

the sign that the processes we call life are being fulfilled and not

thwarted; so, since satisfaction is no such contemptible thing, why not

allow art to furnish it unmixed?

I am sure to be misunderstood. I do not in the least mean to imply that

art can best be appreciated with the least trouble. The mere fact that

the pleasure of a faculty is proportioned to its activity negatives that;

and the fact that the richness, fulness, and hence also the durability,

of all artistic pleasure answers to the amount of our attention: the

mine, the ore, will yield, other things equal, according as we dig, and

wash, and smelt, and separate to the last possibility of separation what

we want from what we do not want.

The historic or psychological study of art does thus undoubtedly increase

our familiarity, and hence our enjoyment. The mere scientific inquiry

into the difference between originals and copies, into the connection

between master and pupil, makes us alive to the special qualities which

can delight us. As long as we looked in a manner so slovenly that a

spurious Botticelli could pass for a genuine one, we could evidently

never benefit by the special quality, the additional excellence of

Botticelli's own work. And similarly in the case of archaeology. Indeed,

in the few cases where I have myself hazarded an hypothesis on some

point of artistic history, as, for instance, regarding the respective

origin of antique and mediaeval sculpture, I am inclined to think that

the chief use (if any at all) of my work, will be to make my readers

more sensitive to the specific pleasure they may get from Praxiteles or

from Mino da Fiesole, than they could have been when the works of both

were so little understood as to be judged by one another's standards.

But to return. It seems as if at present the development, the contagion,

so to speak, of scientific methods applied to art were making people

forget a little that art, besides being, like everything else, the

passive object of scientific treatment, is (what most other things

are not) an active, positive, special factor of pleasure; and that,

therefore, save to special students, the greater, more efficacious form

of art should occupy an immensely larger share of attention than the

lesser and more inefficient. We are made, nowadays, to look at too much

mediocre art on the score of its historical value; we are kept too long

in contemplation of pictures and statues which cannot give much pleasure,

on the score that they led to or proceeded from other pictures or statues

which can.

As regards Greek sculpture, the insistance on archaic forms is becoming,

if I may express my own feelings, a perfect bore. Why should we be kept

in the kitchen tasting half-cooked stuff out of ladles, when most of

us have barely time to eat our fully cooked dinner, which we like

and thrive on, in peace? Similarly with such painters as are mainly

precursors. They are taking up too much of our attention; and one might

sometimes be tempted to think that the only use of great artists, like

the only functions of those patriarchs who kept begetting one another,

was to produce other great artists: Giotto to produce eventually Masaccio,

Masaccio through various generations Michelangelo and Raphael, and

Michelangelo and Raphael, through even more, Manet and Degas, who in

their turn doubtless dutifully.... Meanwhile why should art have gone

on evolving, artists gone on making _filiations of schools_, if art, if

artists, if schools of artists had not answered an imperious, undying

wish for the special pleasures which painting can give?

Therefore it seems to me that, desirable for all reasons as may be the

study of art, the knowledge of _filiations and influences_, it is still

more desirable that each of us should find out some painter whom he

can care for individually; and that all of us should find out certain

painters who can, almost infallibly, give immense pleasure to all of

us; painters who, had they been produced out of nothingness and been

followed by nobody, would yet stand in the most important relation in

which an artist can be: the relation of being beloved by the whole

world, or even by a few solitary individuals.

For this reason let not the mere reader, who comes to art not for work,

but for refreshment, let not the mere reader (I call him reader, to

note his passive, leisurely character) be vexed with too much study of

Florentine and Paduan _precursors_, but go straight to the masters, whom

those useful and dreary persons rendered possible by their grinding.

Our ancestors, or rather those cardinals and superb lords with whom we

have neither spiritual nor temporal relationship, who made the great

collections of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, placing statues

under delicate colonnades and green ilex hedges, and hanging pictures in

oak-panelled corridors and tapestried guard-rooms, were occasionally

mistaken in thinking that a Roman emperor much restored, or a chalky,

sprawling Guido Reni, could afford lasting aesthetic pleasure; but,

bating such errors, were they not nearer good sense than we moderns, who

arrange pictures and statues as we might minerals or herbs in a museum,

and who, for instance, insist that poor tired people, longing for a

little beauty, should carefully examine the works of Castagno, of

Rosselli, and of that artist, so interesting as a specimen of the

minimum of talent, Neri di Bicci? They were unscientific, those lords

and cardinals, and desperately pleasure-seeking; but surely, surely

they were more sensible than we.

Connected with this fact, and to be borne in mind by those not called

upon to elucidate art scientifically, is the further fact, which I have

analogically pointed out, when I said that every individual has in the

Past affinities, possibilities of spiritual satisfaction differing

somewhat from those of every other. It is well that we should try to

enlarge those possibilities; and we must never make up our mind that a

picture, statue, piece of music or poetry, says little to us until we

have listened to its say. But although we strive to make new friends,

let us waste no further time on such persons as we have vainly tried to

make friends of; and let each of us, in heaven's name, cherish to the

utmost his natural affinities. There are persons to whom, for instance,

Botticelli can never be what he truly is to some of their neighbours:

the very quality which gives such marvellous poignancy of pleasure to

certain temperaments causing almost discomfort to others; and similarly

about many other artists, representing very special conditions of being,

and appealing to special conditions in consequence. High Alpine air,

sea-water, Roman melting westerly winds, so vitalising, so soothing to

some folk, are mere worry, or fever, or lassitude to others, without its

being correct to say that one set of persons is healthy and the other

morbid: each being, in truth, healthy or morbid just in proportion as it

realises its necessities of existence, fitting equally into the universe

providing it be fitted each into the proper piece thereof.

On the other hand (and this, rather than _filiations of schools_ and

_influences_ of artistic _milieus_, it were well we should know), it

becomes daily more empirically certain, and will some day doubtless

become scientifically obvious, that there are works of art which

awaken such emotion that they can be delectable only to creatures with

instincts out of gear and perception upside down; while there are others,

infinitely more plentiful, which, in greater or lesser degree, must

delight all persons who are sane, as all such are delighted by fine

weather, normal exercise, and kindly sympathy; and, _vice versa_, that

as these wholesome works of art merely bore or actually distress the

poor morbid exceptions, so the unwholesome ones sicken or harrow the

sound generality; the world of art, moreover, like every other world,

being best employed in keeping alive its sound, not its unsound,

clients.

Such works of art, such artists of widest wholesome appealingness, there

are in all periods of artistic development; more in certain fortunate

moments, say the Periklean age and the early sixteenth century, than

in others; and most perhaps in certain specially favoured regions--in

Attica during Antiquity, and during painting times, in the happy Venetian

country. These we all know of; but by the grace of Nature, which creates

men occasionally so fortunately balanced that their work, learned or

unlearned, must needs be fortunately balanced also, they arise sometimes

in the midst of mere artistic worry and vexation of spirit, or of artist

bleakness, perfect like the almond and peach trees, which blossom, white

and pink, on the frost-bitten green among the sapless vines of wintry

Tuscan hills; and to some natures, doubtless, these are more pleasant

and health-giving than more mature or mellow summer or autumnal

loveliness. But, as I have said, each must find his own closest

affinities in art and history as in friendship.

III

There are some more things, and more important, still to be said, from

the reader's standpoint rather than the writer's, about the influence on

our lives of the Past and of its art, and more particularly of the vague

period called the Renaissance.

When the Renaissance began to attract attention, some twenty or

twenty-five years ago, there happened among English historians and

writers on art, and among their readers, something very similar to what

had happened, apparently, when the Englishmen of the sixteenth century

first came in contact with the Italian Renaissance itself, or whatever

remained of it. Their conscience was sickened, their imagination

hag-ridden, by the discovery of so much beauty united to so much

corruption; and, among our latter-day students of the Renaissance, there

became manifest the same morbid pre-occupation, the same exaggerated

repulsion, which is but inverted attraction, which were rife among

the playwrights who wrote of _Avengers_ and _Atheists_, Giovannis and

Annabellas, Brachianos and Corombonas, and other _White Devils_, as old

Webster picturesquely put it, _of Italy_. Indeed, the second discovery

of the Renaissance by Englishmen had spiritual consequences so similar

to those of the first, that in an essay written fifteen years ago I

analysed the feelings of the Elizabethan playwrights towards Italian

things in order to vent the intense discomfort of spirit which I shared

assuredly with students older and more competent than myself.

This kind of feeling has passed away among writers, together with much

of the fascination of the Renaissance itself. But it has left, I see,

vague traces in the mind of readers, rendering the Renaissance a little

distasteful (and no wonder) to the majority; or worse, a little too

congenial to an unsound minority; worst of all, tarnishing a little the

fair fame of Art; and as a writer now turned reader, I am anxious to

deliver, to the best of my powers, other readers from this perhaps

inevitable but false and unprofitable view of such matters.

The conscience of writers on history and art has long become quite

comfortable about the Renaissance; and the Websterian or (in some cases

John Fordian) phenomenon of twenty years ago been forgotten as a piece

of childish morbidness. Does this mean that the conscience has become

hardened, that evil has ceased to repel us, or that beauty has been

accepted calmly as a pleasant and necessary, but somewhat immoral thing?

Very far from it. Our conscience has become quieter, not because it has

grown more callous, but because it has become more healthily sensitive,

more perceptive of many sides, instead of only one side of life. For

with experience and maturity there surely comes, to every one of us

in his own walk of life, a growing, at length an intuitive sense that

evil is a thing incidentally to fight, but not to think very much

about, because if it is evil, it is in so far sporadic, deciduous, and

eminently barren; while good, that is to say, soundness, harmony of

feeling, thought, and action with themselves, with others' feeling,

thought, and action, and with the great eternities, is organic, fruitful

and useful, as well as delightful to contemplate. Hence that the evil

of past ages should not concern us, save in so far as the understanding

thereof may teach us to diminish the evil of the Present. In any case,

that evil must be handled not with terror, which enervates and subjects

to contagion, but with the busy serenity of the physician, who studies

disease for the sake of health, and eats his wholesome food after

washing his hands, confident in the ultimate wholesomeness of nature.

And in such frame of mind the corruption of the Renaissance leaves us

calm, and we know we had better turn our backs on it, and get from the

Renaissance only what was good. Only, if we are physicians, or more

correctly (since in a private capacity we all are) only _when_ we are

physicians, must we handle the unwholesome. Meanwhile, if we wish to be

sound, let us fill our soul with images and emotions of good; we shall

tackle evil, when need be, only the better. And here, by the way, let

me open a parenthesis to say that, of the good we moderns may get from

occasional journeys into the Past, there is a fine example in our

imaginary and emotional commerce with St. Francis and his joyous

theology. For while other times, our own among them, have given us

loftier morality and severer good sense, no period save that of St.

Francis could have given us a blitheness of soul so vivifying and so

cleansing. For the essence of his teaching, or rather the essence of

his personality, was the trust that serenity and joyfulness must be

incompatible with evil; that simple, spontaneous happiness is, even like

the air and the sunshine in which his beloved brethren the birds flew

about and sang, the most infallible antidote to evil, and the most

sovereign disinfectant. And because we require such doctrine, such

personal conviction, for the better living of our lives, we must, even

as to better climates, journey forth occasionally into that distant Past

of mediaeval Italy; and as to the Ezzelinos, Borgias, and Riarios, and

the foul-mouthed humanists, good heavens! why should we sicken ourselves

with the thought of this long dead and done for abomination?

So much for the history of the Renaissance and the good it can be to

us. Now as to the art. That more organic mode of feeling and thinking

which results in active maturity, from the ever-increasing connections

between our individual soul and the surrounding world; that same

intuition which told us that historic evil was no subject for

contemplation, does also admonish us never to be suspicious of true

beauty, of thoroughly delightful art. Nay, beauty and art in any case;

for though beauty may be adulterated, and art enslaved to something not

itself, be sure that the element of beauty, the activity of art, so far

as they are themselves specific, are far above suspicion even in the

most suspicious company. For even if beauty is united to perverse

fashions, and art (as with Baudelaire and the decadents) employed to

adorn the sentiments of maniacs and gaol-birds, the beauty and the art

remain sound; and if we must needs put them behind us, on account of too

inextricable a fusion, we should remember it is as we sometimes throw

away noble ore, for lack of skill to separate it from a base alloy. As

regards the nightmare anomaly of perfect art arisen in times of moral

corruption, those unconscious analogies I have spoken of, and which

perhaps are our most cogent reasons, have taught us that such anomalies

are but nightmares and horrid delusions. For, taking the phenomenon

historically, we shall see that although art has arisen in periods of

stress and change, and therefore of moral anarchy, it has never arisen

among the immoral classes nor to serve any immoral use: the apparent

anomaly in the Renaissance, for instance, was not an anomaly, but a

coincidence of contrary movements: a materially prosperous, intellectually

innovating epoch, producing on the one hand moral anarchy, on the

other artistic perfection, connected not as cause and effect, but as

coincidence, the one being the drawback, the other the advantage, of

that particular phase of being. The Malatestas and Borgias, of whom we

have heard too much, did not employ Alberti and Pier della Francesca,

Pinturicchio and Bramante, to satisfy their convict wickedness, but to

satisfy their artistic taste, which, in so far, was perfectly sound, as

various others among their faculties, their eye and ear, and sense of

cause and effect, were apparently sound also. And the architecture of

Alberti, the decorations of Pinturicchio, remain as spotless of all

contact with their evil instincts as the hills they may have looked at,

the sea they may have listened to, the eternal verity that two and two

make four, which had doubtless passed through their otherwise badly

inhabited minds. And, moreover, the sea is still sonorous, the mountains

are still hyacinth blue, and the buildings and frescoes still noble,

while the rest of those disagreeable mortals' cravings and strivings are

gone, and on the whole were best forgotten.

But there is another side of this same question, and of it we are

admonished, as it seems to me, still louder by our growing intellectual

instincts--those instincts, let us remember, which do but represent

whatever has been congruous and uniform in repeated experience. Art is

a much greater and more cosmic thing than the mere expression of man's

thoughts or opinions on any one subject, of man's attitude towards his

neighbour or towards his country, much as all this concerns us. Art is

the expression of man's life, of his mode of being, of his relations

with the universe, since it is, in fact, man's inarticulate answer to

the universe's unspoken message. Hence it represents not the details of

his existence, which, more's the pity, are rarely what they should be,

whether in thought or action, but the bulk of his existence, _when that

bulk is unusually sound_. This clause contains the whole philosophy of

art. For art is the outcome of a surplus of human energy, the expression

of a state of vital harmony, striving for and partly realising a yet

greater energy, a more complete harmony in one sphere or another of man's

relations with the universe. Now if evil is a non-vital, deciduous, and

sterile phenomenon _par excellence_, art must be necessarily opposed to

it, and opposed in proportion to art's vigour. While, on the other hand,

the seeking, the realisation of greater harmony, whether harmony visible,

audible, thinkable, and livable, is as necessarily opposed to anomaly

and perversity as the great healthinesses of air and sunshine are

opposed to bodily disease. Hence, in whatever company we find art,

even as in whatever company we find bodily health and vigour, let us

understand that _in so far as truly art_, it is good and a source of

good. Let us never waver in our faith in art, for in so doing we should

be losing (what, alas! Puritan contemners of art, and decadent defilers

thereof, are equally doing) much of our faith in nature and much of our

faith in man. For art is the expression of the harmonies of nature,

conceived and incubated by the harmonious instincts of man.

I have given the influence of St. Francis as an example of what added

strength our modern soul may get by a sojourn in the Past. What our soul

may get of similar but more sober joy may be shown by another example

from that wonderful Umbrian district, one of the earth's oases of

spiritual rest and refreshment. Among all the sane and satisfying art

of the Renaissance, Umbria, on the whole, has surely grown for us the

highest and the holiest. I am not speaking of the fact that Perugino

painted saints in devout contemplation, nor of their type of face and

expression. Whatever his people might be doing, or if they were not

people at all, but variations only of his little slender trees or distant

domes and steeples, his art would have been equally high and holy. And

this because of its effect, direct, unreasoning, on our spirit, making

us, while we look, live with a deeper, more devoutly joyful life. What

the man Perugino was, in his finite dealings with his clients and

neighbours, has mattered nothing in the painting of these pictures and

frescoes; still less what samples of conduct he was shown by the

ephemeral magnificos who bought his works.

The tenderness and strength of the mediaeval Italian temper (as shown in

Dante when he is human, but above all in Francis of Assisi) has been

working through generations toward these paintings, interpreting in its

spirit, selecting and emphasising for its meaning the country in all the

world most naturally fit to express it; and thus in these paintings we

have the incomparable visible manifestation of a perfect mood: that wide

pale shimmering valley, circular like a temple, and domed by the circular

vault of sky, really turned, for our feelings, into a spiritual church,

wherein not merely saints meditate and Madonnas kneel, but ourselves in

deepest devout happiness.

IV

Thoughts such as these bring with them the memory of the master we have

recently lost, of the master who, in the midst of aesthetical anarchy,

taught us once more, and with subtle and solemn efficacy, the old

Platonic and Goethian doctrine of the affinity between artistic beauty

and human worthiness.

The spiritual evolution of the late Walter Pater--with whose name I

am proud to conclude my second, as with it I began my first book on

Renaissance matters--had been significantly similar to that of his own

Marius. He began as an aesthete, and ended as a moralist. By faithful and

self-restraining cultivation of the sense of harmony, he appears to have

risen from the perception of visible beauty to the knowledge of beauty

of the spiritual kind, both being expressions of the same perfect

fittingness to an ever more intense and various and congruous life.

Such an evolution, which is, in the highest meaning, an aesthetic

phenomenon in itself, required a wonderful spiritual endowment and an

unflinchingly discriminating habit. For Walter Pater started by being

above all a writer, and an aesthete in the very narrow sense of twenty

years ago: an aesthete of the school of Mr. Swinburne's _Essays_, and of

the type still common on the Continent. The cultivation of sensations,

vivid sensations, no matter whether healthful or unhealthful, which that

school commended, was, after all, but a theoretic and probably unconscious

disguise for the cultivation of something to be said in a new way, which

is the danger of all persons who regard literature as an end, and not

as a means, feeling in order that they may write, instead of writing

because they feel. And of this Mr. Pater's first and famous book was a

very clear proof. Exquisite in technical quality, in rare perception and

subtle suggestion, it left, like all similar books, a sense of caducity

and barrenness, due to the intuition of all sane persons that only an

active synthesis of preferences and repulsions, what we imply in the

terms _character_ and _moral_, can have real importance in life, affinity

with life--be, in short, vital; and that the yielding to, nay, the

seeking for, variety and poignancy of experience, must result in a

crumbling away of all such possible unity and efficiency of living.

But even as we find in the earliest works of a painter, despite the

predominance of his master's style, indications already of what will

expand into a totally different personality, so even in this earliest

book, examined retrospectively, it is easy to find the characteristic

germs of what will develop, extrude all foreign admixture, knit together

congruous qualities, and give us presently the highly personal synthesis

of _Marius_ and the _Studies on Plato_.

These characteristic germs may be defined, I think, as the recurrence of

impressions and images connected with physical sanity and daintiness;

of aspiration after orderliness, congruity, and one might almost say

_hierarchy_; moreover, a certain exclusiveness, which is not the contempt

of the craftsman for the _bourgeois_, but the aversion of the priest for

the profane uninitiated. Some day, perhaps, a more scientific study of

aesthetic phenomena will explain the connection which we all feel between

physical sanity and purity and the moral qualities called by the same

names; but even nowadays it might have been prophesied that the man who

harped upon the clearness and livingness of water, upon the delicate

bracingness of air, who experienced so passionate a preference for the

whole gamut, the whole palette, of spring, of temperate climates and of

youth and childhood; a person who felt existence in the terms of its

delicate vigour and its restorative austerity, was bound to become,

like Plato, a teacher of self-discipline and self-harmony. Indeed, who

can tell whether the teachings of Mr. Pater's maturity--the insistance

on scrupulously disciplined activity, on cleanness and clearness of

thought and feeling, on the harmony attainable only through moderation,

the intensity attainable only through effort--who can tell whether this

abstract part of his doctrine would affect, as it does, all kindred

spirits if the mood had not been prepared by some of those descriptions

of visible scenes--the spring morning above the Catacombs, the Valley of

Sparta, the paternal house of Marius, and that temple of AEsculapius with

its shining rhythmical waters--which attune our whole being, like the

music of the Lady in _Comus_, to modes of _sober certainty of waking

bliss_?

This inborn affinity for refined wholesomeness made Mr. Pater the natural

exponent of the highest aesthetic doctrine--the search for harmony

throughout all orders of existence. It gave the nucleus of what was

his soul's synthesis, his system (as Emerson puts it) of rejection and

acceptance. Supreme craftsman as he was, it protected him from the

craftsman's delusion--rife under the inappropriate name of "art for

art's sake" in these uninstinctive, over-dextrous days--that subtle

treatment can dignify all subjects equally, and that expression,

irrespective of the foregoing _impression_ in the artist and the

subsequent _impression_ in the audience, is the aim of art. Standing as

he did, as all the greatest artists and thinkers (and he was both) do,

in a definite, inevitable relation to the universe--the equation between

himself and it--he was utterly unable to turn his powers of perception

and expression to idle and irresponsible exercises; and his conception

of art, being the outcome of his whole personal mode of existence, was

inevitably one of art, not for art's sake, but of art for the sake of

life--art as one of the harmonious functions of existence.

Harmonious, and in a sense harmonising. For, as I have said, he rose

from the conception of physical health and congruity to the conception

of health and congruity in matters of the spirit; the very thirst for

healthiness, which means congruity, and congruity which implies health,

forming the vital and ever-expanding connection between the two orders

of phenomena. Two orders, did I say? Surely to the intuition of this

artist and thinker, the fundamental unity--the unity between man's

relations with external nature, with his own thoughts and with others'

feelings--stood revealed as the secret of the highest aesthetics.

This which we guess at as the completion of Walter Pater's message,

alas! must remain for ever a matter of surmise. The completion,

the rounding of his doctrine, can take place only in the grateful

appreciation of his readers. We have been left with unfinished systems,

fragmentary, sometimes enigmatic, utterances. Let us meditate their

wisdom and vibrate with their beauty; and, in the words of the prayer of

Socrates to the Nymphs and to Pan, ask for beauty in the inward soul,

and congruity between the inner and the outer man; and reflect in such

manner the gifts of great art and of great thought in our soul's depths.

For art and thought arise from life; and to life, as principle of

harmony, they must return.

Many years ago, in the fulness of youth and ambition, I was allowed, by

him whom I already reverenced as a master, to write the name of Walter

Pater on the flyleaf of a book which embodied my beliefs and hopes as a

writer. And now, seeing books from the point of view of the reader, I

can find no fitter ending to this present volume than to express what

all we readers have gained, and lost, alas! in this great master.

THE END

_Printed by_ BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.

_Edinburgh and London_

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

The following changes have been made to the text:

and will bare (...) new and will _bear_ (...) new

spiritual wonders spiritual wonders

per speculum et aenigmata per speculum _in aenigmate_

In was in this church that _It_ was in this church that