_Faustus is therefore a parable of the impotent yearnings of the
Middle Ages--its passionate aspiration, its conscience-stricken
desire, its fettered curiosity amid the tramping limits of
imperfect knowledge and irrational dogmatism. The indestructible
beauty of Greek art,--whereof Helen was an emblem, became, through
the discovery of classic poetry and sculpture, the possession of
the modern world. Mediaevalism took this Helen to wife, and their
offspring, the Euphorion of Goethe's drama, is the spirit of the
modern world._--J.A. Symonds, "Renaissance In Italy," vol. ii. p.
54.
Euphorion is the name given by Goethe to the marvellous child born of
the mystic marriage of Faust and Helena. Who Faust is, and who Helena,
we all know. Faust, of whom no man can remember the youth or childhood,
seems to have come into the world by some evil spell, already old and
with the faintness of body and of mind which are the heritage of age;
and every additional year of mysterious study and abortive effort has
made him more vacillating of step and uncertain of sight, but only more
hungry of soul. Postponed and repressed by reclusion from the world, and
desperate tension over insoluble problems; diverted into the channels of
mere thought and vision; there boils within him the energy, the passion,
of retarded youth: its appetites and curiosities, which, cramped by the
intolerant will, and foiled by many a sudden palsy of limb and mind,
torment him with mad visions of unreal worlds, mock him with dreams of
superhuman powers, from which he awakes in impotent and apathetic
anguish. But these often-withstood and often-baffled cravings are not
those merely of scholar or wizard, they are those of soldier and poet
and monk, of the mere man: lawless desires which he seeks to divert, but
fails, from the things of the flesh and of the world to the things of
the reason; supersensuous desires for the beautiful and intangible,
which he strives to crush, but in vain, with the cynical scepticism of
science, which derides the things it cannot grasp. In this strange
Faustus, made up of so many and conflicting instincts; in this old man
with ever-budding and ever-nipped feelings of youthfulness, muddling the
hard-won secrets of nature in search after impossibilities; in him so
all-sided, and yet so wilfully narrowed, so restlessly active, yet so
often palsied and apathetic; in this Faustus, who has laboured so much
and succeeded in so little, feeling himself at the end, when he has
summed up all his studies, as foolish as before--which of us has not
learned to recognize the impersonated Middle Ages? And Helena, we know
her also, she is the spirit of Antiquity. Personified, but we dare
scarcely say, embodied; for she is a ghost raised by the spells of
Faustus, a simulacrum of a thing long dead; yet with such continuing
semblance of life, nay, with all life's real powers, that she seems the
real, vital, living one, and Faustus yonder, thing as he is of the
present, little better than a spectre. Yet Helena has been ages before
Faust ever was; nay, by an awful mystery like those which involve the
birth of Pagan gods, she whom he has evoked to be the mother of his only
son has given, centuries before, somewhat of her life to make this
self-same Faust. A strange mystery of Fate's necromancy this, and with
strange anomalies. For opposite this living, decrepit Faust, Helena, the
long dead, is young; and she is all that which Faust is not. Knowing
much less than he, who has plunged his thoughts like his scalpel into
all the mysteries of life and death, she yet knows much more, can tell
him of the objects and aims of men and things; nay, with little more
than the unconscious faithfulness to instinct of the clean-limbed,
placid brute, she can give peace to his tormented conscience; and, while
he has suffered and struggled and lashed himself for every seeming
baseness of desire, and loathed himself for every imagined microscopic
soiling, she has walked through good and evil, letting the vileness of
sin trickle off her unhidden soul, so quietly and majestically that all
thought of evil vanishes; and the self-tormenting wretch, with macerated
flesh hidden beneath the heavy garments of mysticism and philosophy,
suddenly feels, in the presence of her unabashed nakedness, that he,
like herself, is chaste.
Such are the parents, Faustus and Helena; we know them; but who is this
son Euphorion? To me it seems as if there could be but one answer--the
Renaissance. Goethe indeed has told us (though, with his rejuvenation of
Faustus, unknown to the old German legend and to our Marlowe, in how
bungling a manner!) the tale of that mystic marriage; but Goethe could
not tell us rightly, even had he attempted, the real name of its
offspring. For even so short a time ago, the Middle Ages were only
beginning to be more than a mere historical expression, Antiquity was
being only then critically discovered; and the Renaissance, but vaguely
seen and quite unformulated by the first men, Gibbon and Roscoe, who
perceived it at all, was still virtually unknown. To Goethe, therefore,
it might easily have seemed as if the antique Helena had only just been
evoked, and as if of her union with the worn-out century of his birth, a
real Euphorion, the age in which ourselves are living, might have been
born. But, at the distance of additional time, and from the undreamed-of
height upon which recent historical science has enabled us to stand, we
can easily see that in this he would have been mistaken. Not only is our
modern culture no child of Faustus and Helena, but it is the complex
descendant, strangely featured by atavism from various sides, of many
and various civilizations; and the eighteenth century, so far from being
a Faustus evoking as his bride the long dead Helen of Antiquity, was in
itself a curiously varied grandchild or great-grandchild of such a
marriage, its every moral feature, its every intellectual movement
proclaiming how much of its being was inherited from Antiquity. No
allegory, I well know, and least of all no historical allegory, can ever
be strained to fit quite tight--the lives of individuals and those of
centuries, their modes of intermixture, genesis, and inheritance are far
different; but if an allegory is to possess any meaning at all, we must
surely apply it wherever it will fit most easily and completely; and the
beautiful allegory prepared by the tradition of the sixteenth century
for the elaborating genius of Goethe, can have a real meaning only if we
explain Faust as representing the Middle Ages, Helena as Antiquity, and
Euphorion as that child of the Middle Ages, taking life and reality from
them, but born of and curiously nurtured by the spirit of Antiquity, to
which significant accident has given the name of Renaissance.
After Euphorion I have therefore christened this book; and this not from
any irrational conceit of knowing more (when I am fully aware that I
know infinitely less) than other writers about the life and character of
this wonderful child of Helena and Faustus, but merely because it is
more particularly as the offspring of this miraculous marriage, and with
reference to the harmonies and anomalies which therefrom resulted, that
Euphorion has exercised my thoughts.
The Renaissance has interested and interests me, not merely for what it
is, but even more for what it sprang from, and for the manner in which
the many things inherited from both Middle Ages and Renaissance, the
tendencies and necessities inherent in every special civilization, acted
and reacted upon each other, united in concord or antagonism; forming,
like the gases of the chemist, new things, sometimes like and sometimes
unlike themselves and each other; producing now some unknown substance
of excellence and utility, at other times some baneful element, known
but too well elsewhere, but unexpected here. But not the watching of the
often tragic meeting of these great fatalities of inherited spirit and
habit only: for equally fascinating almost has been the watching of the
elaboration by this double-natured period of things of little weight,
mere trifles of artistic material bequeathed to it by one or by the
other of its spiritual parents. The charm for me--a charm sometimes
pleasurable, but sometimes also painful, like the imperious necessity
which we sometimes feel to see again and examine, seemingly uselessly,
some horrible evil--the charm, I mean the involuntary compulsion of
attention, has often been as great in following the vicissitudes of a
mere artistic item, like the Carolingian stories or the bucolic element,
as it has been in looking on at the dissolution of moral and social
elements. And in this, that I have tried to understand only where my
curiosity was awakened, tried to reconstruct only where my fancy was
taken; in short, studied of this Renaissance civilization only as much
or as little as I cared, depends all the incompleteness and irrelevancy
and unsatisfactoriness of this book, and depends also whatever addition
to knowledge or pleasure it may afford; Were I desirous of giving a
complete, clear notion of the very complex civilization of the
Renaissance, a kind of encyclopaedic atlas of that period, where (by a
double power which history alone possesses) you could see at once the
whole extent and shape of this historical territory, and at the same
time, with all its bosses of mountain and furrows of valley, the exact
composition of all its various earths and waters, the exact actual
colour and shape of all its different vegetations, not to speak of its
big towns and dotting villages;--were I desirous of doing this, I should
not merely be attempting a work completely beyond my faculties, but a
work moreover already carried out with all the perfection due to
specially adapted gifts, to infinite patience and ingenuity,
occasionally amounting almost to genius. Such is not at all within my
wishes, as it assuredly would be totally without my powers.
But besides such marvels of historic mapping as I have described, where
every one can find at a glance whatever he may be looking for, and get
the whole topography, geological and botanical, of an historic tract at
his fingers' ends, there are yet other kinds of work which may be done.
For a period in history is like a more or less extended real landscape:
it has, if you will, actual, chemically defined colours in this and
that, if you consider this and that separate and unaffected by any kind
of visual medium; and measurable distances also between this point and
the other, if you look down upon it as from a balloon. But, like a real
landscape, it may also be seen from different points of view, and under
different lights; then, according as you stand, the features of the
scene will group themselves--this ridge will disappear behind that, this
valley will open out before you, that other will be closed. Similarly,
according to the light wherein the landscape is seen, the relative scale
of colours and tints of objects, due to pervading light and to
distances--what painters call the values--will alter: the scene will
possess one or two predominant effects, it will produce also one or, at
most, two or three (in which case co-ordinated) impressions. The art
which deals with impressions, which tries to seize the real relative
values of colours and tints at a given moment, is what you call
new-fangled: its doctrines and works are still subject to the reproach
of charlatanry. Yet it is the only truly realistic art, and it only, by
giving you a thing as it appears at a given moment, gives it you as it
really ever is; all the rest is the result of cunning abstraction, and
representing the scene as it is always, represents it (by striking an
average) as it never is at all. I do not pretend that in questions of
history we can proceed upon the principles of modern landscape painting:
we do not know what were the elevations which made perspective, what
were the effects of light which created scales of tints, in that far
distant country of the past; and it is safer certainly, and doubtless
much more useful, to strike an average, and represent the past as seen
neither from here nor from there, neither in this light nor that, and
let each man imagine his historical perspective and colour value to the
best of his powers. Yet it is nevertheless certain that the past, to the
people who were in it, was not a miraculous map or other marvellous
diagram constructed on the principle of getting at the actual qualities
of things by analysis; that it must have been, to its inhabitants, but a
series of constantly varied perspectives and constantly varied schemes
of colour, according to the position of each individual, and the light
in which that individual viewed it. To attempt to reconstruct those
various perspective-making heights, to rearrange those various
value-determining lights, would be to the last degree disastrous; we
should have valleys where there existed mountains, and brilliant warm
schemes of colour where there may have been all harmonies of pale and
neutral tints. Still the perspective and colour valuation of individual
minds there must have been; and since it is not given to us to reproduce
those of the near spectator in a region which we can never enter, we may
yet sometimes console ourselves for the too melancholy abstractness and
averageness of scientific representations, by painting that distant
historic country as distant indeed, but as its far-off hill ranges and
shimmering plains really appear in their combination of form and colour,
from the height of an individual interest of our own, and beneath the
light of our individual character. We see only very little at a time,
and that little is not what it appeared to the men of the past; but we
see at least, if not the same things, yet in the same manner in which
they saw, as we see from the standpoints of personal interest and in the
light of personal temper. Scientifically we doubtless lose; but is the
past to be treated only scientifically? and can it not give us, and do
we not owe it, something more than a mere understanding of why and how?
Is it a thing so utterly dead as to be fit only for the scalpel and the
microscope?
Surely not so. The past can give us, and should give us, not merely
ideas, but emotions: healthy pleasure which may make us more light of
spirit, and pain which may make us more earnest of mind; the one, it
seems to me, as necessary for our individual worthiness as is the other.
For to each of us, as we watch the past, as we lie passive and let it
slowly circulate around us, there must come sights which, in their
reality or in their train of associations, and to the mind of each
differently, must gladden as with a sense of beauty, or put us all into
a sullen moral ache. I should hate to be misunderstood in this more,
perhaps, than in anything else in the world. I speak not of any dramatic
emotion, of such egotistic, half-artistic pleasure as some may get from
the alternation of cheerfulness and terror, from the excitement caused
by evil from which we are as safely separated as are those who look on
from the enfuriate bulls in an arena. To such, history, and the history
especially of the Renaissance, has been made to pander up but too much.
The pain I speak of is the pain which must come to every morally
sentient creature with the contemplation of some one of the horrible
tangles of evil, of the still fouler intermeshing of evil with good,
which history brings up ever and anon. Evil which is past, it is true,
but of which the worst evil almost of all, the fact of its having been,
can never be past, must ever remain present; and our trouble and
indignation at which is holy, our pain is healthy: holy and healthy,
because every vibration of such pain as that makes our moral fibre more
sensitive; because every immunity from such sensation deadens our higher
nature: holy and healthy also because, just as no image of pleasurable
things can pass before us without gathering about it other images of
some beauty which have long lain by in each individual mind, so also no
thought of great injustice of man or of accident, of signal whitewashing
of evil or befouling of good, but must, in striking into our soul, put
in motion there the salutary thought of some injustice or lying
legitimation or insidious pollution, smaller indeed perhaps, but perhaps
also nearer to ourselves.
Be not therefore too hard upon me if in what I have written of the
Renaissance, there is too little attempt to make matters scientifically
complete, and too much giving way to personal and perhaps sometimes
irrelevant impressions of pleasure and of pain; if I have followed up
those pleasurable and painful impressions rather more than sought to
discover the exact geography of the historical tract which gave them.
Consider, moreover, that this very cause of deficiency may have been
also the cause of my having succeeded in achieving anything at all.
Personal impression has led me, perhaps, sometimes away from the direct
road; but had it not beckoned me to follow, I should most likely have
simply not stirred. Pleasant impression and painful, as I have said; and
sometimes the painful has been more efficacious than the other. I do not
know whether the interest which I have always taken in the old squabble
of real and ideal has enabled me to make at all clearer the different
characteristics of painting and sculpture in Renaissance portraiture,
the relation of the art of Raphael to the art of Velasquez and the art
of Whistler. I can scarcely judge whether the pleasure which I owe to
the crowding together, the moving about in my fancy, of the heroes and
wizards and hippogriffs of the old tales of Oberon and Ogier; the
association with the knights and ladies of Boiardo and Ariosto, of this
or that figure out of a fresco of Pinturicchio, or a picture by Dosso,
has made it easier or more difficult for me to sum up the history of
mediaeval romance in Renaissance Italy; nor whether the recollection of
certain Tuscan farms, the well-known scent of the sun-dried fennel and
mint under the vine-trellis, the droning song of the contadino ploughing
or pruning unseen in the valley, the snatches of peasants' rhymes, the
outlines of peasants' faces--things all these of this our own time, of
yesterday or to-day; whether all this, running in my mind like so many
scribbly illustrations and annotations along the margin of Lorenzo dei
Medici's poems, has made my studies of rustic poetry more clear or more
confused. But this much I know as a certainty, that never should I have
tried to unravel the causes of the Renaissance's horrible anomaly of
improvement and degradation, had not that anomaly returned and returned
to make me wretched with its loathsome mixture of good and evil; its
detestable alternative of endurance of vile solidarities in the souls of
our intellectual forefathers, or of unjust turning away from the men and
the times whose moral degradation paid the price of our moral dignity. I
also have the further certainty of its having been this long-endured
moral sickening at the sight of this moral anomaly, which enabled me to
realize the feelings of such of our nobler Elizabethan playwrights as
sought to epitomize in single tales of horror the strange impressions
left by the accomplished and infamous Italy of their day; and which made
it possible for me to express perhaps some of the trouble which filled
the mind of Webster and of Tourneur merely by expressing the trouble
which filled my own.
The following studies are not samples, fragments at which one tries
one's hand, of some large and methodical scheme of work. They are mere
impressions developed by means of study: not merely currents of thought
and feeling which I have singled out from the multifold life of the
Renaissance; but currents of thought and feeling in myself, which have
found and swept along with them certain items of Renaissance lore. For
the Renaissance has been to me, in the small measure in which it has
been anything, not so much a series of studies as a series of
impressions. I have not mastered the history and literature of the
Renaissance (first-hand or second-hand, perfectly or imperfectly),
abstract and exact, and then sought out the places and things which
could make that abstraction somewhat more concrete in my mind; I have
seen the concrete things, and what I might call the concrete realities
of thought and feeling left behind by the Renaissance, and then tried to
obtain from books some notion of the original shape and manner of
wearing these relics, rags and tatters of a past civilization.
For Italy, beggared and maimed (by her own unthrift, by the rapacity of
others, by the order of Fate) at the beginning of the sixteenth century,
was never able to weave for herself a new, a modern civilization, as did
the nations who had shattered her looms on which such woofs are made,
and carried off her earnings with which such things may be bought; and
she had, accordingly, to go through life in the old garments, still half
mediaeval in shape, which had been fashioned for her during the
Renaissance: apparel of the best that could then be made, beautiful and
strong in many ways, so beautiful and strong indeed as to impose on
people for a good long time, and make French, and Germans, and
Spaniards, and English believe (comparing these brilliant tissues with
the homespun they were providing for themselves) that it must be all
brand new, and of the very latest fashion. But the garments left to
Italy by those latest Middle Ages which we call Renaissance, were not
eternal: wear and tear, new occupations, and the rough usage of other
nations, rent them most sorely; their utter neglect by the long
seventeenth century, their hasty patchings up (with bits of odd stuff
and all manner of coloured thread and string, so that a harlequin's
jacket could not look queerer) by the happy-go-lucky practicalness of
the eighteenth century and the Revolution, reduced them thoroughly to
rags; and with these rags of Renaissance civilization, Italy may still
be seen to drape herself. Not perhaps in the great centres, where the
garments of modern civilization, economical, unpicturesque, intended to
be worn but a short time, have been imported from other countries; but
yet in many places. Yes, you may still see those rags of the Renaissance
as plainly as you see the tattered linen fluttering from the twisted
iron hooks (made for the display of precious brocades and carpets on
pageant days) which still remain in the stained whitewash, the seams of
battered bricks of the solid old escutcheoned palaces; see them
sometimes displayed like the worm-eaten squares of discoloured
embroidery which the curiosity dealers take out of their musty oak
presses; and sometimes dragging about mere useless and befouled odds and
ends, like the torn shreds which lie among the decaying kitchen refuse,
the broken tiles and plaster, the nameless filth and ooze which attracts
the flies under every black archway, in every steep bricked lane
descending precipitously between the high old houses. Old palaces,
almost strongholds, and which are still inhabited by those too poor to
pull them down and build some plastered bandbox instead; poems and prose
tales written or told five hundred years ago, edited and re-edited by
printers to whom there come no modern poems or prose tales worth editing
instead; half-pagan, mediaeval priest lore, believed in by men and women
who have not been given anything to believe instead; easy-going,
all-permitting fifteenth century scepticism, not yet replaced by the
scientific and socialistic disbelief which is puritanic and
iconoclastic; sly and savage habits of vengeance still doing service
among the lower classes instead of the orderly chicanery of modern
justice;--these are the things, and a hundred others besides, concrete
and spiritual, things too magnificent, too sordid, too irregular, too
nauseous, too beautiful, and, above all, too utterly unpractical and
old-fashioned for our times, which I call the rags of the Renaissance,
and with which Italy still ekes out her scanty apparel of modern
thoughts and things.
It is living among such things, turn by turn delighted by their beauty
and offended by their foulness, that one acquires the habit of spending
a part only of one's intellectual and moral life in the present, and the
rest in the past. Impressions are not derived from description, and
thoughts are not suggested by books. The juxtaposition of concrete
objects invites the making of a theory as the jutting out of two
branches invites the spinning of a spider's web. You find everywhere
your facts without opening a book. The explanation which I have tried to
give of the exact manner in which mediaeval art was influenced by the
remains of antiquity, came like a flash during a rainy morning in the
Pisan Campo Santo; the working out and testing of that explanation in
its details was a matter of going from one church or gallery to the
other, a reference or two to Vasari for some date or fact being the only
necessary reading; and should any one at this moment ask me for
substantiation of that theory, instead of opening books I would take
that person to this Sienese Cathedral, and there bid him compare the
griffins and arabesques, the delicate figure and foliage ornaments
carved in wood and marble by the latter Middle Ages, with the griffins
and arabesques, the boldly bossed horsemen, the exquisite fruit garlands
of a certain antique altar stone which the builders of the church used
as a base to a pillar, and which must have been a never-ceasing-object
of study to every draughtsman and stoneworker in Siena.
Nor are such everywhere-scattered facts ready for working into theoretic
shape, the most which Italy still affords to make the study of the
Renaissance an almost involuntary habit. In certain places where only
decay has altered things from what they were four centuries ago,
Perugia, Orvieto, S. Gimignano, in the older quarters of Florence,
Venice, and Verona, but nowhere I think so much as in this city of Siena
(as purely mediaeval as the suits of rusted armour which its townsfolk
patch up and bury themselves in during their August pageants), we are
subjected to receive impressions of the past so startlingly lifelike as
to get quite interwoven with our impressions of the present; and from
that moment the past must share, in a measure, some of the everyday
thoughts which we give to the present. In such a city as this, the
sudden withdrawal, by sacristan or beggar-crone, of the curtain from
before an altar-piece is many a time much more than the mere displaying
of a picture: it is the sudden bringing us face to face with the real
life of the Renaissance. We have ourselves, perhaps not an hour before,
sauntered through squares and dawdled beneath porticos like those which
we see filled with the red-robed and plumed citizens and patricians, the
Jews and ruffians whom Pinturicchio's parti-coloured men-at-arms are
dispersing to make room for the followers of AEneas Sylvius; or clambered
up rough lanes, hedged in between oak woods and oliveyards, which we
might almost swear were the very ones through which are winding Sodoma's
cavalcades of gallantly dressed gentlemen, with their hawks and hounds,
and negro jesters and apes and beautiful pages, cantering along on
shortnecked little horses with silver bits and scarlet trappings, on the
pretence of being the Kings from the East, carrying gold and myrrh to
the infant Christ. It seems as if all were astoundingly real, as if, by
some magic, we were actually going to mix in the life of the past. But
it is in reality but a mere delusion, a deceit like those dioramas which
we have all been into as children, and where, by paying your shilling,
you were suddenly introduced into an oasis of the desert, or into a
recent battle-field: things which surprised us, real palm trunks and
Arabian water jars, or real fascines and cannon balls, lying about for
us to touch; roads opening on all sides into this simulated desert,
through this simulated battle-field. So also with these seeming
realities of Renaissance life. We can touch the things scattered on the
foreground, can handle the weapons, the furniture, the books and musical
instruments; we can see, or think we see, most plainly the streets and
paths, the faces and movements of that Renaissance world; but when we
try to penetrate into it, we shall find that there is but a slip of
solid ground beneath us, that all around us is but canvas and painted
wall, perspectived and lit up by our fancy; and that when we try to
approach to touch one of those seemingly so real men and women, our eyes
find only daubs of paint, our hands meet only flat and chilly stucco.
Turn we to our books, and seek therein the spell whereby to make this
simulacrum real; and I think the plaster will still remain plaster, the
stones still remain stone. Out of the Renaissance, out of the Middle
Ages, we must never hope to evoke any spectres which can talk with us
and we with them; nothing of the kind of those dim but familiar ghosts,
often grotesque rather than heroic, who come to us from out of the
books, the daubed portraits of times nearer our own, and sit opposite
us, making us laugh, and also cry, with humdrum stories and humdrum woes
so very like our own. No; such ghosts the Renaissance has not left
behind it. From out of it there come to us no familiars. They are all
faces--those which meet us in the pages of chronicles and in the frames
of pictures: they are painted records of the past--we may understand
them by scanning well their features, but they cannot understand, they
cannot perceive us. Such, when all is said, are my impressions of the
Renaissance. The moral atmosphere of those days is as impossible for us
to breathe as would be the physical atmosphere of the moon: could we,
for a moment, penetrate into it, we should die of asphyxia. Say what we
may against both Protestant reformation and Catholic reaction, these two
began to make an atmosphere (pure or foul) different from that of the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, an atmosphere in which lived creatures
like ourselves, into which ourselves might penetrate.
A crotchet this, perhaps, of my own; but it is my feeling, nevertheless.
The Renaissance is, I say again, no period out of which we must try and
evoke ghostly companions. Let us not waste our strength in seeking to do
so; but be satisfied if it teaches us strange truths, scientific and
practical; if its brilliant and solemn personalities, its bright and
majestic art can give us pleasure; if its evils and wrongs, its
inevitable degradation, can move us to pity and to indignation.
Siena, _September_, 1882.