Capitol (of a person called Felix), with its variously employed genii,
making music, carrying lanterns and torches, burning or extinguished
under a trellis hung with tragic masks, as in any Gothic tomb with
angels drawing the curtains of the deathbed. There has been, with the
change of religion, an interruption in the symbolic tradition; yet,
though we no longer interpret with readiness this dead language of
paganism, we feel, if we are the least attentive, that it contains
a real meaning. We feel that the sculptors cared not merely for the
representation, but also for the object represented. These things were
dear to them, a part of their life, their worship, their love; and they
put as much observation into their work as any Gothic sculptor, and
often as much fancy and humour (though both more beautiful), as one may
judge, with plenty of comparison at hand, by a certain antique altar in
Siena Cathedral, none of whose Gothic animals come up to the wonderful
half-human rams' heads and bored, cross griffins of this forlorn fragment
of paganism. The significance of classic ornament the men of the
fifteenth century straightway overlooked. They laid hold of it as
merely so much form, joining sirens, griffins, garlands, rams' heads,
victories, without a suspicion that they might mean or suggest anything.
They do, in fact, mean nothing, in most Florentine work, besides
exquisite pattern; in the less subtle atmosphere of Venice they reach
that frank senselessness which has moved the wrath of Ruskin. But what a
charm have not even those foolish monuments of doges and admirals, tier
upon tier of triumphal arch, of delicately flowered column and scalloped
niche, and then rows of dainty warriors and virtues; how full of meaning
to the eye and spirit is not this art so meaningless to the literary
mind!

Of course the painting of that age never became an art of mere pattern
like the architecture. The whole life and thought of the time was poured
into it; and the art itself developed in its upward movement a number
of scientific interests--perspective, anatomy, expression--which
counteracted that tendency to seek for mere beauty of arrangement and
detail. Yet the perfection of Renaissance art never lies in any realism
in our modern sense, still less in such suggestiveness as belongs to our
literary age; and its triumph is when Raphael can vary and co-ordinate
the greatest number of heads, of hands, feet, and groups, as in the
School of Athens, the Parnassus, the marvellous little Bible histories
of the Loggie; above all, in that "Vision of Ezekiel," which is the very
triumph of compact and harmonious composition; when Michelangelo can
tie human beings into the finest knots, twist them into the most shapely
brackets, frameworks, and key-stones. Even throughout the period of
utmost realism, while art was struggling with absorbing problems, men
never dreamed of such realism as ours. They never painted a corner of
nature at random, merely for the sake of veracity; they never modelled
a modern man or woman in their real everyday dress and at their real
everyday business. In the midst of everything composition ruled supreme,
and each object must needs find its echo, be worked into a scheme of
lines, or, with the Venetians, of symmetrically arranged colours. There
is an anatomical engraving by Antonio Pollaiolo, one of the strongest
realists of his time, which sums up the tendencies of fifteenth-century
art. It is a combat of twelve naked men, extraordinarily hideous and
in hideous attitudes, but they are so arranged that their ungainly and
flayed-looking limbs form with the background of gigantic ivy tendrils
an intricate and beautiful pattern, such as we find in Morris's paper
and stuffs.

This hankering after pattern, this desire for beauty as such, became
manifest in Domenico Neroni after his first sojourn in Rome.

The Roman basilicas, with their stately rows of columns, Corinthian and
Ionic, taken from some former temple, and their sunken floor, solemn
with Byzantine patterns of porphyry and serpentine, had impressed with
their simplicity and harmony the mind of this Florentine, surrounded
hitherto by the intricacies of Gothic buildings. They had formed the
link to those fragments of ancient architecture, more intact but also
more hidden than in our days, whose dignity of proportion and grace of
detail--vast rosetted arches and slender rows of fluted pillars--our
modern and Hellenicised taste has treated with too ready contempt. For
this Vitruvian art, unoriginal and bungling in the eyes of our purists,
was yet full of the serenity, the ampleness which the Middle Ages lacked,
and affected the men of the fifteenth century much like a passage of
Virgil after a canto of Dante. It formed the fit setting for those
remains of antique sculpture which were then gradually beginning to be
drawn from the earth. Of such statues and reliefs--which the men of
the Renaissance regarded as the work rather of ancient Rome than of
Greece--a certain amount was beginning to be carried all over Italy, and
notably to the houses of the rich Florentine merchants, who incrusted
their staircase walls with inscriptions and carvings, and set statues
and sarcophagi under the columns of their courtyards. But such sculpture
was chosen rather for its portable character than its excellence; and
although single busts and slabs were diligently studied by Florentine
artists, there could not have existed in Florence a number of antiques
sufficient to impress the ideal of ancient art upon men surrounded on
all sides by the works of medieval painters and sculptors.

To the various sights of Rome must be due that sudden enlarging of
style, that kind of new classicism, which distinguishes the work of
fifteenth-century masters after their visit to the Eternal City, enabling
Ghirlandaio, Signorelli, Perugino, and Botticelli to make the Sixtine
Chapel, and even the finical Pinturicchio, the Vatican library, into
centres of fresh influence for harmony and beauty.

The result upon Domenico Neroni was a momentary confusion in all his
artistic conceptions. Too much of a seeker for new things, for secret
and complicated knowledge, to undergo a mere widening of style like his
more gifted or more placid contemporaries, he fell foul of his previous
work and his previous masters, without finding a new line or new ideals.
The frescoes of Castagno, the little panels of the Pollaiolos, nay, even
the works of Donatello, were no longer what they had seemed before his
Roman journey, and even what he had remembered them in Rome; for it is
with more noble things, even as with the rooms which we inhabit, which
strike us as small and dingy only on returning from larger and better
lighted ones.

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 encyclopædias, 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 mediæval, 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.

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 Ægina, in those slim-waisted dæmonic 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' _naïveté_; 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 Podestà, 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 "Phædo" 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 Æneas 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, mediæval 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 mediæval 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
mediæval 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 Niccolò 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 Lætus; 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 encyclopædic 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 archæological 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 Cæsar--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 mediæval 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
dæmons 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 dæmons, and they
inspire our noblest thoughts. Hast never heard of the familiar dæmon
of Socrates, whispering to him superhuman wisdom? Yes, indeed, Venus,
Apollo, Æsculapius, Jove, the stars and planets, the winds and tides are
dæmons. 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 chimæras; 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 archæological 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 Podestà, 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 mediæval
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 mediæval 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 Niccolò 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

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 archæology. 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 mediæval 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 æsthetic 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 versâ_, 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.

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 mediæval 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 mediæval 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 æsthetical 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 æsthete, 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 æsthetic
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 æsthete in the very narrow sense of twenty
years ago: an æsthete 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
æsthetic 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 Æsculapius 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 æsthetic 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 æsthetics.

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 ænigmata      per speculum _in ænigmate_

 In was in this church that    _It_ was in this church that