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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Euphorion, by Vernon Lee
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Euphorion
+       Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the
+       Renaissance - Vol. I
+
+Author: Vernon Lee
+
+Release Date: February 17, 2010 [EBook #31303]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EUPHORION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marc D'Hooghe
+
+
+
+
+EUPHORION:
+
+BEING STUDIES OF THE ANTIQUE AND THE MEDIÆVAL IN THE RENAISSANCE
+
+BY
+
+VERNON LEE
+
+_Author of "Studies of the 18th Century in Italy," "Belcaro" etc._
+
+
+VOL. I.
+
+                WALTER PATER,
+IN APPRECIATION OF THAT WHICH, IN EXPOUNDING THE
+  BEAUTIFUL THINGS OF THE PAST, HE HAS ADDED TO
+      THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS OF THE PRESENT.
+
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS.
+
+
+Introduction
+The Sacrifice
+The Italy of the Elizabethan Dramatists
+The Out-Door Poetry
+Symmetria Prisca
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+     _Faustus is therefore a parable of the impotent yearnings of the
+     Middle Ages--its passionate aspiration, its conscience-stricken
+     desire, its fettered curiosity amid the tramping limits of
+     imperfect knowledge and irrational dogmatism. The indestructible
+     beauty of Greek art,--whereof Helen was an emblem, became, through
+     the discovery of classic poetry and sculpture, the possession of
+     the modern world. Mediævalism took this Helen to wife, and their
+     offspring, the Euphorion of Goethe's drama, is the spirit of the
+     modern world._--J.A. Symonds, "Renaissance In Italy," vol. ii. p.
+     54.
+
+
+Euphorion is the name given by Goethe to the marvellous child born of
+the mystic marriage of Faust and Helena. Who Faust is, and who Helena,
+we all know. Faust, of whom no man can remember the youth or childhood,
+seems to have come into the world by some evil spell, already old and
+with the faintness of body and of mind which are the heritage of age;
+and every additional year of mysterious study and abortive effort has
+made him more vacillating of step and uncertain of sight, but only more
+hungry of soul. Postponed and repressed by reclusion from the world, and
+desperate tension over insoluble problems; diverted into the channels of
+mere thought and vision; there boils within him the energy, the passion,
+of retarded youth: its appetites and curiosities, which, cramped by the
+intolerant will, and foiled by many a sudden palsy of limb and mind,
+torment him with mad visions of unreal worlds, mock him with dreams of
+superhuman powers, from which he awakes in impotent and apathetic
+anguish. But these often-withstood and often-baffled cravings are not
+those merely of scholar or wizard, they are those of soldier and poet
+and monk, of the mere man: lawless desires which he seeks to divert, but
+fails, from the things of the flesh and of the world to the things of
+the reason; supersensuous desires for the beautiful and intangible,
+which he strives to crush, but in vain, with the cynical scepticism of
+science, which derides the things it cannot grasp. In this strange
+Faustus, made up of so many and conflicting instincts; in this old man
+with ever-budding and ever-nipped feelings of youthfulness, muddling the
+hard-won secrets of nature in search after impossibilities; in him so
+all-sided, and yet so wilfully narrowed, so restlessly active, yet so
+often palsied and apathetic; in this Faustus, who has laboured so much
+and succeeded in so little, feeling himself at the end, when he has
+summed up all his studies, as foolish as before--which of us has not
+learned to recognize the impersonated Middle Ages? And Helena, we know
+her also, she is the spirit of Antiquity. Personified, but we dare
+scarcely say, embodied; for she is a ghost raised by the spells of
+Faustus, a simulacrum of a thing long dead; yet with such continuing
+semblance of life, nay, with all life's real powers, that she seems the
+real, vital, living one, and Faustus yonder, thing as he is of the
+present, little better than a spectre. Yet Helena has been ages before
+Faust ever was; nay, by an awful mystery like those which involve the
+birth of Pagan gods, she whom he has evoked to be the mother of his only
+son has given, centuries before, somewhat of her life to make this
+self-same Faust. A strange mystery of Fate's necromancy this, and with
+strange anomalies. For opposite this living, decrepit Faust, Helena, the
+long dead, is young; and she is all that which Faust is not. Knowing
+much less than he, who has plunged his thoughts like his scalpel into
+all the mysteries of life and death, she yet knows much more, can tell
+him of the objects and aims of men and things; nay, with little more
+than the unconscious faithfulness to instinct of the clean-limbed,
+placid brute, she can give peace to his tormented conscience; and, while
+he has suffered and struggled and lashed himself for every seeming
+baseness of desire, and loathed himself for every imagined microscopic
+soiling, she has walked through good and evil, letting the vileness of
+sin trickle off her unhidden soul, so quietly and majestically that all
+thought of evil vanishes; and the self-tormenting wretch, with macerated
+flesh hidden beneath the heavy garments of mysticism and philosophy,
+suddenly feels, in the presence of her unabashed nakedness, that he,
+like herself, is chaste.
+
+Such are the parents, Faustus and Helena; we know them; but who is this
+son Euphorion? To me it seems as if there could be but one answer--the
+Renaissance. Goethe indeed has told us (though, with his rejuvenation of
+Faustus, unknown to the old German legend and to our Marlowe, in how
+bungling a manner!) the tale of that mystic marriage; but Goethe could
+not tell us rightly, even had he attempted, the real name of its
+offspring. For even so short a time ago, the Middle Ages were only
+beginning to be more than a mere historical expression, Antiquity was
+being only then critically discovered; and the Renaissance, but vaguely
+seen and quite unformulated by the first men, Gibbon and Roscoe, who
+perceived it at all, was still virtually unknown. To Goethe, therefore,
+it might easily have seemed as if the antique Helena had only just been
+evoked, and as if of her union with the worn-out century of his birth, a
+real Euphorion, the age in which ourselves are living, might have been
+born. But, at the distance of additional time, and from the undreamed-of
+height upon which recent historical science has enabled us to stand, we
+can easily see that in this he would have been mistaken. Not only is our
+modern culture no child of Faustus and Helena, but it is the complex
+descendant, strangely featured by atavism from various sides, of many
+and various civilizations; and the eighteenth century, so far from being
+a Faustus evoking as his bride the long dead Helen of Antiquity, was in
+itself a curiously varied grandchild or great-grandchild of such a
+marriage, its every moral feature, its every intellectual movement
+proclaiming how much of its being was inherited from Antiquity. No
+allegory, I well know, and least of all no historical allegory, can ever
+be strained to fit quite tight--the lives of individuals and those of
+centuries, their modes of intermixture, genesis, and inheritance are far
+different; but if an allegory is to possess any meaning at all, we must
+surely apply it wherever it will fit most easily and completely; and the
+beautiful allegory prepared by the tradition of the sixteenth century
+for the elaborating genius of Goethe, can have a real meaning only if we
+explain Faust as representing the Middle Ages, Helena as Antiquity, and
+Euphorion as that child of the Middle Ages, taking life and reality from
+them, but born of and curiously nurtured by the spirit of Antiquity, to
+which significant accident has given the name of Renaissance.
+
+After Euphorion I have therefore christened this book; and this not from
+any irrational conceit of knowing more (when I am fully aware that I
+know infinitely less) than other writers about the life and character of
+this wonderful child of Helena and Faustus, but merely because it is
+more particularly as the offspring of this miraculous marriage, and with
+reference to the harmonies and anomalies which therefrom resulted, that
+Euphorion has exercised my thoughts.
+
+The Renaissance has interested and interests me, not merely for what it
+is, but even more for what it sprang from, and for the manner in which
+the many things inherited from both Middle Ages and Renaissance, the
+tendencies and necessities inherent in every special civilization, acted
+and reacted upon each other, united in concord or antagonism; forming,
+like the gases of the chemist, new things, sometimes like and sometimes
+unlike themselves and each other; producing now some unknown substance
+of excellence and utility, at other times some baneful element, known
+but too well elsewhere, but unexpected here. But not the watching of the
+often tragic meeting of these great fatalities of inherited spirit and
+habit only: for equally fascinating almost has been the watching of the
+elaboration by this double-natured period of things of little weight,
+mere trifles of artistic material bequeathed to it by one or by the
+other of its spiritual parents. The charm for me--a charm sometimes
+pleasurable, but sometimes also painful, like the imperious necessity
+which we sometimes feel to see again and examine, seemingly uselessly,
+some horrible evil--the charm, I mean the involuntary compulsion of
+attention, has often been as great in following the vicissitudes of a
+mere artistic item, like the Carolingian stories or the bucolic element,
+as it has been in looking on at the dissolution of moral and social
+elements. And in this, that I have tried to understand only where my
+curiosity was awakened, tried to reconstruct only where my fancy was
+taken; in short, studied of this Renaissance civilization only as much
+or as little as I cared, depends all the incompleteness and irrelevancy
+and unsatisfactoriness of this book, and depends also whatever addition
+to knowledge or pleasure it may afford; Were I desirous of giving a
+complete, clear notion of the very complex civilization of the
+Renaissance, a kind of encyclopædic atlas of that period, where (by a
+double power which history alone possesses) you could see at once the
+whole extent and shape of this historical territory, and at the same
+time, with all its bosses of mountain and furrows of valley, the exact
+composition of all its various earths and waters, the exact actual
+colour and shape of all its different vegetations, not to speak of its
+big towns and dotting villages;--were I desirous of doing this, I should
+not merely be attempting a work completely beyond my faculties, but a
+work moreover already carried out with all the perfection due to
+specially adapted gifts, to infinite patience and ingenuity,
+occasionally amounting almost to genius. Such is not at all within my
+wishes, as it assuredly would be totally without my powers.
+
+But besides such marvels of historic mapping as I have described, where
+every one can find at a glance whatever he may be looking for, and get
+the whole topography, geological and botanical, of an historic tract at
+his fingers' ends, there are yet other kinds of work which may be done.
+For a period in history is like a more or less extended real landscape:
+it has, if you will, actual, chemically defined colours in this and
+that, if you consider this and that separate and unaffected by any kind
+of visual medium; and measurable distances also between this point and
+the other, if you look down upon it as from a balloon. But, like a real
+landscape, it may also be seen from different points of view, and under
+different lights; then, according as you stand, the features of the
+scene will group themselves--this ridge will disappear behind that, this
+valley will open out before you, that other will be closed. Similarly,
+according to the light wherein the landscape is seen, the relative scale
+of colours and tints of objects, due to pervading light and to
+distances--what painters call the values--will alter: the scene will
+possess one or two predominant effects, it will produce also one or, at
+most, two or three (in which case co-ordinated) impressions. The art
+which deals with impressions, which tries to seize the real relative
+values of colours and tints at a given moment, is what you call
+new-fangled: its doctrines and works are still subject to the reproach
+of charlatanry. Yet it is the only truly realistic art, and it only, by
+giving you a thing as it appears at a given moment, gives it you as it
+really ever is; all the rest is the result of cunning abstraction, and
+representing the scene as it is always, represents it (by striking an
+average) as it never is at all. I do not pretend that in questions of
+history we can proceed upon the principles of modern landscape painting:
+we do not know what were the elevations which made perspective, what
+were the effects of light which created scales of tints, in that far
+distant country of the past; and it is safer certainly, and doubtless
+much more useful, to strike an average, and represent the past as seen
+neither from here nor from there, neither in this light nor that, and
+let each man imagine his historical perspective and colour value to the
+best of his powers. Yet it is nevertheless certain that the past, to the
+people who were in it, was not a miraculous map or other marvellous
+diagram constructed on the principle of getting at the actual qualities
+of things by analysis; that it must have been, to its inhabitants, but a
+series of constantly varied perspectives and constantly varied schemes
+of colour, according to the position of each individual, and the light
+in which that individual viewed it. To attempt to reconstruct those
+various perspective-making heights, to rearrange those various
+value-determining lights, would be to the last degree disastrous; we
+should have valleys where there existed mountains, and brilliant warm
+schemes of colour where there may have been all harmonies of pale and
+neutral tints. Still the perspective and colour valuation of individual
+minds there must have been; and since it is not given to us to reproduce
+those of the near spectator in a region which we can never enter, we may
+yet sometimes console ourselves for the too melancholy abstractness and
+averageness of scientific representations, by painting that distant
+historic country as distant indeed, but as its far-off hill ranges and
+shimmering plains really appear in their combination of form and colour,
+from the height of an individual interest of our own, and beneath the
+light of our individual character. We see only very little at a time,
+and that little is not what it appeared to the men of the past; but we
+see at least, if not the same things, yet in the same manner in which
+they saw, as we see from the standpoints of personal interest and in the
+light of personal temper. Scientifically we doubtless lose; but is the
+past to be treated only scientifically? and can it not give us, and do
+we not owe it, something more than a mere understanding of why and how?
+Is it a thing so utterly dead as to be fit only for the scalpel and the
+microscope?
+
+Surely not so. The past can give us, and should give us, not merely
+ideas, but emotions: healthy pleasure which may make us more light of
+spirit, and pain which may make us more earnest of mind; the one, it
+seems to me, as necessary for our individual worthiness as is the other.
+For to each of us, as we watch the past, as we lie passive and let it
+slowly circulate around us, there must come sights which, in their
+reality or in their train of associations, and to the mind of each
+differently, must gladden as with a sense of beauty, or put us all into
+a sullen moral ache. I should hate to be misunderstood in this more,
+perhaps, than in anything else in the world. I speak not of any dramatic
+emotion, of such egotistic, half-artistic pleasure as some may get from
+the alternation of cheerfulness and terror, from the excitement caused
+by evil from which we are as safely separated as are those who look on
+from the enfuriate bulls in an arena. To such, history, and the history
+especially of the Renaissance, has been made to pander up but too much.
+The pain I speak of is the pain which must come to every morally
+sentient creature with the contemplation of some one of the horrible
+tangles of evil, of the still fouler intermeshing of evil with good,
+which history brings up ever and anon. Evil which is past, it is true,
+but of which the worst evil almost of all, the fact of its having been,
+can never be past, must ever remain present; and our trouble and
+indignation at which is holy, our pain is healthy: holy and healthy,
+because every vibration of such pain as that makes our moral fibre more
+sensitive; because every immunity from such sensation deadens our higher
+nature: holy and healthy also because, just as no image of pleasurable
+things can pass before us without gathering about it other images of
+some beauty which have long lain by in each individual mind, so also no
+thought of great injustice of man or of accident, of signal whitewashing
+of evil or befouling of good, but must, in striking into our soul, put
+in motion there the salutary thought of some injustice or lying
+legitimation or insidious pollution, smaller indeed perhaps, but perhaps
+also nearer to ourselves.
+
+Be not therefore too hard upon me if in what I have written of the
+Renaissance, there is too little attempt to make matters scientifically
+complete, and too much giving way to personal and perhaps sometimes
+irrelevant impressions of pleasure and of pain; if I have followed up
+those pleasurable and painful impressions rather more than sought to
+discover the exact geography of the historical tract which gave them.
+Consider, moreover, that this very cause of deficiency may have been
+also the cause of my having succeeded in achieving anything at all.
+Personal impression has led me, perhaps, sometimes away from the direct
+road; but had it not beckoned me to follow, I should most likely have
+simply not stirred. Pleasant impression and painful, as I have said; and
+sometimes the painful has been more efficacious than the other. I do not
+know whether the interest which I have always taken in the old squabble
+of real and ideal has enabled me to make at all clearer the different
+characteristics of painting and sculpture in Renaissance portraiture,
+the relation of the art of Raphael to the art of Velasquez and the art
+of Whistler. I can scarcely judge whether the pleasure which I owe to
+the crowding together, the moving about in my fancy, of the heroes and
+wizards and hippogriffs of the old tales of Oberon and Ogier; the
+association with the knights and ladies of Boiardo and Ariosto, of this
+or that figure out of a fresco of Pinturicchio, or a picture by Dosso,
+has made it easier or more difficult for me to sum up the history of
+mediæval romance in Renaissance Italy; nor whether the recollection of
+certain Tuscan farms, the well-known scent of the sun-dried fennel and
+mint under the vine-trellis, the droning song of the contadino ploughing
+or pruning unseen in the valley, the snatches of peasants' rhymes, the
+outlines of peasants' faces--things all these of this our own time, of
+yesterday or to-day; whether all this, running in my mind like so many
+scribbly illustrations and annotations along the margin of Lorenzo dei
+Medici's poems, has made my studies of rustic poetry more clear or more
+confused. But this much I know as a certainty, that never should I have
+tried to unravel the causes of the Renaissance's horrible anomaly of
+improvement and degradation, had not that anomaly returned and returned
+to make me wretched with its loathsome mixture of good and evil; its
+detestable alternative of endurance of vile solidarities in the souls of
+our intellectual forefathers, or of unjust turning away from the men and
+the times whose moral degradation paid the price of our moral dignity. I
+also have the further certainty of its having been this long-endured
+moral sickening at the sight of this moral anomaly, which enabled me to
+realize the feelings of such of our nobler Elizabethan playwrights as
+sought to epitomize in single tales of horror the strange impressions
+left by the accomplished and infamous Italy of their day; and which made
+it possible for me to express perhaps some of the trouble which filled
+the mind of Webster and of Tourneur merely by expressing the trouble
+which filled my own.
+
+The following studies are not samples, fragments at which one tries
+one's hand, of some large and methodical scheme of work. They are mere
+impressions developed by means of study: not merely currents of thought
+and feeling which I have singled out from the multifold life of the
+Renaissance; but currents of thought and feeling in myself, which have
+found and swept along with them certain items of Renaissance lore. For
+the Renaissance has been to me, in the small measure in which it has
+been anything, not so much a series of studies as a series of
+impressions. I have not mastered the history and literature of the
+Renaissance (first-hand or second-hand, perfectly or imperfectly),
+abstract and exact, and then sought out the places and things which
+could make that abstraction somewhat more concrete in my mind; I have
+seen the concrete things, and what I might call the concrete realities
+of thought and feeling left behind by the Renaissance, and then tried to
+obtain from books some notion of the original shape and manner of
+wearing these relics, rags and tatters of a past civilization.
+
+For Italy, beggared and maimed (by her own unthrift, by the rapacity of
+others, by the order of Fate) at the beginning of the sixteenth century,
+was never able to weave for herself a new, a modern civilization, as did
+the nations who had shattered her looms on which such woofs are made,
+and carried off her earnings with which such things may be bought; and
+she had, accordingly, to go through life in the old garments, still half
+mediæval in shape, which had been fashioned for her during the
+Renaissance: apparel of the best that could then be made, beautiful and
+strong in many ways, so beautiful and strong indeed as to impose on
+people for a good long time, and make French, and Germans, and
+Spaniards, and English believe (comparing these brilliant tissues with
+the homespun they were providing for themselves) that it must be all
+brand new, and of the very latest fashion. But the garments left to
+Italy by those latest Middle Ages which we call Renaissance, were not
+eternal: wear and tear, new occupations, and the rough usage of other
+nations, rent them most sorely; their utter neglect by the long
+seventeenth century, their hasty patchings up (with bits of odd stuff
+and all manner of coloured thread and string, so that a harlequin's
+jacket could not look queerer) by the happy-go-lucky practicalness of
+the eighteenth century and the Revolution, reduced them thoroughly to
+rags; and with these rags of Renaissance civilization, Italy may still
+be seen to drape herself. Not perhaps in the great centres, where the
+garments of modern civilization, economical, unpicturesque, intended to
+be worn but a short time, have been imported from other countries; but
+yet in many places. Yes, you may still see those rags of the Renaissance
+as plainly as you see the tattered linen fluttering from the twisted
+iron hooks (made for the display of precious brocades and carpets on
+pageant days) which still remain in the stained whitewash, the seams of
+battered bricks of the solid old escutcheoned palaces; see them
+sometimes displayed like the worm-eaten squares of discoloured
+embroidery which the curiosity dealers take out of their musty oak
+presses; and sometimes dragging about mere useless and befouled odds and
+ends, like the torn shreds which lie among the decaying kitchen refuse,
+the broken tiles and plaster, the nameless filth and ooze which attracts
+the flies under every black archway, in every steep bricked lane
+descending precipitously between the high old houses. Old palaces,
+almost strongholds, and which are still inhabited by those too poor to
+pull them down and build some plastered bandbox instead; poems and prose
+tales written or told five hundred years ago, edited and re-edited by
+printers to whom there come no modern poems or prose tales worth editing
+instead; half-pagan, mediæval priest lore, believed in by men and women
+who have not been given anything to believe instead; easy-going,
+all-permitting fifteenth century scepticism, not yet replaced by the
+scientific and socialistic disbelief which is puritanic and
+iconoclastic; sly and savage habits of vengeance still doing service
+among the lower classes instead of the orderly chicanery of modern
+justice;--these are the things, and a hundred others besides, concrete
+and spiritual, things too magnificent, too sordid, too irregular, too
+nauseous, too beautiful, and, above all, too utterly unpractical and
+old-fashioned for our times, which I call the rags of the Renaissance,
+and with which Italy still ekes out her scanty apparel of modern
+thoughts and things.
+
+It is living among such things, turn by turn delighted by their beauty
+and offended by their foulness, that one acquires the habit of spending
+a part only of one's intellectual and moral life in the present, and the
+rest in the past. Impressions are not derived from description, and
+thoughts are not suggested by books. The juxtaposition of concrete
+objects invites the making of a theory as the jutting out of two
+branches invites the spinning of a spider's web. You find everywhere
+your facts without opening a book. The explanation which I have tried to
+give of the exact manner in which mediæval art was influenced by the
+remains of antiquity, came like a flash during a rainy morning in the
+Pisan Campo Santo; the working out and testing of that explanation in
+its details was a matter of going from one church or gallery to the
+other, a reference or two to Vasari for some date or fact being the only
+necessary reading; and should any one at this moment ask me for
+substantiation of that theory, instead of opening books I would take
+that person to this Sienese Cathedral, and there bid him compare the
+griffins and arabesques, the delicate figure and foliage ornaments
+carved in wood and marble by the latter Middle Ages, with the griffins
+and arabesques, the boldly bossed horsemen, the exquisite fruit garlands
+of a certain antique altar stone which the builders of the church used
+as a base to a pillar, and which must have been a never-ceasing-object
+of study to every draughtsman and stoneworker in Siena.
+
+Nor are such everywhere-scattered facts ready for working into theoretic
+shape, the most which Italy still affords to make the study of the
+Renaissance an almost involuntary habit. In certain places where only
+decay has altered things from what they were four centuries ago,
+Perugia, Orvieto, S. Gimignano, in the older quarters of Florence,
+Venice, and Verona, but nowhere I think so much as in this city of Siena
+(as purely mediæval as the suits of rusted armour which its townsfolk
+patch up and bury themselves in during their August pageants), we are
+subjected to receive impressions of the past so startlingly lifelike as
+to get quite interwoven with our impressions of the present; and from
+that moment the past must share, in a measure, some of the everyday
+thoughts which we give to the present. In such a city as this, the
+sudden withdrawal, by sacristan or beggar-crone, of the curtain from
+before an altar-piece is many a time much more than the mere displaying
+of a picture: it is the sudden bringing us face to face with the real
+life of the Renaissance. We have ourselves, perhaps not an hour before,
+sauntered through squares and dawdled beneath porticos like those which
+we see filled with the red-robed and plumed citizens and patricians, the
+Jews and ruffians whom Pinturicchio's parti-coloured men-at-arms are
+dispersing to make room for the followers of Æneas Sylvius; or clambered
+up rough lanes, hedged in between oak woods and oliveyards, which we
+might almost swear were the very ones through which are winding Sodoma's
+cavalcades of gallantly dressed gentlemen, with their hawks and hounds,
+and negro jesters and apes and beautiful pages, cantering along on
+shortnecked little horses with silver bits and scarlet trappings, on the
+pretence of being the Kings from the East, carrying gold and myrrh to
+the infant Christ. It seems as if all were astoundingly real, as if, by
+some magic, we were actually going to mix in the life of the past. But
+it is in reality but a mere delusion, a deceit like those dioramas which
+we have all been into as children, and where, by paying your shilling,
+you were suddenly introduced into an oasis of the desert, or into a
+recent battle-field: things which surprised us, real palm trunks and
+Arabian water jars, or real fascines and cannon balls, lying about for
+us to touch; roads opening on all sides into this simulated desert,
+through this simulated battle-field. So also with these seeming
+realities of Renaissance life. We can touch the things scattered on the
+foreground, can handle the weapons, the furniture, the books and musical
+instruments; we can see, or think we see, most plainly the streets and
+paths, the faces and movements of that Renaissance world; but when we
+try to penetrate into it, we shall find that there is but a slip of
+solid ground beneath us, that all around us is but canvas and painted
+wall, perspectived and lit up by our fancy; and that when we try to
+approach to touch one of those seemingly so real men and women, our eyes
+find only daubs of paint, our hands meet only flat and chilly stucco.
+Turn we to our books, and seek therein the spell whereby to make this
+simulacrum real; and I think the plaster will still remain plaster, the
+stones still remain stone. Out of the Renaissance, out of the Middle
+Ages, we must never hope to evoke any spectres which can talk with us
+and we with them; nothing of the kind of those dim but familiar ghosts,
+often grotesque rather than heroic, who come to us from out of the
+books, the daubed portraits of times nearer our own, and sit opposite
+us, making us laugh, and also cry, with humdrum stories and humdrum woes
+so very like our own. No; such ghosts the Renaissance has not left
+behind it. From out of it there come to us no familiars. They are all
+faces--those which meet us in the pages of chronicles and in the frames
+of pictures: they are painted records of the past--we may understand
+them by scanning well their features, but they cannot understand, they
+cannot perceive us. Such, when all is said, are my impressions of the
+Renaissance. The moral atmosphere of those days is as impossible for us
+to breathe as would be the physical atmosphere of the moon: could we,
+for a moment, penetrate into it, we should die of asphyxia. Say what we
+may against both Protestant reformation and Catholic reaction, these two
+began to make an atmosphere (pure or foul) different from that of the
+Middle Ages and the Renaissance, an atmosphere in which lived creatures
+like ourselves, into which ourselves might penetrate.
+
+A crotchet this, perhaps, of my own; but it is my feeling, nevertheless.
+The Renaissance is, I say again, no period out of which we must try and
+evoke ghostly companions. Let us not waste our strength in seeking to do
+so; but be satisfied if it teaches us strange truths, scientific and
+practical; if its brilliant and solemn personalities, its bright and
+majestic art can give us pleasure; if its evils and wrongs, its
+inevitable degradation, can move us to pity and to indignation.
+
+Siena, _September_, 1882.
+
+
+
+THE SACRIFICE.
+
+
+     Ihr führt ins Leben uns hinein;
+     Ihr lässt den armen schuldig werden;
+     Dann übergiebt Ihr ihm der Pein,
+     Denn alle Schuld rächt sich auf Erden.
+
+
+At the end of the fifteenth century, Italy was the centre of European
+civilization: while the other nations were still plunged in a feudal
+barbarism which seems almost as far removed from all our sympathies as
+is the condition of some American or Polynesian savages, the Italians
+appear to us as possessing habits of thought, a mode of life, political,
+social, and literary institutions, not unlike those of to-day; as men
+whom we can thoroughly understand, whose ideas and aims, whose general
+views, resemble our own in that main, indefinable characteristic of
+being modern. They had shaken off the morbid monastic ways of feeling,
+they had thrown aside the crooked scholastic modes of thinking, they had
+trampled under foot the feudal institutions of the Middle Ages; no
+symbolical mists made them see things vague, strange, and distorted;
+their intellectual atmosphere was as clear as our own, and, if they saw
+less than we do, what they did see appeared to them in its true shape
+and proportions. Almost for the first time since the ruin of antique
+civilization, they could show well-organized, well-defined States;
+artistically disciplined armies; rationally devised laws; scientifically
+conducted agriculture; and widely extended, intelligently undertaken
+commerce. For the first time, also, they showed regularly built,
+healthy, and commodious towns; well-drained fields; and, more important
+than all, hundreds of miles of country owned not by feudal lords, but by
+citizens; cultivated not by serfs, but by free peasants. While in the
+rest of Europe men were floundering among the stagnant ideas and
+crumbling institutions of the effete Middle Ages, with but a vague
+half-consciousness of their own nature, the Italians walked calmly
+through a life as well arranged as their great towns, bold, inquisitive,
+and sceptical: modern administrators, modern soldiers, modern
+politicians, modern financiers, scholars, and thinkers. Towards the end
+of the fifteenth century, Italy seemed to have obtained the philosophic,
+literary, and artistic inheritance of Greece; the administrative, legal,
+and military inheritance of Rome, increased threefold by her own strong,
+original, essentially modern activities.
+
+Yet, at that very time, and almost in proportion as all these advantages
+developed, the moral vitality of the Italians was rapidly decreasing,
+and a horrible moral gangrene beginning to spread: liberty was
+extinguished; public good faith seemed to be dying out; even private
+morality flickered ominously; every free State became subject to a
+despot, always unscrupulous and often infamous; warfare became a mere
+pretext for the rapine and extortions of mercenaries; diplomacy grew to
+be a mere swindle; the humanists inoculated literature with the
+filthiest refuse cast up by antiquity; nay, even civic and family ties
+were loosened; assassinations and fratricides began to abound, and all
+law, human and divine, to be set at defiance.
+
+The nations who came into contact with the Italians opened their eyes
+with astonishment, with mingled admiration and terror; and we, people of
+the nineteenth century, are filled with the same feeling, only much
+stronger and more defined, as we watch the strange ebullition of the
+Renaissance, seething with good and evil, as we contemplate the
+enigmatic picture drawn by the puzzled historian, the picture of a
+people moving on towards civilization and towards chaos. Our first
+feeling is perplexity; our second feeling, anger; we do not at first
+know whether we ought to believe in such an anomaly; when once we do
+believe in it, we are indignant at its existence. We accuse these
+Italians of the Renaissance of having wilfully and shamefully perverted
+their own powers, of having wantonly corrupted their own civilization,
+of having cynically destroyed their own national existence, of having
+boldly called down the vengeance of Heaven; we lament and we accuse,
+naturally enough, but perhaps not justly.
+
+Let us ask ourselves what the Renaissance really was, and what was its
+use; how it was produced, and how it necessarily ended. Let us try to
+understand its inherent nature, and the nature of what surrounded it,
+which, taken together, constitute its inevitable fate; let us seek the
+explanation of that strange, anomalous civilization, of that life in
+death, and death in life. The Renaissance, inasmuch as it is something
+which we can define, and not a mere vague name for a certain epoch, is
+not a period, but a condition; and if we apply the word to any period in
+particular, it is because in it that condition was peculiarly marked.
+
+The Renaissance may be defined as being that phase in mediæval history
+in which the double influence, feudal and ecclesiastic, which had
+gradually crushed the spontaneous life of the early mediæval revival,
+and reduced all to a dead, sterile mass, was neutralized by the
+existence of democratic and secular communities; that phase in which,
+while there existed not yet any large nations, or any definite national
+feeling, there existed free towns and civic democracies. In this sense
+the Renaissance began to exist with the earliest mediæval revival, but
+its peculiar mission could be carried out only when that general revival
+had come to an end. In this sense, also, the Renaissance did not exist
+all over Italy, and it existed outside Italy; but in Italy it was far
+more universal than elsewhere: there it was the rule, elsewhere the
+exception. There was no Renaissance in Savoy, nor in Naples, nor even in
+Rome; but north of the Alps there was Renaissance only in individual
+towns like Nürnberg, Augsburg, Bruges, Ghent, &c. In the North the
+Renaissance is dotted about amidst the stagnant Middle Ages; in Italy
+the Middle Ages intersect and interrupt the Renaissance here and there:
+the consequence was that in the North the Renaissance was crushed by the
+Middle Ages, whereas in Italy the Middle Ages were crushed by the
+Renaissance. Wherever there was a free town, without direct dependence
+on feudal or ecclesiastical institutions, governed by its own citizens,
+subsisting by its own industry and commerce; wherever the burghers built
+walls, slung chains across their streets, and raised their own
+cathedral; wherever, be it in Germany, in Flanders, or in England, there
+was a suspension of the deadly influences of the later Middle Ages;
+there, to greater or less extent, was the Renaissance.
+
+But in the North this rudimentary Renaissance was never suffered to
+spread beyond the walls of single towns; it was hemmed in on all sides
+by feudal and ecclesiastical institutions, which restrained it within
+definite limits. The free towns of Germany were mostly dependent upon
+their bishops or archbishops; the more politically important cities of
+Flanders were under the suzerainty of a feudal family; they were subject
+to constant vexations from their suzerains, and their very existence was
+endangered by an attempt at independence; Liege was well-nigh destroyed
+by the supporters of her bishop, and Ghent was ruined by the revenge of
+the Duke of Burgundy. In these northern cities, therefore, the
+commonwealth was restricted to a sort of mercantile
+corporation--powerful within the town, but powerless without it; while
+outside the town reigned feudalism, with its robber nobles, free
+companies, and bands of outlawed peasants, from whom the merchant
+princes of Bruges and Nürnberg could scarcely protect their wares. To
+this political feebleness and narrowness corresponded an intellectual
+weakness and pettiness: the burghers were mere self-ruling tradesfolk;
+their interests did not extend far beyond their shops and their houses;
+literature was cramped in guilds, and reflection and imagination were
+confined within the narrow limits of town life. Everything was on a
+small scale; the Renaissance was moderate and inefficient, running no
+great dangers and achieving no great conquests. There was not enough
+action to produce reaction; and, while the Italian free States were
+ground down by foreign tyrannies, the German and Flemish cities
+insensibly merged into the vast empire of the House of Austria. While
+also the Italians of the sixteenth century rushed into moral and
+religious confusion, which only Jesuitism could discipline, the Germans
+of the same time quietly and comfortably adopted the Reformation.
+
+The main cause of this difference, the main explanation of the fact that
+while in the North the Renaissance was cramped and enfeebled, in Italy
+it carried everything before it, lies in the circumstance that feudalism
+never took deep root in Italy. The conquered Latin race was enfeebled,
+it is true, but it was far more civilized than the conquering Teutonic
+peoples; the Barbarians came down, not on to a previous layer of
+Barbarians, but on to a deep layer of civilized men; the nomads of the
+North found in Italy a people weakened and corrupt, but with a long and
+inextinguishable habit of independence, of order, of industry. The
+country had been cultivated for centuries, the Barbarians could not turn
+it into a desert; the inhabitants had been organized as citizens for a
+thousand years, the Barbarians could not reorganize them feudally. The
+Barbarians who settled in Italy, especially the latest of them, the
+Lombards, were not only in a minority, but at an immense disadvantage.
+They founded kingdoms and dukedoms, where German was spoken and German
+laws were enacted; but whenever they tried to communicate with their
+Italian subjects, they found themselves forced to adopt the Latin
+language, manners, and laws; their domination became real only in
+proportion as it ceased to be Teutonic, and the Barbarian element was
+swallowed up by what remained of Roman civilization. Little by little
+these Lombard monarchies, without roots in the soil, and surrounded by
+hostile influences, died out, and there remained of the invaders only a
+certain number of nobles, those whose descendants were to bear the
+originally German names of Gherardesca, Rolandinghi, Soffredinghi,
+Lambertazzi, Guidi, and whose suzerains were the Bavarian and Swabian
+dukes and marquises of Tuscan. Meanwhile the Latin element revived;
+towns were rebuilt; a new Latin language was formed; and the burghers of
+these young communities gradually wrested franchises and privileges from
+the weak Teutonic rulers, who required Italian agriculture, industry,
+and commerce, without which they and their feudal retainers would have
+starved. Feudalism became speedily limited to the hilly country; the
+plain became the property of the cities which it surrounded; the nobles
+turned into mere robber chieftains, then into mercenary soldiers, and
+finally, as the towns gained importance, they gradually descended into
+the cities and begged admission into the guilds of artizans and
+tradesfolk. Thus they grew into citizens and Italians; but for a long
+time they kept hankering after feudalism, and looking towards the German
+emperors who claimed the inheritance of the Lombard kings. The struggle
+between Guelphs and Ghibellines, between the German feudal element and
+the Latin civic one, ended in the complete annihilation of the former in
+all the north and centre of Italy. The nobles sank definitely into
+merchants, and those who persisted in keeping their castles were
+speedily ousted by the commissaries of the free towns. Such is the
+history of feudalism in Italy--the history of Barbarian minority
+engulphed in Latin civilization; of Teutonic counts and dukes turned
+into robber nobles, hunted into the hills by the townsfolk, and finally
+seeking admission into the guilds of wool-spinners or money-changers;
+and in it is the main explanation of the fact that the Italian
+republics, instead of remaining restricted within their city walls like
+those of the North, spread over whole provinces, and became real
+politically organized States. And in such States having a free
+political, military, and commercial life, uncramped by ecclesiastic or
+feudal influence, in them alone could the great revival of human
+intelligence and character thoroughly succeed. The commune was the only
+species of free government possible during the Middle Ages, the only
+form which could resist that utterly prostrating action of later
+mediævalism. Feudalism stamped out civilization; monasticism warped it;
+in the open country it was burnt, trampled on, and uprooted; in the
+cloister it withered and shrank and perished; only within the walls of a
+city, protected from the storm without, and yet in the fresh atmosphere
+of life, could it develope, flourish, and bear fruit.
+
+But this system of the free town contained in itself, as does every
+other institution, the seed of death--contained it in that expanding
+element which developes, ripens, rots, and finally dissolves all living
+organisms. A little town is formed in the midst of some feudal state, as
+Pisa, Florence, Lucca, and Bologna were formed in the dominions of the
+lords of Tuscany; the _elders_ govern it; it is protected from without;
+it obtains privileges from its suzerain, always glad to oppose anything
+to his vassals, and who, unlike them, is too far removed in the feudal
+scale to injure the commune, which is under his supreme jurisdiction but
+not in his land. The town can thus develope regularly, governing itself,
+taxing itself, defending itself against encroaching neighbours; it
+gradually extends beyond its own walls, liberates its peasantry, extends
+its commerce, extinguishes feudalism, beats back its suzerain or buys
+privileges from him; in short, lives the vigorous young life of the
+early Italian commonwealths. But now the danger begins. The original
+system of government, where every head of a family is a power in the
+State, where every man helps to govern, without representation or
+substitution, could exist only as long as the commune remained small
+enough for the individual to be in proportion with it; as long as the
+State remained small enough for all its citizens to assemble in the
+market-place and vote, for every man to know every detail of the
+administration, every inch of the land. When the limits were extended,
+the burgher had to deal with towns and villages and men and things which
+he did not know, and which he probably hated, as every small community
+hated its neighbour; witness the horrible war, lasting centuries,
+between the two little towns of Dinant and Bouvines on the Meuse. Still
+more was this the case with an important city: the subjugated town was
+hated all the more for being a rival centre; the burghers of Florence,
+inspired only by their narrow town interest, treated Pisa according to
+its dictates, that is, tried to stamp it out. Thence the victorious
+communes came to be surrounded by conquered communes, which they dared
+not trust with any degree of power; and which, instead of being so many
+allies in case of invasion, were merely focuses of revolt, or at best
+inert impediments. Similarly, when the communes enlarged, and found it
+indispensable to delegate special men, who could attend to political
+matters more thoroughly than the other citizens, they were constantly
+falling under the tyranny of their _captains of the people_, of their
+_gonfalonieri_, and of all other heads of the State; or else, as in
+Florence, they were frightened by this continual danger into a system of
+perpetual interference with the executive, which was thus rendered
+well-nigh helpless. To this rule Venice forms the only exception, on
+account of her exceptional position and history: the earliest burghers
+turning into an intensely conservative and civic aristocracy, while
+everywhere else the feudal nobles turned into petty burghers, entirely
+subversive of communal interests. Venice had the yet greater safeguard
+of being protected both from her victorious enemies and her own
+victorious generals; who, however powerful on the mainland, could not
+seriously endanger the city itself, which thus remained a centre of
+reorganization in time of disaster. In this Venice was entirely unique,
+as she was unique in the duration of her institutions and independence.
+In the other towns of Italy, where there existed no naturally governing
+family or class, where every citizen had an equal share in government,
+and there existed no distinction save that of wealth and influence,
+there was a constant tendency to the illegitimate preponderance of every
+man or every family that rose above the average; and in a democratic,
+mercantile State, not a day passed without some such elevation. In a
+systematic, consolidated State, where the power is in the hands of a
+hereditary sovereign or aristocracy, a rich merchant remains a rich
+merchant, a victorious general remains a victorious general, an eloquent
+orator remains an eloquent orator; but in a shapeless, flunctuating
+democracy like those of Italy, the man who has influence over his
+fellow-citizens, whether by his money, his soldiers, or his eloquence,
+necessarily becomes the head of the State; everything is free and
+unoccupied, only a little superior strength is required to push into it.
+Cosimo de' Medici has many clients, many correspondents, many debtors;
+he can bind people by pecuniary obligations: he becomes prince. Sforza
+has a victorious army, whom he can either hound on to the city or
+restrain into a protection of its interests: he becomes prince.
+Savonarola has eloquence that makes the virtuous start up and the wicked
+tremble: he becomes prince. The history of the Italian commonwealths
+shows us but one thing: the people, the only legal possessors of
+political power, giving it over to their bankers (Medici, Pepoli); to
+their generals (Della Torre, Visconti, Scaligeri); to their monkish
+reformers (Fra Bussolaro, Fra Giovanni da Vincenza, Savonarola). Here
+then we have the occasional but inevitable usurpers, who either
+momentarily or finally disorganize the State. But this is not all. In
+such a State every family hate, every mercantile hostility, means a
+corresponding political division. The guilds are sure to be rivals, the
+larger wishing to exclude the smaller from government: the lower working
+classes (the _ciompi_ of Florence) wish to upset the guilds completely;
+the once feudal nobles wish to get back military power; the burghers
+wish entirely to extirpate the feudal nobles; the older families wish to
+limit the Government, the newer prefer democracy and Cæsarism. Add to
+this the complications of private interests, the personal jealousies and
+aversions, the private warfare, inevitable in a town where legal justice
+is not always to be had, while forcible retaliation is always within
+reach; and the result is constant party spirit, insults, scuffles,
+conspiracies: the feudal nobles build towers in the streets, the
+burghers pull them down; the lower artizans set fire to the warehouses
+of the guilds, the magistrates take part in the contest; blood is spilt,
+magistrates are beheaded or thrown out of windows, a foreign State is
+entreated to interfere, and a number of citizens are banished by the
+victorious party. This latter result creates a new and terrible danger
+for the State, in the persons of so many exiles, ready to do anything,
+to join with any one, in order to return to the city and drive out their
+enemies in their turn. The end of such constant upheavings is that the
+whole population is disarmed, no party suffering its rival to have any
+means of offence or defence. Moreover, as industry and commerce
+develope, the citizens become unwilling to fight, while on the other
+hand the invention of firearms, subverting the whole system of warfare,
+renders special military training more and more necessary. In the days
+of the Lombard League, of Campaldino and Montaperti, the citizens could
+fight, hand to hand, round their _carroccio_ or banner, without much
+discipline being required; but when it came to fortifying towns against
+cannon, to drilling bodies of heavily armed cavalry, acting by the mere
+dexterity of their movements; when war became a science and an art, then
+the citizen had necessarily to be left out, and adventurers and poor
+nobles had to form armies of mercenaries, making warfare their sole
+profession. This system of mercenary troops, so bitterly inveighed
+against by Machiavelli (who, of course, entirely overlooked its
+inevitable origin and viewed it as a voluntarily incurred pest), added
+yet another and, perhaps, the very worst danger to civil liberty. It
+gave enormous, irresistible power to adventurers unscrupulous by nature
+and lawless by education, the sole object of whose career it became to
+obtain possession of States; by no means a difficult enterprise,
+considering that they and their fellows were the sole possessors of
+military force in the country. At the same time, this system of
+mercenaries perfected the condition of utter defencelessness in which
+the gradual subjection of rival cities, the violent party spirit, and
+the general disarming of the burghers, had placed the great Italian
+cities. For these troops, being wholly indifferent as to the cause for
+which they were fighting, turned war into the merest game of
+dodges--half-a-dozen men being killed at a great battle like that of
+Anghiari--and they at the same time protracted campaigns beyond every
+limit, without any decisive action taking place. The result of all these
+inevitable causes of ruin, was that most of the commonwealths fell into
+the hands of despots; while those that did not were paralyzed by
+interior factions, by a number of rebellious subject towns, and by
+generals who, even if they did not absolutely betray their employers,
+never efficiently served them.
+
+Such a condition of civic disorder lasted throughout the Middle Ages,
+until the end of the fifteenth century, without any further evils
+arising from it. The Italians made endless wars with each other,
+conquered each other, changed their government without end, fell into
+the power of tyrants; but throughout these changes their civilization
+developed unimpeded; because, although one of the centres of national
+life might be momentarily crushed, the others remained in activity, and
+infused vitality even into the feeble one, which would otherwise have
+perished. All these ups and downs seemed but to stir the life in the
+country: and no vital danger appeared to threaten it; nor did any, so
+long as the surrounding countries--France, Germany, and Spain--remained
+mere vast feudal nebulae, formless, weightless, immovable. The Italians
+feared nothing from them; they would call down the King of France or the
+Emperor of Germany without a moment's hesitation, because they knew that
+the king could not bring France, nor the emperor bring Germany, but only
+a few miserable, hungry retainers with him; but Florence would watch the
+growth of the petty State of the Scaligers, and Venice look with terror
+at the Duke of Milan, because they knew that _there_ there was
+concentrated life, and an organization which could be wielded as'
+perfectly as a sword by the head of the State. In the last decade of the
+fifteenth century the Italians called in the French to put down their
+private enemies: Lodovico of Milan called down Charles VIII. to rid him
+of his nephew and of the Venetians; the Venetians to rid them of
+Lodovico: the Medici to establish them firmly in Florence; the party of
+freedom to drive out the Medici. Each State intended to use the French
+to serve their purpose, and then to send back Charles VIII. with a
+little money and a great deal of derision, as they had done with kings
+and emperors of earlier days. But Italian politicians suddenly
+discovered that they had made a fatal mistake; that they had reckoned in
+ignorance, and that instead of an army they had called down a nation:
+for during the interval since their last appeal to foreign interference,
+that great movement had taken place which had consolidated the
+heterogeneous feudal nebulae into homogeneous and compact kingdoms.
+
+Single small States, relying upon mercenary troops, could not for a
+moment resist the shock of such an agglomeration of soldiery as that of
+the French, and of their successors the Spaniards and Germans. Sismondi
+asks indignantly, Why did the Italians not form a federation as soon as
+the strangers appeared? He might as well ask, Why did the commonwealths
+not turn into a modern monarchy? The habit of security from abroad and
+of jealousy within; the essential nature of a number of rival trading
+centres, made such a thing not only impossible of execution, but for a
+while impossible of conception; confederacies had become possible only
+when Burlamacchi was decapitated by the imperialists; popular resistance
+had become a reality only when Feruccio was massacred by the Spaniards;
+a change of national institutions was feasible only when all national
+institutions had been destroyed; when the Italians, having recognized
+the irresistible force of their adversaries, had ceased to form
+independent States and larger and smaller guilds; when all the
+characteristics of Italian civilization had been destroyed; when, in
+short, it was too late to do anything save theorize with Machiavelli and
+Guicciardini as to what ought to have been done. We must not hastily
+accuse the volition of the Italians of the Renaissance; they may have
+been egotistic and timid, but had they been (as some most certainly
+were) heroic and self-sacrificing to the utmost degree, they could not
+have averted the catastrophe. The nature of their civilization prevented
+not only their averting the peril, but even their conceiving its
+existence; the very nature of their political forms necessitated such a
+dissolution of them. The commune grows from within; it is a little speck
+which gradually extends its circumference, and the further this may be
+from the original centre, the less do its parts coalesce. The modern
+monarchy grows from external pressure, and towards the centre; it is a
+huge mass consolidating into a hard, distinct shape. Thence it follows
+that the more the commonwealth developes, the weaker it grows, because
+its tendency is to spread and fall to pieces; whereas the more the
+monarchy developes, the stronger it becomes, because it fills up towards
+the centre, and becomes more vigorously knit together. The city ceases
+to be a city when extended over hundreds of miles; the nation becomes
+all the more a nation for being compressed towards a central point.
+
+The entire political collapse of Italy in the sixteenth century was not
+only inevitable, from the essential nature of the civilization of the
+Renaissance, but it was also indispensable in order that this
+civilization might fulfil its mission. Civilization cannot spread so
+long as it is contained within a national mould, and only a vanquished
+nation can civilize its victors. The Greece of Pericles could not
+Hellenize Rome, but the Greece of the weak successors of Alexander
+could; the Rome of Cæsar did not Romanize the Teutonic races as did the
+Rome of Theodosius; no amount of colonizing among the vanquished can
+ever produce the effect of a victorious army, of a whole nation,
+suddenly finding itself in the midst of the superior civilization of a
+conquered people. Michelet may well call the campaign of Charles VIII.
+the discovery of Italy. His imaginative mind seized at once the vast
+importance of this descent of the French into Italy, which other
+historians have been too prone to view in the same light as any other
+invasion. It is from this moment that dates the _modernisation_, if we
+may so express ourselves, of the North. The barbarous soldiers of Gaston
+de Foix, of Frundsberg, and of Gonsalvo, were the unconscious bearers of
+the seeds of the ages of Elizabeth, of Louis XIV., and of Goethe. These
+stupid and rapacious ruffians, while they wantonly destroyed the works
+of Italian civilization, rendered possible the existence of a Montaigne,
+a Shakespeare, and a Cervantes.
+
+Italy was as a vast store-house, sheltered from all the dangers of
+mediæval destruction; in which, while all other nations were blindly and
+fiercely working out their national existence, the inheritance of
+Antiquity and the produce of the earliest modern civilization had been
+peaceably garnered up. When the store-house was full, its gates had to
+be torn open and its riches plundered and disseminated by the
+intellectual starvelings of the North; thus only could the rest of
+mankind feed on these riches, regain and develope their mental life.
+
+What were those intellectual riches of the Renaissance? What was that
+strong intellectual food which revived the energies and enriched the
+blood of the Barbarians of the sixteenth century? The Renaissance
+possessed the germs of every modern thing, and much that was far more
+than a mere germ: it possessed the habit of equality before the law, of
+civic organization, of industry and commerce developed to immense and
+superb proportions. It possessed science, literature, and art; above
+all, that which at once produced and was produced by all these--thorough
+perception of what exists, thorough consciousness of our own freedom and
+powers: self-cognizance. In Italy there was intellectual light, enabling
+men to see and judge all around them, enabling them to act wittingly and
+deliberately. In this lies the immense greatness of the Renaissance; to
+this are due all its achievements in literature and science, and, above
+all, in art: that, for the first time since the dissolution of antique
+civilization, men were free agents, both in thought and in deed; that
+there was an end of that palsying slavery of the Middle Ages, slavery of
+body and of mind, slavery to stultified ideas and effete forms, which
+made men endure every degree of evil and believe every degree of
+absurdity. For the first time since Antiquity, man walks free of all
+political and intellectual trammels, erect, conscious of his own
+thoughts, master of his own actions; ready to seek for truth across the
+ocean like Columbus, or across the heavens like Copernicus; to seek it
+in criticism and analysis like Machiavelli or Guicciardini, boldly to
+reproduce it in its highest, widest sense like Michael Angelo and
+Raphael.
+
+The men of the Renaissance had to pay a heavy price for this
+intellectual freedom and self-cognizance which they not only enjoyed
+themselves, but transmitted to the rest of the world; the price was the
+loss of all moral standard, of all fixed public feeling. They had thrown
+aside all accepted rules and criteria, they had cast away all faith in
+traditional institutions, they had destroyed, and could not yet rebuild.
+In their instinctive and universal disbelief in all that had been taught
+them, they lost all respect for opinion, for rule, for what had been
+called right and wrong. Could it be otherwise? Had they not discovered
+that what had been called right had often been unnatural, and what had
+been called wrong often natural? Moral teachings, remonstrances, and
+judgments belonged to that dogmatism from which they had broken loose;
+to those schools and churches where the foolish and the unnatural had
+been taught and worshipped; to those priests and monks who themselves
+most shamefully violated their teachings. To profess morality was to be
+a hypocrite; to reprobate others was to be narrow-minded. There was so
+much error mixed up with truth that truth had to share the discredit of
+error; so many innocent things had been denounced as sins that sinful
+ones at length ceased to be reprobated; people had so often found
+themselves sympathizing with supposed criminals, that they soon lost
+their horror of real ones. Damnation came to be disassociated from moral
+indignation: it was the retribution, not of the unnatural and immoral,
+but of the unlawful; and unlawful with respect to a law made without
+reference to reason and instinct. As reason and instinct were thus set
+at defiance, but could not be silenced, the law was soon acquiesced in
+without being morally supported; thus, little by little, moral feeling
+became warped. This was already the case in Dante's day. Farinata is
+condemned to the most horrible punishment, which to Dante seems just,
+because in accordance with an accepted code; yet Dante cannot but admire
+him and cannot really hate him, for there is nothing in him to hate; he
+is a criminal and yet respected--fatal combination! Dante punishes
+Francesca, Pier delle Vigne, and Brunetto Latini, but he shows no
+personal horror of them; in the one case his moral instinct refrains
+from censuring the comparatively innocent, in the other it has ceased to
+revolt from the really infamous. Where Dante does feel real indignation,
+is most often in cases unprovided for by the religious codes, as with
+those low, grovelling, timid natures (the very same with whom
+Machiavelli, the admirer of great villains, fairly loses patience),
+those creatures whom Dante personally despises, whom he punishes with
+filthy devices of his own, whom he passes by with words such as he never
+addresses to Semiramis, Brutus, or Capaneus. This toleration of vice,
+while acquiescing in its legal punishment, increased in proportion to
+the development of individual judgment, and did not cease till all the
+theories of the lawful and unlawful had been so completely demolished as
+to permit of their being rebuilt on solid bases.
+
+This work of demolition had not yet ceased in the beginning of the
+sixteenth century; and the moral confusion due to it was increased by
+various causes dependent on political and other circumstances. The
+despots in whose hands it was the inevitable fate of the various
+commonwealths to fall, were by their very position immoral in all their
+dealings: violent, fraudulent, suspicious, and, from their life of
+constant unnatural tension of the feelings, prone to every species of
+depravity; while, on the other hand, in the feudal parts of Italy--which
+had merely received a superficial Renaissance varnish imported from
+other places with painters and humanists--in Naples, Rome, and the
+greater part of Umbria and the Marches, the upper classes had got into
+that monstrous condition which seems to have been the inevitable final
+product of feudalism, and which, while it gave France her Armagnacs, her
+Foix, and her Retz, gave Italy their counterparts in her hideously
+depraved princelets, the Malatestas, Varanos, Vitelli, and Baglioni.
+Both these classes of men, despots and feudal nobles, had a wide field
+for their ambition among the necessarily dissolved civic institutions;
+and their easy success contributed to confirm the general tendency of
+the day to say with Commines, "Qui a le succès a l'honneur," and to
+confound these two words and ideas. Nor was this yet all: the men of the
+Renaissance discovered the antique world, and in their wild, blind
+enthusiasm, in their ardent, insatiable thirst for its literature,
+swallowed it eagerly, dregs and all, till they were drunk and poisoned.
+
+These are the main causes of the immorality of the Renaissance: first,
+the general disbelief in all accepted doctrines, due to the falseness
+and unnaturalness of those hitherto prevalent; secondly, the success of
+unscrupulous talent in a condition of political disorder; thirdly, the
+wholesale and unjudging enthusiasm for all that remained of Antiquity,
+good or bad. These three great causes, united in a general intellectual
+ebullition, are the explanation of the worst feature of the Renaissance:
+not the wickedness of numberless single individuals, but the universal
+toleration of it by the people at large. Men like Sigismondo Malatesta,
+Sixtus IV., Alexander VI., and Cæsar Borgia might be passed over as
+exceptions, as monstrous aberrations which cannot affect our judgment of
+their time and nation; but the general indifference towards their vices
+shown by their contemporaries and countrymen is a conclusive and
+terrible proof of the moral chaos of the Renaissance. It is just the
+presence of so much instinctive simplicity and virtue, of childlike
+devotion to great objects, of patriarchal simplicity of manners, of all
+that is loveable in the books of men like Vespasiano da Bisticci and
+Leon Battista Albert; of so much that seems like the realization of the
+idyllic home and merchant life of Schiller's "Song of the Bell," by the
+side of all the hideous lawlessness and vice of the despots and
+humanists; that makes the Renaissance so drearily painful a spectacle.
+The presence of the good does not console us for that of the evil,
+because it neither mitigates nor even shrinks from it; we merely lose
+our pleasure in the good nature and simplicity of Æneas Sylvius when we
+see his cool admiration for a man of fraud and violence like Sforza; we
+begin to mistrust the purity and integrity of the upright Guarino da
+Verona when we hear his lenient judgment of the infamous Beccadelli; we
+require of the virtuous that they should not only be incapable of vice,
+but abhorrent of it; and this is what even the best men of the
+Renaissance rarely were.
+
+Such a state of moral chaos there has constantly been when an old effete
+mode of thought required to be destroyed. Such work is always attended,
+in greater or less degree, by this subversion of all recognized
+authority, this indifference to evil, this bold tasting of the
+forbidden. In the eighteenth century France plays the same part that was
+played in the fifteenth by Italy: again we meet the rebellion against
+all that has been consecrated by time and belief, the toleration of
+evil, the praise of the abominable, in the midst of the search for the
+good. These two have been the great fever epochs of modern history;
+fever necessary for a subsequent steady growth. Both gave back truth to
+man, and man to nature, at the expense of temporary moral uncertainty
+and ruthless destruction. The Renaissance reinstated the individual in
+his human dignity, as a thinking, feeling, and acting being; the
+Eighteenth Century reconstructed society as a homogeneous free
+existence; both at the expense of individual degradation and social
+disorder. Both were moments of ebullition in which horrible things rose
+to the surface, but after which what remained was purer than it had ever
+been before.
+
+This is no plea for the immorality of the Renaissance: evil is none the
+less evil for being inevitable and necessary; but it is nevertheless
+well that we should understand its necessity. It certainly is a terrible
+admission, but one which must be made, that evil is part of the
+mechanism for producing good; and had the arrangement of the universe
+been entrusted to us, benevolent and equitable people of an enlightened
+age, there would doubtless have been invented some system of evolution
+and progression differing from the one which includes such machinery as
+hurricanes and pestilences, carnage and misery, superstition and
+license, Renaissance and Eighteenth Century. But unfortunately Nature
+was organized in a less charitable and intelligent fashion; and, among
+other evils required for the final attainment of good, we find that of
+whole generations of men being condemned to moral uncertainty and error
+in order that other generations may enjoy knowledge peacefully and
+guiltlessly. Let us remember this, and let us be more generous towards
+the men who were wicked that we might be enlightened. Above all, let us
+bear in mind, in judging the Renaissance, that the sacrifice which it
+represents could be useful only in so far as it was complete and
+irretrievable. Let us remember that the communal system of government,
+on whose development the Renaissance mainly depended, inevitably
+perished in proportion as it developed; that the absolute subjugation of
+Italy by Barbarous nations was requisite to the dissemination of the
+civilization thus obtained; that the Italians were politically
+annihilated before they had time to recover a normal condition, and were
+given up crushed and broken spirited, to be taught righteousness by
+Spaniards and Jesuits. That, in short, while the morality of the
+Italians was sacrificed to obtain the knowledge on which modern society
+depends, the political existence of Italy was sacrificed to the
+diffusion of that knowledge, and that the nation was not only doomed to
+immorality, but doomed also to the inability to reform. Perhaps, if we
+think of all this, and weigh the tremendous sacrifice to which we owe
+our present intellectual advantages, we may still feel sad, but sad
+rather with remorse than with indignation, in contemplating the
+condition of Italy in the first years of the sixteenth century; in
+looking down from our calm, safe, scientific position, on the murder of
+the Italian Renaissance: great and noble at heart, cut off pitilessly at
+its prime; denied even an hour to repent and amend; hurried off before
+the tribunal of posterity, suddenly, unexpectedly, and still bearing its
+weight of unexpiated, unrecognized guilt.
+
+
+
+
+THE ITALY OF THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
+
+
+I.
+
+The chroniclers of the last years of the fifteenth century have recorded
+how the soldiery of Charles VIII. of France amused the tedious leisure
+of their sullen and suspicious occupation of Rome, by erecting in the
+camp a stage of planks, and performing thereon a rude mystery-play. The
+play thus improvised by a handful of troopers before this motley
+invading army: before the feudal cavalry of Burgundy, strange steel
+monsters, half bird, half reptile, with steel beaked and winged helmets
+and claw-like steel shoes, and jointed steel corselet and rustling steel
+mail coat; before the infantry of Gascony, rapid and rapacious with
+their tattered doublets and rag-bound feet; before the over-fed,
+immensely plumed, and slashed and furbelowed giants of Switzerland, and
+the starved, half-naked savages of Brittany and the Marches--before this
+multifaced, many-speeched army, gathered from the rich cities of the
+North and the devastated fields of the South, and the wilds and rocks of
+the West and the East, alike in nothing save in its wonder and dread and
+delight and horror at this strange invaded Italy--the play performed for
+the entertainment of this encamped army was no ordinary play. No clerkly
+allegorical morality; no mouthing and capering market-place farce; no
+history of Joseph and his brethren, of the birth of the Saviour, or of
+the temptations of St. Anthony. It was the half-allegorical,
+half-dramatic representation of the reigning Borgia pope and his
+children; it was the rude and hesitating moulding into dramatic shape of
+those terrible rumours of simony and poison, of lust and of violence, of
+mysterious death and abominable love, which had met the invaders as they
+had first set their feet in Italy; which had become louder and clearer
+with every onward step through the peninsula, and now circulated around
+them, with frightful distinctness, in the very capital of Christ's vicar
+on earth. This blundering mystery-play of the French troopers is the
+earliest imaginative fruit of that first terrified and fascinated
+glimpse of the men of the barbarous North at the strange Italy of the
+Renaissance; it is the first manifestation of that strong tragic impulse
+due to the sudden sight, by rude and imaginative young nations, of the
+splendid and triumphant wickedness of Italy.
+
+The French saw, wondered, shuddered, and played upon their camp stage
+the tragedy of the Borgias. But the French remained in Italy, became
+familiar with its ways, and soon merely shrugged their shoulders and
+smiled where they had once stared in horror. They served under the flags
+of Sforzas, Borgias, Baglionis, and Vitellis, by the side of the bravos
+of Naples and Umbria; they saw their princes wed the daughters of
+evil-famed Italian sovereigns, and their princes' children, their own
+Valois and Guises, develope into puny, ambiguous, and ominous Medicis
+and Gonzagas, surrounded by Italian minions and poison distillers, and
+buffoons and money-lenders. The French of the sixteenth century, during
+their long Neapolitan and Lombard wars and negotiations, and time to
+learn all that Italy could teach; to become refined, subtle,
+indifferent, and cynical: bastard Italians, with the bastard Italian art
+of Goujon and Philibert Delorme, and the bastard Italian poetry of Du
+Bellay and Ronsard. The French of the sixteenth century therefore
+translated Machiavel and Ariosto and Bandello; but they never again
+attempted such another play as that which they had improvised while
+listening to the tales of Alexander VI. and Cæsar and Lucrezia, in their
+camp in the meadows behind Sant' Angelo. The Spaniards then came to
+Italy, and the Germans: strong mediæval nations, like the French, with
+the creative power of the Middle Ages still in them, refreshed by the
+long rest of the dull fifteenth century. But Spaniards and Germans came
+as mere greedy and besotten and savage mercenaries: the scum of their
+countries, careless of Italian sights and deeds, thinking only of
+torturing for hidden treasure, or swilling southern wines; and they
+returned to Spain and to Germany, to persecutions of Moriscos and
+plundering of abbeys, as savage and as dull as they had arrived. A
+smattering of Italian literature, art, and manners was carried back to
+Spain and Germany by Spanish and German princes and governors, to be
+transmitted to a few courtiers and humanists; but the imagination of the
+lower classes of Spain and of Germany, absorbed in the Quixotic
+Catholicism of Loyola and the biblical contemplation of Luther, never
+came into fertilizing contact with the decaying Italy of the
+Renaissance.
+
+The mystery-play of the soldiers of Charles VIII. seemed destined to
+remain an isolated and abortive attempt. But it was not so. The
+invasions had exhausted themselves; the political organization of Italy
+was definitely broken up; its material wealth was exhausted; the French,
+Germans, and Spaniards had come and gone, and returned and gone again;
+they had left nothing to annex or to pillage; when, about the middle of
+the sixteenth century, the country began to be overrun by a new horde of
+barbarians: the English. The English came neither as invaders nor as
+marauders; they were peaceable students and rich noblemen, who, so far
+from trying to extort money or annex territory, rather profited the
+ruined Italians by the work which they did and the money which they
+squandered. Yet these quiet and profitable travellers, before whom the
+Italians might safely display their remaining wealth, were in reality as
+covetous of the possessions of Italy and as resolute to return home
+enriched as any tattered Gascon men-at-arms or gluttonous Swiss or
+grinding Spaniards. They were, one and all, consciously and
+unconsciously, dragged to Italy by the irresistible instinct that Italy
+possessed that which they required; by the greed of intellectual gain.
+That which they thus instinctively knew that Italy possessed, that which
+they must obtain, was a mode of thought, a habit of form; philosophy,
+art, civilization: all the materials for intellectual manipulation. For,
+in the sixteenth century, on awakening from its long evil sleep, haunted
+by the nightmare of civil war, of the fifteenth century, the English
+mind had started up in the vigour of well-nigh mature youth, fed up and
+rested by the long inactivity in which it had slept through its period
+of assimilation and growth. It had awakened at the first touch of
+foreign influence, and had grown with every fresh contact with the outer
+world: with the first glance at Plato and Xenophon suddenly opened by
+Erasmus and Colet, at the Bible suddenly opened by Cranmer; it had grown
+with its sob of indignation at the sight of the burning faggots
+surrounding the martyrs, with its joyous heart-throbs at the sight of
+the seas and islands of the New World; it had grown with the sudden
+passionate strain of every nerve and every muscle when the galleys of
+Philip had been sighted in the Channel. And when it had paused, taken
+breath, and looked calmly around it, after the tumult of all these
+sights and sounds and actions, the English mind, in the time of
+Elizabeth, had found itself of a sudden full-grown and blossomed out
+into superb manhood, with burning activities and indefatigable powers.
+But it had found itself without materials for work. Of the scholastic
+philosophy and the chivalric poetry of the Middle Ages there remained
+but little that could be utilized: the few bungled formulæ, the few
+half-obsolete rhymes still remaining, were as unintelligible, in their
+spirit of feudalism and monasticism and mysticism, as were the Angevin
+English and the monkish Latin in which they were written to these men of
+the sixteenth century. All the intellectual wealth of England remained
+to be created; but it could not be created out of nothing. Spenser,
+Shakespeare, and Bacon could not be produced out of the half-effete
+and scattered fragments of Chaucer, of Scotus, and of Wycliffe. The
+materials on which English genius was to work must be sought abroad, and
+abroad they could be found only in Italy. For in the demolished Italy of
+the sixteenth century lay the whole intellectual wealth of the world:
+the great legacy of Antiquity, the great work of the Middle Ages had
+been stored up, and had been increased threefold, and sorted and
+classified by the Renaissance; and now that the national edifice had
+been dismantled and dilapidated, and the national activity was
+languishing, it all lay in confusion, awaiting only the hand of those
+who would carry it away and use it once more. To Italy therefore
+Englishmen of thought and fancy were dragged by an impulse of adventure
+and greed as irresistible as that which dragged to Antwerp and the Hanse
+ports, to India and America, the seekers for gold and for soil. To Italy
+they flocked and through Italy they rambled, prying greedily into each
+cranny and mound of the half-broken civilization, upturning with avid
+curiosity all the rubbish and filth; seeking with aching eyes and
+itching fingers for the precious fragments of intellectual splendour;
+lingering with fascinated glance over the broken remnants and deep,
+mysterious gulfs of a crumbling and devastated civilization. And then,
+impatient of their intoxicating and tantalizing search, suddenly grown
+desperate, they clutched and stored away everything, and returned home
+tattered, soiled, bedecked with gold and with tinsel, laden with an
+immense uncouth burden of jewels, and broken wealth, and refuse and
+ordure, with pseudo-antique philosophy, with half-mediæval Dantesque and
+Petrarchesque poetry, with Renaissance science, with humanistic pedantry
+and obscenity, with euphuistic conceits and casuistic quibble, with art,
+politics, metaphysics--civilization embedded in all manner of rubbish
+and abomination, soiled with all manner of ominous stains. All this did
+they carry home and throw helter-skelter into the new-kindled fire of
+English intellectual life, mingling with it many a humble-seeming
+Northern alloy; cleaning and compounding, casting into shapes, mediæval
+and English, this strange Corinthian brass made of all these
+heterogeneous remnants, classical, Italian, Saxon, and Christian. A
+strange Corinthian brass indeed; and as various in tint, in weight, and
+in tone, in manifold varieties of mixture, as were the moulds into which
+it was cast: the white and delicate silver settling down in the gracious
+poetic moulds of Sidney and Spenser; the glittering gold, which can buy
+and increase, in the splendid, heavy mould of Bacon's prose; and the
+copper, the iron, the silver and gold in wondrous mixture, with wondrous
+iridescences of colour and wondrous scale of tone, all poured into the
+manifold moulds, fantastic and beautiful and grand, of Shakespeare. And
+as long as all this dross and ore and filth brought from the ruins of
+Italy was thus mingling in the heat of English genius, while it was yet
+but imperfectly fused, while already its purest and best compounded
+portion was being poured in Shakespeare's mould, and when already there
+remained only a seething residue; as long as there remained aught of the
+glowing fire and the molten mass, some of it all, of the pure metal
+bubbling up, of the scum frothing round, nay, of the very used-up dregs,
+was ever and anon being ladled out--gold, dross, filth, all
+indiscriminately--and cast into shapes severe, graceful, or uncouth. And
+this somewhat, thus pilfered from what was to make, or was making, or
+had made, the works of Shakespeare; this base and noble, still unfused
+or already exhausted alloy, became the strange heterogeneous works of
+the Elizabethan dramatists: of Webster, of Ford, of Tourneur, of Ben
+Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, and of their minor brethren; from the
+splendid ore of Marlowe, only half molten and half freed from dross,
+down to the shining metal, smooth and silvery as only tinsel can be, of
+Massinger.
+
+In all the works of our Elizabethans, we see not only the assimilated
+intellectual wealth of Italy, but we see the deep impression, the
+indelible picture in the memory, of Italy itself; the positive,
+unallegorical, essentially secular mode of thought; the unascetic,
+æsthetic, eminently human mode of feeling; the artistic desire of clear
+and harmonious form; the innumerable tendencies and habits which sever
+the Elizabethans so completely from the Middle Ages, and bring them so
+near at once to ourselves and to the ancients, making them at once
+antique and modern, in opposition to mediæval; these essential
+characters and the vast bulk of absolute scientific fact and formula, of
+philosophic opinion, of artistic shape, of humanistic learning, are only
+one-half of the debt of our sixteenth century to the Italy of the
+Renaissance. The delicate form of the Italian sonnet, as copied by
+Sidney from Bembo and Molza and Costanzo, contained within it the exotic
+and exquisite ideal passion of the "Vita Nuova" and Petrarch. With the
+bright, undulating stanza Spenser received from Ariosto and Tasso the
+richly coloured spirit of the Italian descriptive epic. With the
+splendid involutions of Machiavelli's and Guicciardini's prose Bacon
+learned their cool and disimpassioned philosophy. From the reading of
+Politian and Lorenzo dei Medici, from the sight of the Psyche of
+Raphael, the Europa of Veronese, the Ariadne of Tintoret, men like
+Greene and Dorset learned that revival of a more luscious and pictorial
+antique which was brought to perfection in Shakespeare's "Venus and
+Adonis" and Marlowe's "Sestiad." From the Platonists and Epicureans of
+Renaissance Italy our greatest dramatists learned that cheerful and
+serious love of life, that solemn and manly facing of death, that sense
+of the finiteness of man, the inexhaustibleness of nature, which shines
+out in such grand, paganism, with such Olympian serenity, as of the bent
+brows and smiling lips of an antique Zeus, in Shakespeare, in Marlowe,
+in Beaumont and Fletcher, even in the sad and savage Webster. But with
+the abstract, with the imbibed modes of thought and feeling, with the
+imitated forms, the Elizabethans brought back from Italy the concrete,
+the individual, the personal. They filled their works with Italian
+things: from the whole plot of a play borrowed from an Italian novel, to
+the mere passing allusion to an Italian habit, or the mere quotation of
+an Italian word; from the full-length picture of the actions of Italian
+men and women, down to the mere sketch, in two or three words, of a bit
+of Italian garden or a group of Italian figures; nay, to the innumerable
+scraps of tiny detail, grotesque, graceful, or richly coloured, which
+they stuffed into all their works: allusions to the buffoons of the mask
+comedy, to the high-voiced singers, to the dress of the Venetian
+merchants, to the step of a dance; to the pomegranate in the garden or
+the cypress on the hillside; mere names of Italian things: the _lavolta_
+and _corranto_ dances, the _Traglietto_ ferry, the Rialto bridge;
+countless little touches, trifling to us, but which brought home to the
+audience at the Globe or at Blackfriars that wonderful Italy which every
+man of the day had travelled through at least in spirit, and had loved
+at least in imagination. And of this wonderful Italy the Englishmen of
+the days of Elizabeth and of James knew yet another side; were familiar,
+whether travelled or untravelled, with yet other things besides the
+buffoons and singers and dancers, the scholars and learned ladies, the
+pomegranates, and cypresses and roses and nightingales; were fascinated
+by something besides the green lagoons, the clear summer nights, the
+soft spring evenings of which we feel as it were the fascination in the
+words of Jessica and Portia and Juliet. The English knew and were
+haunted by the crimes of Italy: the terrible and brilliant, the
+mysterious and shadowy crimes of lust and of blood which, in their most
+gigantic union and monstrous enthronement on the throne of the vicar of
+Christ, had in the first terrified glimpse awakened the tragic impulse
+in the soldiers of Charles VIII.
+
+We can imagine the innumerable English travellers who went to Italy
+greedy for life and knowledge or merely obeying a fashion of the
+day--travellers forced into far closer contact with the natives than the
+men of the time of Walpole and of Beckford, who were met by
+French-speaking hosts and lacqueys and officials--travellers also
+thirsting to imbibe the very spirit of the country as the travellers of
+the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries never thirsted; we can imagine
+these Englishmen possessed by the morbid passion for the stories of
+abominable and unpunished crime--crime of the learned, the refined, the
+splendid parts of society--with which the Italy of the deeply corrupted
+sixteenth century was permeated. We can imagine how the prosaic
+merchants' clerks from London; the perfumed dandies, trying on Italian
+clothes, rehearsing Italian steps and collecting Italian oaths, the
+Faulcon-bridges of Shakespeare and Mr. Gingleboys of Beaumont and
+Fletcher, sent to Italy to be able gracefully to
+
+
+         Kiss the hand and cry, "sweet lady!"
+     Say they had been at Rome and seen the relics,
+     Drunk your Verdea wine, and rid at Naples--
+
+
+how all these privileged creatures ferreted about for monstrous crimes
+with which to horrify their stay-at-home countrymen; how the rich young
+lords, returning home with mincing steps and high-pitched lisp,
+surrounded by a train of parti-coloured, dialect-jabbering Venetian
+clowns, deft and sinister Neapolitan fencing masters, silver-voiced
+singing boys decoyed from some church, and cynical humanists escaped
+from the faggot or the gallows, were expected to bring home, together
+with the newest pastoral dramas, lewd novels, Platonic philosophy and
+madrigals set in complicated counterpoint; stories of hideous
+wickedness, of the murders and rapes and poisonings committed by the
+dukes and duchesses, the nobles and senators, in whose palaces they had
+so lately supped and danced. The crimes of Italy fascinated Englishmen
+of genius with a fascination even more potent than that which they
+exercised over the vulgar imagination of mere foppish and swashbuckler
+lovers of the scandalous and the sensational: they fascinated with the
+attraction of tragic grandeur, of psychological strangeness, of moral
+monstrosity, a generation in whom the passionate imagination of the
+playwright was curiously blent with the metaphysical analysis of the
+philosopher and the ethical judgment of the Puritan. To these men, ardent
+and serious even in their profligacy; imaginative and passionate even in
+their Puritanism, all sucking avidly at this newly found Italian
+civilization; the wickedness of Italy was more than morbidly attractive
+or morbidly appalling: it was imaginatively and psychologically
+fascinating. Whether they were as part of the action or as allusions, as
+in Webster's two great plays, in which there occurs poisoning by means
+of the leaves of a book, poisoning by the poisoned lips of a picture,
+poisoning by a helmet, poisoning by the pommel of a saddle; crimes were
+multiplied by means of subordinate plots and unnecessary incidents, like
+the double vengeance of Richardetto and of Hippolita in Ford's "Giovanni
+and Annabella," where both characters are absolutely unnecessary to the
+main story of the horrible love of the hero and heroine; like the
+murders of Levidulcia and Sebastian in Tourneur's "Atheist's Tragedy,"
+and the completely unnecessary though extremely pathetic death of young
+Marcello in Webster's "White Devil;" until the plays were brought to a
+close by the gradual extermination of all the principal performers, and
+only a few confidants and dummies remained to bury the corpses which
+strewed the stage. Imaginary monsters were fashioned out of half-a-dozen
+Neapolitan and Milanese princes, by Ford, by Beaumont and Fletcher, by
+Middleton, by Marston, even by the light and graceful Philip Massinger:
+mythical villains, Ferdinands, Lodowicks, and Fernezes, who yet fell
+short of the frightful realities of men like Sigismondo Malatesta,
+Alexander VI., and Pier Luigi Farnese; nay, more typical monsters, with
+no name save their vices, Lussuriosos, Gelosos, Ambitiosos, and
+Vindicis, like those drawn by the strong and savage hand of Cyril
+Tourneur.
+
+Nothing which the English stage could display seemed to the minds of
+English playwrights and the public to give an adequate picture of the
+abominations of Italy; much as they heaped up horrors and combined them
+with artistic skill, much as they forced into sight, there yet remained
+an abyss of evil which the English tongue refused to mention, but which
+weighed upon the English mind; and which, unspoken, nay (and it is the
+glory of the Elizabethan dramatists excepting Ford), unhinted, yet
+remained as an incubus in the consciousness of the playwrights and the
+public, was in their thoughts when they wrote and heard such savage
+misanthropic outbursts as those of Tourneur and of Marston. The sense of
+the rottenness of the country whence they were obtaining their
+intellectual nourishment, haunted with a sort of sickening fascination
+the imaginative and psychological minds of the late sixteenth century,
+of the men who had had time to outgrow the first cynical plunge of the
+rebellious immature intellects of the contemporaries of Greene, Peele,
+and Marlowe into that dissolved civilization. And of the great men who
+were thus enthralled by Italy and Italian evil, only Shakespeare and
+Massinger maintain or regain their serenity and hopefulness of spirit,
+resist the incubus of horror: Shakespeare from the immense scope of his
+vision, which permitted him to pass over the base and frightful parts of
+human nature and see its purer and higher sides; Massinger from the very
+superficiality of his insight and the narrowness of his sympathies,
+which prevented his ever thoroughly realizing the very horrors he had
+himself invented. But on the minds less elastic than that of
+Shakespeare, and less superficial than that of Massinger, the Italian
+evil weighed like a nightmare. With an infinitely powerful and
+passionate imagination, and an exquisitely subtle faculty of mental
+analysis; only lately freed from the dogma of the Middle Ages; unsettled
+in their philosophy; inclined by wholesale classical reading to a sort
+of negative atheism, a fatalistic and half-melancholy mixture of
+epicurism and stoicism; yet keenly alive, from study of the Bible and of
+religious controversies, to all questions of right and wrong; thus
+highly wrought and deeply perplexed, the minds of the Elizabethan poets
+were impressed by the wickedness of Italy as by the horrible deeds of
+one whom we are accustomed to venerate as our guide, whom we cannot but
+love as our benefactor, whom we cannot but admire as our superior: it
+was a sense of frightful anomaly, of putrescence in beauty and
+splendour, of death in life and life in death, which made the English
+psychologist-poets savage and sombre, cynical and wrathful and hopeless.
+The influence is the same on all, and the difference of attitude is
+slight, and due to individual characters; but the gloom is the same in
+each of them. In Webster--no mere grisly inventor of Radcliffian
+horrors, as we are apt to think of the greatest of our dramatists--after
+Shakespeare--in the noble and tender nature of Webster the sense is one
+of ineffable sadness, unmarred by cynicism, but unbrightened by hope.
+The villains, even if successful till death overtake them, are mere
+hideous phantoms--
+
+
+                       these wretched eminent things
+     Leave no more fame behind 'em, than should one
+     Fall in a frost, and leave his print in snow--
+
+
+the victims of tortured conscience, or, worse still, the owners of
+petrified hearts; there is nothing to envy in them. But none the better
+is it for the good: if Ferdinands, Bosolas, Brachianos, and Flaminios
+perish miserably, it is only after having done to death the tender and
+brave Duchess, the gentle Antonio, the chivalric Marcello; there is
+virtue on earth, but there is no justice in heaven. The half-pagan,
+half-puritanic feeling of Webster bursts out in the dying speech of the
+villain Bosola--
+
+
+                    O, this gloomy world!
+     In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness,
+     Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!
+     Let worthy minds ne'er stagger in distrust
+     To suffer death or shame for what is just.
+
+
+Of real justice in this life or compensation in another, there is no
+thought: Webster, though a Puritan in spirit, is no Christian in faith.
+On Ford the influence is different; although equal, perhaps, in genius
+to Webster, surpassing him even in intense tragic passion, he was far
+below Webster, and, indeed, far below all his generation, in moral
+fibre. The sight of evil fascinates him; his conscience staggers, his
+sympathies are bedraggled in foulness; in the chaos of good and evil he
+loses his reckoning, and recognizes the superiority only of strength of
+passion, of passion for good or evil: the incestuous Giovanni, daring
+his enemies like a wild beast at bay and cheating them of their revenge
+by himself murdering the object of his horrible passion, is as heroic in
+the eyes of Ford as the magnanimous Princess of Sparta, bearing with
+unflinching spirit the succession of misfortunes poured down upon her,
+and leading off the dance while messenger succeeds messenger of evil;
+till, free from her duties as a queen, she sinks down dead. Cyril
+Tourneur and John Marston are far more incomplete in genius than either
+Webster or Ford, although Tourneur sometimes obtains a lurid and ghastly
+tragic intensity which more than equals Ford when at his best; and
+Marston, in the midst of crabbedness and dulness, sometimes has touches
+of pathos and Michelangelesque foreshortenings of metaphor worthy of
+Webster. But Tourneur and Marston have neither the constant sympathy
+with oppressed virtue of the author of the "Duchess of Malfy," nor the
+blind fury of passion of the poet of "Giovanni and Annabella;" they look
+on grim and hopeless spectators at the world of fatalistic and insane
+wickedness which they have created, in which their heroes and heroines
+and villains are slowly entangled in inextricable evil. The men and
+women of Tourneur and Marston are scarcely men and women at all: they
+are mere vague spectres, showing their grisly wounds and moaning out
+their miserable fate. There is around them a thick and clammy moral
+darkness, dispelled only by the ghastly flashes of lurid virtue of
+maniacs like Tourneur's Vindici and Hippolito; a crypt-like moral
+stillness, haunted by strange evil murmurs, broken only by the
+hysterical sobs and laughs of Marston's Antonios and Pandulphos. At the
+most there issues out of the blood-reeking depth a mighty yell of pain,
+a tremendous imprecation not only at sinful man but at unsympathizing
+nature, like that of Marston's old Doge, dethroned, hunted down, crying
+aloud into the grey dawn-mists of the desolate marsh by the lagoon--
+
+
+                         O thou all-bearing earth
+     Which men do gape for till thou cram'st their mouths
+     And choak'st their throats for dust: O charme thy breast
+     And let me sinke into thee.  Look who knocks;
+     Andrugio calls. But O, she's deafe and blinde.
+     A wretch but leane relief on earth can finde.
+
+
+The tragic sense, the sense of utter blank evil, is stronger in all
+these Elizabethan painters of Italian crime than perhaps in any other
+tragic writers. There is, in the great and sinister pictures of Webster,
+of Ford, of Tourneur, and of Marston, no spot of light, no distant
+bright horizon. There is no loving suffering, resigned to suffer and to
+pardon, like that of Desdemona, whose dying lips forgive the beloved who
+kills from too great love; no consoling affection like Cordelia's, in
+whose gentle embrace the poor bruised soul may sink into rest; no
+passionate union in death with the beloved, like the union of Romeo and
+Juliet; nothing but implacable cruelty, violent death received with
+agonized protest, or at best as the only release from unmitigated misery
+with which the wretch has become familiar,
+
+     As the tann'd galley slave is with his oar.
+
+Neither is there in these plays that solemn sense of heavenly justice,
+of the fatality hanging over a house which will be broken when guilt
+shall have been expiated, which lends a sort of serene background of
+eternal justice to the terrible tales of Thebes and Argos. There is for
+these men no fatality save the evil nature of man, no justice save the
+doubling of crime, no compensation save revenge: there is for Webster
+and Ford and Tourneur and Marston no heaven above, wrathful but
+placable; there are no Gods revengeful but just: there is nothing but
+this blood-stained and corpse-strewn earth, defiled by lust-burnt and
+death-hungering men, felling each other down and trampling on one
+another blindly in the eternal darkness which surrounds them. The world
+of these great poets is not the open world with its light and its air,
+its purifying storms and lightnings: it is the darkened Italian palace,
+with its wrought-iron bars preventing escape; its embroidered carpets
+muffling the foot steps; its hidden, suddenly yawning trapdoors; its
+arras-hangings concealing masked ruffians; its garlands of poisoned
+flowers; its long suites of untenanted darkened rooms, through which the
+wretch is pursued by the half-crazed murderer; while below, in the
+cloistered court, the clanking armour and stamping horses, and above, in
+the carved and gilded hall, the viols and lutes and cornets make a
+cheery triumphant concert, and drown the cries of the victim.
+
+
+II.
+
+Such is the Italy of the Renaissance as we see it in the works of our
+tragic playwrights: a country of mysterious horror, the sinister
+reputation of which lasted two hundred years; lasted triumphantly
+throughout the light and finikin eighteenth century, and found its
+latest expression in the grim and ghastly romances of the school of Ann
+Radcliff, romances which are but the last puny and grotesque descendants
+of the great stock of Italian tragedies, born of the first
+terror-stricken meeting of the England of Elizabeth with the Italy of
+the late Renaissance. Is the impression received by the Elizabethan
+playwrights a correct impression? Was Italy in the sixteenth century
+that land of horrors? Reviewing in our memory the literature and art of
+the Italian Renaissance, remembering the innumerable impressions of
+joyous and healthy life with which it has filled us; recalling the
+bright and thoughtless rhymes of Lorenzo dei Medici, of Politian, of
+Bern!, and of Ariosto; the sweet and tender poetry of Bembo and Vittoria
+Colonna and Tasso; the bluff sensuality of novelists like Bandello and
+Masuccio, the Aristophanesque laughter of the comedy of Bibbiena and of
+Beolco; seeing in our mind's eye the stately sweet matrons and noble
+senators of Titian, the virginal saints and madonnas of Raphael, the
+joyous angels of Correggio;--recapitulating rapidly all our impressions
+of this splendid time of exuberant vitality, of this strong and serene
+Renaissance, we answer without hesitation, and with only a smile of
+contempt at our credulous ancestors--no. The Italy of the Renaissance
+was, of all things that have ever existed or ever could exist, the most
+utterly unlike the nightmare visions of men such as Webster and Ford,
+Marston and Tourneur. The only Elizabethan drama which really represents
+the Italy of the Renaissance is the comedy of Shakespeare, of Beaumont
+and Fletcher, and of Ben Jonson and Massinger: to the Renaissance belong
+those clear and sunny figures, the Portias, Antonios, Gratianos, Violas,
+Petruchios, Bellarios, and Almiras; their faces do we see on the
+canvases of Titian and the frescoes of Raphael; they are the real
+children of the Italian Renaissance. These frightful Brachianos and
+Annabellas and Ferdinands and Corombonas and Vindicis and Pieros of the
+"White Devil," of the "Duchess of Malfy," of the "Revenger's Tragedy,"
+and of "Antonio and Mellida," are mere fantastic horrors, as false as
+the Counts Udolpho, the Spalatros, the Zastrozzis, and all their
+grotesquely ghastly pseudo-Italian brethren of eighty years ago.
+
+And, indeed, the Italy of the Renaissance, as represented in its
+literature and its art, is the very negation of Elizabethan horrors. Of
+all the mystery, the colossal horror and terror of our dramatists, there
+is not the faintest trace in the intellectual productions of the Italian
+Renaissance. The art is absolutely stainless: no scenes of horror, no
+frightful martyrdoms, as with the Germans under Albrecht Dürer; no
+abominable butcheries, as with the Bolognese of the seventeenth century;
+no macerated saints and tattered assassins, as with the Spaniards; no
+mystery, no contortion, no horrors: vigorous and serene beauty, pure and
+cheerful life, real or ideal, on wall or canvas, in bronze or in marble.
+The literature is analogous to the art, only less perfect, more tainted
+with the weakness of humanity, less ideal, more real. It is essentially
+human, in the largest sense of the word; or if it cease, in creatures
+like Aretine, to be humanly clean, it becomes merely satyr-like,
+swinish, hircose. But it is never savage in lust or violence; it is
+quite free from the element of ferocity. It is essentially light and
+quiet and well regulated, sane and reasonable, never staggering or
+blinded by excess: it is full of intelligent discrimination, of
+intelligent leniency, of well-bred reserved sympathy; it is civilized as
+are the wide well-paved streets of Ferrara compared with the tortuous
+black alleys of mediæval Paris; as are the well-lit, clean, spacious
+palaces of Michelozzo or Bramante compared with the squalid, unhealthy,
+uncomfortable mediæval castles of Dürer's etchings. It is indeed a
+trifle too civilized; too civilized to produce every kind of artistic
+fruit; it is--and here comes the crushing difference between the Italian
+Renaissance and our Elizabethans' pictures of it--it is, this beautiful
+rich literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, completely
+deficient in every tragic element; it has intuition neither for tragic
+event nor for tragic character; it affords not a single tragic page in
+its poems and novels; it is incapable, after the most laborious and
+conscientious study of Euripides and Seneca, utterly and miserably
+incapable of producing a single real tragedy, anything which is not a
+sugary pastoral or a pompous rhetorical exercise. The epic poets of the
+Italian Renaissance, Pulci, Boiardo, Berni, and Ariosto, even the
+stately and sentimental Tasso, are no epic poets at all. They are mere
+light and amusing gossips, some of them absolute buffoons. Their
+adventures over hill and dale are mere riding parties; their fights mere
+festival tournaments, their enchantments mere pageant wonders. Events
+like the death of Hector, the slaughter of Penelope's suitors, the
+festive massacre of Chriemhilt, the horrible deceit of Alfonso the
+Chaste sending Bernardo del Carpio his father's corpse on horseback--
+things like these never enter their minds. When tragic events do by some
+accident come into their narration, they cease to be tragic; they are
+frittered away into mere pretty conceits like the death of Isabella and
+the sacrifice of Olympia in the "Orlando Furioso;" or melted down into
+vague pathos, like the burning of Olindo and Sofronia, and the death of
+Clorinda by the sentimental Tasso. Neither poet, the one with his
+cheerfulness, the other with his mild melancholy, brings home, conceives
+the horror of the situation; the one treats the tragic in the spirit
+almost of burlesque, the other entirely in the spirit of elegy. So,
+again, with the novel writers: these professional retailers of anecdotes
+will pick up any subject to fill their volumes. In default of pleasant
+stories of filthy intrigue or lewd jest, men like Cinthio and Bandello
+will gabble off occasionally some tragic story, picked out of a history
+book or recently heard from a gossip: the stories of Harmodius and
+Aristogeiton, of Disdémona and the Moorish Captain, of Roméo Montecchio
+and Giulietta Cappelletti, of the Cardinal d'Aragona and the Duchess of
+Amalfi, of unknown grotesque Persian Sophis and Turkish Bassas--stories
+of murder, massacre, rape, incest, anything and everything, prattled
+off, with a few words of vapid compassion and stale moralizing, in the
+serene, cheerful, chatty manner in which they recount their Decameronian
+escapades or Rabelaisian repartees. As it is with tragic action, so is
+it with tragic character. The literature of the country which suggested
+to our Elizabethans their colossal villains, can display only a few
+conventional monsters, fire-eating, swashbuckler Rodomonts and Sultan
+Malechs, strutting and puffing like the grotesque villains of
+puppet-shows; Aladins and Ismenos, enchanters and ogres fit to be put
+into Don Quixote's library: mere conventional rag puppets, doubtless
+valued as such and no more by the shrewd contemporaries of Ariosto and
+Tasso. The inhabitants of Tasso's world of romance are pale chivalric
+unrealities, lifeless as Spenser's half-allegoric knights and ladies;
+those of Pulci's Ardenne forests and Cathay deserts are buffoons such as
+Florentine shopmen may have trapped out for their amusement in rusty
+armour and garlands of sausages. The only lifelike heroes and heroines
+are those of Ariosto. And they are most untragic, unromantic. The men
+are occasionally small scoundrels, but unintentionally on the part of
+the author. They show no deep moral cancers or plague-spots; they
+display cheerfully all the petty dishonour and small lusts which the
+Renaissance regarded as mere flesh and blood characteristics. So also
+Ariosto's ladies: the charming, bright women, coquettish or Amazonian,
+are frail and fickle to the degree which was permissible to a court
+lady, who should be neither prudish nor coquettish; doing unchaste
+things and listening to unchaste words simply, gracefully, without
+prurience or horror; perfectly well-bred, _gentili_, as Ariosto calls
+them; prudent also, according to the notions of the day, in limiting
+their imprudence. The adventure of Fiordispina with Ricciardetto would
+have branded an English serving-wench as a harlot; the behaviour of
+Roger towards the lady he has just rescued from the sea-monster would
+have blushingly been attributed by Spenser to one of his satyrs; but
+these were escapades quite within Ariosto's notions of what was
+permitted to a _gentil cavaliero_ and a _nobil donzella_; and if
+Fiordispina and Roger are not like Florimell and Sir Calidore, still
+less do they in the faintest degree resemble Tourneur and Marston's
+Levidulcias and Isabellas and Lussuriosos. And with the exception
+perhaps, of this heroine and this hero, we cannot find any very great
+harm in Ariosto's ladies and gentlemen: we may, indeed, feel indignant
+when we think that they replace the chaste and noble impossibilities of
+earlier romance, the Rolands and Percivals, the Beatrices and Lauras of
+the past; when we consider that they represent for Ariosto, not the
+bespattered but the spotless, not the real but the ideal. All this may
+awaken in us contempt and disgust; but if we consider these figures in
+themselves as realities, and compare them with the evil figures of our
+drama, we find that they are mere venial sinners--light, fickle,
+amorous, fibbing--very human in their faults; human, trifling, mild, not
+at all monstrous, like all the art products of the Renaissance.[1]
+
+
+[1] The "Orlando Innamorato" of Boiardo contains, part i, canto 8, a
+story too horrible and grotesque for me to narrate, of a monster born of
+Marchino and his murdered sister-in-law, which forms a strange exception
+to my rule, even as does, for instance, Matteo di Giovanni's massacre of
+the Innocents. Can this story have been suggested, a ghastly nightmare,
+by the frightful tale of Sigismondo Malatesta and the beautiful Borbona,
+which was current in Boiardo's day?
+
+
+A serene and spotless art, a literature often impure but always
+cheerful, rational, civilized--this is what the Italian Renaissance
+displays when we seek in it for spirits at all akin to Webster or Lope
+de Vega, to Holbein or Ribera. To find the tragic we must wait for the
+Bolognese painters of the seventeenth century, for Metastasio and
+Alfieri in the eighteenth; it is useless seeking it in this serene and
+joyous Renaissance. Where, then, in the midst of these spotless virgins,
+these noble saints, these brilliant pseudo-chivalric joustings and
+revels, these sweet and sonneteering pastorals, these scurrilous
+adventures and loose buffooneries; where in this Italian Renaissance are
+the horrors which fascinated so strangely our English playwrights: the
+fratricides and incests, the frightful crimes of lust and blood which
+haunted and half crazed the genius of Tourneur and Marston? Where in
+this brilliant and courteous and humane and civilized nation are the
+gigantic villains whose terrible features were drawn with such superb
+awfulness of touch by Webster and Ford? Where in this Renaissance of
+Italian literature, so cheerful and light of conscience, is the foul and
+savage Renaissance of English tragedy? Does the art of Italy tell an
+impossible, universal lie? or is the art of England the victim of an
+impossible, universal hallucination?
+
+Neither; for art can neither tell lies nor be the victim of
+hallucination. The horror exists, and the light-heartedness exists; the
+unhealthiness and the healthiness. For as, in that weird story by
+Nathaniel Hawthorne, the daughter of the Paduan wizard is nurtured on
+the sap and fruit and the emanations of poisonous plants, till they
+become her natural sustenance, and she thrives and is strong and lovely;
+while the youth, bred in the ordinary pure air and nourished on ordinary
+wholesome food, faints and staggers as soon as he breathes the fatal
+odours of the poison garden, and sinks down convulsed and crazed at the
+first touch of his mistress' blooming but death-breathing lips; so also
+the Italians, steeped in the sin of their country, seeing it daily and
+hourly, remained intellectually healthy and serene; while the English,
+coming from a purer moral atmosphere, were seized with strange moral
+sickness of horror at what they had seen and could not forget. And the
+nation which was chaste and true wrote tales of incest and treachery,
+while the nation which was foul and false wrote poetry of shepherds and
+knights-errant.
+
+The monstrous immorality of the Italian Renaissance, as I have elsewhere
+shown in greater detail, was, like the immorality of any other
+historical period, not a formal rebellion against God, but a natural
+result of the evolution of the modern world. The Italy of the
+Renaissance was one of the many victims which inevitable moral sequence
+dooms to be evil in order that others may learn to be good: it was a
+sacrifice which consisted in a sin, a sacrifice requiring frightful
+expiation on the part of the victim. For Italy was subjected, during
+well-nigh two centuries, to a slow process of moral destruction; a
+process whose various factors--political disorganization, religious
+indifference, scientific scepticism, wholesale enthusiasm for the
+antique, breaking-up of mediæval standards and excessive growth of
+industry, commerce, and speculative thought at the expense of warlike
+and religious habits--were at the same time factors in the great advent
+of modern civilization, of which Italy was the pioneer and the victim; a
+process whose result was, in Italy, insensibly and inevitably to reduce
+to chaos the moral and political organization of the nation; at once
+rendering men completely unable to discriminate between good and evil,
+and enabling a certain proportion of them to sin with complete impunity:
+creating on the one hand moral indifference, and on the other social
+irresponsibility. Civilization had kept pace with demoralization; the
+faculty of reasoning over cause and effect had developed at the expense
+of the faculty of judging of actions. The Italians of the Renaissance,
+little by little, could judge only of the adaptation of means to given
+ends; whether means or ends were legitimate or illegitimate they soon
+became unable to perceive and even unable to ask. Success was the
+criterion of all action, and power was its limits. Active and furious
+national wickedness there was not: there was mere moral inertia on the
+part of the people. The Italians of the Renaissance neither resisted
+evil nor rebelled against virtue; they were indifferent to both, and a
+little pressure sufficed to determine them to either. In the governed
+classes, where the law was equal between men, and industry and commerce
+kept up healthy activity, the pressure was towards good. The artizans
+and merchants lived decent lives, endowed hospitals, listened to
+edifying sermons, and were even moved (for a few moments) by men like
+San Bernardino or Savonarola. In the governing classes, where all right
+lay in force, where the necessity of self-defence induced treachery and
+violence, and irresponsibility produced excess, the pressure was towards
+evil. The princelets and prelates and mercenery generals indulged in
+every sensuality, turned treachery into a science and violence into an
+instrument; and sometimes let themselves be intoxicated into mad lust
+and ferocity, as their subjects were occasionally intoxicated with mad
+austerity and mysticism; but the excesses of mad vice, like the excesses
+of mad virtue, lasted only a short time, or lasted only in individual
+saints or blood-maniacs; and the men of the Renaissance speedily
+regained their level of indifferent righteousness and of indifferent
+sinfulness. Righteousness and sinfulness both passive, without power of
+aggression or resistance, and consequently in strange and dreadful peace
+with each other. The wicked men did not dislike virtue, nor the good men
+vice: the villain could admire a saint, and the saint could condone a
+villain. The prudery of righteousness was as unknown as the cynicism of
+evil; the good man, like Guarino da Verona, would not shrink from the
+foul man; the foul man, like Beccadelli, would not despise the pure man.
+The ideally righteous citizen of Agnolo Pandolfini does not interfere
+with the ideally unrighteous prince of Machiavelli: each has his own
+position and conduct; and who can say whether, if the positions were
+exchanged, the conduct might not be exchanged also? In such a condition
+of things as this, evil ceases to appear monstrous; it is explained,
+endured, condoned. The stately philosophical historians, so stoically
+grand, and the prattling local chroniclers, so highly coloured and so
+gentle and graceful; Guicciardini and Machiavelli and Valori and Segni,
+on the one hand--Corio, Allegretti, Matarazzo, Infessura, on the other;
+all these, from whom we learn the real existence of immorality far more
+universal and abominable than our dramatists venture to show, relate
+quietly, calmly, with analytical frigidness or gossiping levity, the
+things which we often shrink from repeating, and sometimes recoil from
+believing. Great statesmanlike historians and humble chattering
+chroniclers are alike unaffected by what goes on around them: they
+collect anecdotes and generalize events without the fumes of evil, among
+which they seek for materials in the dark places of national or local
+history, ever going to their imagination, ever making their heart sicken
+and faint, and their fancy stagger and reel. The life of these
+righteous, or at least, not actively sinning men, may be hampered,
+worried, embittered, or even broken by the villainy of their fellow-men;
+but, except in some visionary monk, life can never be poisoned by the
+mere knowledge of evil. Their town maybe betrayed to the enemy, their
+daughters may be dishonoured or poisoned, their sons massacred; they
+may, in their old age, be cast starving on the world, or imprisoned or
+broken by torture; and they will complain and be fierce in diatribe: the
+fiercest diatribe written against any Pope of the Renaissance being,
+perhaps, that of Platina against Paul II., who was a saint compared with
+his successors Sixtus and Alexander, because the writer of the diatribe
+and his friends were maltreated by this pope. When personally touched,
+the Italians of the Renaissance will brook no villainy--the poniard
+quickly despatches sovereigns like Galeazzo Maria Sforza; but when the
+villainy remains abstract, injures neither themselves nor their
+immediate surroundings, it awakens no horror, and the man who commits it
+is by no means regarded as a fiend. The great criminals of the
+Renaissance--traitors and murderers like Lodovico Sforza, incestuous
+parricides like Gianpaolo Baglioni, committers of every iniquity under
+heaven like Cæsar Borgia--move through the scene of Renaissance history,
+as shown by its writers great and small, quietly, serenely,
+triumphantly; with gracious and magnanimous bearing; applauded, admired,
+or at least endured. On their passage no man, historian or chronicler,
+unless the agent of a hostile political faction, rises up, confronts
+them and says, "This man is a devil."
+
+And devils these men were not: the judgment of their contemporaries,
+morally completely perverted, was probably psychologically correct; they
+misjudged the deeds, but rarely, perhaps, misjudged the man. To us
+moderns, as to our English ancestors of the sixteenth century, this is
+scarcely conceivable. A man who does devilish deeds is necessarily a
+devil; and the evil Italian princes of the Renaissance, the Borgias,
+Sforzas, Baglionis, Malatestas, and Riarios appear, through the mist of
+horrified imagination, so many uncouth and gigantic monsters, nightmare
+shapes, less like human beings than like the grand and frightful angels
+of evil who gather round Milton's Satan in the infernal council. Such
+they appear to us. But if we once succeed in calmly looking at them,
+seeing them not in the lurid lights and shadows of our fancy, but in the
+daylight of contemporary reality, we shall little by little be forced to
+confess (and the confession is horrible) that most of these men are
+neither abnormal nor gigantic. Their times were monstrous, not they.
+They were not, that is clear, at variance with the moral atmosphere
+which surrounded them; and they were the direct result of the social and
+political condition. This may seem no answer; for although we know the
+causes of monster births, they are monstrous none the less. What we mean
+is not that the existence of men capable of committing such actions was
+normal; we mean that the men who committed them, the conditions being
+what they were, were not necessarily men of exceptional character. The
+level of immorality was so high that a man need be no giant to reach up
+into the very seventh heaven of iniquity. When to massacre at a banquet
+a number of enemies enticed by overtures of peace was considered in
+Cæsar Borgia merely a rather audacious and not very holy action,
+indicative of very brilliant powers of diplomacy, then Cæsar Borgia
+required, to commit such an action, little more than a brilliant
+diplomatic endowment, unhampered by scruples and timidity; when a brave,
+and gracious prince like Gianpaolo Baglioni could murder his kinsmen and
+commit incest with his sister without being considered less gracious and
+magnanimous, then Gianpaolo Baglioni might indeed be but an indifferent
+villain; when treachery, lust, and bloodshed, although objected to in
+theory, were condoned In practice, and were regarded as venial sins,
+those who indulged in them might be in fact scarcely more than venial
+sinners. In short, where a fiendish action might be committed without
+the perpetrator being considered a fiend, there was no need of his being
+one. And, indeed, the great villains of the Renaissance never take up
+the attitude of fiends; one or two, like certain Visconti or Aragonese,
+were madmen, but the others were more or less normal human beings. There
+was no barrier between them and evil; they slipped into it, remained in
+it, became accustomed to it; but a vicious determination to be wicked, a
+feeling of the fiend within one, like that of Shakespeare's Richard, or
+a gradual, conscious irresistible absorption into recognized iniquity
+like Macbeth's, there was not. The mere sense of absolute power and
+impunity, together with the complete silence of the conscience of the
+public at large, can make a man do strange things. If Cæsar Borgia be
+free to practise his archery upon hares and deer, why should he not
+practise it upon these prisoners? Who will blame him? Who can prevent
+him? If he had for his mistress every woman he might single out from
+among his captives, why not his sister? If he have the force to carry
+out a plan, why should a man stand in his way? The complete facility in
+the commission of all actions quickly brings such a man to the limits of
+the legitimate: there is no universal cry to tell him where those limits
+are, no universal arm to pull him back. He pooh-poohs, pushes them a
+little further, and does the iniquity. Nothing prevents his gratifying
+his ambition, his avarice, and his lust, so he gratifies them. Soon,
+seeking for further gratification, he has to cut new paths in villainy:
+he has not been restrained by man, who is silent; he is soon restrained
+no longer by nature, whose only voice is in man's conscience. Pleasure
+in wanton cruelty takes the same course: he prefers to throw javelins at
+men and women to throwing javelins at bulls or bears, even as he prefers
+throwing javelins at bulls or bears rather than at targets; the
+excitement is greater; the instinct is that of the soldiers of Spain and
+of France, who invariably preferred shooting at a valuable fresco like
+Sodoma's Christ, at Siena, or Lo Spagna's Madonna, at Spoleto, to
+practising against a mere worthless piece of wood. Such a man as Cæsar
+Borgia is the _nec plus ultra_ of a Renaissance villain; he takes, as
+all do not, absolute pleasure in evil as such. Yet Cæsar Borgia is not a
+fiend nor a maniac. He can restrain himself whenever circumstances or
+policy require it; he can be a wise administrator, a just judge. His
+portraits show no degraded criminal; he is, indeed, a criminal in
+action, but not necessarily a criminal in constitution, this fiendish
+man who did not seem a fiend to Machiavel. We are astonished at the
+strange anomaly in the tastes and deeds of these Renaissance villains;
+we are amazed before their portraits. These men, who, in the frightful
+light of their own misdeeds, appear to us as complete demons or complete
+madmen, have yet much that is amiable and much that is sane; they
+stickle at no abominable lust, yet they are no bestial sybarites; they
+are brave, sober, frugal, enduring like any puritan; they are
+treacherous, rapacious, cruel, utterly indifferent to the sufferings of
+their enemies, yet they are gentle in manner, passionately fond of
+letters and art, superb in their works of public utility, and not
+incapable of genuinely admiring men of pure life like Bernardino or
+Savonarola: they are often, strange to say, like the frightful Baglionis
+of Perugia, passionately admired and loved by their countrymen. The
+bodily portraits of these men, painted by the sternly realistic art of
+the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, are even more confusing to
+our ideas than their moral portraits drawn by historians and
+chroniclers. Cæsar Borgia, with his long fine features and noble head,
+is a gracious and refined prince; there is, perhaps, a certain duplicity
+in the well-cut lips; the beard, worn full and peaked in Spanish
+fashion, forms a sort of mask to the lower part of the face, but what we
+see is noble and intellectual. Sigismondo Malatesta has on his medals a
+head whose scowl has afforded opportunity for various fine descriptions
+of a blood maniac; but the head, thus found so expressive, of this
+monster, is infinitely more human than the head on the medals of
+Lionello d'Este, one of the most mild and cultivated of the decently
+behaved Ferrarese princes. The very flower of precocious iniquity, the
+young Baglionis, Vitellis, and Orsinis, grouped round Signorelli's
+preaching Antichrist at Orvieto, are, in their gallantly trimmed jerkins
+and jewelled caps, the veriest assemblage of harmless young dandies,
+pretty and insipid; we can scarcely believe that these mild beardless
+striplings, tight-waisted and well-curled like girls of sixteen, are the
+terrible Umbrian brigand condottieri--Gianpaolos, Simonettos,
+Vitellozzos, and Astorres--whose abominable deeds fill the pages of the
+chronicles of Matarazzo, of Frolliere, of Monaldeschi. Nowhere among the
+portraits of Renaissance monsters do we meet with anything like those
+Roman emperors, whose frightful effigies, tumid, toad-like Vitelliuses
+or rage-convulsed Caracallas, fill all our museums in marble or bronze
+or loathsome purple porphyry; such types as these are as foreign to the
+reality of the Italian Renaissance as are the Brachianos and
+Lussuriosos, the Pieros and Corombonas, to the Italian fiction of the
+sixteenth century.
+
+Nor must such anomalies between the type of the men and their deeds,
+between their abominable crimes and their high qualities, be merely made
+a subject for grandiloquent disquisition. The man of the Renaissance, as
+we have said, had no need to be a monster to do monstrous things; a
+crime did not necessitate such a moral rebellion as requires complete
+unity of nature, unmixed wickedness; it did not precipitate a man for
+ever into a moral abyss where no good could ever enter. Seeing no
+barrier between the legitimate and the illegitimate, he could alternate
+almost unconsciously between them. He was never shut out from evil, and
+never shut out from good; the judgment of men did not dress him in a
+convict's jacket which made evil his only companion; it did not lock him
+up in a moral dungeon where no ray of righteousness could enter; he was
+not condemned, like the branded harlot, to hopeless infamy. He need be
+bad only as much and as long as he chose. Hence, on the part of the
+evil-doer of the Renaissance, no necessity either for violent rebellion
+or for sincere repentance; hence the absence of all characters such as
+the tragic writer seeks, developed by moral struggle, warped by the
+triumph of vice, or consciously soiled in virtue. What a "Revenger's
+Tragedy" might not Cyril Tourneur have made, had he known all the
+details, of the story of Alessandro de' Medici's death! What a Vindici
+he would have made of the murderer Lorenzino; with what a strange lurid
+grandeur he would have surrounded the plottings of the pander Brutus.
+But Lorenzino de' Medici had none of the feeling of Tourneur's Vindici;
+there was in him none of the ghastly spirit of self-immolation of the
+hero of Tourneur in his attendance upon the foul creature whom he leads
+to his death. Lorenzino had the usual Brutus mania of his day, but
+unmixed with horror. To be the pander and jester of the Duke was no pain
+to his nature; there was probably no sense of debasement in the
+knowledge either of his employer or of his employment. To fasten on
+Alexander, to pretend to be his devoted slave and server of his lust,
+this piece of loathsome acting, merely enhanced, by the ingenuity it
+required, the attraction of what to Lorenzino was an act of heroism. His
+ambition was to be a Brutus; that he had bespattered the part probably
+never occurred to him. The indifference to good and evil permitted the
+men of the Renaissance to mix the two without any moral sickness, as it
+permitted them to alternate them without a moral struggle. Such is the
+wickedness of the Renaissance: not a superhuman fury of lust and
+cruelty, like Victor Hugo's Lucrezia Borgia; but an indifferent, a
+characterless creature like the Lucrezia Borgia of history: passive to
+surrounding influences, blind to good and evil, infamous in the infamous
+Rome, among her father and brother's courtesans and cut-throats; grave
+and gracious! in the grave and gracious Ferrara, among the Platonic
+poets and pacific courtiers of the court of the Estensi. Thus, in the
+complete prose and colourlessness of reality, has the evil of the
+Renaissance been understood and represented only by one man, and
+transmitted to us in one pale and delicate psychological masterpiece far
+more loathsome than any elaborately hideous monster painting by Marston
+or Tourneur. The man who thus conceived the horrors of the Italian
+Renaissance in the spirit in which they were committed is Ford. In his
+great play he has caught the very tone of the Italian Renaissance: the
+abominableness of the play consisting not in the coarse slaughter scenes
+added merely to please the cockpit of an English theatre, but in the
+superficial innocence of tone; in its making evil lose its appearance of
+evil, even as it did to the men of the Renaissance. Giovanni and
+Annabella make love as if they were Romeo and Juliet: there is scarcely
+any struggle, and no remorse; they weep and pay compliments and sigh and
+melt in true Aminta style. There is in the love of the brother and
+sister neither the ferocious heat of tragic lust, nor the awful shudder
+of unnatural evil; they are lukewarm, neither good nor bad. Their
+abominable love is in their own eyes a mere weakness of the flesh; there
+is no sense of revolt against man and nature and God; they are neither
+dragged on by irresistible demoniac force nor held back by the grip of
+conscience; they slip and slide, even like Francesca and Paolo. They pay
+each other sweet and mawkish compliments. The ferocious lust of
+Francesco Cenci is moral compared with the way in which the "trim youth"
+Giovanni praises Annabella's beauty; the blushing, bride-like way in
+which Annabella, "white in her soul," acknowledges her long love. The
+atrociousness of all this is, that if you strike out a word or two the
+scene may be read with perfect moral satisfaction, with the impression
+that this is really "sacred love." For in these scenes Ford wrote with a
+sweetness and innocence truly diabolical, not a shiver of horror passing
+through him--serene, unconscious; handling the filthy without sense of
+its being unclean, to the extent, the incredible extent, of making
+Giovanni and Annabella swear on their mother's ashes eternal fidelity in
+incest: horror of horrors, to which no Walpurgis Night abomination could
+ever approach, this taking as witness of the unutterable, not an obscene
+Beelzebub with abominable words and rites, but the very holiest of
+holies. If ever Englishman approached the temper of the Italian
+Renaissance, it was not Tourneur, nor Shelley with his cleansing hell
+fires of tragic horror, but this sweet and gentle Ford. If ever an
+artistic picture approached the reality of such a man as Gianpaolo
+Baglioni, the incestuous murderer whom the Frolliere chronicler,
+enthusiastic like Matarazzo, admires, for "his most beautiful person,
+his benign and amiable manner and lordly bearing," it is certainly not
+the elaborately villainous Francesco Cenci of Shelley, boasting like
+another Satan of his enormous wickedness, exhausting in his picture of
+himself the rhetoric of horror, committing his final enormity merely to
+complete the crown of atrocities in which he glories; it is no such
+tragic impossibility of moral hideousness as this; it is the Giovanni of
+Ford, the pearl of virtuous and studious youths, the spotless, the
+brave, who, after a moment's reasoning, tramples on a vulgar
+prejudice--"Shall a peevish sound, a customary form from man to man, of
+brother and of sister, be a bar 'twixt my eternal happiness and me?" who
+sins with a clear conscience, defies the world, and dies, bravely,
+proudly, the "sacred name" of Annabella on his lips, like a chivalrous
+hero. The pious, pure Germany of Luther will give the world the tragic
+type of the science-damned Faustus; the devout and savage Spain of
+Cervantes will give the tragic type of Don Juan, damned for mockery of
+man and of death and of heaven; the Puritan England of Milton will give
+the most sublimely tragic type of all, the awful figure of him who says,
+"Evil, be thou my good." What tragic type can this evil Italy of
+Renaissance give to the world? None: or at most this miserable, morbid,
+compassionated Giovanni: whom Ford would have us admire, and whom we can
+only despise.
+
+The blindness to evil which constitutes the criminality of the
+Renaissance is so great as to give a certain air of innocence. For the
+men of that time were wicked solely from a complete sophistication of
+ideas, a complete melting away (owing to slowly operating political and
+intellectual tendencies) of all moral barriers. They walked through the
+paths of wickedness with the serenity with which they would have trod
+the ways of righteousness; seeing no boundary, exercising their psychic
+limbs equally in the open and permitted spaces and in the forbidden.
+They plucked the fruit of evil without a glance behind them, without a
+desperate setting of their teeth; plucked it openly, calmly, as they
+would have plucked the blackberries in the hedge; bit into it, ate it,
+with perfect ease and serenity, saying their prayers before and after,
+as if it were their natural daily bread mentioned in the Lord's Prayer;
+no grimace or unseemly leer the while; no moral indigestion or nightmare
+(except very rarely) in consequence. Hence the serenity of their
+literature and art. These men and women of the Italian Renaissance have,
+in their portraits, a very pleasing nobility of aspect: serene,
+thoughtful, healthy, benign. Titian's courtesans are our archetypes of
+dignified womanhood; we might fancy Portia or Isabella with such calm,
+florid beauty, so wholly unmeretricious and uncankered. The humanists
+and priests who lie outstretched on the acanthus-leaved and
+flower-garlanded sarcophagi by Desiderio and Rossellino are the very
+flowers of refined and gentle men of study; the youths in Botticelli's
+"Adoration of The Magi," for instance, are the ideal of Boiardo's
+chivalry, Rinaldos and Orlandos every one; the corseleted generals of
+the Renaissance, so calm and stern and frank, the Bartolomeo Colleoni of
+Verrocchio, the Gattamelata by Giorgione (or Giorgione's pupil), look
+fit to take up the banner of the crusade: that Gattamelata in the Uffizi
+gallery especially looks like a sort of military Milton: give him a pair
+of wings and he becomes at once Signorelli's archangel, clothed in
+heavenly steel and unsheathing the flaming sword of God. Compare with
+these types Holbein's courtiers of Henry VIII.; what scrofulous hogs!
+Compare Sanchez Coello's Philip II. and Don Carlos; what monomaniacs.
+Compare even Dürer's magnificent head of Willibald Pirkheimer: how the
+swine nature is blended with the thinker. And the swine will be subdued,
+the thinker will triumph. Why? Just because there is a contest--because
+the thinker-Willibald is conscious of the swine-Willibald. In this
+coarse, brutal, deeply stained Germany of the time of Luther, affording
+Dürer and Holbein, alas! how many besotten and bestial types, there will
+arise a great conflict: the obscene leering Death--Death-in-Life as he
+really is--will skulk everywhere, even as in the prints of the day,
+hideous and powerful, trying, with hog's snout, to drive Christ Himself
+out of limbo; but he is known, seen, dreaded. The armed knight of Dürer
+turns away from his grimacings, and urges on his steel-covered horse. He
+visits even the best, even Luther in the Wartburg; but the good men open
+their Bibles, cry "Vade retro!" and throw their inkstands at him,
+showing themselves terrified and ruffled after the combat. And these
+Germans of Luther's are disgustingly fond of blood and horrors: they
+like to see the blood spirt from the decapitated trunk, to watch its
+last contortions; they hammer with a will (in Dürer's "Passion") the
+nails of the cross, they peel off strips of skin in the flagellation.
+But then they can master all that; they can be pure, charitable; they
+have gentleness for the hare and the rabbit, like Luther; they kneel
+piously before the cross-bearing stag, like Saint Hubert. Not so the
+Italians. They rarely or never paint horrors, or death, or abominations.
+Their flagellated Christ, their arrow-riddled Sebastian, never writhe or
+howl with pain; indeed, they suffer none. Judith, in Mantegna's print,
+puts the head of Holophernes into her bag with the serenity of a muse;
+and the head is quite clean, without loathsome drippings or torn
+depending strings of muscle; unconvulsed, a sort of plaster cast. The
+tragedy of Christ, the tragedy of Judith; the physical agency shadowing
+the moral agony; the awfulness of victim and criminal--the whole tragic
+meaning was unknown to the light and cheerful contemporaries of Ariosto,
+the cold and cynical contemporaries of Machiavelli.
+
+The tragic passion and imagination which, in the noble and grotesque
+immaturity of the Middle Ages, had murmured confusedly in the popular
+legends which gave to Ezzelin the Fiend as a father, and Death and Sin
+as adversaries at dice; which had stammered awkwardly but grandly in the
+school Latin of Mussato's tragedy of "Eccerinis;" which had wept and
+stormed and imprecated and laughed for horror in the infinite
+tragedy--pathetic, grand, and grotesque, like all great tragedy--of
+Dante; this tragic passion and imagination, this sense of the horrible
+and the terrible, had been forfeited by the Italy of the Renaissance,
+lost with its sense of right and wrong. The Italian Renaissance, supreme
+in the arts which require a subtle and strong perception of the
+excellence of mere lines and colours and lights and shadows, which
+demand unflinching judgment of material qualities; was condemned to
+inferiority in the art which requires subtle and strong perception of
+the excellence of human emotion and action; in the art which demands
+unflinching judgment of moral motives. The tragic spirit is the
+offspring of the conscience of a people. The sense of the imaginative
+grandeur of evil may perhaps be a forerunner of demoralization; but such
+a sense of wonder and awe, such an imaginative fascination of the
+grandly, superhumanly wicked such a necessity to magnify a villain into
+a demon with archangelic splendour of power of evil, can exist only in
+minds pure and strong, braced up to virtue, virgin of evil, with a
+certain childlike power of wonder; minds to whom it appears that to be
+wicked requires a powerful rebellion; minds accustomed to nature and
+nature's plainness, to whom the unnatural can be no subject of
+sophistication and cynicism, but only of wonder. While, in Italy,
+Giraldi Cinthio prattles off to a gay party of ladies and gentlemen
+stories of murder and lust as frightful as those of "Titus' Andronicus,"
+of "Giovanni and Annabella," and of the "Revenger's Tragedy," in the
+intelligent, bantering tone in which he tells his Decameronian tales; in
+England, Marston, in his superb prologue to the second part of "Antonio
+and Mellida," doubts whether all his audience can rise to the conception
+of the terrible passions he wishes to display:
+
+
+     If any spirit breathes within this round
+     Uncapable of weighty passion,
+     Who winks and shuts his apprehension up
+     From common sense of what men were and are,
+     Who would not know what men must be: let such
+     Hurry amain from our black visaged shows;
+     We shall affright their eyes.
+
+
+The great criminals of Italy were unconscious of being criminals; the
+nation was unconscious of being sinful. Bembo's sonnets were the fit
+reading for Lucrezia Borgia; pastorals by Guarini the dramatic
+amusements of Rannuccio Farnesi; if Vittoria Accoramboni and Francesco
+Cenci read anything besides their prayerbook or ribald novels, it was
+some sugary "Aminta" or "Pastor Fido:" their own tragedies by Webster
+and Shelley they could never have understood.
+
+And thus the Italians of the Renaissance walked placidly through the
+evil which surrounded them; for them, artists and poets, the sky was
+always blue and the sun always bright, and their art and their poetry
+were serene. But the Englishmen of the sixteenth century were astonished
+and fascinated by the evil of Italy: the dark pools of horror, the dabs
+of infamy which had met them ever and anon in the brilliant southern
+cities, haunted them like nightmare, bespattered for them the clear blue
+sky, and danced, black and horrible spots, before the face of the sun.
+The remembrance of Italian wickedness weighed on them like an incubus,
+clung to them with a frightful fascination. While the foulest criminals
+of Italy discussed the platonic vapidnesses of Bembo's sonnets, and wept
+at the sweet and languid lamentations of Guarini's shepherds and nymphs;
+the strong Englishmen of the time of Shakespeare, the men whose children
+were to unsheathe under Cromwell the sword of righteousness, listened
+awe-stricken and fascinated with horror to the gloomy and convulsed, the
+grand and frightful plays of Webster and of Tourneur. And the sin of the
+Renaissance, which the art of Italy could neither pourtray nor perceive;
+appeared on the stage decked in superb and awful garb by the tragic
+imagination of Elizabethan England.
+
+
+
+
+THE OUTDOOR POETRY.
+
+
+The thought of winter is bleak and barren to our mind; the late year is
+chary of æsthetic as of all other food. In the country it does not bring
+ugliness; but it terribly reduces and simplifies things, depriving them
+of two-thirds of their beauty. In sweeping away the last yellow leaves,
+the last crimson clouds, and in bleaching the last green grass, it
+effaces a whole wealth of colour. It deprives us still more by actually
+diminishing the number of forms: for what summer had left rich, various,
+complex, winter reduces to blank uniformity. There is a whole world of
+lovely things, shapes and tints, effects of light, colour, and
+perspective in a wood, as long as it is capriciously divided into a
+thousand nooks and crannies by projecting boughs, bushes, hedges, and
+hanging leaves; and this winter clears away and reduces to a
+Haussmanized simplicity of plan. There is a smaller world, yet one quite
+big enough for a summer's day, in any hay field, among the barren oats,
+the moon-daisies, the seeded grasses, the sorrel, the buttercups, all
+making at a distance a wonderful blent effect of luminous brown and
+lilac and russet foamed with white; and forming, when you look close
+into it, an unlimited forest of delicately separate stems and bloom and
+seed; every plant detaching itself daintily from an undefinable
+background of things like itself. This winter turns into a rusty brown
+and green expanse, or into a bog, or a field of frozen upturned clods.
+The very trees, stripped of their leaves, look as if prepared for
+diagrams of the abstraction tree. Everything, in short, is reduced most
+philosophically to its absolutely ultimate elements; and beauty is got
+rid of almost as completely as by a metaphysical definition. This
+æsthetic barrenness of winter is most of all felt in southern climates,
+to which it brings none of the harsh glitter and glamour of snow and
+ice; but leaves the frozen earth and leafless trees merely bare, without
+the crisp sheen of snow, the glint and glimmer of frost and icicles,
+forming for the denuded rigging of branches a fantastic system of ropes
+and folded sails. In the South, therefore, unless you go where winter
+never comes, and autumn merely merges into a lengthened spring, winter
+is more than ever negative, dreary, barren to our fancy. Yet even this
+southern winter gives one things, very lovely things: things which one
+scarcely notices perhaps, yet which would baffle the most skilled
+painter to imitate, the most skilled poet to describe. Thus, for
+instance, there is a peculiar kind of morning by no means uncommon in
+Tuscany in what is completely winter, not a remnant of autumn or a
+beginning of spring. It is cold, but windless; the sky full of sun, the
+earth full of mist. Sun and mist uniting into a pale luminousness in
+which all things lose body, become mere outline; bodiless hills taking
+shape where they touch the sky with their curve; clear line of irregular
+houses, of projecting ilex roundings and pointed cypresses marking the
+separation between hill and sky, the one scarcely more solid, corporeal
+than the other; the hill almost as blue as the sky, the sky almost as
+vaporous as the hill; the tangible often more ghostlike than the
+intangible. But the sun has smitten the higher hills, and the vapours
+have partially rolled down, in a scarcely visible fold, to their feet;
+and the high hill, not yet rock or earth, swells up into the sky as
+something real, but fluid and of infinite elasticity. All in front the
+plain is white with mist; or pinkish grey with the unseen agglomeration
+of bare tree boughs and trunks, of sere field; till, nearer us, the
+trees become more visible, the short vinebearing elms in the fields,
+interlacing their branches compressed by distance, the clumps of
+poplars, so scant and far between from nearly, so serried and compact
+from afar; and between them an occasional flush, a tawny vapour of the
+orange twigged osiers; and then, still nearer, the expanse of sere
+field, of mottled, crushed-together, yellowed grass and grey brown
+leaves; things of the summer which winter is burying to make room for
+spring. Along the reaches of the river the clumps of leafless poplars
+are grey against the pale, palest blue sky; grey but with a warmth of
+delicate brown, almost of rosiness. Grey also the shingle in the river
+bed; the river itself either (if after rain) pale brown, streaked with
+pale blue sky reflections; or (after a drought), low, grey, luminous
+throughout its surface, you might think, were it not that the metallic
+sheen, the vacillating sparkles of where the sun, smiting down, frets it
+into a shifting mass of scintillating facets, gives you the impression
+that this other luminousness of silvery water must be dull and dead.
+And, looking up the river, it gradually disappears, its place marked
+only, against the all-pervading pale blue haze, by the brownish grey
+spectre of the furthest poplar clumps.
+
+This, I have said, is an effect which winter produces, nay, even a
+southern winter, with those comparatively few and slight elements at its
+disposal. We see it, notice it, and enjoy its delicate loveliness; but
+while so doing we do not think, or we forget, that the habit of
+noticing, nay, the power of perceiving such effects as this, is one of
+those habits and powers which we possess, so to speak, only since
+yesterday. The possibility of reproducing in painting effects like this
+one; or, more truthfully, the wish to reproduce them, is scarcely as old
+as our own century; it is, perhaps, the latest born of all our artistic
+wishes and possibilities. But the possibility of any visible effect
+being perceived and reproduced by the painter, usually precedes--at
+least where any kind of pictorial art already exists--the perception of
+such effects by those who are not painters, and the attempt to reproduce
+them by means of words. We do not care to admit that our grandfathers
+were too unlike ourselves, lest ourselves should be found too unlike our
+grandchildren. We hold to the metaphysic fiction of man having always
+been the same, and only his circumstances having changed; not admitting
+that the very change of circumstances implies something new in the man
+who altered them; and similarly we shrink from the thought of the many
+things which we used never to notice, and which it has required a class
+of men endowed with special powers of vision to find out, copy, and
+teach us to see and appreciate. Yet there is scarcely one of us who has
+not a debt towards some painter or writer for first directing his
+attention to objects or effects which may have abounded around him, but
+unnoticed or confused with others. The painters, as I have said, the men
+who see more keenly and who study what they have seen, naturally come
+first; nor does the poet usually describe what his contemporary painter
+attempts not to paint. An exception might, perhaps, require to be made
+for Dante, who would seem to have seen and described many things left
+quite untouched by Giotto, and even by Raphael; but in estimating Dante
+we must be careful to distinguish the few touches which really belong to
+him, from the great mass of colour and detail which we have
+unconsciously added thereto, borrowing from our own experience and from
+innumerable pictures and poems which, at the moment, we may not in the
+least remember; and having done so, we shall be led to believe that
+those words which suggest to us so clear and coloured a vision of scenes
+often complex and uncommon, presented to his own mind only a
+comparatively simple and incomplete idea: the atmospheric effects,
+requiring a more modern painter than Turner, which we read between the
+lines of the "Inferno" and the "Purgatorio," most probably existed as
+little for Dante as they did for Giotto; the poet seeing and describing
+in reality only salient forms of earth and rock, monotonous in tint and
+deficient in air, like those in the backgrounds of mediæval Tuscan
+frescoes and panels. Be this as it may, the fact grows daily on me that
+men have not at all times seen in the same degree the nature which has
+always equally surrounded them; and that during some periods they have,
+for explicable reasons, seen less not only than their successors, but
+also than their predecessors; and seen that little in a manner
+conventional in proportion to its monotony. There are things about which
+certain historic epochs are strangely silent; so much so, indeed, that
+the breaking of the silence impresses us almost as the more than human
+breaking of a spell; and that silence Is the result of a grievous wrong,
+of a moral disease which half closes the eyes of the fancy, or of a
+moral poison which presents to those sorely aching eyes only a glimmer
+amid darkness. And it is as the most singular instance of such
+conditions that I should wish to study, in themselves, their causes and
+effects, the great differences existing between the ancients and
+ourselves on the one hand, and the men of the genuine Middle Ages on the
+other, in the degree of interest taken respectively by each in external
+nature, the seasons and that rural life which seems to bring us into
+closest contact with them both.
+
+There is, of course, a considerable difference between the manner in
+which the country, its aspects and occupations, are treated by the poets
+of Antiquity and by those of our own day; in the mode of enjoying them
+of an ancient who had read Theocritus and Virgil and Tibullus, and a
+modern whose mind is unconsciously full of the influence of Wordsworth
+or Shelley or Ruskin. But it is a mere difference of mode; and is not
+greater, I think, than the difference between the descriptions in the
+"Allegro," and the descriptions in "Men and Women;" than the difference
+between the love of our Elizabethans for the minuter details of the
+country, the flowers by the stream, the birds in the bushes, the
+ferrets, frogs, lizards, and similar small creatures; and the pleasure
+of our own contemporaries in the larger, more shifting, and perplexing
+forms and colours of cloud, sunlight, earth, and rock. The description
+of effects such as these latter ones, nay, the attention and
+appreciation given to them, are things of our own century, even as is
+the power and desire of painting them. Landscape, in the sense of our
+artists of to-day, is a very recent thing; so recent that even in the
+works of Turner, who was perhaps the earliest landscape painter in the
+modern sense, we are forced to separate from the real rendering of real
+effects, a great deal in which the tints of sky and sea are arranged and
+distributed as a mere vast conventional piece of decoration. Nor could
+it be otherwise. For, in poetry as in painting, landscape could become a
+separate and substantive art only when the interest in the mere ins and
+outs of human adventure, in the mere structure and movement of human
+limbs, had considerably diminished. There is room, in epic or drama,
+only for such little scraps of description as will make clearer, without
+checking, the human action; as there is place, in a fresco of a miracle,
+or a little picture of carousing and singing bacchantes and Venetian
+dandies, only for such little bits of laurel grove, or dim plain, or
+blue alpine crags, as can be introduced in the gaps between head and
+head, or figure and figure.
+
+Thus, therefore, a great difference must exist between what would be
+felt and written about the country and the seasons by an ancient, by a
+man of the sixteenth century, or by a contemporary of our own: a
+difference, however, solely of mode; for we feel sure that of the three
+men each would find something to delight himself and wherewith to
+delight others among the elm-bounded English meadows, the fiat
+cornfields of central France, the vine and olive yards of Italy--
+wherever, in short, he might find himself face to face and, so to
+speak, hand in hand with Nature. But about the man of the Middle Ages
+(unless, perhaps, in Italy, where the whole Middle Ages were merely an
+earlier Renaissance) we could have no such assurance; nay, we might be
+persuaded that, however great his genius, be he even a Gottfried von
+Strassburg, or a Walther von der Vogelweide, or the unknown Frenchman
+who has left us "Aucassin et Nicolette," he would bring back impressions
+only of two things, authorized and consecrated by the poetic routine of
+his contemporaries--of spring and of the woods.
+
+There is nothing more characteristic of mediæval poetry than this
+limitation. Of autumn, of winter; of the standing corn, the ripening
+fruit of summer; of all these things so dear to the ancients and to all
+men of modern times, the Middle Ages seem to know nothing. The autumn
+harvests, the mists and wondrous autumnal transfiguration of the
+humblest tree, or bracken, or bush; the white and glittering splendour
+of winter, and its cosy life by hearth or stove; the drowsiness of
+summer, its suddenly inspired wish for shade and dew and water, all this
+left them stolid. To move them was required the feeling of spring, the
+strongest, most complete and stirring impression which, in our temperate
+climates, can be given by Nature. The whole pleasurableness of warm air,
+clear moist sky, the surprise of the shimmer of pale green, of the
+yellowing blossom on tree tops, the first flicker of faint shadow where
+all has been uniform, colourless, shadeless; the replacing of the long
+silence by the endless twitter and trill of birds, endless in its way as
+is the sea, twitter and trill on every side, depths and depths of it, of
+every degree of distance and faintness, a sea of bird song; and along
+with this the sense of infinite renovation to all the earth and to man's
+own heart. Of all Nature's effects this one alone goes sparkling to the
+head; and it alone finds a response in mediæval poetry. Spring, spring,
+endless spring--for three long centuries throughout the world a dreary
+green monotony of spring all over France, Provence, Italy, Spain,
+Germany, England; spring, spring, nothing but spring even in the
+mysterious countries governed by the Grail King, by the Fairy Morgana,
+by Queen Proserpine, by Prester John; nay, in the new Jerusalem, in the
+kingdom of Heaven itself, nothing but spring; till one longs for a bare
+twig, for a yellow leaf, for a frozen gutter, as for a draught of water
+in the desert. The green fields and meadows enamelled with painted
+flowers, how one detests them! how one would rejoice to see them well
+sprinkled with frost or burnt up to brown in the dry days! the birds,
+the birds which warble through every sonnet, canzone, sirventes, glosa,
+dance lay, roundelay, virelay, rondel, ballade, and whatsoever else it
+may be called,--how one wishes them silent for ever, or their twitter,
+the tarantarantandei of the eternal German nightingale especially,
+drowned by a good howling wind J After any persistent study of mediæval
+poetry, one's feeling towards spring is just similar to that of the
+morbid creature in Schubert's "Müllerin," who would not stir from home
+for the dreadful, dreadful greenness, which he would fain bleach with
+tears, all around:
+
+
+     Ich möchte ziehn in die Welt hinaus, hinaus in die weite
+         Welt,
+     Wenn's nur so grün, so grün nicht war da draussen in
+         Wald und Feld.
+
+
+Moreover this mediæval spring is the spring neither of the shepherd, nor
+of the farmer, nor of any man to whom spring brings work and anxiety and
+hope of gain; it is a mere vague spring of gentle-folk, or at all events
+of well-to-do burgesses, taking their pleasure on the lawns of castle
+parks, or the green holiday places close to the city, much as we see
+them in the first part of "Faust;" a sweet but monotonous charm of
+grass, beneath green lime tree, or in the South the elm or plane; under
+which are seated the poet and the fiddler, playing and singing for the
+young women, their hair woven with chaplets of fresh flowers, dancing
+upon the sward. And poet after poet, Provençal, Italian, and German,
+Nithart and Ulrich, and even the austere singer of the Holy Grail,
+Wolfram, pouring out verse after verse of the songs in praise of spring,
+which they make even as girls wind their garlands: songs of quaint and
+graceful ever-changing rythm, now slowly circling, now bounding along,
+now stamping out the measure like the feet of the dancers, now winding
+and turning as wind and twine their arms in the long-linked mazes; while
+the few and ever-repeated ideas, the old, stale platitudes of praise of
+woman, love pains, joys of dancing, pleasure of spring (spring, always
+spring, eternal, everlasting spring) seem languidly to follow the life
+and movement of the mere metre. Poets, these German, Provençal, French,
+and early Italian lyrists, essentially (if we venture to speak heresy)
+not of ideas or emotions, but of metre, of rythm and rhyme; with just
+the minimum of necessary thought, perpetually presented afresh just as
+the words, often and often repeated and broken up and new combined, of a
+piece of music--poetry which is in truth a sort of music, dance or dirge
+or hymn music as the case may be, more than anything else.
+
+As it is in mediæval poetry with the seasons, so it is likewise with the
+country and its occupations: as there is only spring, so there is only
+the forest. Of the forest, mediæval poetry has indeed much to say; more
+perhaps, and more familiar with its pleasures, than Antiquity. There is
+the memorable forest where the heroes of the Nibelungen go to hunt,
+followed by their waggons of provisions and wine; where Siegfried
+overpowers the bear, and returns to his laughing comrades with the huge
+thing chained to his saddle; where, in that clear space which we see so
+distinctly, a lawn on to which the blue black firs are encroaching,
+Siegfried stoops to drink of the spring beneath the lime tree, and Hagen
+drives his boarspear straight through the Nibelung's back. There is the
+thick wood, all a golden haze through the young green, and with an
+atmosphere of birds' song, where King Mark discovers Tristram and Iseult
+in the cave, the deceitful sword between them, as Gottfried von
+Strassburg relates with wonderful luscious charm. The forest, also, more
+bleak and austere, where the four outlawed sons of Aymon live upon roots
+and wild animals, where they build their castle by the Meuse. Further,
+and most lovely of all, the forest in which Nicolette makes herself a
+hut of branches, bracken, and flowers, through which the stars peep down
+on her whiteness as she dreams of her Lord Aucassin. The forest where
+Huon meets Oberon; and Guy de Lusignan, the good snake-lady; and
+Parzival finds on the snow the feathers and the drops of blood which
+throw him into his long day-dream; and Owen discovers the tomb of
+Merlin; the forest, in short, which extends its interminable glades and
+serried masses of trunks and arches of green from one end to the other
+of mediæval poetry. It is very beautiful, this forest of the Middle
+Ages; but it is monotonous, melancholy; and has a terrible eeriness in
+its endlessness. For there is nothing else. There are no meadows where
+the cows lie lazily, no fields where the red and purple kerchiefs of the
+reapers overtop the high corn; no orchards, no hayfields; nothing like
+those hill slopes where the wild herbs encroach upon the vines, and the
+goats of Corydon and Damoetas require to be kept from mischief; where, a
+little lower down, the Athenian shopkeeper of Aristophanes goes daily to
+look whether yesterday's hard figs may not have ripened, or the vine
+wreaths pruned last week grown too lushly. Nor anything of the sort of
+those Umbrian meadows, where Virgil himself will stop and watch the
+white bullocks splashing slowly into the shallow, sedgy Clitumnus; still
+less like those hamlets in the cornfields through which Propertius would
+stroll, following the jolting osier waggon, or the procession with
+garlands and lights to Pales or to the ochre-stained garden god. Nothing
+of all this: there are no cultivated spots in mediæval poetry; the city
+only, and the castle, and the endless, all-encompassing forest.
+
+And to this narrowness of mediæval notions of outdoor life, inherited
+together with mediæval subjects by the poets even of the sixteenth
+century, must be referred the curious difference existing between the
+romance poets of antiquity, like Homer in the Odyssey, and the romance
+poets--Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Camoens--of modern times, in
+the matter of--how shall I express it?--the ideal life, the fortunate
+realms, the "Kennaqwhere." In Homer, in all the ancients, the ideal
+country is merely a more delightful reality; and its inhabitants happier
+everyday men and women; in the poetry sprung from the Middle Ages it is
+always a fairy-land constructed by mechanicians and architects. For, as
+we have seen, the Middle Ages could bequeath to the sixteenth century no
+ideal of peaceful outdoor enjoyment. Hence, in the poetry of the
+sixteenth century, still permeated by mediæval traditions, an appalling
+artificiality of delightfulness. Fallerina, Alcina, Armida, Acrasia, all
+imitated from the original Calypso, are not strong and splendid
+god-women, living among the fields and orchards, but dainty ladies
+hidden in elaborate gardens, all bedizened with fashionable
+architecture: regular palaces, pleasaunces, with uncomfortable edifices,
+artificial waterfalls, labyrinths, rare and monstrous plants, parrots,
+apes, giraffes; childish splendours of gardening and engineering and
+menageries, which we meet already in "Ogier the Dane" and "Huon of
+Bordeaux," and which later poets epitomized out of the endless
+descriptions of Colonna's "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," the still more
+frightful inventories of the Amadis romances. They are, each of them, a
+kind of anticipated Marly, Versailles, Prince Elector's Friedrichsruhe
+or Nymphenburg, with clipped cypresses and yews, doubtless, and (O Pales
+and Pan!) flower-beds filled with coloured plaster and spas, and
+cascades spirting out (thanks to fifty invisible pumps) under your feet
+and over your head. All the vineyards and cornfields have been swept
+away to make these solemn terraces and water-works; all the cottages
+which, with their little wooden shrine, their humble enclosure of
+sunflowers and rosemary and fruit trees, their buzzing hives and barking
+dogs, were loved and sung even by town rakes like Catullus and smart
+coffeehouse wits like Horace; all these have been swept away to be
+replaced by the carefully constructed (? wire) bowers, the aviaries, the
+porticoes, the frightful circular edifice (_tondo è il ricco edificio_),
+a masterpiece of Palladian stucco work, in which Armida and Rinaldo,
+Acrasia and her Knight, drearily disport themselves. What has become of
+Calypso's island? of the orchards of Alcinous? What would the noble
+knights and ladies of Ariosto and Spenser think of them? What would they
+say, these romantic, dainty creatures, were they to meet Nausicaa with
+the washed linen piled on her waggon? Alas! they would take her for a
+laundress. For it is the terrible aristocratic idleness of the Middle
+Ages, their dreary delicacy, which hampers Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso,
+Spenser, even in the midst of their most unblushing plagiarisms from
+Antiquity: their heroes and heroines have been brought up, surrounded by
+equerries and duennas, elegant, useless things, or at best (the knights
+at least) good only for aristocratic warfare. Plough or prune! defile
+the knightly hands! wash or cook, ply the loom like Nausicaa, Calypso,
+or Penelope! The mere thought sends them very nearly into a faint. No:
+the ladies of mediæval romance must sit quiet, idle; at most they may
+sing to the lute; and if they work with their hands, it must be some
+dreary, strictly useless, piece of fancy work; they are hot-house
+plants, all these dainty folk.
+
+Had they no eyes, then, these poets of the Middle Ages, that they could
+see, among all the things of Nature, only those few which had been seen
+by their predecessors? At first one feels tempted to think so, till the
+recollection of many vivid touches in spring and forest descriptions
+persuades one that, enormous as was the sway of tradition among these
+men, they were not all of them, nor always, repeating mere conventional
+platitudes. This singular limitation in the mediæval perceptions of
+Nature--a limitation so important as almost to make it appear as if the
+Middle Ages had not perceived Nature at all--is most frequently
+attributed to the prevalence of asceticism, which, according to some
+critics, made all mediæval men into so many repetitions of Bernard of
+Clairvaux, of whom it is written that, being asked his opinion of Lake
+Leman, he answered with surprise that, during his journey from Geneva to
+the Rhone Valley, he had remarked no lake whatever, so absorbed had he
+been in spiritual meditations. But the predominance of asceticism has
+been grossly exaggerated. It was a state of moral tension which could
+not exist uninterruptedly, and could exist only in the classes for whom
+poetry was not written. The mischief done by asceticism was the warping
+of the moral nature of men, not of their æsthetic feelings; it had no
+influence upon the vast numbers, the men and women who relished the
+profane and obscene fleshliness and buffoonery of stage plays and
+fabliaux, and those who favoured the delicate and exquisite immoralities
+of Courtly poetry. Indeed, the presence of whole classes of writings, of
+which such things as Boccaccio's Tales, "The Wife of Bath," and Villon's
+"Ballades," on the one hand, and the songs of the troubadours, the poem
+of Gottfried, and the romance or rather novel of "Flamenca," are
+respectively but the most conspicuous examples, ought to prove only too
+clearly that the Middle Ages, for all their asceticism, were both as
+gross and as æsthetic in sensualism as antiquity had been before them.
+We must, therefore, seek elsewhere than in asceticism, necessarily
+limited, and excluding the poetry-reading public, for an explanation of
+this peculiarity of mediæval poetry. And we shall find it, I think, in
+that which during the Middle Ages could, because it was an
+all-regulating social condition, really create universal habits of
+thought and feeling, namely, feudalism. A moral condition like
+asceticism must leave unbiassed all such minds as are incapable of
+feeling it; but a social institution like feudalism walls in the life of
+every individual, and forces his intellectual movements into given
+paths; nor is there any escape, excepting in places where, as in Italy
+and in the free towns of the North, the feudal conditions are wholly or
+partially unknown. To feudalism, therefore, would I ascribe this, which
+appears at first so purely æsthetic, as opposed to social, a
+characteristic of the Middle Ages. Ever since Schiller, in his "Gods of
+Greece," spoke for the first time of undivinized Nature (_die
+entgötterte Natur_), it has been the fashion among certain critics to
+fall foul of Christianity for having robbed the fields and woods of
+their gods, and reduced to mere manured clods the things which had been
+held sacred by antiquity. Desecrated in those long mediæval centuries
+Nature may truly have been, but not by the holy water of Christian
+priests. Desecrated because out of the fields and meadows was driven a
+divinity greater than Pales or Vertumnus or mighty Pan, the divinity
+called _Man_. For in the terrible times when civilization was at its
+lowest, the things of the world had been newly allotted; and by this new
+allotment, man--the man who thinks and loves and hopes and strives, man
+who fights and sings--was shut out from the fields and meadows,
+forbidden the labour, nay, almost the sight, of the earth; and to the
+tending of kine, and sowing of crops, to all those occupations which
+antiquity had associated with piety and righteousness, had deemed worthy
+of the gods themselves, was assigned, or rather condemned, a creature
+whom every advancing year untaught to think or love, or hope, or fight,
+or strive; but taught most utterly to suffer and to despair. For a man
+it is difficult to call him, this mediæval serf, this lump of earth
+detached from the field and wrought into a semblance of manhood, merely
+that the soil of which it is part should be delved and sown, and then
+manured with its carcass or its blood; nor as a man did the Middle Ages
+conceive it. The serf was not even allowed human progenitors: his foul
+breed had originated in an obscene miracle; his stupidity and ferocity
+were as those of the beasts; his cunning was demoniac; he was born under
+God's curse; no words could paint his wickedness, no persecutions could
+exceed his deserts; the whole world turned pale at his crime, for he it
+was, he and not any human creature, who had nailed Christ upon the
+cross. Like the hunger and sores of a fox or a wolf, his hunger and his
+sores are forgotten, never noticed. Were it not that legal and
+ecclesiastical narratives of trials (not of feudal lords for crushing
+and contaminating their peasants, but of peasants for spitting out and
+trampling on the consecrated wafer) give us a large amount of
+pedantically stated detail; tell us how misery begat vice, and filth and
+starvation united families in complicated meshes of incest, taught them
+depopulation as a virtue and a necessity; and how the despair of any joy
+in nature, of any mercy from God, hounded men and women into the
+unspeakable orgies, the obscene parodies, of devil worship; were it not
+for these horrible shreds of judicial evidence (as of tatters of clothes
+or blood-clotted hairs on the shoes of a murderer) we should know little
+or nothing of the life of the men and women who, in mediæval France and
+Germany, did the work which had been taught by Hesiod and Virgil. About
+all these tragedies the literature of the Middle Ages, ready to show us
+town vice and town horror, dens of prostitution and creaking,
+overweighted gibbets, as in Villon's poems, utters not a word. All that
+we can hear is the many-throated yell of mediæval poets, noble and
+plebeian, French, Provençal, and German, against the brutishness, the
+cunning, the cruelty, the hideousness, the heresy of the serf, whose
+name becomes synonymous with every baseness; which, in mock grammatical
+style, is declined into every epithet of wickedness; whose punishment is
+prayed for from the God whom he outrages by his very existence; a
+hideous clamour of indecent jibe, of brutal vituperation, of senseless
+accusation, of every form of words which furious hatred can assume,
+whose echoes reached even countries like Tuscany, where serfdom was well
+nigh unknown, and have reached even to us in the scraps of epigram still
+bandied about by the townsfolk against the peasants, nay, by the
+peasants against themselves.[1] A monstrous rag doll, dressed up in
+shreds of many-coloured villainy without a recognizable human feature,
+dragged in mud, pilloried with unspeakable ordure, paraded in mock
+triumph like a King of Fools, and burnt in the market-place like
+Antichrist, such is the image which mediæval poetry has left us of the
+creature who was once the pious rustic, the innocent god-beloved
+husbandman, on whose threshold justice stopped a while when she fled
+from the towns of Antiquity.
+
+
+[1] The reader may oppose to my views the existence of the--class of
+poems, French, Latin, and German, of which the Provençal Pastourela is
+the original type, and which represent the courting, by the poet, who
+is, of course, a knight, of a beautiful country-girl, who is shown us as
+feeding her sheep or spinning with her distaff. But these poems are, to
+the best of my knowledge, all of a single pattern, and extremely
+insincere and artificial in tone, that I feel inclined to class them
+with the pastorals--Dresden china idylls by men who had never looked a
+live peasant in the face--of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
+--as distant descendants from the pastoral poetry of antiquity, of which
+the chivalric poets may have got some indirect notions as they did of
+the antique epics. It is moreover extremely the likely that these love
+poems, in which, successfully or unsuccessfully, the poet usually offers
+a bribe to the woman of low degree, conceal beneath the conventional
+pastoral trappings the intrigues of minnesingers and troubadours with
+women of the small artizan or village proprietor class. The real peasant
+woman--the female of the villain--could scarcely have been above the
+notice of the noblemen's servants; and, in countries where the
+seigneurial rights were in vigour, would scarcely have been offered
+presents and fine words. As regards the innumerable poems against the
+peasantry, I may refer the reader to an extremely curious publication of
+"Carmina Medii Ævi," recently made by Sig. Francesco Novati, and which
+contains, besides a selection of specimens, a list of references on the
+subject of poems "De Natura Rusticorum." One of the satirical
+declensions runs as follows:
+
+Singulariter.                         Pluraliter.
+Nom.   Hic villanus.                  Nom.   Hi maledicti.
+Gen.   Huius rustici.                 Gen.   Horum tristium.
+Dat.   Huic tferfero (_sic_).           Dat.   His mendacibus.
+Acc.   Hunc furem.                    Acc.   Hos nequissimos.
+Voc.   O latro.                       Voc.   O pessimi.
+Abl.   Ab hoc depredatore.            Abl.   Ab his infidelibus.
+
+The accusation of heresy and of crucifying Christ is evidently
+due to the devil-worship prevalent among the serfs, and is thus,
+alluded to in a north Italian poem, probably borrowed from the
+French:
+
+    Christo fo da villan crucifiò,
+    E stagom sempre in pioza, in vento, e in neve,
+    Perchè havom fato cosi gran peccà.
+
+
+This feeling is exactly analogous to that existing nowadays in
+semi-barbarous countries against the Jews. The idle hated the
+industrious, and hated them all the more when their industry brought
+them any profit.]
+
+
+Yet not so; I can recall one, though only one, occasion in which
+mediæval literature shows us the serf. The place is surely the most
+unexpected, the charming thirteenth century tale of "Aucassin et
+Nicolette." In his beautiful essay upon that story, Mr. Pater has
+deliberately omitted this episode, which is indeed like a spot of
+blood-stained mud upon some perfect tissue of silver flowers on silver
+ground. It is a piece of cruellest realism, because quite quiet and
+unforced, in the midst of a kind of fairy-land idyl of almost childish
+love, the love of the beautiful son of the lord of Beaucaire for a
+beautiful Saracen slave girl. For, although Aucassin and Nicolette are
+often separated, and always disconsolate--she in her wonderfully
+frescoed vaulted room, he in his town prison--there is always
+surrounding them a sort of fairy land of trees and flowers, a constant
+song of birds; although they wander through the woods and tear their
+delicate skin, and catch their hair in brambles and briars, we have
+always the sense of the daisies bending beneath their tread, of the
+green leaves rustling aside from their heads covered with hair--"blond
+et menu crespelé." Their very hardships are lovely, like the hut of
+flowering branches and grapes, which Nicolette builds for herself, and
+through whose fissures the moonlight shines and the little stars
+twinkle: so much so, that when they weep, these two beautiful and dainty
+creatures, we listen as if to singing, and with no more sense of grief
+than at some pathetic little snatch of melody. And in the midst of this
+idyl of lovely things; in the midst of all these delicate patternings,
+whose minuteness and faint tint merge into one vague pleasurable
+impression; stands out, unintentionally placed there by the author,
+little aware of its terrible tragic realism, the episode which I am
+going to translate.
+
+     "Thus Aucassin wandered all day through the forest, without hearing
+     any news of his sweet love; and when he saw that dusk was
+     spreading, he began bitterly to weep. As he was riding along an old
+     road, where weeds and grass grew thick and high, he suddenly saw
+     before him, in the middle of this road, a man such as I am going to
+     describe to you. He was tall, ugly; nay, hideous quite
+     marvellously. His face was blacker than smoked meat, and so wide,
+     that there was a good palm's distance between his eyes; his cheeks
+     were huge, his nostrils also, with a very big flat nose; thick lips
+     as red as embers, and long teeth yellow and smoke colour. He wore
+     leathern shoes and gaiters, kept up with string at the knees; on
+     his back was a parti-coloured coat. He was leaning upon a stout
+     bludgeon. Aucassin was startled and fearful, and said:
+
+     "'Fair brother ("beau frère"--a greeting corresponding to the
+     modern "bon homme")! God be with thee!'
+
+     "'God bless you!' answered the man.
+
+     "'What dost thou here?' asked Aucassin.
+
+     "'What is that to you?' answered the man.
+
+     "'I ask thee from no evil motive.'
+
+     "'Then tell me why,' said the man, 'you yourself are weeping with
+     such grief? Truly, were I a rich man like you, nothing in the world
+     should make me weep.'
+
+     "'And how dost thou know me?'
+
+     "'I know you to be Aucassin, the son of the Count; and if you will
+     tell me why you weep, I will tell you why I am here.'
+
+     "'I will tell thee willingly,' answered Aucassin. 'This morning I
+     came to hunt in the forest; I had a white leveret, the fairest in
+     the world; I have lost him--that is why I am weeping.'
+
+     "'What!' cried the man;' it is for a stinking hound that you waste
+     the tears of your body? Woe to those who shall pity you; you, the
+     richest man of this country. If your father wanted fifteen or
+     twenty white leverets, he could get them. I am weeping and mourning
+     for more serious matters.'
+
+     "'And what are these?'
+
+     "'I will tell you. I was hired to a rich farmer to drive his
+     plough, dragged by four bullocks. Three days ago, I lost a red
+     bullock, the best of the four. I left the plough, and sought the
+     red bullock on all sides, but could not find him. For three days I
+     have neither eaten nor drunk, and have been wandering thus. I have
+     been afraid of going to the town, where they would put me in jail,
+     because I have not wherewith to pay for the bullock. All I possess
+     are the clothes on my back. I have a mother; and the poor woman had
+     nothing more valuable than me; since she had only an old smock
+     wherewith to cover her poor old limbs. They have torn the smock off
+     her back, and now she has to lie on the straw. It is about her that
+     I am afflicted more than about myself, because, as to me, I may get
+     some money some day or other, and as to the red bullock, he may be
+     paid for when he may. And I should never weep for such a trifle as
+     that. Ah! woe betide those who shall make sorrow with you!'"
+
+
+Inserted merely to give occasion to show Aucassin's good heart in paying
+the twenty _sols_ for the man's red bullock; perhaps for no reason at
+all, but certainly with no idea of making the lover's misery seem by
+comparison trifling--there are, nevertheless, few things in literature
+more striking than the meeting in the wood of the daintily nurtured boy,
+weeping over the girl whom he loves with almost childish love of the
+fancy; and of that ragged, tattered, hideous serf, at whose very aspect
+the Bel Aucassin stops in awe and terror. And the attitude is grand of
+this unfortunate creature, who neither begs nor threatens, scarcely
+complains, and not at all for himself; but merely tells his sordid
+misfortune with calm resignation, as if used to such everyday miseries,
+roused to indignation only at the sight of the tears which the fine-bred
+youth is shedding. We feel the dreadful solemnity of the man's words; of
+the reproach thus thrown by the long-suffering serf, accustomed to
+misfortunes as the lean ox is to blows, to that delicate thing weeping
+for his lady love, for the lady of his fancy. It is the one occasion
+upon which that delicate and fantastic mediæval love poetry, that
+fanciful, wistful stripling King Love of the Middle Ages, in which he
+keeps high court, and through which he rides in triumphal procession;
+that King Love laughing and fainting by turns with all his dapper
+artificiality of woes; is confronted with the sordid reality, the tragic
+impersonation of all the dumb miseries, the lives and loves, crushed and
+defiled unnoticed, of the peasantry of those days. Yes, while they
+sing--Provençals, minnesingers, Sicilians, sing of their earthly lady
+and of their paramour in heaven--the hideous peasant, whose naked granny
+is starving on the straw, looks on with dull and tearless eyes; crying
+out to posterity, as the serf cries to Aucassin: "Woe to those who shall
+sorrow at the tears of such as these."
+
+
+
+II.
+
+But meanwhile, during those centuries which lie between the dark ages
+and modern times, the Middle Ages (inasmuch as they mean not a mere
+chronological period, but a definite social and mental condition)
+fortunately did not exist everywhere. Had they existed, it is almost
+impossible to understand how they would ever throughout Europe have come
+to an end; for as the favourite proverb of Catharine of Siena has it,
+one dead man cannot bury another dead man; and the Middle Ages, after
+this tedious dying of the fifteenth century, required to be shovelled
+into the tomb, nay, rather, given the final stroke, by the Renaissance.
+This that we foolishly call--giving a quite incorrect notion of sudden
+and miraculous birth--the Renaissance, and limit to the time of the
+revival of Greek humanities, really existed, as I have repeatedly
+suggested wherever, during the mediæval centuries, the civilization of
+which the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were big was not, by the
+pressure of feudalism and monasticism, made to be abortive or stillborn.
+Low as was Italy at the very close of the dark ages, and much as she
+borrowed for a long while from the more precocious northern nations,
+especially France and Provence; Italy had, nevertheless, an enormous
+advantage in the fact that her populations were not divided into victor
+and vanquished, and that the old Latin institutions of town and country
+were never replaced, except in certain northern and southern districts,
+by feudal arrangements. The very first thing which strikes us in the
+obscure Italian commonwealths of early times, is that in these
+resuscitated relics of Roman or Etruscan towns there is no feeling of
+feudal superiority and inferiority; that there is no lord, and
+consequently no serf. Nor is this the case merely within the city walls.
+The never sufficiently appreciated difference between the Italian free
+burghs and those of Germany, Flanders, and Provence, is that the
+citizens depend only in the remotest and most purely fictitious way upon
+any kind of suzerain; and moreover that the country, instead of
+belonging to feudal nobles, belong every day more and more completely to
+the burghers. The peasant is not a serf, but one of three things--a
+hired labourer, a possessor of property, or a farmer, liable to no
+taxes, paying no rent, and only sharing with the proprietor the produce
+of the land. By this latter system, existing, then as now, throughout
+Tuscany, the peasantry was an independent and well-to-do class. The land
+owned by one man (who, in the commonwealths, was usually a shopkeeper or
+manufacturer in the town) was divided into farms small enough to be
+cultivated--vines, olives, corn, and fruit--by one family of peasants,
+helped perhaps by a paid labourer. The thriftier and less scrupulous
+peasants could, in good seasons, put by sufficient profit from their
+share of the produce to suffice after some years, and with the addition
+of what the women might make by washing, spinning, weaving, plaiting
+straw hats (an accomplishment greatly insisted upon by Lorenzo dei
+Medici), and so forth, to purchase some small strip of land of their
+own. Hence, a class of farmers at once living on another man's land and
+sharing its produce with him, and cultivating and paying taxes upon land
+belonging to themselves.
+
+Of these Tuscan peasants we get occasional glimpses in the mediæval
+Italian novelists--a well-to-do set of people, in constant communication
+with the town where they sell their corn, oil, vegetables, and wine, and
+easily getting confused with the lower class of artizans with whom they
+doubtless largely intermarried. These peasants whom we see in tidy
+kilted tunics and leathern gaiters, driving their barrel-laden bullock
+carts, or riding their mules up to the red city gates in many a
+Florentine and Sienese painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth
+centuries, were in many respects better off than the small artizans of
+the city, heaped up in squalid houses, and oppressed by the greater and
+smaller guilds. Agnolo Pandolfini, teaching thrift to his sons in
+Alberti's charming treatise on "The Government of the Family,"
+frequently groans over the insolence, the astuteness of the peasantry;
+and indeed seems to consider that it is impossible to cope with them--a
+conclusion which would have greatly astounded the bailiffs of the feudal
+proprietors in the Two Sicilies and beyond the Alps. Indeed it is
+impossible to conceive a stranger contrast than that between the
+northern peasant, the starved and stunted serf, whom Holbein drew,
+driving his lean horses across the hard furrow, with compassionate Death
+helping along the plough, and the Tuscan farmer, as shown us by Lorenzo
+dei Medici--the young fellow who, while not above minding his cows or
+hoeing up his field, goes into Florence once a week, offers his
+sweetheart presents of coral necklaces, silk staylaces, and paint for
+her cheeks and eyelashes; who promises, to please her, to have his hair
+frizzled (as only the youths of the Renaissance knew how to be frizzled
+and fuzzed) by the barber, and even dimly hints that some day he may
+appear in silken jerkin and tight hose, like a well-to-do burgess. No
+greater contrast perhaps, unless indeed we should compare his
+sweetheart, Lorenzo's beautiful Nenciozza, with her box full of jewels,
+her Sunday garb of damask kirtle and gold-worked bodice, her almost
+queenly ways towards her adorers, with the wretched creature, not a
+woman, but a mere female animal, cowering among her starving children in
+her mud cottage, and looking forward, in dull lethargy, after the
+morning full of outrages at the castle, to the night, the night on the
+heath, lit with mysterious flickers, to the horrible joys of the
+sacrifice which the oppressed brings to the dethroned, the serf to
+Satan; when, in short, we compare the peasant woman described by Lorenzo
+with the female serf resuscitated by the genius of Michelet; nay, more
+poignant still, with that mother in the "Dance of Death," seated on the
+mud flood of the broken-roofed, dismantled hovel, stewing something on a
+fire of twigs, and stretching out vain arms to her poor tattered
+baby-boy, whom, with the good-humoured tripping step of an old nurse,
+the kindly skeleton is leading away out of this cruel world.
+
+Such were the conditions of the peasantry of the great Italian
+commonwealths. They were, as much as the northern serfs were the
+reverse, creatures pleasant to deal with, pleasant to watch.
+
+The upper classes, on the other hand, differed quite as much from the
+upper classes of feudal countries. They were, be it remembered, men of
+business, constantly in contact with the working classes; Albizis,
+Strozzis, Pandolfinis, Guinigis, Tolomeis, no matter what their name,
+these men who built palaces and churches which outdid the magnificence
+of northern princes, and who might, at any moment, be sent ambassadors
+from Florence, Lucca, or Siena, to the French or English kings, to the
+Emperor or the Pope, spent a large portion of their days at their office
+desk, among the bales of their warehouses, behind the counter of their
+shops; they wore the same dress, had the same habits, spoke the same
+dialect, as the weavers and dyers, the carriers and porters whom they
+employed, and whose sons might, by talent and industry, amass a fortune,
+build palaces, and go ambassadors to kings in their turn. When,
+therefore, these merchant nobles turned to the country for rest and
+relief from their cares, it was not to the country as it existed for the
+feudal noble of the North. Boar and stag hunts had no attraction for
+quiet men of business; forests stocked with wild beasts where vineyard
+and cornfield might have extended, would have seemed to them the very
+height of wastefulness, discomfort, and ugliness. Pacific and
+businesslike, they merely transferred to the country the habits of
+thought and of life which had arisen in the city. Not for them any
+imitation of the feudal castle, turreted and moated, cut up into dark
+irregular rooms and yards, filled with noisy retainers and stinking
+hounds. On some gentle hillside a well-planned palace, its rooms
+spacious and lofty, and sparely windowed for coolness in summer; with a
+neat cloistered court in the centre, ventilating the whole house, and
+affording a cool place, full of scent of flowers and sound of fountains
+for the burning afternoons; a belvedere tower also, on which to seek a
+breeze on stifling nights, when the very stars seem faint for heat, and
+the dim plumy heads of cypress and poplar are motionless against the
+misty blue sky. In front a broad terrace, whence to look down towards
+the beloved city, a vague fog of roofs in the distance; on the side and
+behind, elaborate garden walks walled with high walls of box and oak and
+laurel, in which stand statues in green niches; gardens with little
+channels to bring water, even during droughts, to the myrtles, the
+roses, the stocks and clove pinks, over which bend with blossoms
+brilliant against the pale blue sky the rose-flowered oleander, the
+scarlet-flowered pomegranate; also aviaries and cages full of odd and
+harmless creatures, ferrets, guinea pigs, porcupines, squirrels, and
+monkeys; arbours where wife, daughters, and daughters-in-law may sew and
+make music; and neat lawns where the young men may play at quoits,
+football, or swordsticks and bucklers; and then, sweeping all round the
+house and gardens and terraces an undulating expanse of field and
+orchard, smoke-tinted with olive, bright green in spring with budding
+crops, russet in autumn with sere vines; and from which, in the burning
+noon, rises the incessant sawing noise of the cicalas, and ever and anon
+the high, nasal, melancholy chant of the peasant, lying in the shade of
+barn door or fig tree till the sun shall sink and he can return to his
+labour. If the house in town, with its spacious store-rooms, its carved
+chapel, and painted banqueting hall, large enough to hold sons' children
+and brothers' wives and grandchildren, and a whole host of poor
+relatives, whom the wise father (as Pandolfini teaches) employs rather
+than strangers for his clerks and overseers--if this town house was the
+pride of the Italian burgess; the villa, with its farms and orchards,
+was the real joy, the holiday paradise of the over-worked man. To read
+in the cool house, with cicala's buzz and fountain plash all round, the
+Greek and Latin authors; to discuss them with learned men; to watch the
+games of the youths and the children, this was the reward for years of
+labour and intelligence; but sweeter than all this (how we feel it in
+Agnolo Pandolfini's speeches!) were those occupations which the city
+could not give: the buying and selling of plants, grain, and kine, the
+meddling with new grafted trees, the mending of spaliers, the
+straightening of fences, the going round (with the self-importance and
+impatience of a cockney) to see what flowers had opened, what fruit had
+ripened over-night; to walk through the oliveyards, among the vines; to
+pry into stable, pig-stye, and roosting-place, taking up handfuls of
+drying grain, breaking twigs of olives, to see how things were doing;
+and to have long conversations with the peasants, shrewd enough to
+affect earnest attention when the master was pleased to vent his
+town-acquired knowledge of agriculture and gardening. Sweet also,
+doubtless, for younger folk, or such perhaps as were fonder of teaching
+new lute tunes to the girls than of examining into cabbages, and who
+read Dante and Boccaccio more frequently than Cicero or Sallust; though
+sweet perhaps only as a vague concomitant of their lazy pleasures, to
+listen to those songs of the peasantry rising from the fields below,
+while lying perhaps on one's back in the shaded grass, watching the
+pigeons whirring about the belvedere tower. Vaguely pleasant this also,
+doubtless; but for a long while only vaguely. For, during more than two
+centuries, the burgesses of Italy were held enthralled by the Courtly
+poets of other countries; listening to, and reading, at first, only
+Provençals and Sicilians, or Italians, like Sordello, pretending to be
+of Provence or Sicily; and even later, enduring in their own poets,
+their own Guittones, Cavalcantis, Cinos, Guinicellis, nay even in Dante
+and Petrarch's lyrics, only the repetition (however vivified by genius)
+of the old common-places of Courtly love, and artificial spring, of the
+poetry of feudal nations. But the time came when not only Provençal and
+Sicilian, but even Tuscan, poetry was neglected, when the revival of
+Greek and Latin letters made it impossible to rewrite the threadbare
+mediæval prettinesses, or even to write in earnest in the modern tongue,
+so stiff and thin (as it seemed) and like some grotesque painted saint,
+when compared with the splendidly fleshed antique languages, turning and
+twining in graceful or solemn involutions, as of a Pyrrhic or a maidens'
+dance. And it was during this period, from Petrarch to Politian, that,
+as philologists have now proved beyond dispute, the once fashionable
+chivalric romance, and the poetry of Provençal and Sicilian school, cast
+off by the upper classes, was gradually picked up by the lower and
+especially by the rural classes. Vagabond ballad-singers and
+story-tellers--creatures who wander from house to house, mending broken
+pottery, collecting rags or selling small pedlar's wares--were the old
+clothesmen who carried about these bits of tarnished poetic finery. The
+people of the town, constantly in presence of the upper classes, and
+therefore sooner or later aware of what was or was not in fashion, did
+not care long for the sentimental daintiness of mediæval poetry;
+besides, satire and scurrility are as inevitable in a town as are dogs
+in gutters and cats on roofs; and the townsfolk soon set their own
+buffoonish or satirical ideas to whatever remained of the music of
+mediæval poetry: already early in the fifteenth century the sonnet had
+become for the Florentine artizans a mere scurrilous epigram. It was
+different in the country. The peasant, at least the Tuscan peasant, is
+eminently idealistic and romantic in his literary tastes; it may be that
+he has not the intellectual life required for any utterances or forms of
+his own, and that he consequently accepts poetry as a ready-made
+ornament, something pretty and exotic, which is valued in proportion to
+its prettiness and rarity. Be the reason whatever it may, certain it is
+that nothing can be too artificial or high-flown to please the Italian
+peasantry: its tales are all of kings; princesses, fairies, knights,
+winged horses, marvellous jewels, and so forth; its songs are almost
+without exception about love, constancy, moon, stars, flowers. Such
+things have not been degraded by familiarity and parody as in the town;
+they retain for the country folk the vague charm (like that of music,
+automatic and independent of thorough comprehension) of belonging to a
+sphere of the marvellous; hence they are repeated and repeated with
+almost religious servility, as any one may observe who will listen to
+the stories and verses told and sung even nowadays in the Tuscan
+country, or who will glance over the splendid collections of folklore
+made in the last twenty years. Such things, must suffer alteration from
+people who can neither read nor write, and who cannot be expected to
+remember very clearly details which, in many cases, must have for them
+only the vaguest meaning. The stories split in process of telling and
+re-telling, and are completed with bits of other stories; details are
+forgotten and have to be replaced; the same happens with poetry: songs
+easily get jumbled together, their meaning is partially obliterated, and
+has to be restored or, again, an attempt is made by bold men to adapt
+some seemingly adaptable old song to a new occasion an old love ditty
+seems fit to sing to a new sweetheart.--names, circumstances, and
+details require arranging for this purpose; and hence more alterations.
+Now, however much a peasant may enjoy the confused splendours of Court
+life and of Courtly love, he cannot, with the best will in the world,
+restore their details or colouring if they happen to become obliterated.
+If he chance to forget that when the princess first met the wizard she
+was riding forth on a snow-white jennet with a falcon on her glove,
+there is nothing to prevent his describing her as walking through the
+meadow in charge of a flock of geese; and similarly, should he happen to
+forget that the Courtly lover compares the skin of his mistress to ivory
+and her eyes to Cupid's torches, he is quite capable of filling up the
+gap by saying that the girl is as white as a turnip and as bright-eyed
+as a ferret. As with details of description and metaphors, so also with
+the emotional and social parts of the business. The peasant has not been
+brought up in the idea that the way to gain a woman's affection is to
+stick her glove on a helmet and perform deeds of prowess closely
+resembling those of Don Quixote in the Sierra Morena; so he attempts to
+ingratiate himself by offering her presents of strawberries, figs,
+buttons, hooks-and-eyes, and similar desirable things. Again, were the
+peasant to pay attentions to a married woman, he would merely get (what
+noble husbands were too well bred to dream of) a sound horsewhipping, or
+perhaps even a sharp knife thrust in his stomach; so that he takes good
+care to address his love songs only to marriageable young women. In this
+way, without any deliberate attempt .at originality, the old Courtly
+poetry becomes, when once removed to the country, thoroughly patched and
+seamed with rustic ideas, feelings, and images; while never ceasing to
+be, in its general stuff and shape, of a kind such as only professional
+poets of the upper classes can produce. The Sicilian lyrics collected by
+Signor Pitre, still more the Tuscan poems of Tigri's charming volume,
+are, therefore, a curious mixture of high-flown sentiment, dainty
+imagery, and most artistic arrangements of metre and diction (especially
+in the rispetto, where metrical involution is accompanied by logical
+involution of the most refined mediæval sort), with hopes and complaints
+such as only a farmer could frame, with similes and descriptions such as
+only the business of the field, vineyard, and dairy could suggest. A
+mixture, but not a jumble. For as in this slow process of assimilation
+and alteration only that was remembered by the peasant which the peasant
+could understand and sympathize with; and only that was welded into the
+once Courtly poetry which was sufficiently refined to please the people
+who delighted in the exotic refinement--as, in short, everything came
+about perfectly simply and unconsciously, there resulted what in good
+sooth may be considered as a perfectly substantive and independent form
+of art, with beauties and refinements of its own. And, indeed, it
+appears to me that one might say, without too much paradox, that in
+these peasant songs only does the poetry of minnesingers and
+troubadours, become thoroughly enjoyable; that only when the
+conventionality of feeling and imagery is corrected by the freshness,
+the straightforwardness, nay, even the grotesqueness of rural likings,
+dislikings, and comparisons, can the dainty beauty of mediæval Courtly
+poetry ever really satisfy our wishes. Comparing together Tigri's
+collection of Tuscan folk poetry with any similar anthology that might
+be made of middle-high German and Provençal, and early Italian lyrics, I
+feel that the adoption of Courtly mediæval poetry by the Italian
+peasantry of the Renaissance can be compared more significantly than at
+first seemed with the adoption of a once fashionable garb by country
+folk. The peasant pulled about this Courtly lyrism, oppressively tight
+in its conventional fit and starched with elaborate rhetorical
+embroideries; turned it inside out, twisted a bit here, a bit there,
+ripped open seam after seam, patched and repatched with stuffs and
+stitches of its own; and then wore the whole thing as it had never been
+intended to be worn; until this cast-off poetic apparel, stretched on
+the freer moral limbs of natural folk, faded and stained by weather and
+earth into new and richer tints, had lost all its original fashionable
+stiffness, and crudeness of colour, and niminy-piminy fit, and had
+acquired instead I know not what grace of unexpectedness,
+picturesqueness, and ease.[1]
+
+
+[1] Any one who is sceptical of the Courtly derivation of the Italian
+popular song may, besides consulting the admirable book of Prof.
+d'Ancona, compare with the contents of Tigri's famous "Canti popolari
+Toscani," the following scraps of Sicilian and early Italian lyrics:--
+
+The Emperor Frederick II. writes: "Rosa di maggio--Colorita e
+fresca--Occhi hai fini--E non rifini--Di gioie dare--Lo tuo parlare--La
+gente innamora--Castella ed altura."
+
+Jacopo Pugliesi says of his lady: "Chiarita in viso più che
+argento--Donami allegrezze--Ben eo son morto--E mal colto--Se non mi dai
+conforto--_Fior dell' orto_."
+
+Inghilfredi Siciliano: "Gesù Cristo ideolla in paradiso--E poi la fece
+angelo incarnando--Gioia aggio preso di giglio novello--E vago, che
+sormonta ogni ricchezza--Sua dottrina m' affrezza--Cosi mi coglie e
+olezza--Come pantera le bestie selvagge."
+
+Jacopo da Lentino: "E di virtute tutte l' altre avanza--E somigliante a
+stella è di splendore--Colla sua conta (_cf_. Provençal _coindeta_,
+gentille) e gaia innamoranza--E più bella è che rosa e che fiore--Cristo
+le doni vita ed allegranza--E sì la cresca in gran pregio ed onore."
+
+I must finish off what might be a much longer collection with a charming
+little scrap, quite in rispetto tone, by Guinicelli: "Vedut 'ho la
+lucente stella diana--Ch' appare anzi che 'l giorno renda albore--Ch' a
+preso forma di figura umana--Sovr' ogni altra mi par che dia
+splendore--Viso di neve colorato in grana--Occhi lucenti, gai e pien
+d'amore--Non credo che nel mondo sia cristiana--Si piena di beltate e di
+valore."]
+
+
+Well; for many a year did the song of the peasants rise up from the
+fields and oliveyards unnoticed by the good townsfolk taking their
+holiday at the Tuscan villa; but one day, somewhere in the third quarter
+of the fifteenth century, the long-drawn chant of the rispetto, telling
+perhaps how the singer's sweetheart was beautiful as the star Diana, so
+beautiful as a baby that the Pope christened her with his own hands; the
+quavering nasal cadence of the stornello saying by chance--
+
+
+     Flower of the Palm, &c.,
+
+
+did at last waken the attention of one lettered man, a man of curious
+and somewhat misshapen body and mind, of features satyr-like in
+ugliness, yet moody and mystical in their very earthiness; a man
+essentially of the senses, yet imperfect in them, without taste or
+smell, and, over and above, with a marvellously supple intellect; weak
+and coarse and idealistic; and at once feebly the slave of his times,
+and so boldly, spontaneously innovating as to be quite unconscious of
+innovation: the mixed nature, or rather the nature in many heterogeneous
+bits, of the man of letters who is artistic almost to the point of being
+an actor, natural in every style because morally connected with no style
+at all. The man was Lorenzo di Piero dei Medici, for whom posterity has
+exclusively reserved the civic title of all his family and similar town
+despots, calling him the Magnificent. It is the fashion at present to
+give Lorenzo only the leavings, as it were, of our admiration for the
+weaker, less original, nay, considerably enervate, humanistic exquisite
+Politian; and this absurd injustice appears to me to show that the very
+essence and excellence of Lorenzo is not nowadays perceived. The
+Renaissance produced several versatile and charming poets; and, in the
+midst of classic imitation, one or two, of whom one is certainly
+Boiardo, of real freshness and raciness. But of this new element in the
+Renaissance, this element which is neither imitation of antiquity nor
+revival of mediæval, which is original, vital, fruitful, in short,
+modern, Lorenzo is the most versatile example. He is new, Renaissance,
+modern; not merely in this or that quality, he is so all round. And this
+in the first place because he is so completely the man of impressions;
+the man not uttering wonderful things, nor elaborating exquisite ones,
+but artistically embodying with marvellous versatility whatever strikes
+his fancy and feeling--fancy and feeling which are as new as the
+untouched sculptor's clay. And this extraordinary temper of art for
+art's sake, or rather effect for effect and form's sake, was possible in
+that day only in a man equally without strong passions, and without
+strong convictions. He is naturally attracted most by what is most
+opposed to the academic, Virgilian, Horatian, or Petrarchesque
+æstheticism of his contemporaries; he is essentially a realist, and all
+the effects, which he produces, all the beauty, charm, or beastliness of
+his work, corresponds to beauty, charm, or beastliness in the reality of
+things. If Lorenzo writes at one moment carnival songs of ribald
+dirtiness, at the next hymns full of holy solemnity; it is, I think,
+merely because this versatile artist takes pleasure in trying whether
+his face may not be painted into grinning drunkenness, and then
+elongated and whitened into ascetic gentleness. Instead of seeking, like
+most of his contemporaries, to be Greek, Roman, or mediæval by turns, he
+preferred trying on all the various tricks of thought and feeling which
+he remarked among his unlettered townsfolk. His realism naturally drew
+him towards the classes where realism can deal with the real; and not
+the affected, the self-conscious, the deliberately attempted. Hence
+those wonderful little poems, the carnival songs of the gold-thread
+spinners, of the pastry-cooks, of the shoemakers, which give us so
+completely, so gracefully, the whole appearance, work, manner, gesture
+of the people; give them to us with ease and rapidity so perfect, that
+we scarcely know how they are given; that we almost forget verses and
+song, and actually see the pulling, twisting, and cutting of the
+gold-threads; that we see and hear the shoemaker's hands smoothing down
+the leather of the shoe in his hand, to convince his customers of its
+pliability; that we see and smell the dear little pale yellow pasties
+nestling in the neat white baskets, after having stood by and watched
+the dough being kneaded, chopped, and floured over, the iron plates
+heated in the oven, the soft, half-baked paste twisted and bent; nay, we
+feel almost as if we had eaten of them, those excellent things which
+seem such big mouthfuls but are squeezed and crunched at one go like
+nothing at all. Hence, I mean from this love of watching effects and
+reproducing them, originated also the masterpiece of Lorenzo dei Medici,
+the "Nencia da Barberino."
+
+This poem, of some fifty octaves, is the result of those Tuscan peasant
+songs, of which I have told you the curious Courtly descent, at last
+having struck the fancy of a real poet. It is, what Lorenzo's
+masterpiece necessarily must be, in the highest degree a modern
+performance; as modern as a picture by Bastien Lepage; as an opera,
+founded upon local music, by Bizet. For it is not by any manner of means
+a pastoral, a piece of conventional poetic decoration, with just a
+little realistic detail, more of the mere conventional or more of the
+realistic dominating according as it is a pastoral by Theocritus, or a
+pastoral by Quinault or Metastasio. It is the very reverse of this: it
+is the attempt to obtain a large and complete, detailed and balanced
+impression by the cunning arrangement of a number of small effects which
+the artist has watched in reality; it is the making into a kind of
+little idyl, something half narrative, half drama, with distinct figures
+and accessories and background, of a whole lot of little fragments
+imitated from the peasant poetry, and set in thin, delicate rims of
+imitation no longer of the peasant's songs, but of the peasant's
+thoughts and speech; a perfect piece of impressionist art, marred only
+in rare places by an attempt (inevitable in those days) to force the
+drawing and colour into caricature. The construction, which appears to
+be nowhere, is in reality a masterpiece; for, without knowing it, you
+are shown the actors, the background, the ups and downs of temper, the
+variation of the seasons; above all you are shown the heroine through
+the medium of the praises, the complaints, the narratives of the past,
+the imaginings of the future, of the hero, whose incoherent rhapsodizing
+constitutes the whole poem. He, Valléra, is a well-to-do young farmer;
+she, Nencia, is the daughter of peasant folk of the castellated village
+of Barberino in the Mugello; he is madly in love, but shy, and (to all
+appearance) awkward, so that we feel convinced that of all these
+speeches in praise of his Nenciozza, in blame of his indifference,
+highly poetic flights and most practical adjurations to see all the
+advantages of a good match, the young woman hears few or none; Valléra
+is talking not to her, but at her, or rather, he is rehearsing to
+himself all the things which he cannot squeeze out in her presence. It
+is the long day-dream, poetic, prosaic, practical, and imaginative, of a
+love-sick Italian peasant lad, to whom his sweetheart is at once an
+ideal thing of beauty, a goddess at whose shrine songs must be sung and
+wreaths twined; and a very substantial lass, who cannot be indifferent
+to sixpenny presents, and whom he cannot conceive as not ultimately
+becoming the sharer of his cottage, the cooker of his soup, the mender
+of his linen, the mother of his brats--a dream in which image is effaced
+by image, and one thought is expelled, unfinished, by another. She is to
+him like the Fairy Morgana, the fairy who kept so much of chivalry in
+her enchanted island; she is like the evening star when above his
+cottage it slowly pierces the soft blue sky with its white brilliancy;
+she is purer than the water in the well, and sweeter than the malmsey
+wine, and whiter than the miller's flour; but her heart is as hard as a
+pebble, and she loves driving to distraction a whole lot of youths who
+dangle behind her, captives of those heart-thievish eyes of hers. But
+she is also a most excellent housewife, can stand any amount of hard
+field labour, and makes lots of money by weaving beautiful woollen
+stuff. To see her going, to church of a morning, she is a little pearl!
+her bodice is of damask, and her petticoat of bright, colour, and she
+kneels down carefully where she may be seen, being so smart. And then,
+when she dances!--a born dancer, bouncing like a little goat, and
+twirling more than a mill-wheel; and when she has finished she makes you
+such a curtsey; no citizen's wife in Florence can curtsey as she does.
+It was in April that he first fell in love. She was picking salad in the
+garden; he begged her for a little, and she sent him about his business;
+las, alas! ever since then his peace has been gone; he cannot sleep, he
+can only think of her, and follow her about; he has become quite
+good-for-nothing as to his field work,--yet he hears all the people
+around laughing and saying, "Of course Valléra will get her." Only _she_
+will pay no heed to him. She is finer to look at than the Pope, whiter
+than the whitest wood core: she is more delectable than are the young
+figs to the earwigs, more beautiful than the turnip flower, sweeter than
+honey. He is more in love with her than the moth is in love with the
+lamp; she loves to see him perishing for her. If he could cut himself in
+two without too much pain, he would, just to let her see that he carries
+her in his heart. No; he would cut out his heart, and when she has
+touched it with that slender hand of hers, it would cry out, "Nencia,
+Nencia bella." But, after all, he is not to be despised: he is an
+excellent labourer, most learned in buying--and selling pigs, he can
+play the bagpipe beautifully; he is rich, is willing to go to any
+expense to please her, nay, even to pay the barber double that his hair
+may be nice and fuzzy from the crimping irons; and if only he were to
+get himself tight hose and a silk jerkin, he would be as good as any
+Florentine burgess. But she will not listen; or, rather, she listens and
+laughs. Yes, she sits up in bed at night and laughs herself to death at
+the mere thought of him, that is all he gets. But he knows what it is!
+There is a fellow who will keep sneaking about her; if Valléra only
+catch him near his cottage, won't he give him a taste of his long new
+knife! nay, rip him up and throw his bowels, like those of a pig, to dry
+on a roof! He is sorry--perhaps he bores her--God bless you, Nencia!--he
+had better go and look after his sheep.
+
+All this is not the poetry of the Renaissance peasant; it is the poem
+made out of his reality; the songs which Valléra sang in the fields
+about his Nencia we must seek in the volume of Tigri; those rispetti and
+stornelli of to-day are the rispetti and stornelli of four centuries
+ago; they are much more beautiful and poetic than any of Lorenzo's work;
+but Lorenzo has given us not merely a peasant's love-song; he has given
+us a peasant's thoughts, actions, hopes, fears; he has given us the
+peasant himself, his house, his fields, and his sweetheart, as they
+exist even now. For Lorenzo is gone, and, greater than he, the paladins
+and ladies of Boiardo and Ariosto, have followed the saints and virgins
+of Dante into the limbo of fair unrealities; and the very Greek and
+Roman heroes of a hundred years ago, the very knights and covenanters of
+forty years since, have joined them; but Valléra exists still, and still in
+the flesh exists his Nenciozza. Everything changes, except the country
+and the peasant. For, in the long farms of Southern Tuscany, with double
+row of blackened balcony all tapestried with heavy ingots of Indian
+corn, and spread out among the olives of the hillside, up which twists
+the rough bullock road protected by its vine trellis; and in the little
+farms, with queer hood-shaped double roofs (as if to pull over the face
+of the house when it blows hard), and pigeon towers which show that some
+day they must have been fortified, all about Florence; farms which I
+pass every day, with their sere trees all round, their rough gardens of
+bright dahlias and chrysanthemums draggled by the autumn rains--in these
+there are, do not doubt it, still Nencias: magnificent creatures, fit
+models for Amazons, only just a trifle too full-blown and matronly; but
+with real Amazonian limbs, firm and delicate, under their red and purple
+striped print frocks; creatures with heads set on necks like towers or
+columns, necks firm in broad, well-fleshed chest as branches in a tree's
+trunk; great penthouses of reddish yellow or lustreless black crimped
+hair over the forehead; the forehead, like the cheeks, furrowed a good
+deal--perhaps we dainty people might say, faded and wrinkled by work in
+the burning sun and the wind; women whom you see shovelling bread into
+the heated ovens, or plashing in winter with bare arms in half-frozen
+streams, or digging up a turnip field in the drizzle; or on a Sunday,
+standing listless by their door, surrounded by rolling and squalling
+brats, and who, when they slowly look up at the passer-by, show us, on
+those monumental faces of theirs, a strange smile, a light of bright
+eyes and white teeth; a smile which to us sophisticated townspeople is
+as puzzling as certain sudden looks in some comely animal, but which yet
+makes us understand instinctively that we have before us a Nencia; and
+that the husband yonder, though he now swears at his wife, and perhaps
+occasionally beats her, has nevertheless, in his day, dreamed, argued,
+raged, and sung to himself just like Lorenzo's Valléra.
+
+The "Nencia da Barberino" is certainly Lorenzo dei Medici's masterpiece:
+it is completely and satisfactorily worked out. Yet we may strain
+possibilities to the point of supposing (which, however, I cannot for a
+moment suppose) that this "Nencia" is a kind of fluke; that by an
+accident a beautiful and seemingly appreciative poem has resulted where
+the author, a mediæval realist of a superior Villon sort, had intended
+only a piece of utter grotesqueness. But important as is the "Nencia,"
+Lorenzo has left behind him another poem, greatly inferior in
+completeness, but which settles beyond power of doubt that in him the
+Renaissance was not merely no longer mediæval, but most intensely
+modern. This poem is the "Ambra." It is simply an allegorical narrative
+of the inundation, by the river Ombrone, of a portion, called Ambra, of
+the great Medicean villa of Poggio a Caiano. Lorenzo's object was
+evidently to write a semi-Ovidian poem, of a kind common in his day, and
+common almost up to our own: a river-god, bearded, crown of reeds, urn,
+general dampness and uproariousness of temper, all quite correct; and a
+nymph, whom he pursues, who prays to the Virgin huntress to save her
+from his love, and who, just in the nick of time, is metamorphosed into
+a mossy stone, dimly showing her former woman's shape; the style of
+thing, charming, graceful, insipid, of which every one can remember a
+dozen instances, and which immediately brings up to the mind a vision of
+grand-ducal gardens, where, among the clipped ilexes and the cypress
+trunks, great lumbering water-gods and long-limbed nymphs splash,
+petrified and covered with melancholy ooze and yellow lichen, among the
+stagnant grotto waters. In some respects, therefore, there is in the
+"Ambra" somewhat more artificial, more _barrocco_ than that early
+Renaissance of Politian and Pontano would warrant. There also several
+bits, half graceful, half awkward, pedantic, constrained, childish,
+delightful, like the sedge-crowned rivers telling each other anecdotes
+of the ways and customs of their respective countries, and especially
+the charming dance of zephyr with the flowers on the lawns of Cyprus,
+which must immediately suggest pictures by Piero di Cosimo and by
+Botticelli. So far, therefore, there is plenty to enjoy, but nothing to
+astonish, in the "Ambra." But the Magnificent Lorenzo has had the
+extraordinary whim of beginning his allegory with a description,
+twenty-one stanzas long, of the season of floods. A description, full of
+infinitely delicate minute detail: of the plants which have kept their
+foliage while the others are bare--the prickly juniper, the myrtle and
+bay; of the flocks of cranes printing the sky with their queer shapes,
+of the fish under the ice, and the eagle circling slowly round the
+ponds--little things which affect us mixed up as they are with all
+manner of stiff classic allusions, very much as do the carefully painted
+daisies and clover among the embossed and gilded unrealities of certain
+old pictures. From these rather finikin details, Lorenzo passes,
+however, to details which are a good deal more than details, things
+little noticed until almost recently: the varying effect of the olives
+on the hillside--a grey, green mass, a silver ripple, according as the
+wind stirs them; the golden appearance of the serene summer air, and so
+forth; details no longer, in short, but essentially, however minute,
+effects. And then, suddenly leaving such things behind, he rushes into
+the midst of a real picture, a picture which you might call almost
+impressionistic, of the growth of rivers and the floods. The floods are
+a grand sight; more than a sight--a grand performance, a drama;
+sometimes, God knows, a tragedy. Last night, under a warm, hazy sky,
+through whose buff-tinted clouds the big moon crept in and out, the
+mountain stream was vaguely visible--a dark riband in its wide shingly
+bed, when the moon was hidden; a narrow, shallow, broken stream, sheets
+of brilliant metallic sheen, and showers of sparkling facets, when the
+moon was out; a mere drowsy murmur mixing with the creaking and rustling
+of dry reeds in the warm, wet wind. Thus in the evening. Look down from
+your window next morning. A tremendous rushing mass of waters, thick,
+turbid, reddish, with ominous steel-like lustre where its coppery
+surface reflects the moist blue sky, now fills the whole bed, shaking
+its short fringe of foam, tossing the spray as it swirls round each
+still projecting stone, angrily tugging at the reeds and alders which
+flop their draggled green upon its surface; eddying faster and faster,
+encircling each higher rock or sandbank, covering it at last with its
+foaming red mass. Meanwhile, the sky is covered in with vaporous grey
+clouds, which enshroud the hills; the clear runnels, dash over the green
+banks, spirt through the walls, break their way across the roads; the
+little mountain torrents, dry all summer, descend, raging rivers, red
+with the hill soil; and with every gust of warm wind the river rises
+higher and rushes along tremendously impetuous. Down in the plain it
+eats angrily at the soft banks, and breaks its muddy waters, fringed on
+the surface with a sort of ominous grime of broken wood and earth,
+higher and higher against the pierheads of the bridges; shaking them to
+split their masonry, while crowds of men and women look on, staring at
+the rising water, at the planks, tables, beams, cottage thatches, nay,
+whole trees, which it hurls at the bridge piers. And then, perhaps, the
+terrible, soft, balmy flood-wind persisting, there comes suddenly the
+catastrophe; the embankment, shaken by the resistless current, cracks,
+fissures gives way; and the river rushes into the city, as it has
+already rushed into the fields, to spread in constantly rising,
+melancholy livid pools, throughout the streets and squares.
+
+This Lorenzo saw, and, wonderful to say, in this soiled and seething
+river, in these torn and crumbling banks, in all the dreadfulness of
+these things, he saw a beauty and a grandeur. But he saw not merely the
+struggle of the waters and of the land; he--the heartless man who laid
+his hand even upon the saved-up money of orphan girls in order to keep
+up the splendour of his house and of his bank--saw the misfortunes of
+the peasantry; the mill, the cottage by the riverside, invaded by the
+flood; the doors burst open by the tremendous rushing stream, the
+stables and garners filled with the thick and oozy waters; the poor
+creatures, yesterday prosperous, clinging to the roof, watching their
+sheep and cows, their hay, and straw, and flour, the hemp bleached in
+the summer, the linen spun and woven in the long winter, their furniture
+and chattels, their labour and their hope whirled along by the foaming
+river.
+
+Thus by this versatile Lorenzo dei Medici, this flippant, egotistic
+artist and despot, has at last been broken the long spell of the Middle
+Ages. The Renaissance has sung no longer of knights and of spring, but
+of peasants and of autumn. An immoral and humanistic time, an immoral
+and humanistic man, have had at length a heart for the simpler, ruder
+less favoured classes of mankind; an eye for the bolder, grander, more
+solemn sights of Nature: modern times have begun, modern sympathies,
+modern art are in full swing.
+
+
+
+
+SYMMETRIA PRISCA.
+
+
+    Mirator veterum, discipulusque memor,
+    Defuit mini symmetria prisca. Peregi
+    Quod potui; Veniam da mihi, posteritas.
+          --_Lionardo da Vinci's epitaph by Platino Piatto_.
+
+Into the holy enclosure which had received the precious shiploads of
+earth from Calvary, the Pisans of the thirteenth century carried the
+fragments of ancient sculpture brought from Rome and from Greece; and in
+the Gothic cloister enclosing the green sward and dark cypresses of the
+graveyard of Pisa, the art of the Middle Ages came for the first time
+face to face with the art of Antiquity. There, among pagan sarcophagi
+turned into Christian tombs, with heraldic devices chiselled on their
+arabesques and vizored helmets surmounting their garlands, the great
+unsigned artist of the fourteenth century, Orcagna of Florence, or
+Lorenzetti of Siena, painted the typical masterpiece of mediæval art,
+the great fresco of the Triumph of Death. With wonderful realization of
+character and situation he painted the prosperous of the world, the
+dapper youths and damsels seated with dogs and falcons beneath the
+orchard trees, amusing themselves with Decameronian tales and sound of
+lute and psaltery, unconscious of the colossal scythe wielded by the
+gigantic dishevelled Death, and which, in a second, will descend and mow
+them to the ground; while the crowd of beggars, ragged, maimed,
+paralyzed, leprous, grovelling on their withered limbs, see and implore
+Death, and cry stretching forth their arms, their stumps, and their
+crutches. Further on, three kings in long embroidered robes and
+gold-trimmed shovel caps, Lewis the Emperor, Uguccione of Pisa, and
+Castruccio of Lucca, with their retinue of ladies and squires, and
+hounds and hawks, are riding quietly through a wood. Suddenly their
+horses stop, draw back; the Emperor's bay stretches out his long neck
+sniffing the air; the kings strain forward to see, one holding his nose
+for the stench of death which meets him; and before them are three open
+coffins, in which lie, in three loathsome stages of corruption, from blue
+and bloated putrescence to well-nigh fleshless decay, three crowned
+corpses. This is the triumph of Death; the grim and horrible jest of the
+Middle Ages: equality in decay; kings, emperors, ladies, knights,
+beggars, and cripples, this is what we all come to be, stinking corpses;
+Death, our lord, our only just and lasting sovereign, reigns impartially
+over all.
+
+But opposite, all along the sides of the painted cloister, the Amazons
+are wrestling with the youths on the stone of the sarcophagi; the
+chariots are dashing forward, the Tritons are splashing in the marble
+waves; the Bacchantæ are striking their timbrels in their dance with the
+satyrs; the birds are pecking at the grapes, the goats are nibbling at
+the vines; all is life, strong and splendid in its marble eternity. And
+the mutilated Venus smiles towards the broken Hermes; the stalwart
+Hercules, resting against his club, looks on quietly, a smile beneath
+his beard; and the gods murmur to each other, as they stand in the
+cloister filled with earth from Calvary, where hundreds of men lie
+rotting beneath the cypresses, "Death will not triumph for ever; our day
+will come."
+
+We have all seen them opposite to each other, these two arts, the art
+born of Antiquity and the art born of the Middle Ages; but whether this
+meeting was friendly or hostile or merely indifferent, is a question of
+constant dispute. To some, mediæval art has appeared being led,
+Dante-like, by a magician Virgil through the mysteries of nature up to a
+Christian Beatrice, who alone can guide it to the kingdom of heaven;
+others have seen mediæval art, like some strong, chaste Sir Guyon
+turning away resolutely from the treacherous sorceress of Antiquity, and
+pursuing solitarily the road to the true and the good; for some the
+antique has been an impure goddess Venus, seducing and corrupting the
+Christian artist; the antique has been for others a glorious Helen, an
+unattainable perfection, ever pursued by the mediæval craftsman, but
+seized by him only as a phantom. Magician or witch, voluptuous,
+destroying Venus or cold and ungrasped Helen, what was the antique to
+the art born of the Middle Ages and developed during the Renaissance?
+Was the relation between them that of tuition, cool and abstract; or of
+fruitful love; or of deluding and damning example?
+
+The art which came to maturity in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
+centuries was generated in the early mediæval revival. The seeds may,
+indeed, have come down from Antiquity, but they remained for nearly a
+thousand years hidden in the withered, rotting remains of former
+vegetation; and it was not till that vegetation had completely
+decomposed and become part of the soil, it was not till putrefaction had
+turned into germination, that artistic organism timidly reappeared. The
+new art-germ developed with the new civilization which surrounded it.
+Manufacture and commerce reappeared: the artizans and merchants formed
+into communities; the communities grew into towns, the towns into
+cities; in the city arose the cathedral; the Lombard or Byzantine
+mouldings and traceries of the cathedral gave birth to figure-sculpture;
+its mosaics gave birth to painting; every forward movement of the
+civilization unfolded as it were a new form or detail of the art, until,
+when mediæval civilization was reaching its moment of consolidation,
+when the cathedrals of Lucca and Pisa stood completed, when Niccolò and
+Giovanni Pisano had sculptured their pulpits and sepulchres; painting,
+in the hands of Cimabue and Duccio, of Giotto and of Guido da Siena,
+freed itself from the tradition of the mosaicists as sculpture had freed
+itself from the practice of the stone-masons, and stood forth an
+independent and organic art.
+
+Thus painting was born of a new civilization, and grew by its own vital
+force; a thing of the Middle Ages, original and spontaneous. But
+contemporaneous with the mediæval revival was the resuscitation of
+Antiquity; in proportion as the new civilization developed, the old
+civilization was exhumed; real Latin began to be studied only when real
+Italian began to be written; Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio were at once
+the founders of modern literature and the exponents of the literature of
+antiquity; the strong young present was to profit by the experience of
+the past.
+
+As it was with literature, so likewise was it with art. The most purely
+mediæval sculpture, the sculpture which has, as it were, just detached
+itself from the capitals and porches of the cathedral, is the direct
+pupil of the antique; and the three great Gothic sculptors, Niccolò,
+Giovanni, and Andrea of Pisa, learn from fragments of Greek and Roman
+sculpture how to model the figure of the Redeemer and how to chisel the
+robe of the Virgin. This spontaneous mediæval sculpture, aided by the
+antique, preceded by a full half-century the appearance of mediæval
+painting; and it was from the study of the works of the Pisan sculptors
+that Cimabue and Giotto learned to depart from the mummified
+monstrosities of the hieratic, Byzantine and Roman style of Giunta and
+Berlinghieri. Thus, through the sculpture of the Pisans the painting of
+the school of Giotto received at second-hand the teachings of Antiquity.
+Sculpture had created painting; painting now belonged to the painters.
+In the hands of Giotto it developed within a few years into an art which
+seemed almost mature, an art dealing victoriously with its materials,
+triumphantly solving its problems, executing as if by miracle all that
+was demanded of it. But Giottesque art appeared perfect merely because
+it was limited; it did all that was required of it, because that which
+was required was little; it was not asked to reproduce the real nor to
+represent the beautiful; it was asked merely to suggest a character, a
+situation, a story.
+
+The artistic development of a nation has its exact parallel in the
+artistic development of an individual. The child uses his pencil to tell
+a story, satisfied with balls and sticks as body, head, and legs;
+provided he and his friends can associate with them the ideas in their
+minds. The youth sets himself to copy what he sees, to reproduce forms
+and effects, without any aim beyond the mere pleasure of copying. The
+mature artist strives to obtain forms and effects of which he approves,
+he seeks for beauty. In the life of Italian painting the generation of
+men who flourished at the beginning of the sixteenth century are the
+mature artists; the men of the fifteenth century are the inexperienced
+youths; the Giottesques are the children--children Titanic and
+seraph-like, but children nevertheless; and, like all children, learning
+more perhaps in their few years than can the youth and the man learn in
+a lifetime.
+
+Like the child, the Giottesque painter wished to show a situation or
+express a story, and for this purpose the absolute realization of
+objects was unnecessary. Giottesque art is not incorrect art, it is
+generalized art; it is an art of mere outline. The Giottesques could
+draw with great accuracy the hand: the form of the fingers, the bend of
+the limb, they could give to perfection its whole gesture and movement,
+they could produce a correct and spirited outline, but within this
+correct outline marked off in dark paint there is but a vague, uniform
+mass of pale colour; the body of the hand is missing, and there remains
+only its ghost, visible indeed, but unsubstantial, without weight or
+warmth, eluding the grasp. The difference between this spectre hand of
+the Giottesques, and the sinewy, muscular hand which can shake and crush
+of Masaccio and Signorelli; or the soft hand with throbbing pulse and
+warm pressure of Perugino and Bellini,--this difference is typical of
+the difference between the art of the fourteenth century and the art of
+the fifteenth century: the first suggests, the second realizes; the one
+gives impalpable outlines, the other gives tangible bodies. The
+Giottesque cares for the figure only inasmuch as it displays an action;
+he reduces it to a semblance, a phantom, to the mere exponent of an
+idea; the man of the Renaissance cares for the figure inasmuch as it is
+a living organism, he gives it substance and weight, he makes it stand
+out as an animate reality. Thence, despite its early triumphs, the
+Giottesque style, by its inherent nature, forbade any progress; it
+reached its limits at once, and the followers of Giotto look almost as
+if they were his predecessors, for the simple reason that, being unable
+to advance, they were forced to retrograde. The limited amount of
+artistic realization required to present to the mind of the spectator a
+situation or an allegory, had been obtained by Giotto himself, and
+bequeathed by him to his followers; who, finding it more than sufficient
+for their purposes, and having no incentive to further acquisition in
+the love of form and reality for their own sake, worked on with their
+master's materials, composing and recomposing, but adding nothing of
+their own. Giotto had observed Nature with passionate interest, because,
+although its representation was only a means to an end, it was a means
+which required to be mastered; and as such became in itself a sort of
+secondary aim; but the followers of Giotto merely utilized his
+observations--of Nature, and in so doing gradually conventionalized and
+debased these second-hand observations. Giotto's forms are wilfully
+incomplete, because they aim at mere suggestion, but they are not
+conventional: they are diagrams, not symbols, and thence it is that
+Giotto seems nearer to the Renaissance than do his latest followers, not
+excepting even Orcagna. Painting, which had made the most prodigious
+strides from Giunta to Cimabue, and from Cimabue to Giotto, had got
+enclosed within a vicious circle, in which it moved for nearly a century
+neither backwards nor forwards: painters were satisfied with suggestion;
+and as long as they were satisfied, no progress was possible.
+
+From this Giottesque treadmill, painting was released by the
+intervention of another art. The painters were hopelessly mediocre;
+their art was snatched from them by the sculptors. Orcagna himself,
+perhaps the only Giottesque who gave painting an onward push, had
+modelled and cast one of the bronze gates of the Florence baptistery;
+the generation of artists who arose at the beginning of the fifteenth
+century, and who opened the period of the Renaissance, were sculptors or
+pupils of sculptors. When we see these vigorous lovers of nature, these
+heroic searchers after truth, suddenly pushing aside the decrepit
+Giottesque allegory-mongers, we ask ourselves in astonishment whence
+they have arisen, and how those broken-down artists of effete art could
+have begotten such a generation of giants. Whence do they come?
+Certainly not from the studios of the Giottesques. No, they issue out of
+the workshops of the stone-mason, of the goldsmith, of the worker in
+bronze, of the sculptor. Vasari has preserved the tradition that
+Masolino and Paolo Uccello were apprentices of Ghiberti; he has remarked
+that their greatest contemporary, Masaccio, "trod in the steps of
+Brunelleschi and of Donatello." Pollaiolo and Verrocchio we know to have
+been equally excellent as painters and as workers in bronze. Sculpture,
+at once more naturalistic and more constantly under the influence of the
+antique, had for the second time laboured for painting. Itself a
+subordinate art, without much vitality, without deep roots in the
+civilization, sculpture was destined to remain the unsuccessful pupil of
+the antique, and the unsuccessful rival of painting; but sculpture had
+for its mission to prepare the road for painting and to prepare painting
+for antique influence; and the noblest work of Ghiberti and Donatello
+was Masaccio, as the most lasting glory to the Pisani had been Giotto.
+
+With Masaccio began the study of nature for its own sake, the desire of
+reproducing external objects, without any regard to their significance
+as symbols, or as parts of a story; the passionate wish to arrive at
+absolute realization. The merely suggestive outline art of the
+Giottesques had come to an end; the suggestion became a matter of
+indifference, the realization became a paramount interest; the story was
+forgotten in the telling, the religious thought was lost in the search
+for the artistic form. The Giottesques had used debased conventionalism
+to represent action with wonderful narrative and logical power; the
+artists of the early Renaissance became unskilful narrators and foolish
+allegorists almost in proportion as they became skilful draughtsmen and
+colourists; the saints had become to Masaccio merely so many lay figures
+on to which to cast drapery; for Fra Filippo the Madonna was a mere
+peasant model; for Filippino Lippi and for Ghirlandajo, a miracle meant
+merely an opportunity of congregating a number of admirable portrait
+figures in the dress of the day; the Baptism for Verrocchio had
+significance only as a study of muscular legs and arms; and the
+sacrifice of Noah had no importance for Uccello save as a grand
+opportunity for foreshortenings. In the hands of the Giottesques,
+interested in the subject and indifferent to the representation,
+painting had remained stationary for eighty years; for eighty years did
+it develope in the hands of the men of the fifteenth century,
+indifferent to the subject and passionately interested in the
+representation. The unity, the appearance of comparative perfection of
+the art had disappeared with the limits within which the Giottesques had
+been satisfied to move; instead of the intelligible and solemn
+conventionalism of the Giottesques, we see only disorder,
+half-understood ideas and abortive attempts, confusion which reminds us
+of those enigmatic sheets on which Leonardo or Michael Angelo scrawled
+out their ideas--drawings within drawings, plans of buildings scratched
+over Madonna heads, single flowers upside down next to flayed arms,
+calculations, monsters, sonnets; a very chaos of thoughts and of shapes,
+in which the plan of the artist is inextricably lost, which mean
+everything and nothing, but out of whose unintelligible network of lines
+and curves have issued masterpieces, and which only the foolish or the
+would-be philosophical would exchange for some intelligible, hopelessly
+finished and finite illustration out of a Bible or a book of travels.
+
+Anatomy, perspective, colour, drapery, effects of light, of water, of
+shadow, forms of trees and flowers, converging lines of architecture,
+all this at once absorbed and distracted the attention of the artists of
+the early Renaissance; and while they studied, copied, and calculated,
+another thought began to haunt them, another eager desire began to
+pursue them: by the side of Nature, the manifold, the baffling, the
+bewildering, there rose up before them another divinity, another sphinx,
+mysterious in its very simplicity and serenity--the Antique.
+
+The exhumation of the antique had, as we have seen, been contemporaneous
+with the birth of painting; nay, the study of the remains of antique
+sculpture had, in contributing to form Niccolò Pisano, indirectly helped
+to form Giotto; the very painter of the Triumph of Death had inserted
+into his terrible fresco two-winged genii, upholding a scroll, copied
+without any alteration from some coarse Roman sarcophagus, in which they
+may have sustained the usual _Dis Manibus Sacrum_. There had been, on
+the part of both sculptors and painters, a constant study of the
+antique; but during the Giottesque period this study had been limited to
+technicalities, and had in no way affected the conception of art. The
+mediæval artists, surrounded by physical deformities, and seeing
+sanctity in sickness and dirt, little accustomed to observe the human
+figure, were incapable, both as men and as artists, of at all entering
+into the spirit of antique art. They could not perceive the superior
+beauty of the antique; they could recognize only its superior science
+and its superior handicraft, and these alone they studied to obtain.
+
+Giovanni Pisano sculpturing the unfleshed, caried carcases of the devils
+who leer, writhe, crunch, and tear on the outside of Orvieto Cathedral;
+and the Giottesques painting those terrible green, macerated Christs,
+hanging livid and broken from the cross, which abound in Tuscany and
+Umbria; the artists who produced these loathsome and lugubrious works
+were indubitably students of the antique; but they had learned from it
+not a love for beautiful form and noble drapery, but merely the general
+shape of the limbs and the general fall of the garments: the anatomical
+science and technical processes of Antiquity were being used to produce
+the most intensely un-antique, the most intensely mediæval works. Thus
+matters stood in the time of Giotto. His followers, who studied only
+arrangement, probably consulted the antique as little as they consulted
+nature; but the contemporary sculptors were brought by the very
+constitution of their art into close contact both with Nature and with
+the antique; they studied both with determination, and handed over the
+results of their labours to the sculptor-taught painters of the
+fifteenth century.
+
+Here, then, were the two great factors in the art of the
+Renaissance--the study of nature, and the study of the Antique: both
+understand slowly, imperfectly; the one counteracting the effect of the
+other; the study of nature now scaring away all antique influence, the
+study of the antique now distorting all imitation of nature; rival
+forces confusing the artist and marring the work, until, when each could
+receive its due, the one corrected the other, and they combined,
+producing by this marriage of the living reality with the dead but
+immortal beauty, the great art of Michael Angelo, of Raphael, and of
+Titian: double, like its origin, antique and modern, real and ideal.
+
+The study of the antique is thus placed opposite to the study of nature,
+the comprehension of the works of Antiquity is the momentary antagonist
+of the comprehension of the works of nature. And this may seem strange,
+when we consider that antique art was itself due to perfect
+comprehension of nature. But the contradiction is easily explained. The
+study of nature, as it was carried on in the Renaissance, comprised the
+study of effects which had remained unnoticed by Antiquity; and the
+study of the statue,--colourless, without light, shade, or perspective,
+hampered, and was hampered by, the study of colour, of light and shade,
+of perspective, and of all that a generation of painters would seek to
+learn from nature. Nor was this all; the influence of the civilization
+of the Renaissance, of a civilization directly issued from the Middle
+Ages, was entirely at variance with the influence of antique
+civilization through the medium of ancient art; the Middle Ages and
+Antiquity, Christianity and Paganism, were even more opposed to each
+other than could be the statue and the easel picture, the fresco and the
+bas-relief.
+
+First, then, we have the hostility between painting--and sculpture,
+between the _modus operandi_ of the modern and the _modus operandi_ of
+the ancient art. Antique art is, in the first place, purely linear art,
+colourless, tintless, without light and shade; next, it is essentially
+the art of the isolated figure, without background, grouping, or
+perspective. As linear art it could directly affect only that branch of
+painting which was itself linear; and as art of the isolated figure it
+was ever being contradicted by the constantly developing arts of
+perspective and landscape. The antique never' directly influenced the
+Venetians, not from reasons of geography and culture, but from the fact
+that Venetian painting, founded from the earliest times upon a system of
+colour, could not be affected by antique sculpture, based upon a system
+of modelled, colourless form; the men who saw form only through the
+medium of colour could not learn much from purely linear form; hence it
+is that even after a certain amount of antique imitation had passed into
+Venetian painting, through the medium of Mantegna, the Venetian painters
+display comparatively little antique influence. In Bellini, Carpaccio,
+Cima, and other early masters, the features, forms, and dress are mainly
+modern and Venetian; and Giorgione, Titian, and even the eclectic
+Tintoret, were more interested in the bright lights of a steel
+breastplate than in the shape of a limb; and preferred in their hearts a
+shot brocade of the sixteenth century to the finest drapery ever
+modelled by an ancient.
+
+The antique influence was naturally strongest among the Tuscan schools;
+because the Tuscan schools were essentially schools of drawing, and the
+draughtsman recognized in antique sculpture the highest perfection of
+that linear form which was his own domain. Yet while the antique
+appealed most to the linear schools, even in these it could strongly
+influence only the purely linear part; it is strong in the drawings and
+weak in the paintings. As long as the artists had only the pencil or
+pen, they could reproduce much of the linear perfection of the antique;
+they were, so to speak, alone with it; but as soon as they brought in
+colour, perspective, and scenery, the linear perfection was lost in
+attempts at something new; the antique was put to flight by the modern.
+Botticelli's crayon study for his Venus is almost antique; his tempera
+picture of Venus, with the pale blue scaly sea, the laurel grove, the
+flower-embroidered garments, the wisps of tawny hair, is comparatively
+mediæval; Pinturicchio's sketch of Pans and satyrs contrasts strangely
+with his frescoes in the library of Siena; Mantegna himself,
+supernaturally antique in his engravings, becomes comparatively trivial
+and modern in his oil-paintings. Do what they might, draw from the
+antique and calculate its proportions, the artists of the Renaissance
+found themselves baffled as soon as they attempted to apply the result
+of then linear studies to coloured pictures; as soon as they tried to
+make the antique unite with the modern, one of the two elements was sure
+to succumb. In Botticelli, draughtsman and student though he was, the
+modern, the mediæval, that part of the art which had arisen in the
+Middle Ages, invariably had the upper hand; his Venus, despite her forms
+studied from the antique and her gesture imitated from some earlier
+discovered copy of the Medicean Venus, has the woe-begone prudery of a
+Madonna or of an abbess; she shivers physically and morally in her
+unaccustomed nakedness, and the goddess of Spring, who comes skipping up
+from beneath the laurel copse, does well to prepare her a mantle, for in
+the pallid tempera colour, against the dismal background of rippled sea,
+this mediæval Venus, at once indecent and prudish, is no very pleasing
+sight. In the Allegory of Spring in the Academy of Florence, we again
+have the antique; goddesses and nymphs whose clinging garments the
+gentle Sandro Botticelli has assuredly studied from some old statue of
+Agrippina or Faustina; but what strange livid tints are there beneath
+those draperies, what eccentric gestures are those of the nymphs, what a
+green, ghostlike light illumines this garden of Venus Are these
+goddesses and nymphs immortal women such as the ancients conceived, or
+are they not rather fantastic fairies or nixen, Titanias and Undines,
+incorporeal daughters of dew and gossamer and mist?
+
+In Sandro Botticelli the teachings of the statue are forgotten or
+distorted when the artist takes up his palette and brushes; in his
+greater contemporary, Andrea Mantegna, the ever-present antique chills
+and arrests the vitality of the modern. Mantegna, the pupil of the
+ancient marbles of Squarcione's workshop even more than the pupil of
+Donatello, studies for his paintings not from nature, but from
+sculpture; his figures are seen in strange projection and
+foreshortening, like figures in a high relief seen from below; despite
+his mastery of perspective, they seem hewn out of the background;
+despite the rich colours which he displays in his Veronese altar-piece,
+they look like painted marbles, with their hard clots of stonelike hair
+and beard, with their vacant glance and their wonderful draperies,
+clinging and weighty like the wet draperies of ancient sculpture. They
+are beautiful petrifactions, or vivified statues; Mantegna's
+masterpiece, the sepia "Judith" in Florence, is like an exquisite,
+pathetically lovely Eurydice, who has stepped unconscious and lifeless
+out of a Praxitelian bas-relief. And there are stranger works than even
+the Judith; strange statuesque fancies, like the fight of Marine
+Monsters and the Bacchanal among Mantegna's engravings. The group of
+three wondrous creatures, at once men, fish, and gods, is as grand and
+even more fantastic than Leonardo's Battle of the Standard: a Triton,
+sturdy and muscular, with sea-weed beard and hair, wheels round his
+finned horse, preparing to strike his adversary with a bunch of fish
+which he brandishes above him; on him is rushing, careering on an
+osseous sea-horse, a strange, lank, sinewy being, fury stretching every
+tendon, his long-clawed feet striking into the flanks of his steed, his
+sharp, reed-crowned head turned fiercely, with clenched teeth, on his
+opponent, and stretching forth a truncheon, ready to run down his enemy
+as a ship runs down another; and further off a young Triton, with
+clotted hair and heavy eyes, seems ready to sink wounded below the
+rippling wavelets, with the massive head and marble agony of the dying
+Alexander; enigmatic figures, grand and grotesque, lean, haggard,
+vehement, and yet, in the midst of violence and monstrosity,
+unaccountably antique. The other print, called the Bacchanal, has no
+background: half a dozen male figures stand separate and naked as in a
+bas-relief. Some are leaning against a vine-wreathed tub; a satyr, with
+acanthus-leaves growing wondrously out of him, half man, half plant, is
+emptying a cup; a heavy Silenus is prone upon the ground; a faun, seated
+upon the vat, is supporting in his arms a beautiful sinking youth;
+another youth, grand, muscular, and grave as a statue, stands on the
+further side. Is this really a bacchanal? Yes, for there is the paunchy
+Silenus, there are the fauns, there the vat and vine-wreaths and
+drinking-horns. And yet it cannot be a bacchanal. Compare with it one of
+Rubens's orgies, where the overgrown, rubicund men and women and fauns
+tumble about in tumultuous, riotous intoxication: that is a bacchanal;
+they have been drinking, those magnificent brutes, there is wine firing
+their blood and weighing down their heads. But here all is different, in
+this so-called Bacchanal of Mantegna. This heavy Silenus is supine like
+a mass of marble; these fauns are shy and mute; these youths are grave
+and sombre; there is no wine in the cups, there are no lees in the vat,
+there is no life in these magnificent colossal forms; there is no blood
+in their grandly bent lips, no light in their wide-opened eyes; it is
+not the drowsiness of intoxication which is weighing down the youth
+sustained by the faun; it is no grapejuice which gives that strange,
+vague glance. No; they have drunk, but not of any mortal drink; the
+grapes are grown in Persephone's garden, the vat contains no fruits that
+have ripened beneath our sun. These strange, mute, solemn revellers have
+drunk of Lethe, and they are growing cold with the cold of death and of
+marble; they are the ghosts of the dead ones of antiquity, revisiting
+the artist of the Renaissance, who paints them, thinking he is painting
+life, while that which he paints is in reality death.
+
+This anomaly, this unsatisfactory character of the works of both
+Botticelli and Mantegna, is mainly technical; the antique is frustrated
+in Botticelli, not so much by the Christian, the mediæval, the modern
+mode of feeling, as by the new methods and aims of the new art which
+disconcert the methods and aims of the old art; and that which arrests
+Mantegna in his development as a painter is not the spirit of Paganism
+deadening the spirit of Christianity, but the laws of sculpture
+hampering painting. But this technical contest between two arts, the one
+not yet fully developed, the other not yet fully understood, is as
+nothing compared with the contest between the two civilizations, the
+antique and the modern; between the habits and tendencies of the
+contemporaries of the artists of the Renaissance and of the artists
+themselves, and the habits and tendencies of the antique artists and
+their contemporaries. We are apt to think of the Renaissance as of a
+period closely resembling antiquity, misled by the inevitable similarity
+between southern and democratic countries of whatever age; misled still
+less pardonably by the Ciceronian pedantries and pseudo-antique
+obscenities of a few humanists, and by the pseudo-Corinthian arabesques
+and capitals of a few learned architects. But all this was mere
+archaeological finery borrowed by a civilization in itself entirely
+unlike that of ancient Greece.
+
+The Renaissance, let us remember, was merely the flowering time of that
+great mediæval movement which had germinated early in the twelfth
+century; it was merely a more advanced stage of the civilization which
+had produced Dante and Giotto, of the civilization which was destined to
+produce Luther and Rabelais. The fifteenth century was merely the
+continuation of the fourteenth century, as the fourteenth had been of
+the thirteenth; there had been growth and improvement; development of
+the more modern, diminishing of the more mediæval elements; but, despite
+growth and the changes due to growth, the Renaissance was part and
+parcel of the Middle Ages. The life, thought, aspirations, and habits
+were mediæval; opposed to the open-air life, the physical training and
+the materialistic religion of Antiquity. The surroundings of Masaccio
+and of Signorelli, nay, even of Raphael, were very different from those
+of Phidias or Praxiteles. Let us think what were the daily and hourly
+impressions given by the Renaissance to its artists. Large towns, in
+which thousands of human beings were crowded together, in narrow, gloomy
+streets, with but a strip of blue visible between the projecting roofs;
+and in these cities an incessant commercial activity, with no relief
+save festivals at the churches, brawls at the taverns, and carnival
+buffooneries. Men and women pale and meagre for want of air, and light,
+and movement; undeveloped, untrained bodies, warped by constant work at
+the loom or at the desk, at best with the lumpish freedom of the soldier
+and the vulgar nimbleness of the prentice. And these men and women
+dressed in the dress of the Middle Ages, gorgeous perhaps in colour, but
+heavy, miserable, grotesque, nay, sometimes ludicrous in form; citizens
+in lumpish robes and long-tailed caps; ladies in stiff and foldless
+brocade hoops and stomachers; artizans in striped and close-adhering
+hose and egg-shaped padded jerkin; soldiers in lumbering armour-plates,
+ill-fitted over ill-fitting leather, a shapeless shell of iron, bulging
+out and angular, in which the body was buried as successfully as in the
+robes of the magistrates. Thus we see the men and women of the
+Renaissance in the works of all its painters: heavy in Ghirlandajo,
+vulgarly jaunty in Filippino, preposterously starched and prim in
+Mantegna, ludicrously undignified in Signorelli; while mediæval
+stiffness, awkwardness, and absurdity reach their acme perhaps in the
+little boys, companions of the Medici children, introduced into Benozzo
+Gozzoli's Building of Babel. These are the prosperous townsfolk, among
+whom the Renaissance artist is but too glad to seek for models; but
+besides these there are lamentable sights, mediæval beyond words, at
+every street corner: dwarfs and cripples, maimed and diseased beggars of
+all degrees of loathsomeness, lepers and epileptics, and infinite
+numbers of monks, brown, grey, and black, in sack-shaped frocks and
+pointed hoods, with shaven crown and cropped beard, emaciated with
+penance or bloated with gluttony. And all this the painter sees, daily,
+hourly; it is his standard of humanity, and as such finds its way into
+every picture. It is the living; but opposite it arises the dead. Let us
+turn aside from the crowd of the mediæval city, and look at what the
+workmen have just laid bare, or what the merchant has just brought from
+Rome or from Greece. Look at this: it is corroded by oxides, battered by
+ill-usage, stained with earth: it is not a group, not even a whole
+statue, it has neither head nor arms remaining; it is a mere broken
+fragment of antique sculpture,--a naked body with a fold or two of
+drapery; it is not by Phidias nor by Praxiteles, it may not even be
+Greek; it may be some cheap copy, made for a garden or a bath, in the
+days of Hadrian. But to the artist of the fifteenth century it is the
+revelation of a whole world, a world in itself. We can scarcely realize
+all this; but let us look and reflect, and even we may feel as must have
+felt the man of the Renaissance in the presence of that mutilated,
+stained, battered torso. He sees in that broken stump a grandeur of
+outline, a magnificence of osseous structure, a breadth of muscle and
+sinew, a smooth, firm covering of flesh, such as he would vainly seek in
+any of his living models; he sees a delicate and infinite variety of
+indentures, of projections, of creases following the bend of every limb;
+he sees, where the surface still exists intact, an elasticity of skin, a
+buoyancy of hidden life such as all the colours of his palette are
+unable to imitate; and in this piece of drapery, negligently gathered
+over the hips or rolled upon the arm, he sees a magnificent alternation
+of large folds and small plaits, of straight lines, and broken lines,
+and curves. He sees all this; but he sees more: the broken torso is, as
+we have said, not merely a world in itself, but the revelation of a
+world. It is the revelation of antique civilization, of the palaestra
+and the stadium, of the sanctification of the body, of the apotheosis of
+man, of the religion of life and nature and joy; revealed to the man of
+the Middle Ages, who has hitherto seen in the untrained, diseased,
+despised body but a deformed piece of baseness, which his priests tell
+him belongs to the worms and to Satan; who has been taught that the monk
+living in solitude and celibacy, filthy, sick, worn out with fastings
+and bleeding with flagellation, is the nearest approach to divinity; who
+has seen Divinity itself, pale, emaciated, joyless, hanging bleeding
+from the cross; and who is for ever reminded that the kingdom of this
+Godhead is not of this world.
+
+What passes in the mind of that artist? What surprise, what dawning
+doubts, what sickening fears, what longings and what remorse are not the
+fruit of this sight of Antiquity? Is he to yield or to resist? Is he to
+forget the saints and Christ, and give himself over to Satan and to
+Antiquity? Only one man boldly answered, Yes. Mantegna abjured his
+faith, abjured the Middle Ages, abjured all that belonged to his time;
+and in so doing cast away from him the living art and became the lover,
+the worshipper of shadows. And only one man turned completely aside from
+the antique as from the demon, and that man was a saint, Fra Angelico da
+Fiesole. And with the antique, Fra Angelico rejected all the other
+artistic influences and aims of his time, the time not of Giotto or of
+Orcagna, but of Masaccio and Uccello, of Pollaiolo and Donatello. For the
+mild, meek, angelic monk dreaded the life of his days; dreaded to leave
+the cloister where the sunshine was tempered and the noise reduced to a
+mere faint hum, and where the flower-beds were tidy and prim; dreaded to
+soil or rumple his spotless white robe and his shining black cowl; a
+spiritual sybarite, shrinking from the sight of the crowd seething in
+the streets, shrinking from the idea of stripping the rags off the
+beggar in order to see his tanned and gnarled limbs; shuddering at the
+thought of seeking for muscles in the dead, cut-open body; fearful of
+every whiff of life that might mingle with the incense atmosphere of his
+chapel, of every cry of human passion which might break through the
+well-ordered sweetness of his chants. No; the Renaissance did not exist
+for him who lived in a world of diaphanous form, colour and character,
+unsubstantial and unruffled; dreaming feebly and sweetly of
+transparent-cheeked Madonnas with no limbs beneath their robes; of
+smooth-faced saints with well-combed beard and placid, vacant gaze,
+seated in well-ordered masses, holy with the purity of inanity; of
+divine dolls with pallid flaxen locks, floating between heaven and
+earth, playing upon lute and viol and psaltery; raised to faint visions
+of angels and blessed, moving noiseless, feelingless, meaningless,
+across the flowerets of Paradise; of assemblies of saints seated,
+arrayed in pure pink, and blue and lilac, in an atmosphere of liquid
+gold, in glory. And thus Fra Angelico worked on, content with the dearly
+purchased science of his masters, placid, beatic, effeminate, in an
+æsthetical paradise of his own, a paradise of sloth and sweetness, a
+paradise for weak souls, weak hearts, and weak eyes; patiently repeating
+the same fleshless angels, the same boneless saints, the same bloodless
+virgins; happy in smoothing the unmixed, unshaded tints of the sky, and
+earth, and dresses; laying on the gold of the fretted skies, and of the
+iridescent wings, embroidering robes, instruments of music, halos,
+flowers, with threads of gold.... Sweet, simple artist saint, reducing
+art to--something akin to the delicate pearl and silk embroidery of
+pious nuns, to the exquisite sweetmeat cookery of pious monks; a
+something too delicately gorgeous, too deliciously insipid for human
+wear or human food; no, the Renaissance does not exist for thee, either
+in its study of the existing reality, or in its study of antique beauty.
+
+Mantegna, the learned, the archæological, the pagan, who renounces his
+times and his faith; and Angelico, the monk, the saint, who shuts and
+bolts his monastery doors and sprinkles holy water in the face of the
+antique; the two extremes, are both exceptions. The innumerable artists
+of the Renaissance remained in hesitation; tried to court both the
+antique and the modern, to unite the Pagan and the Christian--some, like
+Ghirlandajo, in cold indifference to all but mere artistic science,
+encrusting marble bacchanals into the walls of the Virgin's paternal
+house, bringing together, unthinkingly, antique-draped women carrying
+baskets, and noble Strozzi and Ruccellai ladies with gloved hands folded
+over their gold brocaded skirts; others, with cheerful and childlike
+pleasure in both antique and modern, like Benozzo, crowding together
+half-naked youths and nymphs treading the grapes and scaling the
+trellise with Florentine magnificos in plaited skirts and starched
+collars, among the pines, and porticos, the sprawling children, barking
+dogs, peacocks sunning themselves, and partridges picking up grain, of
+his Pisan frescoes; yet others using the antique as mere pageant shows,
+allegorical mummeries, destined to amuse some Duke of Ferrara or Marquis
+of Mantua, together with the hurdle races of Jews, hags, and riderless
+donkeys.
+
+Thus little by little the antique amalgamates with the modern; the art
+born of the Middle Ages absorbs the art born of Paganism; but how
+slowly, and with what fantastic and ludicrous results at first; as when
+the anatomical sculptor Pollaiolo gives scenes of naked Roman
+prize-fighters as martyrdoms of St. Sebastian; or when the pious
+Perugino (pious at least with his brush) dresses up his sleek, hectic,
+beardless archangels as Roman warriors, and makes them stand, straddling
+beatically on thin little dapper legs, wistfully gazing from beneath
+their wondrously ornamented helmets on the walls of the Cambio at
+Perugia; when he masquerades meditative fathers of the Church as
+Socrates and haggard anchorites as Numa Pompilius; most ludicrous of
+all, when he attires in scantiest of--clinging antique drapery his mild
+and pensive Madonnas, and, with daintily pointed toes, places them to
+throne bashfully on allegorical chariots as Venus or Diana.
+
+Long is the period of amalgamation, and small are the results throughout
+that long early Renaissance. Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Melozzo,
+Ghirlandajo, Filippino, Botticelli, Verrocchio, have none of them shown
+us the perfect fusion of the two elements whose union is to give us
+Michael Angelo, Raphael, and all the great perfect artists of the early
+sixteenth century; the two elements are for ever ill-combined and
+hostile to each other; the modern vulgarizes the antique, the antique
+paralyzes the modern. And meanwhile the fifteenth century, the century
+of study, of conflict, and of confusion, is rapidly drawing to a close;
+eight or ten more years, and it will be gone. Is the new century to find
+the antique still dead and the modern still mediæval?
+
+The antique and the modern had met for the first time and as
+irreconcilable enemies in the cloisters of Pisa; and the modern had
+triumphed in the great mediæval fresco of the Triumph of Death. By a
+strange coincidence, by a sublime jest of accident, the antique and the
+modern were destined to meet again, and this time indissolubly united,
+in a painting representing the Resurrection. Yes, Signorelli's fresco in
+Orvieto Cathedral is indeed a resurrection, the resurrection of human
+beauty after the long death-slumber of the Middle Ages. And the artist
+would seem to have been dimly conscious of the great allegory he was
+painting. Here and there are strewn skulls; skeletons stand leering by,
+as if in remembrance of the ghastly past, and as a token of former
+death; but magnificent youths are breaking through the crust of the
+earth, emerging, taking shape and flesh; arising, strong and proud,
+ready to go forth at the bidding of the Titanic angels who announce from
+on high with trumpet blast and waving banners, that the death of the
+world has come to an end, and that humanity has arisen once more in the
+youth and beauty of Antiquity.
+
+
+II.
+
+
+Signorelli's frescoes at Orvieto, at once the latest works of the
+fifteenth century, and the latest works of an old man nurtured in the
+traditions of Benozzo Gozzoli and of Piero della Francesca, mark the
+beginning of the maturity and perfection of Italian art. From them
+Michael Angelo learns what he could not be taught even by his master
+Ghirlandajo, the grand and cold realist. He learns; and what he has
+learned at Orvieto he teaches with doubled force in Rome; and the
+ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel, the superb and heroic nudities, the
+majestic draperies, the reappearance in the modern art of painting of
+the spirit and hand of Phidias, give a new impulse and hasten on
+perfection. When the doors of the chapel are at length opened, Raphael
+forgets Perugino; Fra Bartolomeo forgets Botticelli; Sodoma forgets
+Leonardo; the narrower hesitating styles of the fifteenth century are
+abandoned, as the great example is disseminated throughout Italy; and
+even the tumult of angels in glory which the Lombard Correggio is to
+paint in far-off Parma, and the daringly simple Bacchus and Ariadne with
+which Tintoret will decorate the Ducal Palace more than fifty years
+later--all that is great and bold, all that is a re-incarnation of the
+spirit of Antiquity, all that marks the culmination of Renaissance art,
+seems due to the impulse of Michael Angelo, and, through him, to the
+example of Signorelli. From the celestial horseman and bounding avenging
+angels of Raphael's Heliodorus, to the St. Sebastian of Sodoma, with
+exquisite limbs and head, rich with tendril-like locks, delicate against
+the brown Umbrian sunset; from the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto seated,
+with the head and drapery of a Niobe, by the sack of flour in the
+Annunziata cloister, to the voluptuous goddess, with purple mantle half
+concealing her body of golden white, who leans against the sculptured
+fountain in Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, with the greenish blue sky
+and hazy light of evening behind her; from the most extreme examples of
+the most extreme schools of Lombardy and Venetia, to the most intense
+examples of the remotest schools of Tuscany and Umbria; throughout the
+art of the early sixteenth century, of those thirty years which were the
+years of perfection, we see, more or less marked, but always distinct,
+the union of the living art born of the Middle Ages with the dead art
+left by Antiquity, a union producing life and perfection, producing the
+great art of the Renaissance.
+
+This much is clear and easy of definition; but what is neither clearly
+understood nor easily defined is the nature of this union, the manner in
+which the antique and the modern did thus amalgamate. It is easy to
+speak of a vague union of spirit, of the antique idea having permeated
+the modern; but all this explains but little: art is not a metaphysical
+figment, and all its phases and revolutions are concrete, and, so to
+speak, physically explicable and definable. The union of the antique
+with the modern meant simply the absorption by the art of the
+Renaissance of elements of civilization necessary for its perfection,
+but not existing in the medieval civilization of the fifteenth century;
+of elements of civilization which gave what the civilization of the
+fifteenth century--which could give colour, perspective, grouping, and
+landscape--could never have afforded: the nude, drapery, and gesture.
+
+The naked human body, which the Greeks had trained, studied, and
+idolized, did not exist in the fifteenth century; in its stead there was
+only the undressed body, ill-developed, untrained, pinched, and
+distorted by the garments only just cast off; cramped and bent by
+sedentary occupations, livid with the plague-spots of the Middle Ages,
+scarred by the whipmarks of asceticism. This stripped body, unseen and
+unfit to be seen, unaccustomed to the air and to the eyes of others,
+shivered and cowered for cold and for shame. The Giottesques ignored its
+very existence, conceiving humanity as a bodiless creature, with face
+and hands to express emotion, and just enough malformed legs and feet to
+be either standing or moving; further, beneath the garments, there was
+nothing. The realists of the fifteenth century tore off the clothes and
+drew the ugly thing beneath; and bought the corpses from the
+lazar-houses, and stole them from the gallows; in order to see how bone
+fitted into bone, and muscle was stretched over muscle. They learned to
+perfection the anatomy of the human frame, but they could not learn its
+beauty; they became even reconciled to the ugliness they were accustomed
+to see; and, with their minds full of antique examples, Verrocchio,
+Donatello, Pollaiolo, and Ghirlandajo, the greatest anatomists of the
+fifteenth century, imitated their coarse and ill-made living models when
+they imagined that they were imitating antique marbles.
+
+So much for the nude. Drapery, as the ancients understood it in the
+delicate plaits of Greek chiton and tunic, in the grand folds of Roman
+toga, the fifteenth century could not show; it knew only the stiff,
+scanty raiment of the active classes; the shapeless masses of lined
+cloth of the merchants and magistrates; the prudish and ostentatious
+starched dress of the women; and the coarse, lumpish garb of the monks.
+
+The artist of the fifteenth century knew drapery only as an exotic, an
+exotic with whose representation the habit of seeing mediæval costume
+was for ever interfering; on the stripped, unseemly, indecent body he
+places, with the stiffness of artificiality, drapery such as he has
+never seen upon any living creature; the result is awkwardness and
+rigidity. And what attitude, what gesture, can he expect from this
+stripped and artificially draped model? None, for the model scarce knows
+how to stand in so unaccustomed a condition of body. The artist must
+seek for attitude and gesture among his townsfolk, and among them he can
+find only trivial, awkward, often vulgar movement. They have never been
+taught how to stand or to move with grace and dignity; the artist must
+study attitude and gesture in the market-place or the bull-baiting
+ground, where Ghirlandajo found his jauntily strutting idlers, and
+Verrocchio his brutally staggering prize-fighters. Between the
+constrained attitudinizing of Byzantine and Giottesque tradition, and
+the imitation of the movements of clodhoppers and ragamuffins, the
+realist of the fifteenth century would wander hopelessly were it not for
+the antique. Genius and science are of no avail; the position of Christ
+in baptism in the paintings of Verrocchio and Ghirlandajo is mean and
+servile; the movements of the "Thunder-stricken" in Signorelli's
+lunettes is an inconceivable mixture of the brutish, the melodramatic,
+and the comic; the magnificently drawn youth at the door of the prison
+in Filippino's Liberation of St. Peter is gradually going to sleep and
+collapsing in a fashion which is truly ignoble.
+
+And the same applies to sculptured figures or to figures standing
+isolated like statues; no Greek would have ventured upon the swaggering
+position, with legs apart and elbows out, of Donatello's St. George, or
+Perugino's St. Michael; and a young Athenian who should have assumed the
+attitude of Verrocchio's David, with tripping legs and hand clapped on
+his hip, would have been sent to sit in a corner as a saucy little
+ragamuffin.
+
+Coarse nude, stiff drapery, vulgar attitude, was all that the fifteenth
+century could offer to its artists; but Antiquity could offer more and
+very different things: the naked body developed by the most artistic
+training, drapery the most natural and refined, and attitude and gesture
+regulated by an education the most careful and artistic; and all these
+things Antiquity did give to the artists of the Renaissance. They did
+not copy antique statues as living naked men and women, but they
+corrected the faults of their living models by the example of the
+statues; they did not copy antique stone draperies in coloured pictures,
+but they arranged the robes on their models with the antique folds well
+in their memory; they did not give the gestures of statues to living
+figures, but they made the living figures move in accordance with those
+principles of harmony which they had found exemplified in the statues.
+
+They did not imitate the antique, they studied it; they obtained through
+the fragments of antique sculpture a glimpse into the life of antiquity,
+and that glimpse served to correct the vulgarism and distortion of the
+mediæval life of the fifteenth century. In the perfection of Italian
+painting, the union of antique and modern being consummated, it is
+perhaps difficult to disentangle what really is antique from what is
+modern; but in the earlier times, when the two elements were still
+separate, we can see them opposite each other and compare them in the
+works of the greatest artists. Wherever, in the paintings of the early
+Renaissance, there is realism, marked by the costume of the times, there
+is ugliness of form and vulgarity of movement; where there is idealism,
+marked by imitation of the antique, the nude, and drapery, there is
+beauty and dignity. We need only compare Filippino's Scene before the
+Proconsul with his Raising of the King's Son in the Brancacci Chapel;
+the grand attitude and draperies of Ghirlandajo's Zachariah with the
+vulgar dress and movements of the Florentine citizens surrounding him;
+Benozzo Gozzoli's noble naked figure of Noah with his ungainly,
+hideously dressed figure of Cosimo de' Medici; Mantegna's exquisite
+Judith with his preposterous Marquis of Mantua; in short, all the purely
+realistic with all the purely idealistic painting of the fifteenth
+century. We may give one last instance. In Signorelli's Orvieto frescoes
+there is a figure of a young man, with aquiline features, long crisp
+hair and strongly developed throat, which reappears unmistakably in all
+the compositions, and in some of them twice and thrice in various
+positions. His naked figure is magnificent, his attitudes splendid, his
+thrown-back head superb, whether he be slowly and painfully emerging
+from the earth, staggered and gasping with his newly infused life, or
+sinking oppressed on the ground, broken and crushed by the sound of the
+trumpet of judgment; or whether he be moving forward with ineffable
+longing towards the angel about to award him the crown of the blessed;
+in all these positions he is heroically beautiful. We meet him again,
+unmistakable, but how different, in the realistic group of the
+"Thunder-stricken "--the long, lank youth, with spindle-shanks and
+egg-shaped body, bounding forward, with most grotesque strides, over the
+uncouth heap of dead bodies, ungainly masses with soles and nostrils
+uppermost, lying in beast-like confusion. This youth, with something of
+a harlequin in his jumps and his ridiculous thin legs and preposterous
+round body, is evidently the model for the naked demi-gods of the
+Resurrection and the Paradise: he is the handsome boy as the fifteenth
+century gave him to Signorelli; opposite, he is the living youth of the
+fifteenth century idealized by the study of ancient sculpture; just as
+the "Thunder-stricken" may be some scene of street massacre such as
+Signorelli might have witnessed at Cortona or Perugia; while the agonies
+of the "Hell" are the grouped and superb agonies taught by the antique;
+just as the two archangels of the "Hell," in their armour of Baglioni's
+heavy cavalry, may represent the modern element, and the same
+archangels, naked, with magnificent flying draperies, blowing the
+trumpets of the Resurrection, may show the antique element in
+Renaissance art.
+
+The antique influence was not, indeed, equally strong throughout Italy;
+it was strongest in the Tuscan school, which, seeking for perfection of
+linear form, found that perfection in the antique; it was weakest in the
+Lombard and Venetian schools, which sought for what the antique could
+not give, light and shade and colour; the antique was most efficacious
+where it was most indispensable, and it was more necessary to a Tuscan,
+strong only with his charcoal or pencil, than to Leonardo da Vinci, who
+could make an imperfect figure, beckoning mysteriously from out of the
+gloom, more fascinating than the finest drawn Florentine Madonna, and
+could surround an insignificant childish head with the wondrous sheen
+and ripple of hair, as with an aureole of poetry; it was also less
+necessary to Giorgione and Titian, who could hide coarse limbs beneath
+their draperies of precious ruby, and transfigure, by the liquid gold of
+their palettes, a peasant woman into a goddess. But even the Lombards,
+even the Venetians, required the antique influence. They could not
+perhaps have obtained it direct like the Tuscans: the colourists and
+masters of light and shade might never have understood the blank lines
+and faint shadows of the marble; but they received the antique
+influence, strong but modified by the medium through which it had
+passed, from Mantegna; and the relentless self-sacrifice to Antiquity,
+the self-paralyzation of the great artist, was not without its use: from
+Venetian Padua, Mantegna influenced the Bellini and Giorgione; from
+Lombard Mantua, he influenced Leonardo; and Mantegna's influence was
+that of the antique.
+
+What would have been the art of the Renaissance without the antique? The
+speculation is vain, for the antique had influenced it, had been goading
+it on ever since the earliest times; it had been present at its birth,
+it had affected Giotto through Niccolò Pisano, and Masaccio through
+Ghiberti; the antique influence cannot be conceived as absent in the
+history of Italian painting. So far, as a study of the impossible, the
+speculation respecting the fate of Renaissance art had it not been
+influenced by the antique would be childishly useless. But lest we
+forget that this antique influence did exist, lest, grown ungrateful and
+blind, we refuse it its immense share in producing Michael Angelo,
+Raphael, and Titian, we may do well to turn to an art born and bred like
+Italian art, in the Middle Ages; like it, full of strength and power of
+self-development, but which, unlike Italian art, was not influenced by
+the antique. This art is the great German art of the early sixteenth
+century; the art of Martin Schongauer, of Aldegrever, of Altdorfer, of
+Wohlgemuth, of Kranach, of Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein, whom they
+resemble as Pinturicchio and Lo Spagna resemble Perugino, as Palma and
+Paris Bordone resemble Titian. This is an art born in a civilization
+less perfect indeed than that of Italy, narrower, as Nürnberg or Basle
+is narrower than Florence; but resembling it in habits, dress, religion,
+above all, the main characteristic of being mediæval; and its masters,
+as great as their Italian contemporaries in all the technicalities of
+the art, and In absolute honesty of endeavour, may show what the Italian
+art of the sixteenth century might have been without the antique. Let us
+therefore open a portfolio of those wonderful minute yet grand
+engravings of the old Germans. They are for the most part Scriptural
+scenes or allegories, quite analogous to those of the Italians, but
+purely realistic, conscious of no world beyond that of an Imperial City
+of the year 1520. Here we have the whole turn-out, male and female, of a
+German free-town, in the shape of scenes from the lives of the Virgin
+and saints; here are short fat burghers, with enormous blotchy, bloated
+faces and little eyes set in fat, their huge stomachs protruding from
+under their jackets; here are blear-eyed ladies, tall, thin, wrinkled
+though not old, with figures like hungry harpies, stalking about in high
+headgears and stiff gowns, or sitting by the side of lean and stunted
+pages, singing (with dolorous voice) to lutes; or promenading under
+trees with long-shanked, high-shouldered gentlemen, with vacant sickly
+face and long scraggy hair and beard, their bony elbows sticking out of
+their slashed doublets. These courtly figures culminate in Dürer's
+magnificent plate of the wild man of the woods kissing the hideous,
+leering Jezebel in her brocade and jewels. These aristocratic women are
+terrible; prudish, malicious, licentious, never modest because they are
+always ugly. Even the poor Madonnas, seated in front of village hovels
+or windmills, smile the smile of starved, sickly sempstresses. It is a
+stunted, poverty-stricken, plague-sick society, this mediæval society of
+burghers and burghers' wives; the air seems bad and heavy, and the light
+wanting physically and morally, in these old free-towns; there is
+intellectual sickness as well as bodily in those musty gabled houses;
+the mediæval spirit blights what revival of healthiness may exist in
+these commonwealths. And feudalism is outside the gates. There are the
+brutal, leering men-at-arms, in slashed, puffed doublets and heavy
+armour, face and dress as unhuman as possible, standing grimacing at the
+blood spirting from John the Baptist's decapitated trunk, as in
+Kranach's horrible print, while gaping spectators fill the castle-yard;
+there are the castles high on rocks amidst woods, with miserable
+villages below, where the Prodigal Son wallows among the swine, and the
+tattered boors tumble about in drunkenness, or rest wearied on their
+spades. There are the Middle Ages in full force. But had these Germans
+of the days of Luther really no thought beyond their own times and their
+own country? Had they really no knowledge of the antique? Not so; they
+had heard from their learned men, from Willibald Pirkheimer and Ulrich
+von Hutten, that the world had once been peopled with naked gods and
+goddesses. Nay, the very year perhaps that Raphael handed to his
+engraver, Marc Antonio, his magnificent drawing of the Judgment of
+Paris, Lukas Kranach bethought him to represent the story of the good
+Knight Paris giving the apple to the Lady Venus. So Kranach took up his
+steady pencil and sharp chisel, and in strong, clear, minute lines of
+black and white showed us the scene. There, on Mount Ida, with a
+castellated rock in the distance, the charger of Paris browses beneath
+some stunted larches; the Trojan knight's helmet, with its monstrous
+beak and plume, lies on the ground; and near it reclines Paris himself,
+lazy, in complete armour, with frizzled fashionable beard. To him, all
+wrinkled and grinning with brutal lust, comes another bearded knight,
+with wings to his vizored helmet, Sir Mercury, leading the three
+goddesses, short, fat-cheeked German wenches, housemaids stripped of
+their clothes, stupid, brazen, indifferent. And Paris is evidently
+prepared with his choice: he awards the apple to the fattest, for among
+a half-starved, plague-stricken people like this, the chosen of gods and
+men must needs be the fattest.
+
+No, such pagan scenes are mere burlesques, coarse mummeries, such as may
+have amused Nürnberg and Augsburg during Shrovetide, when drunken louts
+figured as Bacchus and sang drinking songs by Hans Sachs. There is no
+reality in all this; there is no belief in pagan gods. If we would see
+the haunting divinity of the German Renaissance, we shall find him
+prying and prowling in nearly every scene of real life; him, the ever
+present, the king of the Middle Ages, whose triumph we have seen on the
+cloister wall at Pisa, the Lord Death. His fleshless face peers from
+behind a bush at Zatzinger's stunted, fever-stricken lady and imbecile
+gentleman; he sits grinning on a tree in Orso Grafs allegory, while the
+cynical knights, with haggard, sensual faces, crack dirty jokes with the
+fat, brutish woman squatted below; he puts his hand into the basket of
+Dürer's tattered pedlar; he leers hideously at the stirrup of Dürer's
+armed and stalwart knight. No gods of youth and nature, no Hercules, no
+Hermes, no Venus, have invaded his German territories, as they invaded
+even his own palace, the burial-ground at Pisa; the antique has not
+perverted Dürer and his fellows, as it perverted Masaccio and Signorelli
+and Mantegna, from the mediæval worship of Death.
+
+The Italians had seen the antique and had let themselves be seduced by
+it, despite their civilization and their religion. Let us only rejoice
+thereat. There are indeed some, and among them the great English critic
+who is irrefutable when he is a poet, and irrational when he becomes a
+philosopher;--there are some who tell us that in its union with antique
+art, the art of the followers of Giotto embraced death, and rotted away
+ever after. There are others, more moderate but less logical, who would
+teach us that in uniting with the antique, the mediæval art of the
+fifteenth century purified and sanctified the beautiful but evil child
+of Paganism; that the goddess of Scopas and the athlete of Polyclete
+were raised to a higher sphere when Raphael changed the one into a
+Madonna, and Michael Angelo metamorphosed the other into a prophet. But
+both schools of criticism are wrong. Every civilization has its inherent
+evil; Antiquity had its inherent evils, as the Middle Ages had theirs;
+Antiquity may have bequeathed to the Renaissance the bad with the good,
+as the Middle Ages had bequeathed to the Renaissance the good with the
+bad. But the art of Antiquity was not the evil, it was the good of
+Antiquity; it was born of its strength and its purity only, and it was
+the incarnation of its noblest qualities. It could not be purified,
+because it was spotless; it could not be sanctified, because it was
+holy. It could gain nothing from the art of the Middle Ages, alternately
+strong in brutal reality, and languid in mystic inanity; the men of the
+Renaissance could, if they influenced it at all, influence the antique
+only for evil; they belonged to an inferior artistic civilization, and
+if we conscientiously seek for the spiritual improvements brought by
+them into antique types, we shall see that they consist in spoiling
+their perfect proportions; in making necks longer and muscles more
+prominent; in rendering more or less flaccid, or meagre or coarse, the
+grand and delicate forms of antique art. And when we have examined into
+this purified art of the Renaissance, when we have compared coolly and
+equitably, we may perhaps confess that, while the Renaissance added
+immense wealth of beauty in colour, perspective, and grouping, it took
+away something of the perfection of simple lines and modest light and
+shade of the antique; we may admit to ourselves that the grandest saint
+by Raphael is meagre and stunted; and the noblest Virgin by Titian is
+overblown and sensual by the side of the demi-gods and amazons of
+antique sculpture.
+
+The antique perfected the art of the Renaissance, it did not corrupt it.
+The art of the Renaissance fell indeed into shameful degradation soon
+after the period of its triumphant union with the antique; and Raphael's
+grand gods and goddesses, his exquisite Eros and radiant Psyche of the
+Farnesina, are indeed succeeded but too soon by the Olympus of Giulio
+Romano, an Olympus of harlots and acrobats, who smirk and mouth and
+wriggle and sprawl ignobly on the walls and ceilings of the dismantled
+palace which crumbles away among the stunted willows, the stagnant
+pools, and rank grass of the marshes of Mantua. But this is no more the
+fault of Antiquity than it is the fault of the Middle Ages; it is the
+fault of that great principle of life and of change which makes all
+things organic, be they physical or intellectual, germinate, grow,
+attain maturity, and then fade, wither, and rot. The dead art of
+Antiquity could never have brought the art of the Renaissance to an
+untimely end; the art of the Renaissance decayed because it was mature,
+and died because it had lived.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Euphorion, by Vernon Lee
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Euphorion, by Vernon Lee
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Euphorion
+       Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the
+              Renaissance - Vol. I
+
+Author: Vernon Lee
+
+Release Date: February 17, 2010 [EBook #31303]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EUPHORION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marc D'Hooghe
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<h1>EUPHORION:</h1>
+
+<h2>BEING STUDIES OF THE ANTIQUE AND THE MEDI&AElig;VAL IN THE RENAISSANCE</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>VERNON LEE</h2>
+
+<h3><i>Author of "Studies of the 18th Century in Italy," "Belcaro" etc.</i></h3>
+
+
+<h3>VOL. I.</h3>
+
+<h4>WALTER PATER,</h4>
+<h4>IN APPRECIATION OF THAT WHICH, IN EXPOUNDING THE</h4>
+<h4>BEAUTIFUL THINGS OF THE PAST, HE HAS ADDED TO</h4>
+<h4>THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS OF THE PRESENT.</h4>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h3>TABLE OF CONTENTS.</h3>
+
+
+<p class="center"><a href="#INTRODUCTION">Introduction</a></p>
+<p class="center"><a href="#THE_SACRIFICE">The Sacrifice</a></p>
+<p class="center"><a href="#THE_ITALY_OF_THE_ELIZABETHAN_DRAMATISTS">The Italy of the Elizabethan Dramatists</a></p>
+<p class="center"><a href="#THE_OUTDOOR_POETRY"></a>The Outdoor Poetry</p>
+<p class="center"><a href="#SYMMETRIA_PRISCA">Symmetria Prisca</a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2><a name="INTRODUCTION" id="INTRODUCTION"></a>INTRODUCTION.</h2>
+
+<p><i>Faustus is therefore a parable of the impotent yearnings of the Middle Ages&mdash;its
+passionate aspiration, its conscience-stricken desire, its fettered curiosity amid the
+tramping limits of imperfect knowledge and irrational dogmatism. The indestructible
+beauty of Greek art,&mdash;whereof Helen was an emblem, became, through the
+discovery of classic poetry and sculpture, the possession of the modern world.
+Medi&aelig;valism took this Helen to wife, and their offspring, the Euphorion of
+Goethe's drama, is the spirit of the modern world.</i>&mdash;J.A. Symonds, "Renaissance
+In Italy," vol. ii. p. 54.</p>
+
+<p>Euphorion is the name given by Goethe to the
+marvellous child born of the mystic marriage of Faust
+and Helena. Who Faust is, and who Helena, we all
+know. Faust, of whom no man can remember the
+youth or childhood, seems to have come into the
+world by some evil spell, already old and with the
+faintness of body and of mind which are the heritage
+of age; and every additional year of mysterious study
+and abortive effort has made him more vacillating of
+step and uncertain of sight, but only more hungry of
+soul. Postponed and repressed by reclusion from the
+world, and desperate tension over insoluble problems;
+diverted into the channels of mere thought and vision;
+there boils within him the energy, the passion, of
+retarded youth: its appetites and curiosities, which,
+cramped by the intolerant will, and foiled by many a
+sudden palsy of limb and mind, torment him with
+mad visions of unreal worlds, mock him with dreams
+of superhuman powers, from which he awakes in
+impotent and apathetic anguish. But these often-
+withstood and often-baffled cravings are not those
+merely of scholar or wizard, they are those of soldier
+and poet and monk, of the mere man: lawless desires
+which he seeks to divert, but fails, from the things of
+the flesh and of the world to the things of the reason;
+supersensuous desires for the beautiful and intangible,
+which he strives to crush, but in vain, with the cynical
+scepticism of science, which derides the things it cannot
+grasp. In this strange Faustus, made up of so many
+and conflicting instincts; in this old man with ever-
+budding and ever-nipped feelings of youthfulness,
+muddling the hard-won secrets of nature in search
+after impossibilities; in him so all-sided, and yet so
+wilfully narrowed, so restlessly active, yet so often palsied
+and apathetic; in this Faustus, who has laboured
+so much and succeeded in so little, feeling himself at
+the end, when he has summed up all his studies, as
+foolish as before&mdash;which of us has not learned to
+recognize the impersonated Middle Ages? And
+Helena, we know her also, she is the spirit of Antiquity.
+Personified, but we dare scarcely say, embodied;
+for she is a ghost raised by the spells of
+Faustus, a simulacrum of a thing long dead; yet with
+such continuing semblance of life, nay, with all life's
+real powers, that she seems the real, vital, living one,
+and Faustus yonder, thing as he is of the present,
+little better than a spectre. Yet Helena has been
+ages before Faust ever was; nay, by an awful mystery
+like those which involve the birth of Pagan gods,
+she whom he has evoked to be the mother of his only
+son has given, centuries before, somewhat of her life
+to make this self-same Faust. A strange mystery of
+Fate's necromancy this, and with strange anomalies.
+For opposite this living, decrepit Faust, Helena, the
+long dead, is young; and she is all that which Faust
+is not. Knowing much less than he, who has plunged
+his thoughts like his scalpel into all the mysteries of
+life and death, she yet knows much more, can tell
+him of the objects and aims of men and things; nay,
+with little more than the unconscious faithfulness to
+instinct of the clean-limbed, placid brute, she can
+give peace to his tormented conscience; and, while
+he has suffered and struggled and lashed himself for
+every seeming baseness of desire, and loathed himself
+for every imagined microscopic soiling, she has
+walked through good and evil, letting the vileness of
+sin trickle off her unhidden soul, so quietly and
+majestically that all thought of evil vanishes; and
+the self-tormenting wretch, with macerated flesh hidden
+beneath the heavy garments of mysticism and
+philosophy, suddenly feels, in the presence of her unabashed
+nakedness, that he, like herself, is chaste.</p>
+
+<p>Such are the parents, Faustus and Helena; we know
+them; but who is this son Euphorion? To me it
+seems as if there could be but one answer&mdash;the Renaissance.
+Goethe indeed has told us (though, with his
+rejuvenation of Faustus, unknown to the old German
+legend and to our Marlowe, in how bungling a manner!)
+the tale of that mystic marriage; but Goethe could
+not tell us rightly, even had he attempted, the real
+name of its offspring. For even so short a time ago,
+the Middle Ages were only beginning to be more
+than a mere historical expression, Antiquity was being
+only then critically discovered; and the Renaissance,
+but vaguely seen and quite unformulated by the
+first men, Gibbon and Roscoe, who perceived it at
+all, was still virtually unknown. To Goethe, therefore,
+it might easily have seemed as if the antique
+Helena had only just been evoked, and as if of her
+union with the worn-out century of his birth, a real
+Euphorion, the age in which ourselves are living,
+might have been born. But, at the distance of additional
+time, and from the undreamed-of height upon
+which recent historical science has enabled us to stand,
+we can easily see that in this he would have been
+mistaken. Not only is our modern culture no child of
+Faustus and Helena, but it is the complex descendant,
+strangely featured by atavism from various sides, of
+many and various civilizations; and the eighteenth
+century, so far from being a Faustus evoking as his
+bride the long dead Helen of Antiquity, was in itself a
+curiously varied grandchild or great-grandchild of such
+a marriage, its every moral feature, its every intellectual
+movement proclaiming how much of its being was inherited
+from Antiquity. No allegory, I well know,
+and least of all no historical allegory, can ever be
+strained to fit quite tight&mdash;the lives of individuals and
+those of centuries, their modes of intermixture, genesis,
+and inheritance are far different; but if an allegory is
+to possess any meaning at all, we must surely apply it
+wherever it will fit most easily and completely; and
+the beautiful allegory prepared by the tradition of the
+sixteenth century for the elaborating genius of Goethe,
+can have a real meaning only if we explain Faust as representing
+the Middle Ages, Helena as Antiquity, and
+Euphorion as that child of the Middle Ages, taking
+life and reality from them, but born of and curiously
+nurtured by the spirit of Antiquity, to which significant
+accident has given the name of Renaissance.
+After Euphorion I have therefore christened this
+book; and this not from any irrational conceit of
+knowing more (when I am fully aware that I know
+infinitely less) than other writers about the life and
+character of this wonderful child of Helena and Faustus,
+but merely because it is more particularly as the offspring
+of this miraculous marriage, and with reference
+to the harmonies and anomalies which therefrom
+resulted, that Euphorion has exercised my thoughts.
+The Renaissance has interested and interests me, not
+merely for what it is, but even more for what it sprang
+from, and for the manner in which the many things
+inherited from both Middle Ages and Renaissance, the
+tendencies and necessities inherent in every special
+civilization, acted and reacted upon each other, united
+in concord or antagonism; forming, like the gases of
+the chemist, new things, sometimes like and sometimes
+unlike themselves and each other; producing now
+some unknown substance of excellence and utility, at
+other times some baneful element, known but too well
+elsewhere, but unexpected here. But not the watching
+of the often tragic meeting of these great fatalities
+of inherited spirit and habit only: for equally fascinating
+almost has been the watching of the elaboration
+by this double-natured period of things of little
+weight, mere trifles of artistic material bequeathed to
+it by one or by the other of its spiritual parents. The
+charm for me&mdash;a charm sometimes pleasurable, but
+sometimes also painful, like the imperious necessity
+which we sometimes feel to see again and examine,
+seemingly uselessly, some horrible evil&mdash;the charm, I
+mean the involuntary compulsion of attention, has
+often been as great in following the vicissitudes of a
+mere artistic item, like the Carolingian stories or the
+bucolic element, as it has been in looking on at the
+dissolution of moral and social elements. And in
+this, that I have tried to understand only where my
+curiosity was awakened, tried to reconstruct only
+where my fancy was taken; in short, studied of this
+Renaissance civilization only as much or as little as I
+cared, depends all the incompleteness and irrelevancy
+and unsatisfactoriness of this book, and depends also
+whatever addition to knowledge or pleasure it may
+afford; Were I desirous of giving a complete, clear
+notion of the very complex civilization of the Renaissance,
+a kind of encyclop&aelig;dic atlas of that period,
+where (by a double power which history alone possesses)
+you could see at once the whole extent and
+shape of this historical territory, and at the same time,
+with all its bosses of mountain and furrows of valley,
+the exact composition of all its various earths and
+waters, the exact actual colour and shape of all its
+different vegetations, not to speak of its big towns
+and dotting villages;&mdash;were I desirous of doing this, I
+should not merely be attempting a work completely
+beyond my faculties, but a work moreover already
+carried out with all the perfection due to specially
+adapted gifts, to infinite patience and ingenuity, occasionally
+amounting almost to genius. Such is not
+at all within my wishes, as it assuredly would be
+totally without my powers.</p>
+
+<p>But besides such marvels of historic mapping
+as I have described, where every one can find at
+a glance whatever he may be looking for, and get
+the whole topography, geological and botanical,
+of an historic tract at his fingers' ends, there are
+yet other kinds of work which may be done. For a
+period in history is like a more or less extended real
+landscape: it has, if you will, actual, chemically defined
+colours in this and that, if you consider this and
+that separate and unaffected by any kind of visual
+medium; and measurable distances also between this
+point and the other, if you look down upon it as from
+a balloon. But, like a real landscape, it may also be
+seen from different points of view, and under different
+lights; then, according as you stand, the features of
+the scene will group themselves&mdash;this ridge will disappear
+behind that, this valley will open out before you,
+that other will be closed. Similarly, according to the
+light wherein the landscape is seen, the relative scale
+of colours and tints of objects, due to pervading light
+and to distances&mdash;what painters call the values&mdash;will
+alter: the scene will possess one or two predominant
+effects, it will produce also one or, at most, two
+or three (in which case co-ordinated) impressions.
+The art which deals with impressions, which tries to
+seize the real relative values of colours and tints at a
+given moment, is what you call new-fangled: its doctrines
+and works are still subject to the reproach of
+charlatanry. Yet it is the only truly realistic art, and
+it only, by giving you a thing as it appears at a given
+moment, gives it you as it really ever is; all the rest
+is the result of cunning abstraction, and representing
+the scene as it is always, represents it (by striking an
+average) as it never is at all. I do not pretend that
+in questions of history we can proceed upon the
+principles of modern landscape painting: we do not
+know what were the elevations which made perspective,
+what were the effects of light which created
+scales of tints, in that far distant country of the past;
+and it is safer certainly, and doubtless much more
+useful, to strike an average, and represent the past as
+seen neither from here nor from there, neither in this
+light nor that, and let each man imagine his historical
+perspective and colour value to the best of his powers.
+Yet it is nevertheless certain that the past, to the people
+who were in it, was not a miraculous map or other
+marvellous diagram constructed on the principle of
+getting at the actual qualities of things by analysis;
+that it must have been, to its inhabitants, but a series
+of constantly varied perspectives and constantly varied
+schemes of colour, according to the position of each
+individual, and the light in which that individual
+viewed it. To attempt to reconstruct those various
+perspective-making heights, to rearrange those various
+value-determining lights, would be to the last degree
+disastrous; we should have valleys where there existed
+mountains, and brilliant warm schemes of colour where
+there may have been all harmonies of pale and neutral
+tints. Still the perspective and colour valuation of
+individual minds there must have been; and since it
+is not given to us to reproduce those of the near
+spectator in a region which we can never enter, we
+may yet sometimes console ourselves for the too
+melancholy abstractness and averageness of scientific
+representations, by painting that distant historic
+country as distant indeed, but as its far-off hill ranges
+and shimmering plains really appear in their combination
+of form and colour, from the height of an individual
+interest of our own, and beneath the light of
+our individual character. We see only very little at
+a time, and that little is not what it appeared to the
+men of the past; but we see at least, if not the same
+things, yet in the same manner in which they saw, as
+we see from the standpoints of personal interest and
+in the light of personal temper. Scientifically we
+doubtless lose; but is the past to be treated only
+scientifically? and can it not give us, and do we not
+owe it, something more than a mere understanding of
+why and how? Is it a thing so utterly dead as to be
+fit only for the scalpel and the microscope?
+Surely not so. The past can give us, and should
+give us, not merely ideas, but emotions: healthy
+pleasure which may make us more light of spirit,
+and pain which may make us more earnest of mind;
+the one, it seems to me, as necessary for our individual
+worthiness as is the other. For to each of us,
+as we watch the past, as we lie passive and let it slowly
+circulate around us, there must come sights which, in
+their reality or in their train of associations, and to
+the mind of each differently, must gladden as with a
+sense of beauty, or put us all into a sullen moral ache.
+I should hate to be misunderstood in this more, perhaps,
+than in anything else in the world. I speak not
+of any dramatic emotion, of such egotistic, half-artistic
+pleasure as some may get from the alternation of
+cheerfulness and terror, from the excitement caused
+by evil from which we are as safely separated as are
+those who look on from the enfuriate bulls in an arena.
+To such, history, and the history especially of the Renaissance,
+has been made to pander up but too much.</p>
+
+<p>The pain I speak of is the pain which must come to
+every morally sentient creature with the contemplation
+of some one of the horrible tangles of evil, of the
+still fouler intermeshing of evil with good, which
+history brings up ever and anon. Evil which is past,
+it is true, but of which the worst evil almost of all, the
+fact of its having been, can never be past, must ever
+remain present; and our trouble and indignation at
+which is holy, our pain is healthy: holy and healthy,
+because every vibration of such pain as that makes our
+moral fibre more sensitive; because every immunity
+from such sensation deadens our higher nature: holy
+and healthy also because, just as no image of pleasurable
+things can pass before us without gathering about it
+other images of some beauty which have long lain by
+in each individual mind, so also no thought of great
+injustice of man or of accident, of signal whitewashing
+of evil or befouling of good, but must, in striking into
+our soul, put in motion there the salutary thought
+of some injustice or lying legitimation or insidious
+pollution, smaller indeed perhaps, but perhaps also
+nearer to ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>Be not therefore too hard upon me if in what I
+have written of the Renaissance, there is too little
+attempt to make matters scientifically complete, and
+too much giving way to personal and perhaps sometimes
+irrelevant impressions of pleasure and of pain;
+if I have followed up those pleasurable and painful
+impressions rather more than sought to discover the
+exact geography of the historical tract which gave
+them. Consider, moreover, that this very cause of deficiency
+may have been also the cause of my having
+succeeded in achieving anything at all. Personal impression
+has led me, perhaps, sometimes away from
+the direct road; but had it not beckoned me to follow,
+I should most likely have simply not stirred. Pleasant
+impression and painful, as I have said; and sometimes
+the painful has been more efficacious than the other.
+I do not know whether the interest which I have
+always taken in the old squabble of real and ideal
+has enabled me to make at all clearer the different
+characteristics of painting and sculpture in Renaissance
+portraiture, the relation of the art of Raphael to the
+art of Velasquez and the art of Whistler. I can
+scarcely judge whether the pleasure which I owe to
+the crowding together, the moving about in my fancy,
+of the heroes and wizards and hippogriffs of the old
+tales of Oberon and Ogier; the association with the
+knights and ladies of Boiardo and Ariosto, of this or
+that figure out of a fresco of Pinturicchio, or a picture
+by Dosso, has made it easier or more difficult for
+me to sum up the history of medi&aelig;val romance in
+Renaissance Italy; nor whether the recollection of
+certain Tuscan farms, the well-known scent of the
+sun-dried fennel and mint under the vine-trellis, the
+droning song of the contadino ploughing or pruning
+unseen in the valley, the snatches of peasants' rhymes,
+the outlines of peasants' faces&mdash;things all these of this
+our own time, of yesterday or to-day; whether all
+this, running in my mind like so many scribbly illustrations
+and annotations along the margin of Lorenzo
+dei Medici's poems, has made my studies of rustic
+poetry more clear or more confused. But this much I
+know as a certainty, that never should I have tried
+to unravel the causes of the Renaissance's horrible
+anomaly of improvement and degradation, had not that
+anomaly returned and returned to make me wretched
+with its loathsome mixture of good and evil; its detestable
+alternative of endurance of vile solidarities in
+the souls of our intellectual forefathers, or of unjust
+turning away from the men and the times whose moral
+degradation paid the price of our moral dignity. I
+also have the further certainty of its having been this
+long-endured moral sickening at the sight of this
+moral anomaly, which enabled me to realize the
+feelings of such of our nobler Elizabethan playwrights
+as sought to epitomize in single tales of horror the
+strange impressions left by the accomplished and
+infamous Italy of their day; and which made it possible
+for me to express perhaps some of the trouble which
+filled the mind of Webster and of Tourneur merely by
+expressing the trouble which filled my own.</p>
+
+<p>The following studies are not samples, fragments at
+which one tries one's hand, of some large and methodical
+scheme of work. They are mere impressions
+developed by means of study: not merely currents of
+thought and feeling which I have singled out from
+the multifold life of the Renaissance; but currents of
+thought and feeling in myself, which have found and
+swept along with them certain items of Renaissance
+lore. For the Renaissance has been to me, in the
+small measure in which it has been anything, not so
+much a series of studies as a series of impressions. I
+have not mastered the history and literature of the
+Renaissance (first-hand or second-hand, perfectly or
+imperfectly), abstract and exact, and then sought out
+the places and things which could make that abstraction
+somewhat more concrete in my mind; I have
+seen the concrete things, and what I might call the
+concrete realities of thought and feeling left behind by
+the Renaissance, and then tried to obtain from books
+some notion of the original shape and manner of wearing
+these relics, rags and tatters of a past civilization.
+For Italy, beggared and maimed (by her own unthrift,
+by the rapacity of others, by the order of Fate)
+at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was never
+able to weave for herself a new, a modern civilization, as
+did the nations who had shattered her looms on which
+such woofs are made, and carried off her earnings with
+which such things may be bought; and she had,
+accordingly, to go through life in the old garments,
+still half medi&aelig;val in shape, which had been fashioned
+for her during the Renaissance: apparel of the best
+that could then be made, beautiful and strong in many
+ways, so beautiful and strong indeed as to impose on
+people for a good long time, and make French, and
+Germans, and Spaniards, and English believe (comparing
+these brilliant tissues with the homespun they
+were providing for themselves) that it must be all
+brand new, and of the very latest fashion. But the
+garments left to Italy by those latest Middle Ages
+which we call Renaissance, were not eternal: wear and
+tear, new occupations, and the rough usage of other
+nations, rent them most sorely; their utter neglect
+by the long seventeenth century, their hasty patchings
+up (with bits of odd stuff and all manner of coloured
+thread and string, so that a harlequin's jacket could
+not look queerer) by the happy-go-lucky practicalness
+of the eighteenth century and the Revolution, reduced
+them thoroughly to rags; and with these rags of Renaissance
+civilization, Italy may still be seen to drape
+herself. Not perhaps in the great centres, where the
+garments of modern civilization, economical, unpicturesque,
+intended to be worn but a short time, have
+been imported from other countries; but yet in many
+places. Yes, you may still see those rags of the
+Renaissance as plainly as you see the tattered linen
+fluttering from the twisted iron hooks (made for the
+display of precious brocades and carpets on pageant
+days) which still remain in the stained whitewash, the
+seams of battered bricks of the solid old escutcheoned
+palaces; see them sometimes displayed like the worm-&nbsp;
+eaten squares of discoloured embroidery which the
+curiosity dealers take out of their musty oak presses;
+and sometimes dragging about mere useless and befouled
+odds and ends, like the torn shreds which lie
+among the decaying kitchen refuse, the broken tiles
+and plaster, the nameless filth and ooze which attracts
+the flies under every black archway, in every steep
+bricked lane descending precipitously between the
+high old houses. Old palaces, almost strongholds,
+and which are still inhabited by those too poor to pull
+them down and build some plastered bandbox instead;
+poems and prose tales written or told five
+hundred years ago, edited and re-edited by printers
+to whom there come no modern poems or prose tales
+worth editing instead; half-pagan, medi&aelig;val priest
+lore, believed in by men and women who have not
+been given anything to believe instead; easy-going,
+all-permitting fifteenth century scepticism, not yet
+replaced by the scientific and socialistic disbelief which
+is puritanic and iconoclastic; sly and savage habits of
+vengeance still doing service among the lower classes
+instead of the orderly chicanery of modern justice;
+&mdash;these are the things, and a hundred others besides,
+concrete and spiritual, things too magnificent, too
+sordid, too irregular, too nauseous, too beautiful, and,
+above all, too utterly unpractical and old-fashioned for
+our times, which I call the rags of the Renaissance,
+and with which Italy still ekes out her scanty apparel
+of modern thoughts and things.</p>
+
+<p>It is living among such things, turn by turn delighted
+by their beauty and offended by their foulness, that
+one acquires the habit of spending a part only of
+one's intellectual and moral life in the present, and
+the rest in the past. Impressions are not derived from
+description, and thoughts are not suggested by books.
+The juxtaposition of concrete objects invites the
+making of a theory as the jutting out of two branches
+invites the spinning of a spider's web. You find
+everywhere your facts without opening a book. The
+explanation which I have tried to give of the exact
+manner in which medi&aelig;val art was influenced by the
+remains of antiquity, came like a flash during a rainy
+morning in the Pisan Campo Santo; the working out
+and testing of that explanation in its details was a
+matter of going from one church or gallery to the
+other, a reference or two to Vasari for some date or
+fact being the only necessary reading; and should
+any one at this moment ask me for substantiation of
+that theory, instead of opening books I would take
+that person to this Sienese Cathedral, and there bid
+him compare the griffins and arabesques, the delicate
+figure and foliage ornaments carved in wood and
+marble by the latter Middle Ages, with the griffins
+and arabesques, the boldly bossed horsemen, the exquisite
+fruit garlands of a certain antique altar stone
+which the builders of the church used as a base to a
+pillar, and which must have been a never-ceasing-
+object of study to every draughtsman and stoneworker in Siena.</p>
+
+<p>Nor are such everywhere-scattered facts ready for
+working into theoretic shape, the most which Italy
+still affords to make the study of the Renaissance an
+almost involuntary habit. In certain places where
+only decay has altered things from what they were
+four centuries ago, Perugia, Orvieto, S. Gimignano, in
+the older quarters of Florence, Venice, and Verona,
+but nowhere I think so much as in this city of Siena
+(as purely medi&aelig;val as the suits of rusted armour
+which its townsfolk patch up and bury themselves in
+during their August pageants), we are subjected to
+receive impressions of the past so startlingly lifelike
+as to get quite interwoven with our impressions of the
+present; and from that moment the past must share,
+in a measure, some of the everyday thoughts which
+we give to the present. In such a city as this, the
+sudden withdrawal, by sacristan or beggar-crone, of
+the curtain from before an altar-piece is many a time
+much more than the mere displaying of a picture: it
+is the sudden bringing us face to face with the real
+life of the Renaissance. We have ourselves, perhaps
+not an hour before, sauntered through squares and
+dawdled beneath porticos like those which we see
+filled with the red-robed and plumed citizens and
+patricians, the Jews and ruffians whom Pinturicchio's
+parti-coloured men-at-arms are dispersing to make
+room for the followers of Aeneas Sylvius; or clambered
+up rough lanes, hedged in between oak woods and
+oliveyards, which we might almost swear were the
+very ones through which are winding Sodoma's cavalcades
+of gallantly dressed gentlemen, with their hawks
+and hounds, and negro jesters and apes and beautiful
+pages, cantering along on shortnecked little horses
+with silver bits and scarlet trappings, on the pretence
+of being the Kings from the East, carrying gold and
+myrrh to the infant Christ. It seems as if all were
+astoundingly real, as if, by some magic, we were
+actually going to mix in the life of the past. But it
+is in reality but a mere delusion, a deceit like those
+dioramas which we have all been into as children, and
+where, by paying your shilling, you were suddenly
+introduced into an oasis of the desert, or into a recent
+battle-field: things which surprised us, real palm
+trunks and Arabian water jars, or real fascines and
+cannon balls, lying about for us to touch; roads opening
+on all sides into this simulated desert, through this
+simulated battle-field. So also with these seeming
+realities of Renaissance life. We can touch the things
+scattered on the foreground, can handle the weapons,
+the furniture, the books and musical instruments; we
+can see, or think we see, most plainly the streets and
+paths, the faces and movements of that Renaissance
+world; but when we try to penetrate into it, we
+shall find that there is but a slip of solid ground
+beneath us, that all around us is but canvas and
+painted wall, perspectived and lit up by our fancy;
+and that when we try to approach to touch one of those
+seemingly so real men and women, our eyes find only
+daubs of paint, our hands meet only flat and chilly
+stucco. Turn we to our books, and seek therein the
+spell whereby to make this simulacrum real; and I
+think the plaster will still remain plaster, the stones
+still remain stone. Out of the Renaissance, out of the
+Middle Ages, we must never hope to evoke any spectres
+which can talk with us and we with them; nothing
+of the kind of those dim but familiar ghosts, often
+grotesque rather than heroic, who come to us from
+out of the books, the daubed portraits of times nearer
+our own, and sit opposite us, making us laugh, and
+also cry, with humdrum stories and humdrum woes so
+very like our own. No; such ghosts the Renaissance
+has not left behind it. From out of it there come to
+us no familiars. They are all faces&mdash;those which meet
+us in the pages of chronicles and in the frames of
+pictures: they are painted records of the past&mdash;we may
+understand them by scanning well their features, but
+they cannot understand, they cannot perceive us.
+Such, when all is said, are my impressions of the
+Renaissance. The moral atmosphere of those days is
+as impossible for us to breathe as would be the physical
+atmosphere of the moon: could we, for a moment,
+penetrate into it, we should die of asphyxia. Say what
+we may against both Protestant reformation and
+Catholic reaction, these two began to make an atmosphere
+(pure or foul) different from that of the Middle
+Ages and the Renaissance, an atmosphere in which
+lived creatures like ourselves, into which ourselves
+might penetrate.</p>
+
+<p>A crotchet this, perhaps, of my own; but it is my
+feeling, nevertheless. The Renaissance is, I say again,
+no period out of which we must try and evoke ghostly
+companions. Let us not waste our strength in seeking
+to do so; but be satisfied if it teaches us strange
+truths, scientific and practical; if its brilliant and
+solemn personalities, its bright and majestic art can
+give us pleasure; if its evils and wrongs, its inevitable
+degradation, can move us to pity and to indignation.</p>
+
+<p>Siena,
+September, 1882.</p>
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="THE_SACRIFICE" id="THE_SACRIFICE"></a>THE SACRIFICE.</h2>
+
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Ihr f&uuml;hrt ins Leben uns hinein;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Ihr l&auml;sst den armen schuldig werden;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Dann &uuml;bergiebt Ihr ihm der Pein,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Denn alle Schuld r&auml;cht sich auf Erden.</span><br /></p>
+
+
+<p>At the end of the fifteenth century, Italy was the
+centre of European civilization: while the other
+nations were still plunged in a feudal barbarism which
+seems almost as far removed from all our sympathies
+as is the condition of some American or Polynesian
+savages, the Italians appear to us as possessing habits
+of thought, a mode of life, political, social, and literary
+institutions, not unlike those of to-day; as men
+whom we can thoroughly understand, whose ideas
+and aims, whose general views, resemble our own in
+that main, indefinable characteristic of being modern.
+They had shaken off the morbid monastic ways of
+feeling, they had thrown aside the crooked scholastic
+modes of thinking, they had trampled under foot the
+feudal institutions of the Middle Ages; no symbolical
+mists made them see things vague, strange, and distorted;
+their intellectual atmosphere was as clear as
+our own, and, if they saw less than we do, what they
+did see appeared to them in its true shape and proportions.
+Almost for the first time since the ruin of
+antique civilization, they could show well-organized,
+well-defined States; artistically disciplined armies;
+rationally devised laws; scientifically conducted agriculture;
+and widely extended, intelligently undertaken
+commerce. For the first time, also, they showed
+regularly built, healthy, and commodious towns; well-
+drained fields; and, more important than all, hundreds
+of miles of country owned not by feudal lords, but by
+citizens; cultivated not by serfs, but by free peasants.
+While in the rest of Europe men were floundering
+among the stagnant ideas and crumbling institutions
+of the effete Middle Ages, with but a vague half-
+consciousness of their own nature, the Italians
+walked calmly through a life as well arranged as their
+great towns, bold, inquisitive, and sceptical: modern
+administrators, modern soldiers, modern politicians,
+modern financiers, scholars, and thinkers. Towards
+the end of the fifteenth century, Italy seemed to have
+obtained the philosophic, literary, and artistic inheritance
+of Greece; the administrative, legal, and military
+inheritance of Rome, increased threefold by her own
+strong, original, essentially modern activities.
+Yet, at that very time, and almost in proportion as
+all these advantages developed, the moral vitality of
+the Italians was rapidly decreasing, and a horrible
+moral gangrene beginning to spread: liberty was
+extinguished; public good faith seemed to be dying
+out; even private morality flickered ominously; every
+free State became subject to a despot, always unscrupulous
+and often infamous; warfare became a mere
+pretext for the rapine and extortions of mercenaries;
+diplomacy grew to be a mere swindle; the humanists
+inoculated literature with the filthiest refuse cast up
+by antiquity; nay, even civic and family ties were
+loosened; assassinations and fratricides began to
+abound, and all law, human and divine, to be set at
+defiance.</p>
+
+<p>The nations who came into contact with the
+Italians opened their eyes with astonishment, with
+mingled admiration and terror; and we, people of the
+nineteenth century, are filled with the same feeling,
+only much stronger and more defined, as we watch
+the strange ebullition of the Renaissance, seething
+with good and evil, as we contemplate the enigmatic
+picture drawn by the puzzled historian, the picture of
+a people moving on towards civilization and towards
+chaos. Our first feeling is perplexity; our second
+feeling, anger; we do not at first know whether we
+ought to believe in such an anomaly; when once we
+do believe in it, we are indignant at its existence.
+We accuse these Italians of the Renaissance of having
+wilfully and shamefully perverted their own powers,
+of having wantonly corrupted their own civilization,
+of having cynically destroyed their own national existence,
+of having boldly called down the vengeance of
+Heaven; we lament and we accuse, naturally enough,
+but perhaps not justly.</p>
+
+<p>Let us ask ourselves what the Renaissance really
+was, and what was its use; how it was produced, and
+how it necessarily ended. Let us try to understand
+its inherent nature, and the nature of what surrounded
+it, which, taken together, constitute its inevitable fate;
+let us seek the explanation of that strange, anomalous
+civilization, of that life in death, and death in life.
+The Renaissance, inasmuch as it is something
+which we can define, and not a mere vague name for
+a certain epoch, is not a period, but a condition; and
+if we apply the word to any period in particular, it is
+because in it that condition was peculiarly marked.</p>
+
+<p>The Renaissance may be defined as being that phase
+in medi&aelig;val history in which the double influence,
+feudal and ecclesiastic, which had gradually crushed
+the spontaneous life of the early medi&aelig;val revival, and
+reduced all to a dead, sterile mass, was neutralized by
+the existence of democratic and secular communities;
+that phase in which, while there existed not yet any
+large nations, or any definite national feeling, there
+existed free towns and civic democracies. In this
+sense the Renaissance began to exist with the earliest
+medi&aelig;val revival, but its peculiar mission could be
+carried out only when that general revival had come
+to an end. In this sense, also, the Renaissance did not
+exist all over Italy, and it existed outside Italy; but
+in Italy it was far more universal than elsewhere:
+there it was the rule, elsewhere the exception. There
+was no Renaissance in Savoy, nor in Naples, nor even
+in Rome; but north of the Alps there was Renaissance
+only in individual towns like N&uuml;rnberg, Augsburg,
+Bruges, Ghent, &amp;c. In the North the Renaissance
+is dotted about amidst the stagnant Middle
+Ages; in Italy the Middle Ages intersect and interrupt
+the Renaissance here and there: the consequence
+was that in the North the Renaissance was crushed
+by the Middle Ages, whereas in Italy the Middle
+Ages were crushed by the Renaissance. Wherever
+there was a free town, without direct dependence on
+feudal or ecclesiastical institutions, governed by its
+own citizens, subsisting by its own industry and commerce;
+wherever the burghers built walls, slung
+chains across their streets, and raised their own cathedral;
+wherever, be it in Germany, in Flanders, or in
+England, there was a suspension of the deadly influences
+of the later Middle Ages; there, to greater
+or less extent, was the Renaissance.</p>
+
+<p>But in the North this rudimentary Renaissance was
+never suffered to spread beyond the walls of single
+towns; it was hemmed in on all sides by feudal and
+ecclesiastical institutions, which restrained it within
+definite limits. The free towns of Germany were
+mostly dependent upon their bishops or archbishops;
+the more politically important cities of Flanders were
+under the suzerainty of a feudal family; they were
+subject to constant vexations from their suzerains,
+and their very existence was endangered by an
+attempt at independence; Liege was well-nigh destroyed
+by the supporters of her bishop, and Ghent
+was ruined by the revenge of the Duke of Burgundy.
+In these northern cities, therefore, the commonwealth
+was restricted to a sort of mercantile corporation&mdash;
+powerful within the town, but powerless without it;
+while outside the town reigned feudalism, with its
+robber nobles, free companies, and bands of outlawed
+peasants, from whom the merchant princes of Bruges
+and N&uuml;rnberg could scarcely protect their wares. To
+this political feebleness and narrowness corresponded
+an intellectual weakness and pettiness: the burghers
+were mere self-ruling tradesfolk; their interests did
+not extend far beyond their shops and their houses;
+literature was cramped in guilds, and reflection and
+imagination were confined within the narrow limits of
+town life. Everything was on a small scale; the
+Renaissance was moderate and inefficient, running
+no great dangers and achieving no great conquests.
+There was not enough action to produce reaction;
+and, while the Italian free States were ground down
+by foreign tyrannies, the German and Flemish cities
+insensibly merged into the vast empire of the House
+of Austria. While also the Italians of the sixteenth
+century rushed into moral and religious confusion,
+which only Jesuitism could discipline, the Germans of
+the same time quietly and comfortably adopted the
+Reformation.</p>
+
+<p>The main cause of this difference, the main explanation
+of the fact that while in the North the Renaissance
+was cramped and enfeebled, in Italy it carried
+everything before it, lies in the circumstance that
+feudalism never took deep root in Italy. The conquered
+Latin race was enfeebled, it is true, but it was
+far more civilized than the conquering Teutonic peoples;
+the Barbarians came down, not on to a previous layer
+of Barbarians, but on to a deep layer of civilized men;
+the nomads of the North found in Italy a people
+weakened and corrupt, but with a long and inextinguishable
+habit of independence, of order, of industry.
+The country had been cultivated for centuries, the
+Barbarians could not turn it into a desert; the inhabitants
+had been organized as citizens for a thousand
+years, the Barbarians could not reorganize them feudally.
+The Barbarians who settled in Italy, especially the
+latest of them, the Lombards, were not only in a
+minority, but at an immense disadvantage. They
+founded kingdoms and dukedoms, where German was
+spoken and German laws were enacted; but whenever
+they tried to communicate with their Italian subjects,
+they found themselves forced to adopt the Latin language,
+manners, and laws; their domination became
+real only in proportion as it ceased to be Teutonic,
+and the Barbarian element was swallowed up by what
+remained of Roman civilization. Little by little these
+Lombard monarchies, without roots in the soil, and
+surrounded by hostile influences, died out, and there
+remained of the invaders only a certain number of
+nobles, those whose descendants were to bear the
+originally German names of Gherardesca, Rolandinghi,
+Soffredinghi, Lambertazzi, Guidi, and whose suzerains
+were the Bavarian and Swabian dukes and marquises
+of Tuscan. Meanwhile the Latin element revived;
+towns were rebuilt; a new Latin language was formed;
+and the burghers of these young communities gradually
+wrested franchises and privileges from the weak Teutonic
+rulers, who required Italian agriculture, industry,
+and commerce, without which they and their feudal
+retainers would have starved. Feudalism became
+speedily limited to the hilly country; the plain
+became the property of the cities which it surrounded;
+the nobles turned into mere robber chieftains, then into
+mercenary soldiers, and finally, as the towns gained
+importance, they gradually descended into the cities
+and begged admission into the guilds of artizans and
+tradesfolk. Thus they grew into citizens and Italians;
+but for a long time they kept hankering after feudalism,
+and looking towards the German emperors who
+claimed the inheritance of the Lombard kings. The
+struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, between
+the German feudal element and the Latin civic one,
+ended in the complete annihilation of the former in
+all the north and centre of Italy. The nobles sank
+definitely into merchants, and those who persisted in
+keeping their castles were speedily ousted by the
+commissaries of the free towns. Such is the history
+of feudalism in Italy&mdash;the history of Barbarian minority
+engulphed in Latin civilization; of Teutonic counts
+and dukes turned into robber nobles, hunted into the
+hills by the townsfolk, and finally seeking admission
+into the guilds of wool-spinners or money-changers;
+and in it is the main explanation of the fact that the
+Italian republics, instead of remaining restricted within
+their city walls like those of the North, spread over
+whole provinces, and became real politically organized
+States. And in such States having a free political,
+military, and commercial life, uncramped by ecclesiastic
+or feudal influence, in them alone could the great
+revival of human intelligence and character thoroughly
+succeed. The commune was the only species of free
+government possible during the Middle Ages, the only
+form which could resist that utterly prostrating action
+of later medi&aelig;valism. Feudalism stamped out civilization;
+monasticism warped it; in the open country
+it was burnt, trampled on, and uprooted; in the cloister
+it withered and shrank and perished; only within the
+walls of a city, protected from the storm without, and
+yet in the fresh atmosphere of life, could it develope,
+flourish, and bear fruit.</p>
+
+<p>But this system of the free town contained in itself,
+as does every other institution, the seed of death&mdash;
+contained it in that expanding element which developes,
+ripens, rots, and finally dissolves all living organisms.
+A little town is formed in the midst of some feudal
+state, as Pisa, Florence, Lucca, and Bologna were
+formed in the dominions of the lords of Tuscany;
+the elders govern it; it is protected from without; it
+obtains privileges from its suzerain, always glad to
+oppose anything to his vassals, and who, unlike them,
+is too far removed in the feudal scale to injure the
+commune, which is under his supreme jurisdiction but
+not in his land. The town can thus develope regularly,
+governing itself, taxing itself, defending itself
+against encroaching neighbours; it gradually extends
+beyond its own walls, liberates its peasantry, extends
+its commerce, extinguishes feudalism, beats back its
+suzerain or buys privileges from him; in short, lives
+the vigorous young life of the early Italian commonwealths.
+But now the danger begins. The original
+system of government, where every head of a family
+is a power in the State, where every man helps to
+govern, without representation or substitution, could
+exist only as long as the commune remained small
+enough for the individual to be in proportion with it;
+as long as the State remained small enough for all its
+citizens to assemble in the market-place and vote,
+for every man to know every detail of the administration,
+every inch of the land. When the limits
+were extended, the burgher had to deal with towns
+and villages and men and things which he did not
+know, and which he probably hated, as every small
+community hated its neighbour; witness the horrible
+war, lasting centuries, between the two little towns of
+Dinant and Bouvines on the Meuse. Still more was
+this the case with an important city: the subjugated
+town was hated all the more for being a rival centre;
+the burghers of Florence, inspired only by their narrow
+town interest, treated Pisa according to its dictates,
+that is, tried to stamp it out. Thence the victorious
+communes came to be surrounded by conquered communes,
+which they dared not trust with any degree of
+power; and which, instead of being so many allies in
+case of invasion, were merely focuses of revolt, or at
+best inert impediments. Similarly, when the communes
+enlarged, and found it indispensable to delegate
+special men, who could attend to political matters more
+thoroughly than the other citizens, they were constantly
+falling under the tyranny of their captains, of the people,
+of their gonfalonieri, and of all other heads of the State;
+or else, as in Florence, they were frightened by this
+continual danger into a system of perpetual interference
+with the executive, which was thus rendered well-
+nigh helpless. To this rule Venice forms the only
+exception, on account of her exceptional position and
+history: the earliest burghers turning into an intensely
+conservative and civic aristocracy, while everywhere
+else the feudal nobles turned into petty burghers, entirely
+subversive of communal interests. Venice had
+the yet greater safeguard of being protected both from
+her victorious enemies and her own victorious generals;
+who, however powerful on the mainland, could not
+seriously endanger the city itself, which thus remained
+a centre of reorganization in time of disaster. In this
+Venice was entirely unique, as she was unique in the
+duration of her institutions and independence. In the
+other towns of Italy, where there existed no naturally
+governing family or class, where every citizen had an
+equal share in government, and there existed no distinction
+save that of wealth and influence, there was a
+constant tendency to the illegitimate preponderance
+of every man or every family that rose above the average;
+and in a democratic, mercantile State, not a day
+passed without some such elevation. In a systematic,
+consolidated State, where the power is in the hands of
+a hereditary sovereign or aristocracy, a rich merchant
+remains a rich merchant, a victorious general remains
+a victorious general, an eloquent orator remains an
+eloquent orator; but in a shapeless, flunctuating
+democracy like those of Italy, the man who has influence
+over his fellow-citizens, whether by his money,
+his soldiers, or his eloquence, necessarily becomes the
+head of the State; everything is free and unoccupied,
+only a little superior strength is required to push into
+it. Cosimo de' Medici has many clients, many correspondents,
+many debtors; he can bind people by
+pecuniary obligations: he becomes prince. Sforza
+has a victorious army, whom he can either hound on
+to the city or restrain into a protection of its interests:
+he becomes prince. Savonarola has eloquence that
+makes the virtuous start up and the wicked tremble:
+he becomes prince. The history of the Italian commonwealths
+shows us but one thing: the people, the
+only legal possessors of political power, giving it over
+to their bankers (Medici, Pepoli); to their generals
+(Della Torre, Visconti, Scaligeri); to their monkish
+reformers (Fra Bussolaro, Fra Giovanni da Vincenza,
+Savonarola). Here then we have the occasional but
+inevitable usurpers, who either momentarily or finally
+disorganize the State. But this is not all. In such
+a State every family hate, every mercantile hostility,
+means a corresponding political division. The guilds
+are sure to be rivals, the larger wishing to exclude the
+smaller from government: the lower working classes
+(the ciompi of Florence) wish to upset the guilds completely;
+the once feudal nobles wish to get back military power;
+the burghers wish entirely to extirpate
+the feudal nobles; the older families wish to limit the
+Government, the newer prefer democracy and C&aelig;sarism.
+Add to this the complications of private interests, the
+personal jealousies and aversions, the private warfare,
+inevitable in a town where legal justice is not always
+to be had, while forcible retaliation is always within
+reach; and the result is constant party spirit, insults,
+scuffles, conspiracies: the feudal nobles build towers
+in the streets, the burghers pull them down; the lower
+artizans set fire to the warehouses of the guilds, the
+magistrates take part in the contest; blood is spilt,
+magistrates are beheaded or thrown out of windows,
+a foreign State is entreated to interfere, and a number
+of citizens are banished by the victorious party. This
+latter result creates a new and terrible danger for the
+State, in the persons of so many exiles, ready to do
+anything, to join with any one, in order to return to the
+city and drive out their enemies in their turn. The end
+of such constant upheavings is that the whole population
+is disarmed, no party suffering its rival to have any
+means of offence or defence. Moreover, as industry and
+commerce develope, the citizens become unwilling to
+fight, while on the other hand the invention of firearms,
+subverting the whole system of warfare, renders special
+military training more and more necessary. In the
+days of the Lombard League, of Campaldino and
+Montaperti, the citizens could fight, hand to hand,
+round their carroccio or banner, without much discipline
+being required; but when it came to fortifying
+towns against cannon, to drilling bodies of heavily
+armed cavalry, acting by the mere dexterity of their
+movements; when war became a science and an art,
+then the citizen had necessarily to be left out, and
+adventurers and poor nobles had to form armies of
+mercenaries, making warfare their sole profession.
+This system of mercenary troops, so bitterly inveighed
+against by Machiavelli (who, of course, entirely overlooked
+its inevitable origin and viewed it as a voluntarily
+incurred pest), added yet another and, perhaps,
+the very worst danger to civil liberty. It gave enormous,
+irresistible power to adventurers unscrupulous
+by nature and lawless by education, the sole object of
+whose career it became to obtain possession of States;
+by no means a difficult enterprise, considering that
+they and their fellows were the sole possessors of
+military force in the country. At the same time, this
+system of mercenaries perfected the condition of utter
+defencelessness in which the gradual subjection of
+rival cities, the violent party spirit, and the general
+disarming of the burghers, had placed the great Italian
+cities. For these troops, being wholly indifferent as
+to the cause for which they were fighting, turned war
+into the merest game of dodges&mdash;half-a-dozen men
+being killed at a great battle like that of Anghiari
+&mdash;and they at the same time protracted campaigns
+beyond every limit, without any decisive action taking
+place. The result of all these inevitable causes of ruin,
+was that most of the commonwealths fell into the
+hands of despots; while those that did not were paralyzed
+by interior factions, by a number of rebellious
+subject towns, and by generals who, even if they did
+not absolutely betray their employers, never efficiently
+served them.</p>
+
+<p>Such a condition of civic disorder lasted throughout
+the Middle Ages, until the end of the fifteenth
+century, without any further evils arising from it.
+The Italians made endless wars with each other,
+conquered each other, changed their government
+without end, fell into the power of tyrants; but
+throughout these changes their civilization developed
+unimpeded; because, although one of the centres of
+national life might be momentarily crushed, the others
+remained in activity, and infused vitality even into
+the feeble one, which would otherwise have perished.
+All these ups and downs seemed but to stir the life
+in the country: and no vital danger appeared to
+threaten it; nor did any, so long as the surrounding
+countries&mdash;France, Germany, and Spain&mdash;remained
+mere vast feudal nebul&aelig;, formless, weightless, immovable.
+The Italians feared nothing from them;
+they would call down the King of France or the
+Emperor of Germany without a moment's hesitation,
+because they knew that the king could not bring
+France, nor the emperor bring Germany, but only a
+few miserable, hungry retainers with him; but Florence
+would watch the growth of the petty State of the
+Scaligers, and Venice look with terror at the Duke of
+Milan, because they knew that there there was concentrated
+life, and an organization which could be
+wielded as perfectly as a sword by the head of the
+State. In the last decade of the fifteenth century
+the Italians called in the French to put down their
+private enemies: Lodovico of Milan called down
+Charles VIII. to rid him of his nephew and of the
+Venetians; the Venetians to rid them of Lodovico:
+the Medici to establish them firmly in Florence; the
+party of freedom to drive out the Medici. Each State
+intended to use the French to serve their purpose, and
+then to send back Charles VIII. with a little money
+and a great deal of derision, as they had done with
+kings and emperors of earlier days. But Italian politicians
+suddenly discovered that they had made a
+fatal mistake; that they had reckoned in ignorance,
+and that instead of an army they had called down a
+nation: for during the interval since their last appeal
+to foreign interference, that great movement had
+taken place which had consolidated the heterogeneous
+feudal nebul&aelig; into homogeneous and compact
+kingdoms.</p>
+
+<p>Single small States, relying upon mercenary troops,
+could not for a moment resist the shock of such
+an agglomeration of soldiery as that of the French,
+and of their successors the Spaniards and Germans.
+Sismondi asks indignantly, Why did the Italians not
+form a federation as soon as the strangers appeared?
+He might as well ask, Why did the commonwealths
+not turn into a modern monarchy? The habit of
+security from abroad and of jealousy within; the
+essential nature of a number of rival trading centres,
+made such a thing not only impossible of execution,
+but for a while impossible of conception; confederacies
+had become possible only when Burlamacchi was
+decapitated by the imperialists; popular resistance
+had become a reality only when Feruccio was massacred
+by the Spaniards; a change of national institutions
+was feasible only when all national institutions
+had been destroyed; when the Italians, having recognized
+the irresistible force of their adversaries, had
+ceased to form independent States and larger and
+smaller guilds; when all the characteristics of Italian
+civilization had been destroyed; when, in short, it was
+too late to do anything save theorize with Machiavelli
+and Guicciardini as to what ought to have been done.
+We must not hastily accuse the volition of the Italians
+of the Renaissance; they may have been egotistic and
+timid, but had they been (as some most certainly
+were) heroic and self-sacrificing to the utmost degree,
+they could not have averted the catastrophe. The
+nature of their civilization prevented not only their
+averting the peril, but even their conceiving its existence;
+the very nature of their political forms necessitated
+such a dissolution of them. The commune
+grows from within; it is a little speck which gradually
+extends its circumference, and the further this may be
+from the original centre, the less do its parts coalesce.
+The modern monarchy grows from external pressure,
+and towards the centre; it is a huge mass consolidating
+into a hard, distinct shape. Thence it follows
+that the more the commonwealth developes, the
+weaker it grows, because its tendency is to spread
+and fall to pieces; whereas the more the monarchy
+developes, the stronger it becomes, because it fills up
+towards the centre, and becomes more vigorously
+knit together. The city ceases to be a city when
+extended over hundreds of miles; the nation becomes
+all the more a nation for being compressed towards a
+central point.</p>
+
+<p>The entire political collapse of Italy in the sixteenth
+century was not only inevitable, from the essential
+nature of the civilization of the Renaissance, but it
+was also indispensable in order that this civilization
+might fulfil its mission. Civilization cannot spread
+so long as it is contained within a national mould,
+and only a vanquished nation can civilize its victors.
+The Greece of Pericles could not Hellenize Rome,
+but the Greece of the weak successors of Alexander
+could; the Rome of C&aelig;sar did not Romanize the
+Teutonic races as did the Rome of Theodosius; no
+amount of colonizing among the vanquished can ever
+produce the effect of a victorious army, of a whole
+nation, suddenly finding itself in the midst of the
+superior civilization of a conquered people. Michelet
+may well call the campaign of Charles VIII. the discovery
+of Italy. His imaginative mind seized at once
+the vast importance of this descent of the French into
+Italy, which other historians have been too prone
+to view in the same light as any other invasion. It
+is from this moment that dates the modernisation,
+if we may so express ourselves, of the North. The
+barbarous soldiers of Gaston de Foix, of Frundsberg,
+and of Gonsalvo, were the unconscious bearers of the
+seeds of the ages of Elizabeth, of Louis XIV, and of
+Goethe. These stupid and rapacious ruffians, while
+they wantonly destroyed the works of Italian civilization,
+rendered possible the existence of a Montaigne,
+a Shakespeare, and a Cervantes.</p>
+
+<p>Italy was as a vast store-house, sheltered from all the
+dangers of medi&aelig;val destruction; in which, while all
+other nations were blindly and fiercely working out
+their national existence, the inheritance of Antiquity
+and the produce of the earliest modern civilization
+had been peaceably garnered up. When the store-house
+was full, its gates had to be torn open and its
+riches plundered and disseminated by the intellectual
+starvelings of the North; thus only could the rest of
+mankind feed on these riches, regain and develope
+their mental life.</p>
+
+<p>What were those intellectual riches of the Renaissance?
+What was that strong intellectual food which
+revived the energies and enriched the blood of the
+Barbarians of the sixteenth century? The Renaissance
+possessed the germs of every modern thing, and
+much that was far more than a mere germ: it possessed
+the habit of equality before the law, of civic organization,
+of industry and commerce developed to immense
+and superb proportions. It possessed science, literature,
+and art; above all, that which at once produced
+and was produced by all these&mdash;thorough perception
+of what exists, thorough consciousness of our own
+freedom and powers: self-cognizance. In Italy there
+was intellectual light, enabling men to see and
+judge all around them, enabling them to act wittingly
+and deliberately. In this lies the immense
+greatness of the Renaissance; to this are due all its
+achievements in literature and science, and, above all,
+in art: that, for the first time since the dissolution of
+antique civilization, men were free agents, both in
+thought and in deed; that there was an end of that
+palsying slavery of the Middle Ages, slavery of body
+and of mind, slavery to stultified ideas and effete
+forms, which made men endure every degree of evil
+and believe every degree of absurdity. For the first
+time since Antiquity, man walks free of all political
+and intellectual trammels, erect, conscious of his own
+thoughts, master of his own actions; ready to seek
+for truth across the ocean like Columbus, or across the
+heavens like Copernicus; to seek it in criticism and
+analysis like Machiavelli or Guicciardini, boldly to
+reproduce it in its highest, widest sense like Michael
+Angelo and Raphael.</p>
+
+<p>The men of the Renaissance had to pay a heavy
+price for this intellectual freedom and self-cognizance
+which they not only enjoyed themselves, but transmitted
+to the rest of the world; the price was the loss
+of all moral standard, of all fixed public feeling. They
+had thrown aside all accepted rules and criteria, they
+had cast away all faith in traditional institutions, they
+had destroyed, and could not yet rebuild. In their
+instinctive and universal disbelief in all that had been
+taught them, they lost all respect for opinion, for rule,
+for what had been called right and wrong. Could it
+be otherwise? Had they not discovered that what
+had been called right had often been unnatural, and
+what had been called wrong often natural? Moral
+teachings, remonstrances, and judgments belonged to
+that dogmatism from which they had broken loose;
+to those schools and churches where the foolish and
+the unnatural had been taught and worshipped; to
+those priests and monks who themselves most shamefully
+violated their teachings. To profess morality
+was to be a hypocrite; to reprobate others was to be
+narrow-minded. There was so much error mixed up
+with truth that truth had to share the discredit of error;
+so many innocent things had been denounced as sins
+that sinful ones at length ceased to be reprobated;
+people had so often found themselves sympathizing
+with supposed criminals, that they soon lost their
+horror of real ones. Damnation came to be disassociated
+from moral indignation: it was the retribution,
+not of the unnatural and immoral, but of the unlawful;
+and unlawful with respect to a law made without
+reference to reason and instinct. As reason and
+instinct were thus set at defiance, but could not be
+silenced, the law was soon acquiesced in without being
+morally supported; thus, little by little, moral feeling
+became warped. This was already the case in Dante's
+day. Farinata is condemned to the most horrible
+punishment, which to Dante seems just, because in
+accordance with an accepted code; yet Dante cannot
+but admire him and cannot really hate him, for there
+is nothing in him to hate; he is a criminal and yet
+respected&mdash;fatal combination! Dante punishes Francesca,
+Pier delle Vigne, and Brunetto Latini, but he
+shows no personal horror of them; in the one case
+his moral instinct refrains from censuring the comparatively
+innocent, in the other it has ceased to
+revolt from the really infamous. Where Dante does
+feel real indignation, is most often in cases unprovided
+for by the religious codes, as with those low,
+grovelling, timid natures (the very same with whom
+Machiavelli, the admirer of great villains, fairly loses
+patience), those creatures whom Dante personally
+despises, whom he punishes with filthy devices of his
+own, whom he passes by with words such as he never
+addresses to Semiramis, Brutus, or Capaneus. This
+toleration of vice, while acquiescing in its legal punishment,
+increased in proportion to the development
+of individual judgment, and did not cease till all the
+theories of the lawful and unlawful had been so completely
+demolished as to permit of their being rebuilt
+on solid bases.</p>
+
+<p>This work of demolition had not yet ceased in the
+beginning of the sixteenth century; and the moral
+confusion due to it was increased by various causes
+dependent on political and other circumstances. The
+despots in whose hands it was the inevitable fate of
+the various commonwealths to fall, were by their very
+position immoral in all their dealings: violent, fraudulent,
+suspicious, and, from their life of constant unnatural
+tension of the feelings, prone to every species
+of depravity; while, on the other hand, in the feudal
+parts of Italy&mdash;which had merely received a superficial
+Renaissance varnish imported from other places with
+painters and humanists&mdash;in Naples, Rome, and the
+greater part of Umbria and the Marches, the upper
+classes had got into that monstrous condition which
+seems to have been the inevitable final product of
+feudalism, and which, while it gave France her
+Armagnacs, her Foix, and her Retz, gave Italy their
+counterparts in her hideously depraved princelets, the
+Malatestas, Varanos, Vitelli, and Baglioni. Both these
+classes of men, despots and feudal nobles, had a wide
+field for their ambition among the necessarily dissolved
+civic institutions; and their easy success contributed
+to confirm the general tendency of the day to say with
+Commines, "Qui a le succ&egrave;s &agrave; l'honneur," and to
+confound these two words and ideas. Nor was this
+yet all: the men of the Renaissance discovered the
+antique world, and in their wild, blind enthusiasm, in
+their ardent, insatiable thirst for its literature, swallowed
+it eagerly, dregs and all, till they were drunk
+and poisoned.</p>
+
+<p>These are the main causes of the immorality of the
+Renaissance: first, the general disbelief in all accepted
+doctrines, due to the falseness and unnaturalness of
+those hitherto prevalent; secondly, the success of unscrupulous
+talent in a condition of political disorder;
+thirdly, the wholesale and unjudging enthusiasm for
+all that remained of Antiquity, good or bad. These
+three great causes, united in a general intellectual
+ebullition, are the explanation of the worst feature of
+the Renaissance: not the wickedness of numberless
+single individuals, but the universal toleration of it by
+the people at large. Men like Sigismondo Malatesta,
+Sixtus IV., Alexander VI., and C&aelig;sar Borgia might
+be passed over as exceptions, as monstrous aberrations
+which cannot affect our judgment of their time
+and nation; but the general indifference towards
+their vices shown by their contemporaries and
+countrymen is a conclusive and terrible proof of the
+moral chaos of the Renaissance. It is just the
+presence of so much instinctive simplicity and virtue,
+of childlike devotion to great objects, of patriarchal
+simplicity of manners, of all that is loveable in the
+books of men like Vespasiano da Bisticci and Leon
+Battista Albert; of so much that seems like the
+realization of the idyllic home and merchant life of
+Schiller's "Song of the Bell," by the side of all the
+hideous lawlessness and vice of the despots and
+humanists; that makes the Renaissance so drearily
+painful a spectacle. The presence of the good does
+not console us for that of the evil, because it neither
+mitigates nor even shrinks from it; we merely lose
+our pleasure in the good nature and simplicity of
+Aeneas Sylvius when we see his cool admiration for
+a man of fraud and violence like Sforza; we begin
+to mistrust the purity and integrity of the upright
+Guarino da Verona when we hear his lenient judgment
+of the infamous Beccadelli; we require of the
+virtuous that they should not only be incapable of
+vice, but abhorrent of it; and this is what even the
+best men of the Renaissance rarely were.</p>
+
+<p>Such a state of moral chaos there has constantly
+been when an old effete mode of thought required
+to be destroyed. Such work is always attended, in
+greater or less degree, by this subversion of all recognized
+authority, this indifference to evil, this bold
+tasting of the forbidden. In the eighteenth century
+France plays the same part that was played in the
+fifteenth by Italy: again we meet the rebellion against
+all that has been consecrated by time and belief, the
+toleration of evil, the praise of the abominable, in the
+midst of the search for the good. These two have
+been the great fever epochs of modern history; fever
+necessary for a subsequent steady growth. Both gave
+back truth to man, and man to nature, at the expense
+of temporary moral uncertainty and ruthless destruction.
+The Renaissance reinstated the individual
+in his human dignity, as a thinking, feeling, and
+acting being; the Eighteenth Century reconstructed
+society as a homogeneous free existence; both at the
+expense of individual degradation and social disorder.
+Both were moments of ebullition in which horrible
+things rose to the surface, but after which what remained
+was purer than it had ever been before.
+
+This is no plea for the immorality of the Renaissance:
+evil is none the less evil for being inevitable
+and necessary; but it is nevertheless well that we
+should understand its necessity. It certainly is a
+terrible admission, but one which must be made, that
+evil is part of the mechanism for producing good; and
+had the arrangement of the universe been entrusted
+to us, benevolent and equitable people of an enlightened
+age, there would doubtless have been invented
+some system of evolution and progression differing
+from the one which includes such machinery as hurricanes
+and pestilences, carnage and misery, superstition
+and license, Renaissance and Eighteenth
+Century. But unfortunately Nature was organized in
+a less charitable and intelligent fashion; and, among
+other evils required for the final attainment of good,
+we find that of whole generations of men being condemned
+to moral uncertainty and error in order that
+other generations may enjoy knowledge peacefully
+and guiltlessly. Let us remember this, and let us be
+more generous towards the men who were wicked
+that we might be enlightened. Above all, let us bear
+in mind, in judging the Renaissance, that the sacrifice
+which it represents could be useful only in so far as it
+was complete and irretrievable. Let us remember that
+the communal system of government, on whose development
+the Renaissance mainly depended, inevitably
+perished in proportion as it developed; that the
+absolute subjugation of Italy by Barbarous nations
+was requisite to the dissemination of the civilization
+thus obtained; that the Italians were politically annihilated
+before they had time to recover a normal
+condition, and were given up crushed and broken
+spirited, to be taught righteousness by Spaniards and
+Jesuits. That, in short, while the morality of the
+Italians was sacrificed to obtain the knowledge on
+which modern society depends, the political existence
+of Italy was sacrificed to the diffusion of that knowledge,
+and that the nation was not only doomed to
+immorality, but doomed also to the inability to reform.
+Perhaps, if we think of all this, and weigh the tremendous
+sacrifice to which we owe our present intellectual
+advantages, we may still feel sad, but sad
+rather with remorse than with indignation, in contemplating
+the condition of Italy in the first years of the
+sixteenth century; in looking down from our calm,
+safe, scientific position, on the murder of the Italian
+Renaissance: great and noble at heart, cut off pitilessly
+at its prime; denied even an hour to repent and
+amend; hurried off before the tribunal of posterity,
+suddenly, unexpectedly, and still bearing its weight
+of unexpiated, unrecognized guilt.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_ITALY_OF_THE_ELIZABETHAN_DRAMATISTS" id="THE_ITALY_OF_THE_ELIZABETHAN_DRAMATISTS"></a>THE ITALY OF THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I.</h3>
+
+<p>The chroniclers of the last years of the fifteenth
+century have recorded how the soldiery of Charles
+VIII. of France amused the tedious leisure of their
+sullen and suspicious occupation of Rome, by erecting
+in the camp a stage of planks, and performing thereon
+a rude mystery-play. The play thus improvised
+by a handful of troopers before this motley invading
+army: before the feudal cavalry of Burgundy, strange
+steel monsters, half bird, half reptile, with steel beaked
+and winged helmets and claw-like steel shoes, and
+jointed steel corselet and rustling steel mail coat;
+before the infantry of Gascony, rapid and rapacious
+with their tattered doublets and rag-bound feet; before
+the over-fed, immensely plumed, and slashed and
+furbelowed giants of Switzerland, and the starved,
+half-naked savages of Brittany and the Marches&mdash;
+before this multifaced, many-speeched army, gathered
+from the rich cities of the North and the devastated
+fields of the South, and the wilds and rocks of the
+West and the East, alike in nothing save in its wonder
+and dread and delight and horror at this strange
+invaded Italy&mdash;the play performed for the entertainment
+of this encamped army was no ordinary play.
+No clerkly allegorical morality; no mouthing and
+capering market-place farce; no history of Joseph
+and his brethren, of the birth of the Saviour, or of the
+temptations of St. Anthony. It was the half-allegorical,
+half-dramatic representation of the reigning
+Borgia pope and his children; it was the rude and
+hesitating moulding into dramatic shape of those
+terrible rumours of simony and poison, of lust and of
+violence, of mysterious death and abominable love,
+which had met the invaders as they had first set their
+feet in Italy; which had become louder and clearer
+with every onward step through the peninsula, and
+now circulated around them, with frightful distinctness,
+in the very capital of Christ's vicar on earth.
+This blundering mystery-play of the French troopers
+is the earliest imaginative fruit of that first terrified
+and fascinated glimpse of the men of the barbarous
+North at the strange Italy of the Renaissance; it is
+the first manifestation of that strong tragic impulse
+due to the sudden sight, by rude and imaginative
+young nations, of the splendid and triumphant wickedness
+of Italy.</p>
+
+<p>The French saw, wondered, shuddered, and played
+upon their camp stage the tragedy of the Borgias.
+But the French remained in Italy, became familiar
+with its ways, and soon merely shrugged their
+shoulders and smiled where they had once stared
+in horror. They served under the flags of Sforzas,
+Borgias, Baglionis, and Vitellis, by the side of the
+bravos of Naples and Umbria; they saw their princes
+wed the daughters of evil-famed Italian sovereigns,
+and their princes' children, their own Valois and
+Guises, develope into puny, ambiguous, and ominous
+Medicis and Gonzagas, surrounded by Italian minions
+and poison distillers, and buffoons and money-
+lenders. The French of the sixteenth century, during
+their long Neapolitan and Lombard wars and negotiations,
+and time to learn all that Italy could teach;
+to become refined, subtle, indifferent, and cynical:
+bastard Italians, with the bastard Italian art of
+Goujon and Philibert Delorme, and the bastard
+Italian poetry of Du Bellay and Ronsard. The
+French of the sixteenth century therefore translated
+Machiavel and Ariosto and Bandello; but they never
+again attempted such another play as that which they
+had improvised while listening to the tales of Alexander
+VI. and C&aelig;sar and Lucrezia, in their camp in
+the meadows behind Sant' Angelo. The Spaniards
+then came to Italy, and the Germans: strong medi&aelig;val
+nations, like the French, with the creative power of
+the Middle Ages still in them, refreshed by the long
+rest of the dull fifteenth century. But Spaniards and
+Germans came as mere greedy and besotten and
+savage mercenaries: the scum of their countries, careless
+of Italian sights and deeds, thinking only of
+torturing for hidden treasure, or swilling southern
+wines; and they returned to Spain and to Germany,
+to persecutions of Moriscos and plundering of abbeys,
+as savage and as dull as they had arrived. A smattering
+of Italian literature, art, and manners was carried
+back to Spain and Germany by Spanish and German
+princes and governors, to be transmitted to a few
+courtiers and humanists; but the imagination of the
+lower classes of Spain and of Germany, absorbed in
+the Quixotic Catholicism of Loyola and the biblical
+contemplation of Luther, never came into fertilizing
+contact with the decaying Italy of the Renaissance.
+The mystery-play of the soldiers of Charles VIII.
+seemed destined to remain an isolated and abortive
+attempt. But it was not so. The invasions had
+exhausted themselves; the political organization of
+Italy was definitely broken up; its material wealth
+was exhausted; the French, Germans, and Spaniards
+had come and gone, and returned and gone again;
+they had left nothing to annex or to pillage; when,
+about the middle of the sixteenth century, the country
+began to be overrun by a new horde of barbarians:
+the English. The English came neither as invaders
+nor as marauders; they were peaceable students and
+rich noblemen, who, so far from trying to extort
+money or annex territory, rather profited the ruined
+Italians by the work which they did and the money
+which they squandered. Yet these quiet and profitable
+travellers, before whom the Italians might safely
+display their remaining wealth, were in reality as
+covetous of the possessions of Italy and as resolute to
+return home enriched as any tattered Gascon men-
+at-arms or gluttonous Swiss or grinding Spaniards.
+They were, one and all, consciously and unconsciously,
+dragged to Italy by the irresistible instinct that Italy
+possessed that which they required; by the greed of
+intellectual gain. That which they thus instinctively
+knew that Italy possessed, that which they must
+obtain, was a mode of thought, a habit of form;
+philosophy, art, civilization: all the materials for intellectual
+manipulation. For, in the sixteenth century,
+on awakening from its long evil sleep, haunted by the
+nightmare of civil war, of the fifteenth century, the
+English mind had started up in the vigour of well-
+nigh mature youth, fed up and rested by the long
+inactivity in which it had slept through its period of
+assimilation and growth. It had awakened at the
+first touch of foreign influence, and had grown with
+every fresh contact with the outer world: with the
+first glance at Plato and Xenophon suddenly opened
+by Erasmus and Colet, at the Bible suddenly opened
+by Cranmer; it had grown with its sob of indignation
+at the sight of the burning faggots surrounding the
+martyrs, with its joyous heart-throbs at the sight of
+the seas and islands of the New World; it had grown
+with the sudden passionate strain of every nerve and
+every muscle when the galleys of Philip had been
+sighted in the Channel. And when it had paused,
+taken breath, and looked calmly around it, after the
+tumult of all these sights and sounds and actions, the
+English mind, in the time of Elizabeth, had found itself
+of a sudden full-grown and blossomed out into superb
+manhood, with burning activities and indefatigable
+powers. But it had found itself without materials for
+work. Of the scholastic philosophy and the chivalric
+poetry of the Middle Ages there remained but little
+that could be utilized: the few bungled formulas, the
+few half-obsolete rhymes still remaining, were as unintelligible,
+in their spirit of feudalism and monasticism
+and mysticism, as were the Angevin English and the
+monkish Latin in which they were written to these
+men of the sixteenth century. All the intellectual
+wealth of England remained to be created; but it
+could not be created out of nothing. Spenser, Shakespeare,
+and Bacon could not be produced out of the
+half-effete and scattered fragments of Chaucer, of
+Scotus, and of Wycliffe. The materials on which
+English genius was to work must be sought abroad,
+and abroad they could be found only in Italy. For
+in the demolished Italy of the sixteenth century lay
+the whole intellectual wealth of the world: the great
+legacy of Antiquity, the great work of the Middle
+Ages had been stored up, and had been increased
+threefold, and sorted and classified by the Renaissance;
+and now that the national edifice had been
+dismantled and dilapidated, and the national activity
+was languishing, it all lay in confusion, awaiting only
+the hand of those who would carry it away and use
+it once more. To Italy therefore Englishmen of
+thought and fancy were dragged by an impulse of
+adventure and greed as irresistible as that which
+dragged to Antwerp and the Hanse ports, to India
+and America, the seekers for gold and for soil. To
+Italy they flocked and through Italy they rambled,
+prying greedily into each cranny and mound of the
+half-broken civilization, upturning with avid curiosity
+all the rubbish and filth; seeking with aching eyes
+and itching fingers for the precious fragments of
+intellectual splendour; lingering with fascinated
+glance over the broken remnants and deep, mysterious
+gulfs of a crumbling and devastated civilization.
+And then, impatient of their intoxicating and tantalizing
+search, suddenly grown desperate, they clutched
+and stored away everything, and returned home
+tattered, soiled, bedecked with gold and with tinsel,
+laden with an immense uncouth burden of jewels,
+and broken wealth, and refuse and ordure, with
+pseudo-antique philosophy, with half-medi&aelig;val Dantesque
+and Petrarchesque poetry, with Renaissance
+science, with humanistic pedantry and obscenity, with
+euphuistic conceits and casuistic quibble, with art,
+politics, metaphysics&mdash;civilization embedded in all
+manner of rubbish and abomination, soiled with all
+manner of ominous stains. All this did they carry
+home and throw helter-skelter into the new-kindled
+fire of English intellectual life, mingling with it many
+a humble-seeming Northern alloy; cleaning and compounding,
+casting into shapes, medi&aelig;val and English,
+this strange Corinthian brass made of all these heterogeneous
+remnants, classical, Italian, Saxon, and Christian.
+A strange Corinthian brass indeed; and as
+various in tint, in weight, and in tone, in manifold
+varieties of mixture, as were the moulds into which it
+was cast: the white and delicate silver settling down
+in the gracious poetic moulds of Sidney and Spenser;
+the glittering gold, which can buy and increase, in
+the splendid, heavy mould of Bacon's prose; and the
+copper, the iron, the silver and gold in wondrous
+mixture, with wondrous iridescences of colour and
+wondrous scale of tone, all poured into the manifold
+moulds, fantastic and beautiful and grand, of Shakespeare.
+And as long as all this dross and ore and
+filth brought from the ruins of Italy was thus mingling
+in the heat of English genius, while it was yet
+but imperfectly fused, while already its purest and
+best compounded portion was being poured in Shakespeare's
+mould, and when already there remained only
+a seething residue; as long as there remained aught
+of the glowing fire and the molten mass, some of it
+all, of the pure metal bubbling up, of the scum frothing
+round, nay, of the very used-up dregs, was ever
+and anon being ladled out&mdash;gold, dross, filth, all indiscriminately
+&mdash;and cast into shapes severe, graceful, or
+uncouth. And this somewhat, thus pilfered from
+what was to make, or was making, or had made, the
+works of Shakespeare; this base and noble, still unfused
+or already exhausted alloy, became the strange
+heterogeneous works of the Elizabethan dramatists:
+of Webster, of Ford, of Tourneur, of Ben Jonson, of
+Beaumont and Fletcher, and of their minor brethren;
+from the splendid ore of Marlowe, only half molten
+and half freed from dross, down to the shining metal,
+smooth and silvery as only tinsel can be, of Massinger.
+In all the works of our Elizabethans, we see not
+only the assimilated intellectual wealth of Italy, but
+we see the deep impression, the indelible picture in
+the memory, of Italy itself; the positive, unallegorical,
+essentially secular mode of thought; the unascetic,
+&aelig;sthetic, eminently human mode of feeling; the artistic
+desire of clear and harmonious form; the innumerable
+tendencies and habits which sever the Elizabethans
+so completely from the Middle Ages, and bring them
+so near at once to ourselves and to the ancients,
+making them at once antique and modern, in opposition
+to medi&aelig;val; these essential characters and the
+vast bulk of absolute scientific fact and formula, of
+philosophic opinion, of artistic shape, of humanistic
+learning, are only one-half of the debt of our sixteenth
+century to the Italy of the Renaissance. The delicate
+form of the Italian sonnet, as copied by Sidney from
+Bembo and Molza and Costanzo, contained within it
+the exotic and exquisite ideal passion of the "Vita
+Nuova" and Petrarch. With the bright, undulating
+stanza Spenser received from Ariosto and Tasso
+the richly coloured spirit of the Italian descriptive
+epic. With the splendid involutions of Machiavelli's
+and Guicciardini's prose Bacon learned their cool and
+disimpassioned philosophy. From the reading of
+Politian and Lorenzo dei Medici, from the sight of
+the Psyche of Raphael, the Europa of Veronese, the
+Ariadne of Tintoret, men like Greene and Dorset
+learned that revival of a more luscious and pictorial
+antique which was brought to perfection in Shakespeare's
+"Venus and Adonis" and Marlowe's "Sestiad."
+From the Platonists and Epicureans of Renaissance
+Italy our greatest dramatists learned that cheerful
+and serious love of life, that solemn and manly facing
+of death, that sense of the finiteness of man, the
+inexhaustibleness of nature, which shines out in such
+grand, paganism, with such Olympian serenity, as of
+the bent brows and smiling lips of an antique Zeus,
+in Shakespeare, in Marlowe, in Beaumont and
+Fletcher, even in the sad and savage Webster. But
+with the abstract, with the imbibed modes of thought
+and feeling, with the imitated forms, the Elizabethans
+brought back from Italy the concrete, the individual,
+the personal. They filled their works with Italian
+things: from the whole plot of a play borrowed from
+an Italian novel, to the mere passing allusion to an
+Italian habit, or the mere quotation of an Italian
+word; from the full-length picture of the actions of
+Italian men and women, down to the mere sketch,
+in two or three words, of a bit of Italian garden or
+a group of Italian figures; nay, to the innumerable
+scraps of tiny detail, grotesque, graceful, or richly
+coloured, which they stuffed into all their works: allusions
+to the buffoons of the mask comedy, to the high-
+voiced singers, to the dress of the Venetian merchants,
+to the step of a dance; to the pomegranate in the
+garden or the cypress on the hillside; mere names of
+Italian things: the lavolta and corranto dances, the
+Traglietto ferry, the Rialto bridge; countless little
+touches, trifling to us, but which brought home to the
+audience at the Globe or at Blackfriars that wonderful
+Italy which every man of the day had travelled through
+at least in spirit, and had loved at least in imagination.
+And of this wonderful Italy the Englishmen of the
+days of Elizabeth and of James knew yet another
+side; were familiar, whether travelled or untravelled,
+with yet other things besides the buffoons and singers
+and dancers, the scholars and learned ladies, the
+pomegranates, and cypresses and roses and nightingales;
+were fascinated by something besides the green
+lagoons, the clear summer nights, the soft spring
+evenings of which we feel as it were the fascination
+in the words of Jessica and Portia and Juliet. The
+English knew and were haunted by the crimes of
+Italy: the terrible and brilliant, the mysterious and
+shadowy crimes of lust and of blood which, in their
+most gigantic union and monstrous enthronement on
+the throne of the vicar of Christ, had in the first
+terrified glimpse awakened the tragic impulse in the
+soldiers of Charles VIII.</p>
+
+<p>We can imagine the innumerable English travellers
+who went to Italy greedy for life and knowledge or
+merely obeying a fashion of the day&mdash;travellers forced
+into far closer contact with the natives than the men
+of the time of Walpole and of Beckford, who were met
+by French-speaking hosts and lacqueys and officials
+&mdash;travellers also thirsting to imbibe the very spirit
+of the country as the travellers of the seventeenth and
+eighteenth centuries never thirsted; we can imagine
+these Englishmen possessed by the morbid passion for
+the stories of abominable and unpunished crime&mdash;
+crime of the learned, the refined, the splendid parts of
+society&mdash;with which the Italy of the deeply corrupted
+sixteenth century was permeated. We can imagine
+how the prosaic merchants' clerks from London; the
+perfumed dandies, trying on Italian clothes, rehearsing
+Italian steps and collecting Italian oaths, the Faulcon-
+bridges of Shakespeare and Mr. Gingleboys of Beaumont
+and Fletcher, sent to Italy to be able gracefully to</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Kiss the hand and cry, "sweet lady!"</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Say they had been at Rome and seen the relics,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Drunk your Verdea wine, and rid at Naples&mdash;</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>how all these privileged creatures ferreted about for
+monstrous crimes with which to horrify their stay-at-
+home countrymen; how the rich young lords, returning
+home with mincing steps and high-pitched lisp, surrounded
+by a train of parti-coloured, dialect-jabbering
+Venetian clowns, deft and sinister Neapolitan fencing
+masters, silver-voiced singing boys decoyed from some
+church, and cynical humanists escaped from the faggot
+or the gallows, were expected to bring home, together
+with the newest pastoral dramas, lewd novels,
+Platonic philosophy and madrigals set in complicated
+counterpoint; stories of hideous wickedness, of the
+murders and rapes and poisonings committed by the
+dukes and duchesses, the nobles and senators, in
+whose palaces they had so lately supped and danced.
+The crimes of Italy fascinated Englishmen of genius
+with a fascination even more potent than that which
+they exercised over the vulgar imagination of mere
+foppish and swashbuckler lovers of the scandalous
+and the sensational: they fascinated with the attraction
+of tragic grandeur, of psychological strangeness,
+of moral monstrosity, a generation in whom the
+passionate imagination of the playwright was curiously
+blent with the metaphysical analysis of the philosopher
+and the ethical judgment of the Puritan. To these
+men, ardent and serious even in their profligacy; imaginative
+and passionate even in their Puritanism, all
+sucking avidly at this newly found Italian civilization;
+the wickedness of Italy was more than morbidly
+attractive or morbidly appalling: it was imaginatively
+and psychologically fascinating. Whether they were
+as part of the action or as allusions, as in Webster's
+two great plays, in which there occurs poisoning by
+means of the leaves of a book, poisoning by the poisoned
+lips of a picture, poisoning by a helmet, poisoning
+by the pommel of a saddle; crimes were multiplied
+by means of subordinate plots and unnecessary incidents,
+like the double vengeance of Richardetto and
+of Hippolita in Ford's "Giovanni and Annabella,"
+where both characters are absolutely unnecessary to
+the main story of the horrible love of the hero and
+heroine; like the murders of Levidulcia and Sebastian
+in Tourneur's "Atheist's Tragedy," and the completely
+unnecessary though extremely pathetic death
+of young Marcello in Webster's "White Devil;" until
+the plays were brought to a close by the gradual extermination
+of all the principal performers, and only
+a few confidants and dummies remained to bury the
+corpses which strewed the stage. Imaginary monsters
+were fashioned out of half-a-dozen Neapolitan and
+Milanese princes, by Ford, by Beaumont and Fletcher,
+by Middleton, by Marston, even by the light and
+graceful Philip Massinger: mythical villains, Ferdinands,
+Lodowicks, and Fernezes, who yet fell short of
+the frightful realities of men like Sigismondo Malatesta,
+Alexander VI., and Pier Luigi Farnese; nay,
+more typical monsters, with no name save their vices,
+Lussuriosos, Gelosos, Ambitiosos, and Vindicis, like
+those drawn by the strong and savage hand of Cyril
+Tourneur.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing which the English stage could display
+seemed to the minds of English playwrights and the
+public to give an adequate picture of the abominations
+of Italy; much as they heaped up horrors and combined
+them with artistic skill, much as they forced into
+sight, there yet remained an abyss of evil which the
+English tongue refused to mention, but which weighed
+upon the English mind; and which, unspoken, nay
+(and it is the glory of the Elizabethan dramatists
+excepting Ford), unhinted, yet remained as an incubus
+in the consciousness of the playwrights and the public,
+was in their thoughts when they wrote and heard such
+savage misanthropic outbursts as those of Tourneur
+and of Marston. The sense of the rottenness of the
+country whence they were obtaining their intellectual
+nourishment, haunted with a sort of sickening fascination
+the imaginative and psychological minds of the
+late sixteenth century, of the men who had had time
+to outgrow the first cynical plunge of the rebellious
+immature intellects of the contemporaries of Greene,
+Peele, and Marlowe into that dissolved civilization.
+And of the great men who were thus enthralled by
+Italy and Italian evil, only Shakespeare and Massinger
+maintain or regain their serenity and hopefulness of
+spirit, resist the incubus of horror: Shakespeare from
+the immense scope of his vision, which permitted him
+to pass over the base and frightful parts of human
+nature and see its purer and higher sides; Massinger
+from the very superficiality of his insight and the narrowness
+of his sympathies, which prevented his ever
+thoroughly realizing the very horrors he had himself
+invented. But on the minds less elastic than that of
+Shakespeare, and less superficial than that of Massinger,
+the Italian evil weighed like a nightmare.
+With an infinitely powerful and passionate imagination,
+and an exquisitely subtle faculty of mental analysis;
+only lately freed from the dogma of the Middle
+Ages; unsettled in their philosophy; inclined by wholesale
+classical reading to a sort of negative atheism, a
+fatalistic and half-melancholy mixture of epicurism
+and stoicism; yet keenly alive, from study of the
+Bible and of religious controversies, to all questions of
+right and wrong; thus highly wrought and deeply
+perplexed, the minds of the Elizabethan poets were
+impressed by the wickedness of Italy as by the horrible
+deeds of one whom we are accustomed to venerate as
+our guide, whom we cannot but love as our benefactor,
+whom we cannot but admire as our superior: it was a
+sense of frightful anomaly, of putrescence in beauty
+and splendour, of death in life and life in death, which
+made the English psychologist-poets savage and
+sombre, cynical and wrathful and hopeless. The influence
+is the same on all, and the difference of attitude
+is slight, and due to individual characters; but the
+gloom is the same in each of them. In Webster&mdash;
+no mere grisly inventor of Radcliffian horrors, as
+we are apt to think of the greatest of our dramatists
+after Shakespeare&mdash;in the noble and tender
+nature of Webster the sense is one of ineffable sadness,
+unmarred by cynicism, but unbrightened by hope.
+The villains, even if successful till death overtake
+them, are mere hideous phantoms&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 9em;">these wretched eminent things</span><br />
+Leave no more fame behind 'em, than should one<br />
+Fall in a frost, and leave his print in snow&mdash;<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>the victims of tortured conscience, or, worse still, the
+owners of petrified hearts; there is nothing to envy in
+them. But none the better is it for the good: if Ferdinands,
+Bosolas, Brachianos, and Flaminios perish
+miserably, it is only after having done to death the
+tender and brave Duchess, the gentle Antonio, the
+chivalric Marcello; there is virtue on earth, but there
+is no justice in heaven. The half-pagan, half-puritanic
+feeling of Webster bursts out in the dying speech of
+the villain Bosola&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">O, this gloomy world!</span><br />
+In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness,<br />
+Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!<br />
+Let worthy minds ne'er stagger in distrust<br />
+To suffer death or shame for what is just.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Of real justice in this life or compensation in another,
+there is no thought: Webster, though a Puritan in
+spirit, is no Christian in faith. On Ford the influence
+is different; although equal, perhaps, in genius to
+Webster, surpassing him even in intense tragic passion,
+he was far below Webster, and, indeed, far below all
+his generation, in moral fibre. The sight of evil
+fascinates him; his conscience staggers, his sympathies
+are bedraggled in foulness; in the chaos of good and
+evil he loses his reckoning, and recognizes the superiority
+only of strength of passion, of passion for good
+or evil: the incestuous Giovanni, daring his enemies
+like a wild beast at bay and cheating them of their
+revenge by himself murdering the object of his horrible
+passion, is as heroic in the eyes of Ford as the magnanimous
+Princess of Sparta, bearing with unflinching
+spirit the succession of misfortunes poured down upon
+her, and leading off the dance while messenger succeeds
+messenger of evil; till, free from her duties as a
+queen, she sinks down dead. Cyril Tourneur and
+John Marston are far more incomplete in genius than
+either Webster or Ford, although Tourneur sometimes
+obtains a lurid and ghastly tragic intensity which
+more than equals Ford when at his best; and Marston,
+in the midst of crabbedness and dulness, sometimes
+has touches of pathos and Michelangelesque foreshortenings
+of metaphor worthy of Webster. But
+Tourneur and Marston have neither the constant
+sympathy with oppressed virtue of the author of the
+"Duchess of Malfy," nor the blind fury of passion of
+the poet of "Giovanni and Annabella;" they look on
+grim and hopeless spectators at the world of fatalistic
+and insane wickedness which they have created, in
+which their heroes and heroines and villains are slowly
+entangled in inextricable evil. The men and women
+of Tourneur and Marston are scarcely men and women
+at all: they are mere vague spectres, showing their
+grisly wounds and moaning out their miserable fate.
+There is around them a thick and clammy moral
+darkness, dispelled only by the ghastly flashes of lurid
+virtue of maniacs like Tourneur's Vindici and Hippolito;
+a crypt-like moral stillness, haunted by strange
+evil murmurs, broken only by the hysterical sobs and
+laughs of Marston's Antonios and Pandulphos. At
+the most there issues out of the blood-reeking depth
+a mighty yell of pain, a tremendous imprecation not
+only at sinful man but at unsympathizing nature, like
+that of Marston's old Doge, dethroned, hunted down,
+crying aloud into the grey dawn-mists of the desolate
+marsh by the lagoon&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">O thou all-bearing earth</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Which men do gape for till thou cram'st their mouths</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And choak'st their throats for dust: O charme thy breast</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And let me sinke into thee. Look who knocks;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Andrugio calls. But O, she's deafe and blinde.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">A wretch but leane relief on earth can finde.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The tragic sense, the sense of utter blank evil, is
+stronger in all these Elizabethan painters of Italian
+crime than perhaps in any other tragic writers. There
+is, in the great and sinister pictures of Webster, of
+Ford, of Tourneur, and of Marston, no spot of light,
+no distant bright horizon. There is no loving suffering,
+resigned to suffer and to pardon, like that of
+Desdemona, whose dying lips forgive the beloved who
+kills from too great love; no consoling affection like
+Cordelia's, in whose gentle embrace the poor bruised
+soul may sink into rest; no passionate union in death
+with the beloved, like the union of Romeo and Juliet;
+nothing but implacable cruelty, violent death received
+with agonized protest, or at best as the only release
+from unmitigated misery with which the wretch has
+become familiar,</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">As the tann'd galley slave is with his oar.<br /></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>Neither is there in these plays that solemn sense of
+heavenly justice, of the fatality hanging over a house
+which will be broken when guilt shall have been
+expiated, which lends a sort of serene background of
+eternal justice to the terrible tales of Thebes and
+Argos. There is for these men no fatality save the
+evil nature of man, no justice save the doubling of
+crime, no compensation save revenge: there is for
+Webster and Ford and Tourneur and Marston no
+heaven above, wrathful but placable; there are no
+Gods revengeful but just: there is nothing but this
+blood-stained and corpse-strewn earth, defiled by lust-
+burnt and death-hungering men, felling each other
+down and trampling on one another blindly in the
+eternal darkness which surrounds them. The world
+of these great poets is not the open world with its light
+and its air, its purifying storms and lightnings: it is
+the darkened Italian palace, with its wrought-iron bars
+preventing escape; its embroidered carpets muffling
+the foot steps; its hidden, suddenly yawning trap-
+doors; its arras-hangings concealing masked ruffians;
+its garlands of poisoned flowers; its long suites of untenanted
+darkened rooms, through which the wretch
+is pursued by the half-crazed murderer; while below,
+in the cloistered court, the clanking armour and stamping
+horses, and above, in the carved and gilded hall,
+the viols and lutes and cornets make a cheery triumphant
+concert, and drown the cries of the victim.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II.</h3>
+
+<p>Such is the Italy of the Renaissance as we see it
+in the works of our tragic playwrights: a country of
+mysterious horror, the sinister reputation of which
+lasted two hundred years; lasted triumphantly throughout
+the light and finikin eighteenth century, and found
+its latest expression in the grim and ghastly romances
+of the school of Ann Radcliff, romances which are but
+the last puny and grotesque descendants of the great
+stock of Italian tragedies, born of the first terror-
+stricken meeting of the England of Elizabeth with
+the Italy of the late Renaissance. Is the impression
+received by the Elizabethan playwrights a correct
+impression? Was Italy in the sixteenth century
+that land of horrors? Reviewing in our memory the
+literature and art of the Italian Renaissance, remembering
+the innumerable impressions of joyous and healthy
+life with which it has filled us; recalling the bright
+and thoughtless rhymes of Lorenzo dei Medici, of
+Politian, of Bern, and of Ariosto; the sweet and
+tender poetry of Bembo and Vittoria Colonna and
+Tasso; the bluff sensuality of novelists like Bandello
+and Masuccio, the Aristophanesque laughter of the
+comedy of Bibbiena and of Beolco; seeing in our
+mind's eye the stately sweet matrons and noble
+senators of Titian, the virginal saints and madonnas
+of Raphael, the joyous angels of Correggio;&mdash;recapitulating
+rapidly all our impressions of this splendid time
+of exuberant vitality, of this strong and serene Renaissance,
+we answer without hesitation, and with only
+a smile of contempt at our credulous ancestors&mdash;no.
+The Italy of the Renaissance was, of all things that
+have ever existed or ever could exist, the most utterly
+unlike the nightmare visions of men such as Webster
+and Ford, Marston and Tourneur. The only Elizabethan
+drama which really represents the Italy of the
+Renaissance is the comedy of Shakespeare, of Beaumont
+and Fletcher, and of Ben Jonson and Massinger:
+to the Renaissance belong those clear and sunny figures,
+the Portias, Antonios, Gratianos, Violas, Petruchios,
+Bellarios, and Almiras; their faces do we see on the
+canvases of Titian and the frescoes of Raphael; they
+are the real children of the Italian Renaissance.
+These frightful Brachianos and Annabellas and Ferdinands
+and Corombonas and Vindicis and Pieros of
+the "White Devil," of the "Duchess of Malfy," of the
+"Revenger's Tragedy," and of "Antonio and Mellida,"
+are mere fantastic horrors, as false as the Counts
+Udolpho, the Spalatros, the Zastrozzis, and all their
+grotesquely ghastly pseudo-Italian brethren of eighty
+years ago.</p>
+
+<p>And, indeed, the Italy of the Renaissance, as represented
+in its literature and its art, is the very negation
+of Elizabethan horrors. Of all the mystery, the
+colossal horror and terror of our dramatists, there is
+not the faintest trace in the intellectual productions
+of the Italian Renaissance. The art is absolutely
+stainless: no scenes of horror, no frightful martyrdoms,
+as with the Germans under Albrecht D&uuml;rer; no
+abominable butcheries, as with the Bolognese of the
+seventeenth century; no macerated saints and tattered
+assassins, as with the Spaniards; no mystery, no contortion,
+no horrors: vigorous and serene beauty, pure
+and cheerful life, real or ideal, on wall or canvas, in
+bronze or in marble. The literature is analogous to
+the art, only less perfect, more tainted with the weakness
+of humanity, less ideal, more real. It is essentially
+human, in the largest sense of the word; or if it cease,
+in creatures like Aretine, to be humanly clean, it
+becomes merely satyr-like, swinish, hircose. But it is
+never savage in lust or violence; it is quite free from
+the element of ferocity. It is essentially light and
+quiet and well regulated, sane and reasonable, never
+staggering or blinded by excess: it is full of intelligent
+discrimination, of intelligent leniency, of well-bred
+reserved sympathy; it is civilized as are the wide well-
+paved streets of Ferrara compared with the tortuous
+black alleys of medi&aelig;val Paris; as are the well-lit,
+clean, spacious palaces of Michelozzo or Bramante
+compared with the squalid, unhealthy, uncomfortable
+medi&aelig;val castles of D&uuml;rer's etchings. It is indeed a
+trifle too civilized; too civilized to produce every kind
+of artistic fruit; it is&mdash;and here comes the crushing
+difference between the Italian Renaissance and our
+Elizabethans' pictures of it&mdash;it is, this beautiful rich
+literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
+completely deficient in every tragic element; it has
+intuition neither for tragic event nor for tragic character;
+it affords not a single tragic page in its poems
+and novels; it is incapable, after the most laborious
+and conscientious study of Euripides and Seneca,
+utterly and miserably incapable of producing a single
+real tragedy, anything which is not a sugary pastoral
+or a pompous rhetorical exercise. The epic poets of
+the Italian Renaissance, Pulci, Boiardo, Berni, and
+Ariosto, even the stately and sentimental Tasso, are
+no epic poets at all. They are mere light and amusing
+gossips, some of them absolute buffoons. Their adventures
+over hill and dale are mere riding parties;
+their fights mere festival tournaments, their enchantments
+mere pageant wonders. Events like the death
+of Hector, the slaughter of Penelope's suitors, the
+festive massacre of Chriemhilt, the horrible deceit of
+Alfonso the Chaste sending Bernardo del Carpio his
+father's corpse on horseback&mdash;things like these never
+enter their minds. When tragic events do by some
+accident come into their narration, they cease to be
+tragic; they are frittered away into mere pretty conceits
+like the death of Isabella and the sacrifice of
+Olympia in the "Orlando Furioso;" or melted down
+into vague pathos, like the burning of Olindo and
+Sofronia, and the death of Clorinda by the sentimental
+Tasso. Neither poet, the one with his cheerfulness,
+the other with his mild melancholy, brings home,
+conceives the horror of the situation; the one treats
+the tragic in the spirit almost of burlesque, the other
+entirely in the spirit of elegy. So, again, with the
+novel writers: these professional retailers of anecdotes
+will pick up any subject to fill their volumes. In
+default of pleasant stories of filthy intrigue or lewd
+jest, men like Cinthio and Bandello will gabble off
+occasionally some tragic story, picked out of a history
+book or recently heard from a gossip: the stories of
+Harmodius and Aristogeiton, of Disdemona and the
+Moorish Captain, of Romeo Montecchio and Giulietta
+Cappelletti, of the Cardinal dAragona and the
+Duchess of Amalfi, of unknown grotesque Persian
+Sophis and Turkish Bassas&mdash;stories of murder, massacre,
+rape, incest, anything and everything, prattled
+off, with a few words of vapid compassion and stale
+moralizing, in the serene, cheerful, chatty manner in
+which they recount their Decameronian escapades or
+Rabelaisian repartees. As it is with tragic action, so
+is it with tragic character. The literature of the country
+which suggested to our Elizabethans their colossal villains,
+can display only a few conventional monsters, fire-
+eating, swashbuckler Rodomonts and Sultan Malechs,
+strutting and puffing like the grotesque villains of
+puppet-shows; Aladins and Ismenos, enchanters and
+ogres fit to be put into Don Quixote's library: mere
+conventional rag puppets, doubtless valued as such
+and no more by the shrewd contemporaries of Ariosto
+and Tasso. The inhabitants of Tasso's world of
+romance are pale chivalric unrealities, lifeless as
+Spenser's half-allegoric knights and ladies; those of
+Pulci's Ardenne forests and Cathay deserts are buffoons
+such as Florentine shopmen may have trapped out
+for their amusement in rusty armour and garlands of
+sausages. The only lifelike heroes and heroines are
+those of Ariosto. And they are most untragic, un-
+romantic. The men are occasionally small scoundrels,
+but unintentionally on the part of the author. They
+show no deep moral cancers or plague-spots; they
+display cheerfully all the petty dishonour and small
+lusts which the Renaissance regarded as mere flesh and
+blood characteristics. So also Ariosto's ladies: the
+charming, bright women, coquettish or Amazonian,
+are frail and fickle to the degree which was permissible
+to a court lady, who should be neither prudish nor
+coquettish; doing unchaste things and listening to
+unchaste words simply, gracefully, without prurience
+or horror; perfectly well-bred, gentili, as Ariosto calls
+them; prudent also, according to the notions of the
+day, in limiting their imprudence. The adventure of
+Fiordispina with Ricciardetto would have branded an
+English serving-wench as a harlot; the behaviour of
+Roger towards the lady he has just rescued from the
+sea-monster would have blushingly been attributed by
+Spenser to one of his satyrs; but these were escapades
+quite within Ariosto's notions of what was permitted
+to a gentil cavaliero and a nobil donzella; and if
+Fiordispina and Roger are not like Florimell and Sir
+Calidore, still less do they in the faintest degree
+resemble Tourneur and Marston's Levidulcias and
+Isabellas and Lussuriosos. And with the exception
+perhaps, of this heroine and this hero, we cannot find
+any very great harm in Ariosto's ladies and gentlemen:
+we may, indeed, feel indignant when we think
+that they replace the chaste and noble impossibilities
+of earlier romance, the Rolands and Percivals, the
+Beatrices and Lauras of the past; when we consider
+that they represent for Ariosto, not the bespattered
+but the spotless, not the real but the ideal. All this
+may awaken in us contempt and disgust; but if we
+consider these figures in themselves as realities, and
+compare them with the evil figures of our drama, we
+find that they are mere venial sinners&mdash;light, fickle,
+amorous, fibbing&mdash;very human in their faults; human,
+trifling, mild, not at all monstrous, like all the art
+products of the Renaissance.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> The "Orlando Innamorato" of Boiardo contains, parti, canto
+8, a story too horrible and grotesque for me to narrate, of a
+monster born of Marchino and his murdered sister-in-law, which
+forms a strange exception to my rule, even as does, for instance,
+Matteo di Giovanni's massacre of the Innocents. Can this
+story have been suggested, a ghastly nightmare, by the frightful
+tale of Sigismondo Malatesta and the beautiful Borbona, which
+was current in Boiardo's day?</p></div>
+
+
+<p>A serene and spotless art, a literature often impure
+but always cheerful, rational, civilized&mdash;this is what
+the Italian Renaissance displays when we seek in it for
+spirits at all akin to Webster or Lope de Vega, to Holbein
+or Ribera. To find the tragic we must wait for
+the Bolognese painters of the seventeenth century, for
+Metastasio and Alfieri in the eighteenth; it is useless
+seeking it in this serene and joyous Renaissance.
+Where, then, in the midst of these spotless virgins,
+these noble saints, these brilliant pseudo-chivalric
+joustings and revels, these sweet and sonneteering
+pastorals, these scurrilous adventures and loose
+buffooneries; where in this Italian Renaissance are
+the horrors which fascinated so strangely our English
+playwrights: the fratricides and incests, the frightful
+crimes of lust and blood which haunted and half
+crazed the genius of Tourneur and Marston? Where
+in this brilliant and courteous and humane and civilized
+nation are the gigantic villains whose terrible
+features were drawn with such superb awfulness of
+touch by Webster and Ford? Where in this Renaissance
+of Italian literature, so cheerful and light
+of conscience, is the foul and savage Renaissance of
+English tragedy? Does the art of Italy tell an impossible,
+universal lie? or is the art of England the
+victim of an impossible, universal hallucination?</p>
+
+<p>Neither; for art can neither tell lies nor be the
+victim of hallucination. The horror exists, and the
+light-heartedness exists; the unhealthiness and the
+healthiness. For as, in that weird story by Nathaniel
+Hawthorne, the daughter of the Paduan wizard is
+nurtured on the sap and fruit and the emanations of
+poisonous plants, till they become her natural sustenance,
+and she thrives and is strong and lovely; while
+the youth, bred in the ordinary pure air and nourished
+on ordinary wholesome food, faints and staggers as
+soon as he breathes the fatal odours of the poison
+garden, and sinks down convulsed and crazed at the
+first touch of his mistress' blooming but death-breathing
+lips; so also the Italians, steeped in the sin of
+their country, seeing it daily and hourly, remained
+intellectually healthy and serene; while the English,
+coming from a purer moral atmosphere, were seized
+with strange moral sickness of horror at what they
+had seen and could not forget. And the nation
+which was chaste and true wrote tales of incest and
+treachery, while the nation which was foul and false
+wrote poetry of shepherds and knights-errant.
+The monstrous immorality of the Italian Renaissance,
+as I have elsewhere shown in greater detail,
+was, like the immorality of any other historical period,
+not a formal rebellion against God, but a natural
+result of the evolution of the modern world. The
+Italy of the Renaissance was one of the many victims
+which inevitable moral sequence dooms to be evil in
+order that others may learn to be good: it was a
+sacrifice which consisted in a sin, a sacrifice requiring
+frightful expiation on the part of the victim. For
+Italy was subjected, during well-nigh two centuries, to
+a slow process of moral destruction; a process whose
+various factors&mdash;political disorganization, religious indifference,
+scientific scepticism, wholesale enthusiasm
+for the antique, breaking-up of medi&aelig;val standards
+and excessive growth of industry, commerce, and
+speculative thought at the expense of warlike and
+religious habits&mdash;were at the same time factors in the
+great advent of modern civilization, of which Italy
+was the pioneer and the victim; a process whose
+result was, in Italy, insensibly and inevitably to reduce
+to chaos the moral and political organization of the
+nation; at once rendering men completely unable to
+discriminate between good and evil, and enabling a
+certain proportion of them to sin with complete impunity:
+creating on the one hand moral indifference,
+and on the other social irresponsibility. Civilization
+had kept pace with demoralization; the faculty of
+reasoning over cause and effect had developed at
+the expense of the faculty of judging of actions. The
+Italians of the Renaissance, little by little, could judge
+only of the adaptation of means to given ends;
+whether means or ends were legitimate or illegitimate
+they soon became unable to perceive and even unable
+to ask. Success was the criterion of all action, and
+power was its limits. Active and furious national
+wickedness there was not: there was mere moral
+inertia on the part of the people. The Italians of the
+Renaissance neither resisted evil nor rebelled against
+virtue; they were indifferent to both, and a little
+pressure sufficed to determine them to either. In the
+governed classes, where the law was equal between
+men, and industry and commerce kept up healthy
+activity, the pressure was towards good. The artizans
+and merchants lived decent lives, endowed hospitals,
+listened to edifying sermons, and were even moved
+(for a few moments) by men like San Bernardino or
+Savonarola. In the governing classes, where all right
+lay in force, where the necessity of self-defence induced
+treachery and violence, and irresponsibility
+produced excess, the pressure was towards evil. The
+princelets and prelates and mercenery generals indulged
+in every sensuality, turned treachery into a
+science and violence into an instrument; and sometimes
+let themselves be intoxicated into mad lust and
+ferocity, as their subjects were occasionally intoxicated
+with mad austerity and mysticism; but the
+excesses of mad vice, like the excesses of mad virtue,
+lasted only a short time, or lasted only in individual
+saints or blood-maniacs; and the men of the Renaissance
+speedily regained their level of indifferent
+righteousness and of indifferent sinfulness. Righteousness
+and sinfulness both passive, without power of
+aggression or resistance, and consequently in strange
+and dreadful peace with each other. The wicked
+men did not dislike virtue, nor the good men vice:
+the villain could admire a saint, and the saint could
+condone a villain. The prudery of righteousness was
+as unknown as the cynicism of evil; the good man,
+like Guarino da Verona, would not shrink from the
+foul man; the foul man, like Beccadelli, would not
+despise the pure man. The ideally righteous citizen
+of Agnolo Pandolfini does not interfere with the
+ideally unrighteous prince of Machiavelli: each has
+his own position and conduct; and who can say
+whether, if the positions were exchanged, the conduct
+might not be exchanged also? In such a condition
+of things as this, evil ceases to appear monstrous; it
+is explained, endured, condoned. The stately philosophical
+historians, so stoically grand, and the
+prattling local chroniclers, so highly coloured and so
+gentle and graceful; Guicciardini and Machiavelli
+and Valori and Segni, on the one hand&mdash;Corio, Allegretti,
+Matarazzo, Infessura, on the other; all these,
+from whom we learn the real existence of immorality
+far more universal and abominable than our dramatists
+venture to show, relate quietly, calmly, with
+analytical frigidness or gossiping levity, the things
+which we often shrink from repeating, and sometimes
+recoil from believing. Great statesmanlike historians
+and humble chattering chroniclers are alike unaffected
+by what goes on around them: they collect anecdotes
+and generalize events without the fumes of evil, among
+which they seek for materials in the dark places of
+national or local history, ever going to their imagination,
+ever making their heart sicken and faint, and
+their fancy stagger and reel. The life of these
+righteous, or at least, not actively sinning men, may
+be hampered, worried, embittered, or even broken by
+the villainy of their fellow-men; but, except in some
+visionary monk, life can never be poisoned by the
+mere knowledge of evil. Their town maybe betrayed
+to the enemy, their daughters may be dishonoured or
+poisoned, their sons massacred; they may, in their old
+age, be cast starving on the world, or imprisoned or
+broken by torture; and they will complain and be
+fierce in diatribe: the fiercest diatribe written against
+any Pope of the Renaissance being, perhaps, that of
+Platina against Paul II., who was a saint compared
+with his successors Sixtus and Alexander, because
+the writer of the diatribe and his friends were maltreated
+by this pope. When personally touched, the
+Italians of the Renaissance will brook no villainy&mdash;the
+poniard quickly despatches sovereigns like Galeazzo
+Maria Sforza; but when the villainy remains
+abstract, injures neither themselves nor their immediate
+surroundings, it awakens no horror, and the
+man who commits it is by no means regarded as a
+fiend. The great criminals of the Renaissance&mdash;
+traitors and murderers like Lodovico Sforza, incestuous
+parricides like Gianpaolo Baglioni, committers
+of every iniquity under heaven like C&aelig;sar Borgia&mdash;
+move through the scene of Renaissance history, as
+shown by its writers great and small, quietly, serenely,
+triumphantly; with gracious and magnanimous bearing;
+applauded, admired, or at least endured. On
+their passage no man, historian or chronicler, unless
+the agent of a hostile political faction, rises up, confronts
+them and says, "This man is a devil."
+And devils these men were not: the judgment of
+their contemporaries, morally completely perverted,
+was probably psychologically correct; they misjudged
+the deeds, but rarely, perhaps, misjudged the man.
+To us moderns, as to our English ancestors of the
+sixteenth century, this is scarcely conceivable. A man
+who does devilish deeds is necessarily a devil; and
+the evil Italian princes of the Renaissance, the Borgias,
+Sforzas, Baglionis, Malatestas, and Riarios appear,
+through the mist of horrified imagination, so many
+uncouth and gigantic monsters, nightmare shapes, less
+like human beings than like the grand and frightful
+angels of evil who gather round Milton's Satan in the
+infernal council. Such they appear to us. But if we
+once succeed in calmly looking at them, seeing them
+not in the lurid lights and shadows of our fancy, but
+in the daylight of contemporary reality, we shall little
+by little be forced to confess (and the confession is
+horrible) that most of these men are neither abnormal
+nor gigantic. Their times were monstrous, not they.
+They were not, that is clear, at variance with the moral
+atmosphere which surrounded them; and they were
+the direct result of the social and political condition.</p>
+
+<p>This may seem no answer; for although we know the
+causes of monster births, they are monstrous none the
+less. What we mean is not that the existence of men
+capable of committing such actions was normal; we
+mean that the men who committed them, the conditions
+being what they were, were not necessarily
+men of exceptional character. The level of immorality
+was so high that a man need be no giant to reach
+up into the very seventh heaven of iniquity. When
+to massacre at a banquet a number of enemies enticed
+by overtures of peace was considered in C&aelig;sar Borgia
+merely a rather audacious and not very holy action,
+indicative of very brilliant powers of diplomacy, then
+C&aelig;sar Borgia required, to commit such an action,
+little more than a brilliant diplomatic endowment,
+unhampered by scruples and timidity; when a brave,
+and gracious prince like Gianpaolo Baglioni could
+murder his kinsmen and commit incest with his
+sister without being considered less gracious and
+magnanimous, then Gianpaolo Baglioni might indeed
+be but an Indifferent villain; when treachery, lust,
+and bloodshed, although objected to in theory, were
+condoned In practice, and were regarded as venial
+sins, those who indulged in them might be in fact
+scarcely more than venial sinners. In short, where a
+fiendish action might be committed without the per-
+petrator being considered a fiend, there was no need
+of his being one. And, indeed, the great villains of
+the Renaissance never take up the attitude of fiends;
+one or two, like certain Visconti or Aragonese, were
+madmen, but the others were more or less normal
+human beings. There was no barrier between them
+and evil; they slipped into it, remained in it, became
+accustomed to it; but a vicious determination to be
+wicked, a feeling of the fiend within one, like that of
+Shakespeare's Richard, or a gradual, conscious irresistible
+absorption into recognized iniquity like Macbeth's,
+there was not. The mere sense of absolute power
+and impunity, together with the complete silence of
+the conscience of the public at large, can make a man
+do strange things. If C&aelig;sar Borgia be free to practise
+his archery upon hares and deer, why should he not
+practise it upon these prisoners? Who will blame
+him? Who can prevent him? If he had for his
+mistress every woman he might single out from
+among his captives, why not his sister? If he have
+the force to carry out a plan, why should a man stand
+in his way? The complete facility in the commission
+of all actions quickly brings such a man to the limits
+of the legitimate: there is no universal cry to tell him
+where those limits are, no universal arm to pull him
+back. He pooh-poohs, pushes them a little further,
+and does the iniquity. Nothing prevents his gratifying
+his ambition, his avarice, and his lust, so he
+gratifies them. Soon, seeking for further gratification,
+he has to cut new paths in villainy: he has not been
+restrained by man, who is silent; he is soon restrained
+no longer by nature, whose only voice is in man's
+conscience. Pleasure in wanton cruelty takes the
+same course: he prefers to throw javelins at men and
+women to throwing javelins at bulls or bears, even as
+he prefers throwing javelins at bulls or bears rather
+than at targets; the excitement is greater; the instinct
+is that of the soldiers of Spain and of France, who
+invariably preferred shooting at a valuable fresco like
+Sodoma's Christ, at Siena, or Lo Spagna's Madonna,
+at Spoleto, to practising against a mere worthless
+piece of wood. Such a man as C&aelig;sar Borgia is the
+nec plus ultra of a Renaissance villain; he takes, as
+all do not, absolute pleasure in evil as such. Yet
+C&aelig;sar Borgia is not a fiend nor a maniac. He can
+restrain himself whenever circumstances or policy
+require it; he can be a wise administrator, a just
+judge. His portraits show no degraded criminal; he
+is, indeed, a criminal in action, but not necessarily a
+criminal in constitution, this fiendish man who did
+not seem a fiend to Machiavel. We are astonished at
+the strange anomaly in the tastes and deeds of these
+Renaissance villains; we are amazed before their
+portraits. These men, who, in the frightful light of
+their own misdeeds, appear to us as complete demons
+or complete madmen, have yet much that is amiable
+and much that is sane; they stickle at no abominable
+lust, yet they are no bestial sybarites; they are brave,
+sober, frugal, enduring like any puritan; they are
+treacherous, rapacious, cruel, utterly indifferent to the
+sufferings of their enemies, yet they are gentle in
+manner, passionately fond of letters and art, superb
+in their works of public utility, and not incapable of
+genuinely admiring men of pure life like Bernardino
+or Savonarola: they are often, strange to say, like the
+frightful Baglionis of Perugia, passionately admired
+and loved by their countrymen. The bodily portraits
+of these men, painted by the sternly realistic art of the
+fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, are even more
+confusing to our ideas than their moral portraits drawn
+by historians and chroniclers. C&aelig;sar Borgia, with his
+long fine features and noble head, is a gracious and
+refined prince; there is, perhaps, a certain duplicity in
+the well-cut lips; the beard, worn full and peaked in
+Spanish fashion, forms a sort of mask to the lower
+part of the face, but what we see is noble and intellectual.
+Sigismondo Malatesta has on his medals a head
+whose scowl has afforded opportunity for various fine
+descriptions of a blood maniac; but the head, thus
+found so expressive, of this monster, is infinitely
+more human than the head on the medals of Lionello
+d'Este, one of the most mild and cultivated of
+the decently behaved Ferrarese princes. The very
+flower of precocious iniquity, the young Baglionis,
+Vitellis, and Orsinis, grouped round Signorelli's
+preaching Antichrist at Orvieto, are, in their gallantly
+trimmed jerkins and jewelled caps, the veriest assemblage
+of harmless young dandies, pretty and insipid;
+we can scarcely believe that these mild beardless
+striplings, tight-waisted and well-curled like girls of
+sixteen, are the terrible Umbrian brigand condottieri
+&mdash;Gianpaolos, Simonettos, Vitellozzos, and Astorres&mdash;
+whose abominable deeds fill the pages of the chronicles
+of Matarazzo, of Frolliere, of Monaldeschi. Nowhere
+among the portraits of Renaissance monsters do we
+meet with anything like those Roman emperors,
+whose frightful effigies, tumid, toad-like Vitelliuses
+or rage-convulsed Caracallas, fill all our museums
+in marble or bronze or loathsome purple porphyry;
+such types as these are as foreign to the reality of the
+Italian Renaissance as are the Brachianos and Lussuriosos,
+the Pieros and Corombonas, to the Italian
+fiction of the sixteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>Nor must such anomalies between the type of the
+men and their deeds, between their abominable
+crimes and their high qualities, be merely made a
+subject for grandiloquent disquisition. The man of
+the Renaissance, as we have said, had no need to be
+a monster to do monstrous things; a crime did not
+necessitate such a moral rebellion as requires complete
+unity of nature, unmixed wickedness; it did not
+precipitate a man for ever into a moral abyss where
+no good could ever enter. Seeing no barrier between
+the legitimate and the illegitimate, he could alternate
+almost unconsciously between them. He was never
+shut out from evil, and never shut out from good;
+the judgment of men did not dress him in a convict's
+jacket which made evil his only companion; it did
+not lock him up in a moral dungeon where no ray
+of righteousness could enter; he was not condemned,
+like the branded harlot, to hopeless infamy. He need
+be bad only as much and as long as he chose. Hence,
+on the part of the evil-doer of the Renaissance, no
+necessity either for violent rebellion or for sincere
+repentance; hence the absence of all characters such
+as the tragic writer seeks, developed by moral struggle,
+warped by the triumph of vice, or consciously soiled
+in virtue. What a "Revenger's Tragedy" might not
+Cyril Tourneur have made, had he known all the
+details, of the story of Alessandro de' Medici's death!
+What a Vindici he would have made of the murderer
+Lorenzino; with what a strange lurid grandeur he
+would have surrounded the plottings of the pander
+Brutus. But Lorenzino de' Medici had none of the
+feeling of Tourneur's Vindici; there was in him
+none of the ghastly spirit of self-immolation of the
+hero of Tourneur in his attendance upon the foul
+creature whom he leads to his death. Lorenzino had
+the usual Brutus mania of his day, but unmixed with
+horror. To be the pander and jester of the Duke
+was no pain to his nature; there was probably no
+sense of debasement in the knowledge either of his
+employer or of his employment. To fasten on Alexander,
+to pretend to be his devoted slave and server
+of his lust, this piece of loathsome acting, merely
+enhanced, by the ingenuity it required, the attraction
+of what to Lorenzino was an act of heroism. His
+ambition was to be a Brutus; that he had bespattered
+the part probably never occurred to him. The indifference
+to good and evil permitted the men of the
+Renaissance to mix the two without any moral sickness,
+as it permitted them to alternate them without
+a moral struggle. Such is the wickedness of the
+Renaissance: not a superhuman fury of lust and
+cruelty, like Victor Hugo's Lucrezia Borgia; but an
+indifferent, a characterless creature like the Lucrezia
+Borgia of history: passive to surrounding influences,
+blind to good and evil, infamous in the infamous
+Rome, among her father and brother's courtesans
+and cut-throats; grave and gracious! in the grave and
+gracious Ferrara, among the Platonic poets and pacific
+courtiers of the court of the Estensi. Thus, in the
+complete prose and colourlessness of reality, has the
+evil of the Renaissance been understood and represented
+only by one man, and transmitted to us in one
+pale and delicate psychological masterpiece far more
+loathsome than any elaborately hideous monster
+painting by Marston or Tourneur. The man who
+thus conceived the horrors of the Italian Renaissance
+in the spirit in which they were committed is Ford.
+In his great play he has caught the very tone of the
+Italian Renaissance: the abominableness of the play
+consisting not in the coarse slaughter scenes added
+merely to please the cockpit of an English theatre,
+but in the superficial innocence of tone; in its making
+evil lose its appearance of evil, even as it did to the
+men of the Renaissance. Giovanni and Annabella
+make love as if they were Romeo and Juliet: there
+is scarcely any struggle, and no remorse; they weep
+and pay compliments and sigh and melt in true
+Aminta style. There is in the love of the brother
+and sister neither the ferocious heat of tragic lust,
+nor the awful shudder of unnatural evil; they are
+lukewarm, neither good nor bad. Their abominable
+love is in their own eyes a mere weakness of the
+flesh; there is no sense of revolt against man and
+nature and God; they are neither dragged on by
+irresistible demoniac force nor held back by the grip
+of conscience; they slip and slide, even like Francesca
+and Paolo. They pay each other sweet and mawkish
+compliments. The ferocious lust of Francesco Cenci
+is moral compared with the way in which the "trim
+youth" Giovanni praises Annabella's beauty; the
+blushing, bride-like way in which Annabella, "white in
+her soul," acknowledges her long love. The atrociousness
+of all this is, that if you strike out a word
+or two the scene may be read with perfect moral
+satisfaction, with the impression that this is really
+"sacred love." For in these scenes Ford wrote with
+a sweetness and innocence truly diabolical, not a
+shiver of horror passing through him&mdash;serene, unconscious;
+handling the filthy without sense of its being
+unclean, to the extent, the incredible extent, of
+making Giovanni and Annabella swear on their
+mother's ashes eternal fidelity in incest: horror of
+horrors, to which no Walpurgis Night abomination
+could ever approach, this taking as witness of the un-utterable,
+not an obscene Beelzebub with abominable
+words and rites, but the very holiest of holies. If ever
+Englishman approached the temper of the Italian
+Renaissance, it was not Tourneur, nor Shelley with his
+cleansing hell fires of tragic horror, but this sweet and
+gentle Ford. If ever an artistic picture approached
+the reality of such a man as Gianpaolo Baglioni, the
+incestuous murderer whom the Frolliere chronicler,
+enthusiastic like Matarazzo, admires, for "his most
+beautiful person, his benign and amiable manner and
+lordly bearing," it is certainly not the elaborately
+villainous Francesco Cenci of Shelley, boasting like
+another Satan of his enormous wickedness, exhausting
+in his picture of himself the rhetoric of horror, committing
+his final enormity merely to complete the
+crown of atrocities in which he glories; it is no such
+tragic impossibility of moral hideousness as this; it
+is the Giovanni of Ford, the pearl of virtuous and
+studious youths, the spotless, the brave, who, after a
+moment's reasoning, tramples on a vulgar prejudice&mdash;
+"Shall a peevish sound, a customary form from man
+to man, of brother and of sister, be a bar 'twixt my
+eternal happiness and me?" who sins with a clear conscience,
+defies the world, and dies, bravely, proudly,
+the "sacred name" of Annabella on his lips, like a
+chivalrous hero. The pious, pure Germany of Luther
+will give the world the tragic type of the science-
+damned Faustus; the devout and savage Spain of
+Cervantes will give the tragic type of Don Juan,
+damned for mockery of man and of death and of
+heaven; the Puritan England of Milton will give the
+most sublimely tragic type of all, the awful figure of
+him who says, "Evil, be thou my good." What tragic
+type can this evil Italy of Renaissance give to the
+world? None: or at most this miserable, morbid,
+compassionated Giovanni: whom Ford would have
+us admire, and whom we can only despise.</p>
+
+<p>The blindness to evil which constitutes the criminality
+of the Renaissance is so great as to give a
+certain air of innocence. For the men of that time
+were wicked solely from a complete sophistication
+of ideas, a complete melting away (owing to slowly
+operating political and intellectual tendencies) of all
+moral barriers. They walked through the paths of
+wickedness with the serenity with which they would
+have trod the ways of righteousness; seeing no
+boundary, exercising their psychic limbs equally in the
+open and permitted spaces and in the forbidden. They
+plucked the fruit of evil without a glance behind
+them, without a desperate setting of their teeth;
+plucked it openly, calmly, as they would have plucked
+the blackberries in the hedge; bit into it, ate it, with
+perfect ease and serenity, saying their prayers before
+and after, as if it were their natural daily bread mentioned
+in the Lord's Prayer; no grimace or unseemly
+leer the while; no moral indigestion or nightmare
+(except very rarely) in consequence. Hence the
+serenity of their literature and art. These men and
+women of the Italian Renaissance have, in their
+portraits, a very pleasing nobility of aspect: serene,
+thoughtful, healthy, benign. Titian's courtesans are
+our archetypes of dignified womanhood; we might
+fancy Portia or Isabella with such calm, florid beauty,
+so wholly unmeretricious and uncankered. The
+humanists and priests who lie outstretched on the
+acanthus-leaved and flower-garlanded sarcophagi by
+Desiderio and Rossellino are the very flowers of
+refined and gentle men of study; the youths in Botticelli's
+"Adoration of The Magi," for instance, are the
+ideal of Boiardo's chivalry, Rinaldos and Orlandos
+every one; the corseleted generals of the Renaissance,
+so calm and stern and frank, the Bartolomeo Colleoni
+of Verrocchio, the Gattamelata by Giorgione (or
+Giorgione's pupil), look fit to take up the banner of
+the crusade: that Gattamelata in the Uffizi gallery
+especially looks like a sort of military Milton: give
+him a pair of wings and he becomes at once Signorelli's
+archangel, clothed in heavenly steel and un-
+sheathing the flaming sword of God. Compare with
+these types Holbein's courtiers of Henry VIII.; what
+scrofulous hogs! Compare Sanchez Coello's Philip
+II. and Don Carlos; what monomaniacs. Compare
+even D&uuml;rer's magnificent head of Willibald Pirkheimer:
+how the swine nature is blended with the thinker.
+And the swine will be subdued, the thinker will
+triumph. Why? Just because there is a contest&mdash;
+because the thinker-Willibald is conscious of the
+swine-Willibald. In this coarse, brutal, deeply stained
+Germany of the time of Luther, affording D&uuml;rer and
+Holbein, alas! how many besotten and bestial types,
+there will arise a great conflict: the obscene leering
+Death&mdash;Death-in-Life as he really is&mdash;will skulk
+everywhere, even as in the prints of the day, hideous
+and powerful, trying, with hog's snout, to drive Christ
+Himself out of limbo; but he is known, seen, dreaded.
+The armed knight of D&uuml;rer turns away from his
+grimacings, and urges on his steel-covered horse. He
+visits even the best, even Luther in the Wartburg;
+but the good men open their Bibles, cry "Vade retro!"
+and throw their inkstands at him, showing themselves
+terrified and ruffled after the combat. And these
+Germans of Luther's are disgustingly fond of blood
+and horrors: they like to see the blood spirt from the
+decapitated trunk, to watch its last contortions; they
+hammer with a will (in D&uuml;rer's "Passion") the nails
+of the cross, they peel off strips of skin in the flagellation.
+But then they can master all that; they can be
+pure, charitable; they have gentleness for the hare
+and the rabbit, like Luther; they kneel piously before
+the cross-bearing stag, like Saint Hubert. Not so the
+Italians. They rarely or never paint horrors, or death,
+or abominations. Their flagellated Christ, their arrow-
+riddled Sebastian, never writhe or howl with pain;
+indeed, they suffer none. Judith, in Mantegna's print,
+puts the head of Holophernes into her bag with the
+serenity of a muse; and the head is quite clean,
+without loathsome drippings or torn depending strings
+of muscle; unconvulsed, a sort of plaster cast. The
+tragedy of Christ, the tragedy of Judith; the physical
+agency shadowing the moral agony; the awfulness of
+victim and criminal&mdash;the whole tragic meaning was
+unknown to the light and cheerful contemporaries of
+Ariosto, the cold and cynical contemporaries of
+Machiavelli.</p>
+
+<p>The tragic passion and imagination which, in the
+noble and grotesque immaturity of the Middle Ages,
+had murmured confusedly in the popular legends
+which gave to Ezzelin the Fiend as a father, and
+Death and Sin as adversaries at dice; which had
+stammered awkwardly but grandly in the school
+Latin of Mussato's tragedy of "Eccerinis;" which had
+wept and stormed and imprecated and laughed for
+horror in the infinite tragedy&mdash;pathetic, grand, and
+grotesque, like all great tragedy&mdash;of Dante; this
+tragic passion and imagination, this sense of the
+horrible and the terrible, had been forfeited by the
+Italy of the Renaissance, lost with its sense of right
+and wrong. The Italian Renaissance, supreme in the
+arts which require a subtle and strong perception of
+the excellence of mere lines and colours and lights
+and shadows, which demand unflinching judgment of
+material qualities; was condemned to inferiority in the
+art which requires subtle and strong perception of the
+excellence of human emotion and action; in the art
+which demands unflinching judgment of moral motives.
+The tragic spirit is the offspring of the conscience of
+a people. The sense of the imaginative grandeur of
+evil may perhaps be a forerunner of demoralization;
+but such a sense of wonder and awe, such an imaginative
+fascination of the grandly, superhumanly wicked
+such a necessity to magnify a villain into a demon
+with archangelic splendour of power of evil, can exist
+only in minds pure and strong, braced up to virtue,
+virgin of evil, with a certain childlike power of wonder;
+minds to whom it appears that to be wicked requires
+a powerful rebellion; minds accustomed to nature and
+nature's plainness, to whom the unnatural can be no
+subject of sophistication and cynicism, but only of
+wonder. While, in Italy, Giraldi Cinthio prattles off
+to a gay party of ladies and gentlemen stories of
+murder and lust as frightful as those of "Titus' Andronicus,"
+of "Giovanni and Annabella," and of the
+"Revenger's Tragedy," in the intelligent, bantering
+tone in which he tells his Decameronian tales;
+in England, Marston, in his superb prologue to the
+second part of "Antonio and Mellida," doubts
+whether all his audience can rise to the conception of
+the terrible passions he wishes to display:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">If any spirit breathes within this round</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Uncapable of weighty passion,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Who winks and shuts his apprehension up</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">From common sense of what men were and are,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Who would not know what men must be: let such</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Hurry amain from our black visaged shows;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">We shall affright their eyes.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The great criminals of Italy were unconscious of being
+criminals; the nation was unconscious of being sinful.
+Bembo's sonnets were the fit reading for Lucrezia
+Borgia; pastorals by Guarini the dramatic amusements
+of Rannuccio Farnesi; if Vittoria Accoramboni and
+Francesco Cenci read anything besides their prayer-
+book or ribald novels, it was some sugary "Aminta" or
+"Pastor Fido:" their own tragedies by Webster and
+Shelley they could never have understood.</p>
+
+<p>And thus the Italians of the Renaissance walked
+placidly through the evil which surrounded them; for
+them, artists and poets, the sky was always blue and
+the sun always bright, and their art and their poetry
+were serene. But the Englishmen of the sixteenth
+century were astonished and fascinated by the evil of
+Italy: the dark pools of horror, the dabs of infamy
+which had met them ever and anon in the brilliant
+southern cities, haunted them like nightmare, bespattered
+for them the clear blue sky, and danced,
+black and horrible spots, before the face of the sun.
+The remembrance of Italian wickedness weighed on
+them like an incubus, clung to them with a frightful
+fascination. While the foulest criminals of Italy discussed
+the platonic vapidnesses of Bembo's sonnets,
+and wept at the sweet and languid lamentations of
+Guarini's shepherds and nymphs; the strong Englishmen
+of the time of Shakespeare, the men whose
+children were to unsheathe under Cromwell the sword
+of righteousness, listened awe-stricken and fascinated
+with horror to the gloomy and convulsed, the grand
+and frightful plays of Webster and of Tourneur. And
+the sin of the Renaissance, which the art of Italy could
+neither pourtray nor perceive; appeared on the stage
+decked in superb and awful garb by the tragic imagination
+of Elizabethan England.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_OUTDOOR_POETRY" id="THE_OUTDOOR_POETRY"></a>THE OUTDOOR POETRY.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The thought of winter is bleak and barren to our
+mind; the late year is chary of &aelig;sthetic as of all
+other food. In the country it does not bring ugliness;
+but it terribly reduces and simplifies things,
+depriving them of two-thirds of their beauty. In
+sweeping away the last yellow leaves, the last crimson
+clouds, and in bleaching the last green grass, it
+effaces a whole wealth of colour. It deprives us still
+more by actually diminishing the number of forms:
+for what summer had left rich, various, complex,
+winter reduces to blank uniformity. There is a whole
+world of lovely things, shapes and tints, effects of
+light, colour, and perspective in a wood, as long as it
+is capriciously divided into a thousand nooks and
+crannies by projecting boughs, bushes, hedges, and
+hanging leaves; and this winter clears away and
+reduces to a Haussmanized simplicity of plan. There
+is a smaller world, yet one quite big enough for a sum-
+mer's day, in any hay field, among the barren oats, the
+moon-daisies, the seeded grasses, the sorrel, the buttercups,
+all making at a distance a wonderful blent effect
+of luminous brown and lilac and russet foamed with
+white; and forming, when you look close into it,
+an unlimited forest of delicately separate stems and
+bloom and seed; every plant detaching itself daintily
+from an undefinable background of things like itself.
+This winter turns into a rusty brown and green expanse,
+or into a bog, or a field of frozen upturned
+clods. The very trees, stripped of their leaves, look
+as if prepared for diagrams of the abstraction tree.
+Everything, in short, is reduced most philosophically
+to its absolutely ultimate elements; and beauty is got
+rid of almost as completely as by a metaphysical
+definition. This &aelig;sthetic barrenness of winter is most
+of all felt in southern climates, to which it brings
+none of the harsh glitter and glamour of snow and
+ice; but leaves the frozen earth and leafless trees
+merely bare, without the crisp sheen of snow, the glint
+and glimmer of frost and icicles, forming for the
+denuded rigging of branches a fantastic system of
+ropes and folded sails. In the South, therefore, unless
+you go where winter never comes, and autumn merely
+merges into a lengthened spring, winter is more than
+ever negative, dreary, barren to our fancy. Yet even
+this southern winter gives one things, very lovely
+things: things which one scarcely notices perhaps,
+yet which would baffle the most skilled painter to
+imitate, the most skilled poet to describe. Thus,
+for instance, there is a peculiar kind of morning by no
+means uncommon in Tuscany in what is completely
+winter, not a remnant of autumn or a beginning of
+spring. It is cold, but windless; the sky full of sun, the
+earth full of mist. Sun and mist uniting into a pale
+luminousness in which all things lose body, become
+mere outline; bodiless hills taking shape where they
+touch the sky with their curve; clear line of irregular
+houses, of projecting ilex roundings and pointed
+cypresses marking the separation between hill and
+sky, the one scarcely more solid, corporeal than the
+other; the hill almost as blue as the sky, the sky
+almost as vaporous as the hill; the tangible often
+more ghostlike than the intangible. But the sun
+has smitten the higher hills, and the vapours have
+partially rolled down, in a scarcely visible fold, to
+their feet; and the high hill, not yet rock or earth,
+swells up into the sky as something real, but fluid and
+of infinite elasticity. All in front the plain is white
+with mist; or pinkish grey with the unseen agglomeration
+of bare tree boughs and trunks, of sere field;
+till, nearer us, the trees become more visible, the
+short vinebearing elms in the fields, interlacing their
+branches compressed by distance, the clumps of poplars,
+so scant and far between from nearly, so serried
+and compact from afar; and between them an occasional
+flush, a tawny vapour of the orange twigged
+osiers; and then, still nearer, the expanse of sere
+field, of mottled, crushed-together, yellowed grass and
+grey brown leaves; things of the summer which
+winter is burying to make room for spring. Along
+the reaches of the river the clumps of leafless poplars
+are grey against the pale, palest blue sky; grey but
+with a warmth of delicate brown, almost of rosiness.
+Grey also the shingle in the river bed; the river itself
+either (if after rain) pale brown, streaked with pale
+blue sky reflections; or (after a drought), low, grey,
+luminous throughout its surface, you might think,
+were it not that the metallic sheen, the vacillating
+sparkles of where the sun, smiting down, frets it into
+a shifting mass of scintillating facets, gives you the
+impression that this other luminousness of silvery
+water must be dull and dead. And, looking up the
+river, it gradually disappears, its place marked only,
+against the all-pervading pale blue haze, by the
+brownish grey spectre of the furthest poplar clumps.
+This, I have said, is an effect which winter produces,
+nay, even a southern winter, with those comparatively
+few and slight elements at its disposal.
+We see it, notice it, and enjoy its delicate loveliness;
+but while so doing we do not think, or we forget, that
+the habit of noticing, nay, the power of perceiving
+such effects as this, is one of those habits and powers
+which we possess, so to speak, only since yesterday.
+The possibility of reproducing in painting effects like
+this one; or, more truthfully, the wish to reproduce
+them, is scarcely as old as our own century; it is,
+perhaps, the latest born of all our artistic wishes and
+possibilities. But the possibility of any visible effect
+being perceived and reproduced by the painter, usually
+precedes&mdash;at least where any kind of pictorial art
+already exists&mdash;the perception of such effects by those
+who are not painters, and the attempt to reproduce
+them by means of words. We do not care to admit
+that our grandfathers were too unlike ourselves, lest
+ourselves should be found too unlike our grand-
+children. We hold to the metaphysic fiction of man
+having always been the same, and only his circumstances
+having changed; not admitting that the very
+change of circumstances implies something new in the
+man who altered them; and similarly we shrink from
+the thought of the many things which we used never
+to notice, and which it has required a class of men
+endowed with special powers of vision to find out,
+copy, and teach us to see and appreciate. Yet there
+is scarcely one of us who has not a debt towards some
+painter or writer for first directing his attention to
+objects or effects which may have abounded around
+him, but unnoticed or confused with others. The
+painters, as I have said, the men who see more keenly
+and who study what they have seen, naturally come
+first; nor does the poet usually describe what his
+contemporary painter attempts not to paint. An exception
+might, perhaps, require to be made for Dante,
+who would seem to have seen and described many
+things left quite untouched by Giotto, and even by
+Raphael; but in estimating Dante we must be careful
+to distinguish the few touches which really belong to
+him, from the great mass of colour and detail which we
+have unconsciously added thereto, borrowing from our
+own experience and from innumerable pictures and
+poems which, at the moment, we may not in the least
+remember; and having done so, we shall be led to
+believe that those words which suggest to us so clear
+and coloured a vision of scenes often complex and uncommon,
+presented to his own mind only a comparatively
+simple and incomplete idea: the atmospheric
+effects, requiring a more modern painter than Turner,
+which we read between the lines of the "Inferno" and
+the "Purgatorio," most probably existed as little for
+Dante as they did for Giotto; the poet seeing and
+describing in reality only salient forms of earth and
+rock, monotonous in tint and deficient in air, like those
+in the backgrounds of medi&aelig;val Tuscan frescoes and
+panels. Be this as it may, the fact grows daily on me
+that men have not at all times seen in the same degree
+the nature which has always equally surrounded them;
+and that during some periods they have, for explicable
+reasons, seen less not only than their successors, but
+also than their predecessors; and seen that little in a
+manner conventional in proportion to its monotony.
+There are things about which certain historic epochs
+are strangely silent; so much so, indeed, that the
+breaking of the silence impresses us almost as the
+more than human breaking of a spell; and that silence
+Is the result of a grievous wrong, of a moral disease
+which half closes the eyes of the fancy, or of a moral
+poison which presents to those sorely aching eyes
+only a glimmer amid darkness. And it is as the most
+singular instance of such conditions that I should wish
+to study, in themselves, their causes and effects, the
+great differences existing between the ancients and
+ourselves on the one hand, and the men of the genuine
+Middle Ages on the other, in the degree of interest
+taken respectively by each in external nature, the
+seasons and that rural life which seems to bring us
+into closest contact with them both.</p>
+
+<p>There is, of course, a considerable difference between
+the manner in which the country, its aspects and occupations,
+are treated by the poets of Antiquity and
+by those of our own day; in the mode of enjoying
+them of an ancient who had read Theocritus and
+Virgil and Tibullus, and a modern whose mind is unconsciously
+full of the influence of Wordsworth or
+Shelley or Ruskin. But it is a mere difference of mode;
+and is not greater, I think, than the difference between
+the descriptions in the "Allegro," and the descriptions
+in "Men and Women;" than the difference between
+the love of our Elizabethans for the minuter details of
+the country, the flowers by the stream, the birds in the
+bushes, the ferrets, frogs, lizards, and similar small
+creatures; and the pleasure of our own contemporaries
+in the larger, more shifting, and perplexing forms and
+colours of cloud, sunlight, earth, and rock. The description
+of effects such as these latter ones, nay, the
+attention and appreciation given to them, are things
+of our own century, even as is the power and desire of
+painting them. Landscape, in the sense of our artists
+of to-day, is a very recent thing; so recent that even
+in the works of Turner, who was perhaps the earliest
+landscape painter in the modern sense, we are forced
+to separate from the real rendering of real effects, a
+great deal in which the tints of sky and sea are
+arranged and distributed as a mere vast conventional
+piece of decoration. Nor could it be otherwise. For,
+in poetry as in painting, landscape could become a
+separate and substantive art only when the interest in
+the mere ins and outs of human adventure, in the
+mere structure and movement of human limbs, had
+considerably diminished. There is room, in epic or
+drama, only for such little scraps of description as will
+make clearer, without checking, the human action; as
+there is place, in a fresco of a miracle, or a little picture
+of carousing and singing bacchantes and Venetian
+dandies, only for such little bits of laurel grove, or dim
+plain, or blue alpine crags, as can be introduced in
+the gaps between head and head, or figure and figure.
+Thus, therefore, a great difference must exist
+between what would be felt and written about the
+country and the seasons by an ancient, by a man of
+the sixteenth century, or by a contemporary of our
+own: a difference, however, solely of mode; for we
+feel sure that of the three men each would find something
+to delight himself and wherewith to delight
+others among the elm-bounded English meadows, the
+fiat cornfields of central France, the vine and olive
+yards of Italy&mdash;wherever, in short, he might find himself
+face to face and, so to speak, hand in hand with
+Nature. But about the man of the Middle Ages
+(unless, perhaps, in Italy, where the whole Middle
+Ages were merely an earlier Renaissance) we could
+have no such assurance; nay, we might be persuaded
+that, however great his genius, be he even a Gottfried
+von Strassburg, or a Walther von der Vogelweide, or
+the unknown Frenchman who has left us "Aucassin
+et Nicolette," he would bring back impressions only
+of two things, authorized and consecrated by the
+poetic routine of his contemporaries&mdash;of spring and
+of the woods.</p>
+
+<p>There is nothing more characteristic of medi&aelig;val
+poetry than this limitation. Of autumn, of winter;
+of the standing corn, the ripening fruit of summer; of
+all these things so dear to the ancients and to all men
+of modern times, the Middle Ages seem to know
+nothing. The autumn harvests, the mists and wondrous
+autumnal transfiguration of the humblest tree,
+or bracken, or bush; the white and glittering splendour
+of winter, and its cosy life by hearth or stove; the
+drowsiness of summer, its suddenly inspired wish for
+shade and dew and water, all this left them stolid.
+To move them was required the feeling of spring, the
+strongest, most complete and stirring impression which,
+in our temperate climates, can be given by Nature.
+The whole pleasurableness of warm air, clear moist
+sky, the surprise of the shimmer of pale green, of the
+yellowing blossom on tree tops, the first flicker of
+faint shadow where all has been uniform, colourless,
+shadeless; the replacing of the long silence by the
+endless twitter and trill of birds, endless in its way as
+is the sea, twitter and trill on every side, depths and
+depths of it, of every degree of distance and faintness,
+a sea of bird song; and along with this the sense of
+infinite renovation to all the earth and to man's own
+heart. Of all Nature's effects this one alone goes
+sparkling to the head; and it alone finds a response
+in medi&aelig;val poetry. Spring, spring, endless spring&mdash;
+for three long centuries throughout the world a dreary
+green monotony of spring all over France, Provence,
+Italy, Spain, Germany, England; spring, spring,
+nothing but spring even in the mysterious countries
+governed by the Grail King, by the Fairy Morgana,
+by Queen Proserpine, by Prester John; nay, in the
+new Jerusalem, in the kingdom of Heaven itself,
+nothing but spring; till one longs for a bare twig, for
+a yellow leaf, for a frozen gutter, as for a draught of
+water in the desert. The green fields and meadows
+enamelled with painted flowers, how one detests
+them! how one would rejoice to see them well
+sprinkled with frost or burnt up to brown in the dry
+days! the birds, the birds which warble through every
+sonnet, canzone, sirventes, glosa, dance lay, roundelay,
+virelay, rondel, ballade, and whatsoever else it may
+be called,&mdash;how one wishes them silent for ever, or
+their twitter, the tarantarantandei of the eternal
+German nightingale especially, drowned by a good
+howling wind J After any persistent study of medi&aelig;val
+poetry, one's feeling towards spring is just similar
+to that of the morbid creature in Schubert's "M&uuml;llerin,"
+who would not stir from home for the dreadful,
+dreadful greenness, which he would fain bleach with
+tears, all around:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Ich m&ouml;chte ziehn in die Welt hinaus, hinaus in die weite<br />
+Welt,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Wenn's nur so gr&uuml;n, so gr&uuml;n nicht wär da draussen in<br />
+Wald und Feld.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Moreover this medi&aelig;val spring is the spring neither
+of the shepherd, nor of the farmer, nor of any man to
+whom spring brings work and anxiety and hope of
+gain; it is a mere vague spring of gentle-folk, or at
+all events of well-to-do burgesses, taking their pleasure
+on the lawns of castle parks, or the green holiday
+places close to the city, much as we see them in the
+first part of "Faust;" a sweet but monotonous charm
+of grass, beneath green lime tree, or in the South the
+elm or plane; under which are seated the poet and the
+fiddler, playing and singing for the young women,
+their hair woven with chaplets of fresh flowers,
+dancing upon the sward. And poet after poet, Proven&ccedil;al,
+Italian, and German, Nithart and Ulrich, and
+even the austere singer of the Holy Grail, Wolfram,
+pouring out verse after verse of the songs in praise
+of spring, which they make even as girls wind their
+garlands: songs of quaint and graceful ever-changing
+rythm, now slowly circling, now bounding along, now
+stamping out the measure like the feet of the dancers,
+now winding and turning as wind and twine their
+arms in the long-linked mazes; while the few and
+ever-repeated ideas, the old, stale platitudes of praise
+of woman, love pains, joys of dancing, pleasure of
+spring (spring, always spring, eternal, everlasting
+spring) seem languidly to follow the life and movement
+of the mere metre. Poets, these German, Proven&ccedil;al,
+French, and early Italian lyrists, essentially (if
+we venture to speak heresy) not of ideas or emotions,
+but of metre, of rythm and rhyme; with just the
+minimum of necessary thought, perpetually presented
+afresh just as the words, often and often repeated and
+broken up and new combined, of a piece of music&mdash;
+poetry which is in truth a sort of music, dance or
+dirge or hymn music as the case may be, more than
+anything else.</p>
+
+<p>As it is in medi&aelig;val poetry with the seasons, so it
+is likewise with the country and its occupations: as
+there is only spring, so there is only the forest. Of
+the forest, medi&aelig;val poetry has indeed much to say;
+more perhaps, and more familiar with its pleasures,
+than Antiquity. There is the memorable forest where
+the heroes of the Nibelungen go to hunt, followed
+by their waggons of provisions and wine; where
+Siegfried overpowers the bear, and returns to his
+laughing comrades with the huge thing chained to his
+saddle; where, in that clear space which we see so
+distinctly, a lawn on to which the blue black firs are
+encroaching, Siegfried stoops to drink of the spring
+beneath the lime tree, and Hagen drives his boar-
+spear straight through the Nibelung's back. There is
+the thick wood, all a golden haze through the young
+green, and with an atmosphere of birds' song, where
+King Mark discovers Tristram and Iseult in the cave,
+the deceitful sword between them, as Gottfried von
+Strassburg relates with wonderful luscious charm.
+The forest, also, more bleak and austere, where the
+four outlawed sons of Aymon live upon roots and wild
+animals, where they build their castle by the Meuse.
+Further, and most lovely of all, the forest in which
+Nicolette makes herself a hut of branches, bracken,
+and flowers, through which the stars peep down on
+her whiteness as she dreams of her Lord Aucassin.
+The forest where Huon meets Oberon; and Guy de
+Lusignan, the good snake-lady; and Parzival finds on
+the snow the feathers and the drops of blood which
+throw him into his long day-dream; and Owen discovers
+the tomb of Merlin; the forest, in short, which
+extends its interminable glades and serried masses of
+trunks and arches of green from one end to the other
+of medi&aelig;val poetry. It is very beautiful, this forest
+of the Middle Ages; but it is monotonous, melancholy;
+and has a terrible eeriness in its endlessness. For
+there is nothing else. There are no meadows where
+the cows lie lazily, no fields where the red and purple
+kerchiefs of the reapers overtop the high corn; no
+orchards, no hayfields; nothing like those hill slopes
+where the wild herbs encroach upon the vines, and the
+goats of Corydon and Damoetas require to be kept
+from mischief; where, a little lower down, the Athenian
+shopkeeper of Aristophanes goes daily to look
+whether yesterday's hard figs may not have ripened,
+or the vine wreaths pruned last week grown too lushly.
+Nor anything of the sort of those Umbrian meadows,
+where Virgil himself will stop and watch the white
+bullocks splashing slowly into the shallow, sedgy
+Clitumnus; still less like those hamlets in the cornfields
+through which Propertius would stroll, following
+the jolting osier waggon, or the procession with
+garlands and lights to Pales or to the ochre-stained
+garden god. Nothing of all this: there are no cultivated
+spots in medi&aelig;val poetry; the city only, and
+the castle, and the endless, all-encompassing forest
+And to this narrowness of medi&aelig;val notions of outdoor
+life, inherited together with medi&aelig;val subjects
+by the poets even of the sixteenth century, must be
+referred the curious difference existing between the romance
+poets of antiquity, like Homer in the Odyssey,
+and the romance poets&mdash;Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso,
+Spenser, Camoens&mdash;of modern times, in the matter of
+&mdash;how shall I express it?&mdash;the ideal life, the fortunate
+realms, the "Kennaqwhere." In Homer, in all the
+ancients, the ideal country is merely a more delightful
+reality; and its inhabitants happier everyday men and
+women; in the poetry sprung from the Middle Ages it
+is always a fairy-land constructed by mechanicians and
+architects. For, as we have seen, the Middle Ages
+could bequeath to the sixteenth century no ideal of
+peaceful outdoor enjoyment. Hence, in the poetry
+of the sixteenth century, still permeated by medi&aelig;val
+traditions, an appalling artificiality of delightfulness.
+Fallerina, Alcina, Armida, Acrasia, all imitated from
+the original Calypso, are not strong and splendid
+god-women, living among the fields and orchards,
+but dainty ladies hidden in elaborate gardens, all
+bedizened with fashionable architecture: regular
+palaces, pleasaunces, with uncomfortable edifices,
+artificial waterfalls, labyrinths, rare and monstrous
+plants, parrots, apes, giraffes; childish splendours of
+gardening and engineering and menageries, which we
+meet already in "Ogier the Dane" and "Huon of Bordeaux,"
+and which later poets epitomized out of the
+endless descriptions of Colonna's "Hypnerotomachia
+Poliphili," the still more frightful inventories of the
+Amadis romances. They are, each of them, a kind
+of anticipated Marly, Versailles, Prince Elector's Friedrichsruhe
+or Nymphenburg, with clipped cypresses
+and yews, doubtless, and (O Pales and Pan!) flowerbeds
+filled with coloured plaster and spas, and cascades
+spirting out (thanks to fifty invisible pumps)
+under your feet and over your head. All the
+vineyards and cornfields have been swept away to
+make these solemn terraces and water-works; all the
+cottages which, with their little wooden shrine, their
+humble enclosure of sunflowers and rosemary and fruit
+trees, their buzzing hives and barking dogs, were loved
+and sung even by town rakes like Catullus and smart
+coffeehouse wits like Horace; all these have been swept
+away to be replaced by the carefully constructed
+(? wire) bowers, the aviaries, the porticoes, the frightful
+circular edifice (tondo &egrave; il ricco edificio), a masterpiece
+of Palladian stucco work, in which Armida and Rinaldo,
+Acrasia and her Knight, drearily disport themselves.
+What has become of Calypso's island? of the orchards
+of Alcinous? What would the noble knights and ladies
+of Ariosto and Spenser think of them? What would
+they say, these romantic, dainty creatures, were they
+to meet Nausicaa with the washed linen piled on her
+waggon? Alas! they would take her for a laundress.
+For it is the terrible aristocratic idleness of the Middle
+Ages, their dreary delicacy, which hampers Boiardo,
+Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, even in the midst of their
+most unblushing plagiarisms from Antiquity: their
+heroes and heroines have been brought up, surrounded
+by equerries and duennas, elegant, useless things, or
+at best (the knights at least) good only for aristocratic
+warfare. Plough or prune! defile the knightly hands!
+wash or cook, ply the loom like Nausicaa, Calypso, or
+Penelope! The mere thought sends them very nearly
+into a faint. No: the ladies of medi&aelig;val romance
+must sit quiet, idle; at most they may sing to the
+lute; and if they work with their hands, it must be
+some dreary, strictly useless, piece of fancy work; they
+are hot-house plants, all these dainty folk.
+Had they no eyes, then, these poets of the Middle
+Ages, that they could see, among all the things of
+Nature, only those few which had been seen by their
+predecessors? At first one feels tempted to think so,
+till the recollection of many vivid touches in spring
+and forest descriptions persuades one that, enormous
+as was the sway of tradition among these men, they
+were not all of them, nor always, repeating mere conventional
+platitudes. This singular limitation in the
+medi&aelig;val perceptions of Nature&mdash;a limitation so im-
+portant as almost to make it appear as if the Middle
+Ages had not perceived Nature at all&mdash;is most frequently
+attributed to the prevalence of asceticism,
+which, according to some critics, made all medi&aelig;val
+men into so many repetitions of Bernard of Clairvaux,
+of whom it is written that, being asked his opinion of
+Lake Leman, he answered with surprise that, during
+his journey from Geneva to the Rhone Valley, he had
+remarked no lake whatever, so absorbed had he been
+in spiritual meditations. But the predominance of
+asceticism has been grossly exaggerated. It was a
+state of moral tension which could not exist uninterruptedly,
+and could exist only in the classes for whom
+poetry was not written. The mischief done by asceticism
+was the warping of the moral nature of men, not
+of their &aelig;sthetic feelings; it had no influence upon
+the vast numbers, the men and women who relished
+the profane and obscene fleshliness and buffoonery of
+stage plays and fabliaux, and those who favoured the
+delicate and exquisite immoralities of Courtly poetry.
+Indeed, the presence of whole classes of writings, of
+which such things as Boccaccio's Tales, "The Wife of
+Bath," and Villon's "Ballades," on the one hand, and
+the songs of the troubadours, the poem of Gottfried,
+and the romance or rather novel of "Flamenca," are
+respectively but the most conspicuous examples, ought
+to prove only too clearly that the Middle Ages, for all
+their asceticism, were both as gross and as &aelig;sthetic in
+sensualism as antiquity had been before them. We
+must, therefore, seek elsewhere than in asceticism,
+necessarily limited, and excluding the poetry-reading
+public, for an explanation of this peculiarity of medi&aelig;val
+poetry. And we shall find it, I think, in that which
+during the Middle Ages could, because it was an all-
+regulating social condition, really create universal
+habits of thought and feeling, namely, feudalism. A
+moral condition like asceticism must leave unbiassed
+all such minds as are incapable of feeling it; but a
+social institution like feudalism walls in the life of
+every individual, and forces his intellectual movements
+into given paths; nor is there any escape, excepting
+in places where, as in Italy and in the free towns of
+the North, the feudal conditions are wholly or partially
+unknown. To feudalism, therefore, would I ascribe
+this, which appears at first so purely &aelig;sthetic, as
+opposed to social, a characteristic of the Middle Ages.
+Ever since Schiller, in his "Gods of Greece," spoke for
+the first time of undivinized Nature [die entg&ouml;tterte
+Natur], it has been the fashion among certain critics
+to fall foul of Christianity for having robbed the fields
+and woods of their gods, and reduced to mere manured
+clods the things which had been held sacred by antiquity.
+Desecrated in those long medi&aelig;val centuries
+Nature may truly have been, but not by the holy
+water of Christian priests. Desecrated because out of
+the fields and meadows was driven a divinity greater
+than Pales or Vertumnus or mighty Pan, the divinity
+called Man. For in the terrible times when civilization
+was at its lowest, the things of the world had been
+newly allotted; and by this new allotment, man&mdash;the
+man who thinks and loves and hopes and strives, man
+who fights and sings&mdash;was shut out from the fields
+and meadows, forbidden the labour, nay, almost the
+sight, of the earth; and to the tending of kine, and
+sowing of crops, to all those occupations which antiquity
+had associated with piety and righteousness,
+had deemed worthy of the gods themselves, was
+assigned, or rather condemned, a creature whom
+every advancing year untaught to think or love, or
+hope, or fight, or strive; but taught most utterly to
+suffer and to despair. For a man it is difficult to call
+him, this medi&aelig;val serf, this lump of earth detached
+from the field and wrought into a semblance of manhood,
+merely that the soil of which it is part should
+be delved and sown, and then manured with its carcass
+or its blood; nor as a man did the Middle Ages conceive
+it. The serf was not even allowed human progenitors:
+his foul breed had originated in an obscene
+miracle; his stupidity and ferocity were as those of
+the beasts; his cunning was demoniac; he was born
+under God's curse; no words could paint his wickedness,
+no persecutions could exceed his deserts; the
+whole world turned pale at his crime, for he it was, he
+and not any human creature, who had nailed Christ
+upon the cross. Like the hunger and sores of a fox
+or a wolf, his hunger and his sores are forgotten, never
+noticed. Were it not that legal and ecclesiastical
+narratives of trials (not of feudal lords for crushing
+and contaminating their peasants, but of peasants for
+spitting out and trampling on the consecrated wafer)
+give us a large amount of pedantically stated detail;
+tell us how misery begat vice, and filth and starvation
+united families in complicated meshes of incest, taught
+them depopulation as a virtue and a necessity; and
+how the despair of any joy in nature, of any mercy
+from God, hounded men and women into the unspeakable
+orgies, the obscene parodies, of devil worship;
+were it not for these horrible shreds of judicial evidence
+(as of tatters of clothes or blood-clotted hairs on the
+shoes of a murderer) we should know little or nothing
+of the life of the men and women who, in medi&aelig;val
+France and Germany, did the work which had been
+taught by Hesiod and Virgil. About all these
+tragedies the literature of the Middle Ages, ready to
+show us town vice and town horror, dens of prostitution
+and creaking, overweighted gibbets, as in Villon's
+poems, utters not a word. All that we can hear is
+the many-throated yell of medi&aelig;val poets, noble and
+plebeian, French, Proven gal, and German, against the
+brutishness, the cunning, the cruelty, the hideousness,
+the heresy of the serf, whose name becomes synonymous
+with every baseness; which, in mock grammatical
+style, is declined into every epithet of wickedness;
+whose punishment is prayed for from the God whom
+he outrages by his very existence; a hideous clamour
+of indecent jibe, of brutal vituperation, of senseless
+accusation, of every form of words which furious hatred
+can assume, whose echoes reached even countries like
+Tuscany, where serfdom was well nigh unknown, and
+have reached even to us in the scraps of epigram still
+bandied about by the townsfolk against the peasants,
+nay, by the peasants against themselves.<a name="FNanchor_1_2" id="FNanchor_1_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_2" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> A monstrous</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_2" id="Footnote_1_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_2"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> The reader may oppose to my views the existence of the
+&mdash;class of poems, French, Latin, and German, of which the Proven&ccedil;al
+
+Pastourela is the original type, and which represent the
+courting, by the poet, who is, of course, a knight, of a beautiful
+country-girl, who is shown us as feeding her sheep or spinning
+with her distaff. But these poems are, to the best of my knowledge,
+all of a single pattern, and extremely insincere and artificial
+in tone, that I feel inclined to class them with the pastorals
+&mdash;Dresden china idylls by men who had never looked a live
+peasant in the face&mdash;of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
+-as distant descendants from the pastoral poetry of antiquity, of
+which the chivalric poets may have got some indirect notions
+as they did of the antique epics. It is moreover extremely
+rag doll, dressed up in shreds of many-coloured villainy
+without a recognizable human feature, dragged in the
+likely that these love poems, in which, successfully or unsuccess-
+fully, the poet usually offers a bribe to the woman of low degree,
+conceal beneath the conventional pastoral trappings the intrigues
+of minnesingers and troubadours with women of the small
+artizan or village proprietor class. The real peasant woman&mdash;
+the female of the villain&mdash;could scarcely have been above the
+notice of the noblemen's servants; and, in countries where the
+seigneurial rights were in vigour, would scarcely have been
+offered presents and fine words. As regards the innumerable
+poems against the peasantry, I may refer the reader to an
+extremely curious publication of "Carmina Medii Ævi," recently
+made by Sig. Francesco Novati, and which contains, besides a
+selection of specimens, a list of references on the subject of
+poems "De Natura Rusticorum." One of the satirical declensions
+runs as follows:
+</p>
+
+<table summary="latin declension"><tr><td>Singulariter.</td>                       <td>Pluraliter.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Nom.   Hic villanus. </td>               <td>Nom.   Hi maledicti.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Gen.   Huius rustici.</td>               <td>Gen.   Horum tristium.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dat.   Huic tferfero (sic). </td>        <td>Dat.   His mendacibus.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Acc.   Hunc furem.</td>                  <td>Acc.   Hos nequissimos.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Voc.   O latro. </td>                    <td>Voc.   O pessimi.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Abl.   Ab hoc depredatore.</td>          <td>Abl.   Ab his infidelibus.</td></tr></table>
+
+<p>
+The accusation of heresy and of crucifying Christ is evidently
+due to the devil-worship prevalent among the serfs, and is thus,
+alluded to in a north Italian poem, probably borrowed from the
+French:
+</p>
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Christo fo da villan crucifi&ograve;,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">E stagom sempre in pioza, in vento, e in neve,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Perch&egrave; havom fato cosi gran pecc&agrave;.</span><br />
+</p>
+<p>
+This feeling is exactly analogous to that existing nowadays in
+semi-barbarous countries against the Jews. The idle hated the
+industrious, and hated them all the more when their industry
+brought them any profit.</p></div>
+
+<p>mud, pilloried with unspeakable ordure, paraded in
+mock triumph like a King of Fools, and burnt in the
+market-place like Antichrist, such is the image which
+medi&aelig;val poetry has left us of the creature who was
+once the pious rustic, the innocent god-beloved
+husbandman, on whose threshold justice stopped a
+while when she fled from the towns of Antiquity.
+Yet not so; I can recall one, though only one,
+occasion in which medi&aelig;val literature shows us the
+serf. The place is surely the most unexpected, the
+charming thirteenth century tale of "Aucassin et
+Nicolette." In his beautiful essay upon that story, Mr.
+Pater has deliberately omitted this episode, which is
+indeed like a spot of blood-stained mud upon some
+perfect tissue of silver flowers on silver ground. It is
+a piece of cruellest realism, because quite quiet and
+unforced, in the midst of a kind of fairy-land idyl of
+almost childish love, the love of the beautiful son of
+the lord of Beaucaire for a beautiful Saracen slave
+girl. For, although Aucassin and Nicolette are often
+separated, and always disconsolate&mdash;she in her wonderfully
+frescoed vaulted room, he in his town prison&mdash;
+there is always surrounding them a sort of fairy land
+of trees and flowers, a constant song of birds;
+although they wander through the woods and tear
+their delicate skin, and catch their hair in brambles
+and briars, we have always the sense of the daisies
+bending beneath their tread, of the green leaves rustling
+aside from their heads covered with hair&mdash;
+"blond et menu crespel&eacute;." Their very hardships are
+lovely, like the hut of flowering branches and grapes,
+which Nicolette builds for herself, and through whose
+fissures the moonlight shines and the little stars
+twinkle: so much so, that when they weep, these two
+beautiful and dainty creatures, we listen as if to singing,
+and with no more sense of grief than at some
+pathetic little snatch of melody. And in the midst
+of this idyl of lovely things; in the midst of all these
+delicate patternings, whose minuteness and faint tint
+merge into one vague pleasurable impression; stands
+out, unintentionally placed there by the author, little
+aware of its terrible tragic realism, the episode which
+I am going to translate.</p>
+
+<p>"Thus Aucassin wandered all day through the
+forest, without hearing any news of his sweet love;
+and when he saw that dusk was spreading, he began
+bitterly to weep. As he was riding along an old road,
+where weeds and grass grew thick and high, he
+suddenly saw before him, in the middle of this road, a
+man such as I am going to describe to you. He was
+tall, ugly; nay, hideous quite marvellously. His face
+was blacker than smoked meat, and so wide, that
+there was a good palm's distance between his eyes;
+his cheeks were huge, his nostrils also, with a very big
+flat nose; thick lips as red as embers, and long teeth
+yellow and smoke colour. He wore leathern shoes
+and gaiters, kept up with string at the knees; on his
+back was a parti-coloured coat. He was leaning
+upon a stout bludgeon. Aucassin was startled and
+fearful, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"'Fair brother ("beau fr&egrave;re"&mdash;a greeting corresponding
+to the modern "bon homme") 'God be with
+thee!'</p>
+<p>"'God bless you!' answered the man.</p>
+<p>"'What dost thou here?' asked Aucassin.</p>
+<p>"'What is that to you?' answered the man.</p>
+<p>"'I ask thee from no evil motive.'</p>
+<p>"'Then tell me why,' said the man, 'you yourself
+are weeping with such grief? Truly, were I a rich
+man like you, nothing in the world should make me
+weep.'</p>
+<p>"'And how dost thou know me?'</p>
+<p>"'I know you to be Aucassin, the son of the Count;
+and if you will tell me why you weep, I will tell you
+why I am here.'</p>
+<p>"'I will tell thee willingly,' answered Aucassin.
+'This morning I came to hunt in the forest; I had
+a white leveret, the fairest in the world; I have lost
+him&mdash;that is why I am weeping.'</p>
+<p>"'What!' cried the man;' it is for a stinking hound
+that you waste the tears of your body? Woe to
+those who shall pity you; you, the richest man of
+this country. If your father wanted fifteen or twenty
+white leverets, he could get them. I am weeping and
+mourning for more serious matters.'</p>
+<p>"'And what are these?'</p>
+<p>"'I will tell you. I was hired to a rich farmer to
+drive his plough, dragged by four bullocks. Three
+days ago, I lost a red bullock, the best of the four. I
+left the plough, and sought the red bullock on all
+sides, but could not find him. For three days I have
+neither eaten nor drunk, and have been wandering
+thus. I have been afraid of going to the town,
+where they would put me in jail, because I have not
+wherewith to pay for the bullock. All I possess are
+the clothes on my back. I have a mother; and the
+poor woman had nothing more valuable than me;
+since she had only an old smock wherewith to cover
+her poor old limbs. They have torn the smock off
+her back, and now she has to lie on the straw. It is
+about her that I am afflicted more than about myself,
+because, as to me, I may get some money some day
+or other, and as to the red bullock, he may be paid
+for when he may. And I should never weep for such
+a trifle as that. Ah! woe betide those who shall
+make sorrow with you!'"</p>
+
+<p>Inserted merely to give occasion to show Aucassin's
+good heart in paying the twenty sols for the man's red
+bullock; perhaps for no reason at all, but certainly
+with no idea of making the lover's misery seem
+by comparison trifling&mdash;there are, nevertheless, few
+things in literature more striking than the meeting in
+the wood of the daintily nurtured boy, weeping over
+the girl whom he loves with almost childish love of
+the fancy; and of that ragged, tattered, hideous serf,
+at whose very aspect the Bel Aucassin stops in awe
+and terror. And the attitude is grand of this unfortunate
+creature, who neither begs nor threatens,
+scarcely complains, and not at all for himself; but
+merely tells his sordid misfortune with calm resignation,
+as if used to such everyday miseries, roused to
+indignation only at the sight of the tears which the
+fine-bred youth is shedding. We feel the dreadful
+solemnity of the man's words; of the reproach thus
+thrown by the long-suffering serf, accustomed to misfortunes
+as the lean ox is to blows, to that delicate
+thing weeping for his lady love, for the lady of his
+fancy. It is the one occasion upon which that delicate
+and fantastic medi&aelig;val love poetry, that fanciful,
+wistful stripling King Love of the Middle Ages, in
+which he keeps high court, and through which he rides
+in triumphal procession; that King Love laughing
+and fainting by turns with all his dapper artificiality
+of woes; is confronted with the sordid reality, the
+tragic impersonation of all the dumb miseries, the
+lives and loves, crushed and defiled unnoticed, of the
+peasantry of those days. Yes, while they sing&mdash;
+Provençals, minnesingers, Sicilians, sing of their
+earthly lady and of their paramour in heaven&mdash;the
+hideous peasant, whose naked granny is starving on
+the straw, looks on with dull and tearless eyes; crying
+out to posterity, as the serf cries to Aucassin:
+"Woe to those who shall sorrow at the tears of such
+as these."</p>
+
+
+<h3>II.</h3>
+
+
+<p>But meanwhile, during those centuries which lie
+between the dark ages and modern times, the Middle
+Ages (inasmuch as they mean not a mere chronological
+period, but a definite social and mental condition)
+fortunately did not exist everywhere. Had they existed,
+it is almost impossible to understand how they
+would ever throughout Europe have come to an end;
+for as the favourite proverb of Catharine of Siena has
+it, one dead man cannot bury another dead man; and
+the Middle Ages, after this tedious dying of the fifteenth
+century, required to be shovelled into the tomb,
+nay, rather, given the final stroke, by the Renaissance.
+This that we foolishly call&mdash;giving a quite incorrect
+notion of sudden and miraculous birth&mdash;the Renaissance,
+and limit to the time of the revival of Greek humanities,
+really existed, as I have repeatedly suggested
+wherever, during the medi&aelig;val centuries, the civilization
+of which the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
+were big was not, by the pressure of feudalism and
+monasticism, made to be abortive or stillborn. Low
+as was Italy at the very close of the dark ages, and
+much as she borrowed for a long while from the more
+precocious northern nations, especially France and
+Provence; Italy had, nevertheless, an enormous advantage
+in the fact that her populations were not
+divided into victor and vanquished, and that the old
+Latin institutions of town and country were never
+replaced, except in certain northern and southern
+districts, by feudal arrangements. The very first
+thing which strikes us in the obscure Italian commonwealths
+of early times, is that in these resuscitated
+relics of Roman or Etruscan towns there is no feeling
+of feudal superiority and inferiority; that there is no
+lord, and consequently no serf. Nor is this the case
+merely within the city walls. The never sufficiently
+appreciated difference between the Italian free burghs
+and those of Germany, Flanders, and Provence, is
+that the citizens depend only in the remotest and most
+purely fictitious way upon any kind of suzerain; and
+moreover that the country, instead of belonging to
+feudal nobles, belong every day more and more completely
+to the burghers. The peasant is not a serf, but
+one of three things&mdash;a hired labourer, a possessor of
+property, or a farmer, liable to no taxes, paying no
+rent, and only sharing with the proprietor the produce
+of the land. By this latter system, existing, then as
+now, throughout Tuscany, the peasantry was an independent
+and well-to-do class. The land owned by
+one man (who, in the commonwealths, was usually a
+shopkeeper or manufacturer in the town) was divided
+into farms small enough to be cultivated&mdash;vines,
+olives, corn, and fruit&mdash;by one family of peasants,
+helped perhaps by a paid labourer. The thriftier and
+less scrupulous peasants could, in good seasons, put
+by sufficient profit from their share of the produce to
+suffice after some years, and with the addition of what
+the women might make by washing, spinning, weaving,
+plaiting straw hats (an accomplishment greatly
+insisted upon by Lorenzo dei Medici), and so forth,
+to purchase some small strip of land of their own.
+Hence, a class of farmers at once living on another
+man's land and sharing its produce with him, and
+cultivating and paying taxes upon land belonging to
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Of these Tuscan peasants we get occasional glimpses
+in the medi&aelig;val Italian novelists&mdash;a well-to-do set of
+people, in constant communication with the town
+where they sell their corn, oil, vegetables, and wine,
+and easily getting confused with the lower class of
+artizans with whom they doubtless largely intermarried.
+These peasants whom we see in tidy kilted tunics and
+leathern gaiters, driving their barrel-laden bullock
+carts, or riding their mules up to the red city gates in
+many a Florentine and Sienese painting of the fourteenth
+and fifteenth centuries, were in many respects
+better off than the small artizans of the city, heaped
+up in squalid houses, and oppressed by the greater
+and smaller guilds. Agnolo Pandolfini, teaching
+thrift to his sons in Alberti's charming treatise on
+"The Government of the Family," frequently groans
+over the insolence, the astuteness of the peasantry;
+and indeed seems to consider that it is impossible
+to cope with them&mdash;a conclusion which would have
+greatly astounded the bailiffs of the feudal proprietors
+in the Two Sicilies and beyond the Alps. Indeed it
+is impossible to conceive a stranger contrast than that
+between the northern peasant, the starved and stunted
+serf, whom Holbein drew, driving his lean horses
+across the hard furrow, with compassionate Death
+helping along the plough, and the Tuscan farmer,
+as shown us by Lorenzo dei Medici&mdash;the young fellow
+who, while not above minding his cows or hoeing up
+his field, goes into Florence once a week, offers his
+sweetheart presents of coral necklaces, silk staylaces,
+and paint for her cheeks and eyelashes; who promises,
+to please her, to have his hair frizzled (as only the
+youths of the Renaissance knew how to be frizzled
+and fuzzed) by the barber, and even dimly hints that
+some day he may appear in silken jerkin and tight
+hose, like a well-to-do burgess. No greater contrast
+perhaps, unless indeed we should compare his sweetheart,
+Lorenzo's beautiful Nenciozza, with her box
+full of jewels, her Sunday garb of damask kirtle and
+gold-worked bodice, her almost queenly ways towards
+her adorers, with the wretched creature, not a woman,
+but a mere female animal, cowering among her starving
+children in her mud cottage, and looking forward,
+in dull lethargy, after the morning full of outrages at
+the castle, to the night, the night on the heath, lit with
+mysterious flickers, to the horrible joys of the sacrifice
+which the oppressed brings to the dethroned, the
+serf to Satan; when, in short, we compare the peasant
+woman described by Lorenzo with the female serf
+resuscitated by the genius of Michelet; nay, more
+poignant still, with that mother in the "Dance of Death,"
+seated on the mud flood of the broken-roofed, dismantled
+hovel, stewing something on a fire of twigs,
+and stretching out vain arms to her poor tattered baby-
+boy, whom, with the good-humoured tripping step of
+an old nurse, the kindly skeleton is leading away out
+of this cruel world.</p>
+
+<p>Such were the conditions of the peasantry of the
+great Italian commonwealths. They were, as much
+as the northern serfs were the reverse, creatures
+pleasant to deal with, pleasant to watch.
+The upper classes, on the other hand, differed quite
+as much from the upper classes of feudal countries.
+They were, be it remembered, men of business, constantly
+in contact with the working classes; Albizis,
+Strozzis, Pandolfinis, Guinigis, Tolomeis, no matter
+what their name, these men who built palaces and
+churches which outdid the magnificence of northern
+princes, and who might, at any moment, be sent
+ambassadors from Florence, Lucca, or Siena, to the
+French or English kings, to the Emperor or the Pope,
+spent a large portion of their days at their office desk,
+among the bales of their warehouses, behind the
+counter of their shops; they wore the same dress, had
+the same habits, spoke the same dialect, as the weavers
+and dyers, the carriers and porters whom they employed,
+and whose sons might, by talent and industry,
+amass a fortune, build palaces, and go ambassadors to
+kings in their turn. When, therefore, these merchant
+nobles turned to the country for rest and relief from
+their cares, it was not to the country as it existed for
+the feudal noble of the North. Boar and stag hunts
+had no attraction for quiet men of business; forests
+stocked with wild beasts where vineyard and cornfield
+might have extended, would have seemed to them the
+very height of wastefulness, discomfort, and ugliness.
+Pacific and businesslike, they merely transferred to
+the country the habits of thought and of life which
+had arisen in the city. Not for them any imitation
+of the feudal castle, turreted and moated, cut up into
+dark irregular rooms and yards, filled with noisy retainers
+and stinking hounds. On some gentle hillside
+a well-planned palace, its rooms spacious and lofty,
+and sparely windowed for coolness in summer; with
+a neat cloistered court in the centre, ventilating the
+whole house, and affording a cool place, full of scent
+of flowers and sound of fountains for the burning
+afternoons; a belvedere tower also, on which to seek
+a breeze on stifling nights, when the very stars seem
+faint for heat, and the dim plumy heads of cypress
+and poplar are motionless against the misty blue sky.
+In front a broad terrace, whence to look down towards
+the beloved city, a vague fog of roofs in the distance;
+on the side and behind, elaborate garden walks walled
+with high walls of box and oak and laurel, in which
+stand statues in green niches; gardens with little
+channels to bring water, even during droughts, to the
+myrtles, the roses, the stocks and clove pinks, over
+which bend with blossoms brilliant against the pale
+blue sky the rose-flowered oleander, the scarlet-
+flowered pomegranate; also aviaries and cages full of
+odd and harmless creatures, ferrets, guinea pigs, porcupines,
+squirrels, and monkeys; arbours where wife,
+daughters, and daughters-in-law may sew and make
+music; and neat lawns where the young men may
+play at quoits, football, or swordsticks and bucklers;
+and then, sweeping all round the house and gardens
+and terraces an undulating expanse of field and
+orchard, smoke-tinted with olive, bright green in spring
+with budding crops, russet in autumn with sere vines;
+and from which, in the burning noon, rises the incessant
+sawing noise of the cicalas, and ever and anon
+the high, nasal, melancholy chant of the peasant, lying
+in the shade of barn door or fig tree till the sun shall
+sink and he can return to his labour. If the house in
+town, with its spacious store-rooms, its carved chapel,
+and painted banqueting hall, large enough to hold
+sons' children and brothers' wives and grandchildren,
+and a whole host of poor relatives, whom the wise
+father (as Pandolfini teaches) employs rather than
+strangers for his clerks and overseers&mdash;if this town
+house was the pride of the Italian burgess; the villa,
+with its farms and orchards, was the real joy, the
+holiday paradise of the over-worked man. To read in
+the cool house, with cicala's buzz and fountain plash
+all round, the Greek and Latin authors; to discuss
+them with learned men; to watch the games of the
+youths and the children, this was the reward for years
+of labour and intelligence; but sweeter than all this
+(how we feel it in Agnolo Pandolfini's speeches!) were
+those occupations which the city could not give: the
+buying and selling of plants, grain, and kine, the
+meddling with new grafted trees, the mending of
+spaliers, the straightening of fences, the going round
+(with the self-importance and impatience of a cockney)
+to see what flowers had opened, what fruit had ripened
+over-night; to walk through the oliveyards, among
+the vines; to pry into stable, pig-stye, and roosting-
+place, taking up handfuls of drying grain, breaking
+twigs of olives, to see how things were doing; and to
+have long conversations with the peasants, shrewd
+enough to affect earnest attention when the master
+was pleased to vent his town-acquired knowledge of
+agriculture and gardening. Sweet also, doubtless, for
+younger folk, or such perhaps as were fonder of
+teaching new lute tunes to the girls than of examining
+into cabbages, and who read Dante and Boccaccio
+more frequently than Cicero or Sallust; though sweet
+perhaps only as a vague concomitant of their lazy
+pleasures, to listen to those songs of the peasantry
+rising from the fields below, while lying perhaps on
+one's back in the shaded grass, watching the pigeons
+whirring about the belvedere tower. Vaguely pleasant
+this also, doubtless; but for a long while only vaguely.
+For, during more than two centuries, the burgesses of
+Italy were held enthralled by the Courtly poets of
+other countries; listening to, and reading, at first,
+only Provençals and Sicilians, or Italians, like Sordello,
+pretending to be of Provence or Sicily; and
+even later, enduring in their own poets, their own
+Guittones, Cavalcantis, Cinos, Guinicellis, nay even in
+Dante and Petrarch's lyrics, only the repetition (however
+vivified by genius) of the old common-places of
+Courtly love, and artificial spring, of the poetry of
+feudal nations. But the time came when not only
+Provençal and Sicilian, but even Tuscan, poetry was
+neglected, when the revival of Greek and Latin letters
+made it impossible to rewrite the threadbare medi&aelig;val
+prettinesses, or even to write in earnest in the modern
+tongue, so stiff and thin (as it seemed) and like some
+grotesque painted saint, when compared with the
+splendidly fleshed antique languages, turning and
+twining in graceful or solemn involutions, as of a
+Pyrrhic or a maidens' dance. And it was during this
+period, from Petrarch to Politian, that, as philologists
+have now proved beyond dispute, the once fashionable
+chivalric romance, and the poetry of Proven&ccedil;al and
+Sicilian school, cast off by the upper classes, was
+gradually picked up by the lower and especially by
+the rural classes. Vagabond ballad-singers and story-
+tellers&mdash;creatures who wander from house to house,
+mending broken pottery, collecting rags or selling
+small pedlar's wares&mdash;were the old clothesmen who
+carried about these bits of tarnished poetic finery.
+The people of the town, constantly in presence of the
+upper classes, and therefore sooner or later aware of
+what was or was not in fashion, did not care long for
+the sentimental daintiness of medi&aelig;val poetry; besides,
+satire and scurrility are as inevitable in a town
+as are dogs in gutters and cats on roofs; and the
+townsfolk soon set their own buffoonish or satirical
+ideas to whatever remained of the music of medi&aelig;val
+poetry: already early in the fifteenth century the
+sonnet had become for the Florentine artizans a mere
+scurrilous epigram. It was different in the country.
+The peasant, at least the Tuscan peasant, is eminently
+idealistic and romantic in his literary tastes; it may
+be that he has not the intellectual life required for any
+utterances or forms of his own, and that he consequently
+accepts poetry as a ready-made ornament,
+something pretty and exotic, which is valued in proportion
+to its prettiness and rarity. Be the reason
+whatever it may, certain it is that nothing can be too
+artificial or high-flown to please the Italian peasantry:
+its tales are all of kings; princesses, fairies, knights,
+winged horses, marvellous jewels, and so forth; its
+songs are almost without exception about love, constancy,
+moon, stars, flowers. Such things have not
+been degraded by familiarity and parody as in the
+town; they retain for the country folk the vague
+charm (like that of music, automatic and independent
+of thorough comprehension) of belonging to a
+sphere of the marvellous; hence they are repeated and
+repeated with almost religious servility, as any one
+may observe who will listen to the stories and verses
+told and sung even nowadays in the Tuscan country,
+or who will glance over the splendid collections of
+folklore made in the last twenty years. Such things,
+must suffer alteration from people who can neither
+read nor write, and who cannot be expected to
+remember very clearly details which, in many cases,
+must have for them only the vaguest meaning. The
+stories split in process of telling and re-telling, and
+are completed with bits of other stories; details are
+forgotten and have to be replaced; the same happens
+with poetry: songs easily get jumbled together, their
+meaning is partially obliterated, and has to be restored
+or, again, an attempt is made by bold men to adapt
+some seemingly adaptable old song to a new occasion
+an old love ditty seems fit to sing to a new sweetheart
+&mdash;names, circumstances, and details require arranging
+for this purpose; and hence more alterations. Now,
+however much a peasant may enjoy the confused
+splendours of Court life and of Courtly love, he cannot,
+with the best will in the world, restore their details or
+colouring if they happen to become obliterated. If
+he chance to forget that when the princess first met
+the wizard she was riding forth on a snow-white jennet
+with a falcon on her glove, there is nothing to prevent
+his describing her as walking through the meadow in
+charge of a flock of geese; and similarly, should he
+happen to forget that the Courtly lover compares the
+skin of his mistress to ivory and her eyes to Cupid's
+torches, he is quite capable of filling up the gap by
+saying that the girl is as white as a turnip and as
+bright-eyed as a ferret. As with details of description
+and metaphors, so also with the emotional and social
+parts of the business. The peasant has not been
+brought up in the idea that the way to gain a woman's
+affection is to stick her glove on a helmet and perform
+deeds of prowess closely resembling those of Don
+Quixote in the Sierra Morena; so he attempts to
+ingratiate himself by offering her presents of strawberries,
+figs, buttons, hooks-and-eyes, and similar
+desirable things. Again, were the peasant to pay
+attentions to a married woman, he would merely get
+(what noble husbands were too well bred to dream of)
+a sound horsewhipping, or perhaps even a sharp knife
+thrust in his stomach; so that he takes good care to
+address his love songs only to marriageable young
+women. In this way, without any deliberate attempt
+.at originality, the old Courtly poetry becomes, when
+once removed to the country, thoroughly patched and
+seamed with rustic ideas, feelings, and images; while
+never ceasing to be, in its general stuff and shape, of
+a kind such as only professional poets of the upper
+classes can produce. The Sicilian lyrics collected by
+Signor Pitre, still more the Tuscan poems of Tigri's
+charming volume, are, therefore, a curious mixture of
+highflown sentiment, dainty imagery, and most artistic
+arrangements of metre and diction (especially in the
+rispetto, where metrical involution is accompanied by
+logical involution of the most refined medi&aelig;val sort),
+with hopes and complaints such as only a farmer could
+frame, with similes and descriptions such as only the
+business of the field, vineyard, and dairy could suggest.
+A mixture, but not a jumble. For as in this slow
+process of assimilation and alteration only that was
+remembered by the peasant which the peasant could
+understand and sympathize with; and only that was
+welded into the once Courtly poetry which was sufficiently
+refined to please the people who delighted in
+the exotic refinement&mdash;as, in short, everything came
+about perfectly simply and unconsciously, there
+resulted what in good sooth may be considered as a
+perfectly substantive and independent form of art,
+with beauties and refinements of its own. And,
+indeed, it appears to me that one might say, without
+too much paradox, that in these peasant songs only
+does the poetry of minnesingers and troubadours,
+become thoroughly enjoyable; that only when the
+conventionality of feeling and imagery is corrected by
+the freshness, the straightforwardness, nay, even the
+grotesqueness of rural likings, dislikings, and comparisons,
+can the dainty beauty of medi&aelig;val Courtly
+poetry ever really satisfy our wishes. Comparing
+together Tigri's collection of Tuscan folk poetry with
+any similar anthology that might be made of middle-
+high German and Provençal, and early Italian lyrics,
+I feel that the adoption of Courtly medi&aelig;val poetry
+by the Italian peasantry of the Renaissance can be
+compared more significantly than at first seemed with
+the adoption of a once fashionable garb by country
+folk. The peasant pulled about this Courtly lyrism,
+oppressively tight in its conventional fit and starched
+with elaborate rhetorical embroideries; turned it inside
+out, twisted a bit here, a bit there, ripped open seam
+after seam, patched and repatched with stuffs and
+stitches of its own; and then wore the whole thing as
+it had never been intended to be worn; until this
+cast-off poetic apparel, stretched on the freer moral
+limbs of natural folk, faded and stained by weather
+and earth into new and richer tints, had lost all its
+original fashionable stiffness, and crudeness of colour,
+and niminy-piminy fit, and had acquired instead I
+know not what grace of unexpectedness, picturesqueness,
+and ease.<a name="FNanchor_1_3" id="FNanchor_1_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_3" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_3" id="Footnote_1_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_3"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Any one who is sceptical of the Courtly derivation of the
+Italian popular song may, besides consulting the admirable
+book of Prof. d'Ancona, compare with the contents of Tigri's
+famous "Canti popolari Toscani," the following scraps of
+Sicilian and early Italian lyrics:&mdash;</p>
+<p>The Emperor Frederick II. writes: "Rosa di maggio&mdash;
+Colorita e fresca&mdash;Occhi hai fini&mdash;E non rifini&mdash;Di gioie dare&mdash;
+Lo tuo parlare&mdash;La gente innamora&mdash;Castella ed altura."
+Jacopo Pugliesi says of his lady: "Chiarita in viso pi&ugrave; che
+argento&mdash;Donami allegrezze&mdash;Ben eo son morto&mdash;E mal colto&mdash;
+Se non mi dai conforto&mdash;<i>Fior dell' orto</i>."</p>
+<p>Inghilfredi Siciliano: "Ges&ugrave; Cristo ideolla in paradiso&mdash;
+E poi la fece angelo incarnando&mdash;Gioia aggio preso di giglio
+novello&mdash;E vago, che sormonta ogni ricchezza&mdash;Sua dottrina
+m' affrezza&mdash;Cosi mi coglie e olezza&mdash;Come pantera le bestie
+selvagge."</p>
+<p>Jacopo da Lentino: "E di virtute tutte 1' altre avanza&mdash;E
+somigliante a stella &egrave; di splendore&mdash;Colla sua conta (<i>cf</i>. Proven&ccedil;al
+<i>coindeta</i>, gentille) e gaia innamoranza&mdash;E pi&ugrave; bella &egrave;
+che rosa e che fiore&mdash;Cristo le doni vita ed allegranza&mdash;E s&igrave; la
+cresca in gran pregio ed onore."</p>
+<p>I must finish off what might be a much longer collection
+with a charming little scrap, quite in rispetto tone, by
+Guinicelli: "Vedut 'ho la lucente stella diana&mdash;Ch' appare anzi
+che 'l giorno renda albore&mdash;Ch' a preso forma di figura umana&mdash;
+Sovr' ogni altra mi par che dia splendore&mdash;Viso di neve colorato
+in grana&mdash;Occhi lucenti, gai e pien d'amore&mdash;Non credo che
+nel mondo sia cristiana&mdash;Si piena di beltate e di valore."</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Well; for many a year did the song of the peasants
+rise up from the fields and oliveyards unnoticed by
+the good townsfolk taking their holiday at the Tuscan
+villa; but one day, somewhere in the third quarter
+of the fifteenth century, the long-drawn chant of the
+rispetto, telling perhaps how the singer's sweetheart
+was beautiful as the star Diana, so beautiful as a baby
+that the Pope christened her with his own hands; the
+quavering nasal cadence of the stornello saying by
+chance&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Flower of the Palm, &amp;c.,<br />
+</span></p>
+
+<p>did at last waken the attention of one lettered man,
+a man of curious and somewhat misshapen body and
+mind, of features satyr-like in ugliness, yet moody
+and mystical in their very earthiness; a man essentially
+of the senses, yet imperfect in them, without
+taste or smell, and, over and above, with a marvellously
+supple intellect; weak and coarse and idealistic; and
+at once feebly the slave of his times, and so boldly,
+spontaneously innovating as to be quite unconscious
+of innovation: the mixed nature, or rather the nature
+in many heterogeneous bits, of the man of letters who
+is artistic almost to the point of being an actor, natural
+in every style because morally connected with no
+style at all. The man was Lorenzo di Piero dei Medici,
+for whom posterity has exclusively reserved the civic
+title of all his family and similar town despots, calling
+him the Magnificent. It is the fashion at present to
+give Lorenzo only the leavings, as it were, of our
+admiration for the weaker, less original, nay, considerably
+enervate, humanistic exquisite Politian; and
+this absurd injustice appears to me to show that the
+very essence and excellence of Lorenzo is not nowadays
+perceived. The Renaissance produced several
+versatile and charming poets; and, in the midst of
+classic imitation, one or two, of whom one is certainly
+Boiardo, of real freshness and raciness. But of this
+new element in the Renaissance, this element which
+is neither imitation of antiquity nor revival of medi&aelig;val,
+which is original, vital, fruitful, in short, modern,
+Lorenzo is the most versatile example. He is new,
+Renaissance, modern; not merely in this or that
+quality, he is so all round. And this in the first place
+because he is so completely the man of impressions;
+the man not uttering wonderful things, nor elaborating
+exquisite ones, but artistically embodying with
+marvellous versatility whatever strikes his fancy and
+feeling&mdash;fancy and feeling which are as new as the
+untouched sculptor's clay. And this extraordinary
+temper of art for art's sake, or rather effect for effect
+and form's sake, was possible in that day only in
+a man equally without strong passions, and without
+strong convictions. He is naturally attracted most by
+what is most opposed to the academic, Virgilian,
+Horatian, or Petrarchesque &aelig;stheticism of his contemporaries;
+he is essentially a realist, and all the effects,
+which he produces, all the beauty, charm, or beastliness
+of his work, corresponds to beauty, charm, or beastli-
+ness in the reality of things. If Lorenzo writes at one
+moment carnival songs of ribald dirtiness, at the
+next hymns full of holy solemnity; it is, I think,
+merely because this versatile artist takes pleasure in
+trying whether his face may not be painted into grinning
+drunkenness, and then elongated and whitened
+into ascetic gentleness. Instead of seeking, like most
+of his contemporaries, to be Greek, Roman, or medi&aelig;val
+by turns, he preferred trying on all the various
+tricks of thought and feeling which he remarked
+among his unlettered townsfolk. His realism naturally
+drew him towards the classes where realism can deal
+with the real; and not the affected, the self-conscious,
+the deliberately attempted. Hence those wonderful
+little poems, the carnival songs of the gold-thread
+spinners, of the pastry-cooks, of the shoemakers,
+which give us so completely, so gracefully, the whole
+appearance, work, manner, gesture of the people;
+give them to us with ease and rapidity so perfect, that
+we scarcely know how they are given; that we almost
+forget verses and song, and actually see the pulling,
+twisting, and cutting of the gold-threads; that we see
+and hear the shoemaker's hands smoothing down the
+leather of the shoe in his hand, to convince his customers
+of its pliability; that we see and smell the
+dear little pale yellow pasties nestling in the neat
+white baskets, after having stood by and watched the
+dough being kneaded, chopped, and floured over, the
+iron plates heated in the oven, the soft, half-baked
+paste twisted and bent; nay, we feel almost as if we
+had eaten of them, those excellent things which seem
+such big mouthfuls but are squeezed and crunched at
+one go like nothing at all. Hence, I mean from
+this love of watching effects and reproducing them,
+originated also the masterpiece of Lorenzo dei Medici,
+the Nencia da Barberino.</p>
+
+<p>This poem, of some fifty octaves, is the result of
+those Tuscan peasant songs, of which I have told you
+the curious Courtly descent, at last having struck the
+fancy of a real poet. It is, what Lorenzo's masterpiece
+necessarily must be, in the highest degree a modern
+performance; as modern as a picture by Bastien
+Lepage; as an opera, founded upon local music, by
+Bizet. For it is not by any manner of means a
+pastoral, a piece of conventional poetic decoration,
+with just a little realistic detail, more of the mere
+conventional or more of the realistic dominating
+according as it is a pastoral by Theocritus, or a pastoral
+by Quinault or Metastasio. It is the very reverse of
+this: it is the attempt to obtain a large and complete,
+detailed and balanced impression by the cunning
+arrangement of a number of small effects which the
+artist has watched in reality; it is the making into a
+kind of little idyl, something half narrative, half drama,
+with distinct figures and accessories and background,
+of a whole lot of little fragments imitated from the
+peasant poetry, and set in thin, delicate rims of
+imitation no longer of the peasant's songs, but of the
+peasant's thoughts and speech; a perfect piece of
+impressionist art, marred only in rare places by an
+attempt (inevitable in those days) to force the drawing
+and colour into caricature. The construction, which
+appears to be nowhere, is in reality a masterpiece;
+for, without knowing it, you are shown the actors, the
+background, the ups and downs of temper, the variation
+of the seasons; above all you are shown the heroine
+through the medium of the praises, the complaints,
+the narratives of the past, the imaginings of the
+future, of the hero, whose incoherent rhapsodizing
+constitutes the whole poem. He, Vallera, is a well-
+to-do young farmer; she, Nencia, is the daughter of
+peasant folk of the castellated village of Barberino in
+the Mugello; he is madly in love, but shy, and (to all
+appearance) awkward, so that we feel convinced that
+of all these speeches in praise of his Nenciozza, in
+blame of his indifference, highly poetic flights and most
+practical adjurations to see all the advantages of a
+good match, the young woman hears few or none;
+Vallera is talking not to her, but at her, or rather,
+he is rehearsing to himself all the things which he
+cannot squeeze out in her presence. It is the long
+day-dream, poetic, prosaic, practical, and imaginative,
+of a love-sick Italian peasant lad, to whom his
+sweetheart is at once an ideal thing of beauty, a
+goddess at whose shrine songs must be sung and
+wreaths twined; and a very substantial lass, who
+cannot be indifferent to sixpenny presents, and whom
+he cannot conceive as not ultimately becoming the
+sharer of his cottage, the cooker of his soup, the
+mender of his linen, the mother of his brats&mdash;a dream
+in which image is effaced by image, and one thought
+is expelled, unfinished, by another. She is to him
+like the Fairy Morgana, the fairy who kept so much
+of chivalry in her enchanted island; she is like the
+evening star when above his cottage it slowly pierces
+the soft blue sky with its white brilliancy; she is purer
+than the water in the well, and sweeter than the
+malmsey wine, and whiter than the miller's flour; but
+her heart is as hard as a pebble, and she loves driving
+to distraction a whole lot of youths who dangle behind
+her, captives of those heart-thievish eyes of hers. But
+she is also a most excellent housewife, can stand any
+amount of hard field labour, and makes lots of money
+by weaving beautiful woollen stuff. To see her going,
+to church of a morning, she is a little pearl! her
+bodice is of damask, and her petticoat of bright,
+colour, and she kneels down carefully where she may
+be seen, being so smart. And then, when she dances!
+&mdash;a born dancer, bouncing like a little goat, and
+twirling more than a mill-wheel; and when she has
+finished she makes you such a curtsey; no citizen's
+wife in Florence can curtsey as she does. It was in
+April that he first fell in love. She was picking salad
+in the garden; he begged her for a little, and she sent
+him about his business. las, alas! ever since then
+his peace has been gone; he cannot sleep, he can only
+think of her, and follow her about; he has become quite
+good-for-nothing as to his field work,&mdash;yet he hears all
+the people around laughing and saying, "Of course
+Valléra will get her."  Only she will pay no heed to
+him. She is finer to look at than the Pope, whiter than
+the whitest wood core: she is more delectable than are
+the young figs to the earwigs, more beautiful than the
+turnip flower, sweeter than honey. He is more in love
+with her than the moth is in love with the lamp; she loves
+to see him perishing for her. If he could cut himself
+in two without too much pain, he would, just to let
+her see that he carries her in his heart. No; he would
+cut out his heart, and when she has touched it with
+that slender hand of hers, it would cry out, "Nencia,
+Nencia bella." But, after all, he is not to be despised:
+he is an excellent labourer, most learned in buying
+&mdash;and selling pigs, he can play the bagpipe beautifully;
+he is rich, is willing to go to any expense to please
+her, nay, even to pay the barber double that his hair
+may be nice and fuzzy from the crimping irons; and
+if only he were to get himself tight hose and a silk
+jerkin, he would be as good as any Florentine burgess.
+But she will not listen; or, rather, she listens and laughs.
+Yes, she sits up in bed at night and laughs herself to
+death at the mere thought of him, that is all he gets.
+But he knows what it is! There is a fellow who will
+keep sneaking about her; if Vall&eacute;ra only catch him
+near his cottage, won't he give him a taste of his long
+new knife! nay, rip him up and throw his bowels, like
+those of a pig, to dry on a roof! He is sorry&mdash;perhaps
+he bores her&mdash;God bless you, Nencia!&mdash;he had better
+go and look after his sheep.</p>
+
+<p>All this is not the poetry of th Renaissance
+peasant; it is the poem made out of his reality; the
+songs which Vall&eacute;ra sang in the fields about his Nencia
+we must seek in the volume of Tigri; those rispetti and
+stornelli of to-day are the rispetti and stornelli of four
+centuries ago; they are much more beautiful and poetic
+than any of Lorenzo's work; but Lorenzo has given us
+not merely a peasant's love-song; he has given us a
+peasant's thoughts, actions, hopes, fears; he has given
+us the peasant himself, his house, his fields, and his
+sweetheart, as they exist even now. For Lorenzo is
+gone, and, greater than he, the paladins and ladies of
+Boiardo and Ariosto, have followed the saints and
+virgins of Dante into the limbo of fair unrealities; and
+the very Greek and Roman heroes of a hundred years
+ago, the very knights and covenanters of forty years
+since, have joined them; but Valléra exists still, and still
+in the flesh exists his Nenciozza. Everything changes,
+except the country and the peasant. For, in the long
+farms of Southern Tuscany, with double row of blackened
+balcony all tapestried with heavy ingots of Indian
+corn, and spread out among the olives of the hillside, up
+which twists the rough bullock road protected by its vine
+trellis; and in the little farms, with queer hood-shaped
+double roofs (as if to pull over the face of the house
+when it blows hard), and pigeon towers which show
+that some day they must have been fortified, all about
+Florence; farms which I pass every day, with their
+sere trees all round, their rough gardens of bright
+dahlias and chrysanthemums draggled by the autumn
+rains&mdash;in these there are, do not doubt it, still
+Nencias: magnificent creatures, fit models for Amazons,
+only just a trifle too full-blown and matronly; but
+with real Amazonian limbs, firm and delicate, under
+their red and purple striped print frocks; creatures
+with heads set on necks like towers or columns, necks
+firm in broad, well-fleshed chest as branches in a tree's
+trunk; great penthouses of reddish yellow or lustreless
+black crimped hair over the forehead; the forehead,
+like the cheeks, furrowed a good deal&mdash;perhaps we
+dainty people might say, faded and wrinkled by work
+in the burning sun and the wind; women whom you
+see shovelling bread into the heated ovens, or plashing
+in winter with bare arms in half-frozen streams, or
+digging up a turnip field in the drizzle; or on a
+Sunday, standing listless by their door, surrounded
+by rolling and squalling brats, and who, when they
+slowly look up at the passer-by, show us, on those
+monumental faces of theirs, a strange smile, a light
+of bright eyes and white teeth; a smile which to us
+sophisticated townspeople is as puzzling as certain
+sudden looks in some comely animal, but which yet
+makes us understand instinctively that we have before
+us a Nencia; and that the husband yonder, though he
+now swears at his wife, and perhaps occasionally beats
+her, has nevertheless, in his day, dreamed, argued,
+raged, and sung to himself just like Lorenzo's Vallera.
+The "Nencia da Barberino" is certainly Lorenzo dei
+Medici's masterpiece: it is completely and satisfactorily
+worked out. Yet we may strain possibilities to
+the point of supposing (which, however, I cannot for a
+moment suppose) that this "Nencia" is a kind of fluke;
+that by an accident a beautiful and seemingly appreciative
+poem has resulted where the author, a medi&aelig;val
+realist of a superior Villon sort, had intended only a
+piece of utter grotesqueness. But important as is the
+"Nencia," Lorenzo has left behind him another poem,
+greatly inferior in completeness, but which settles
+beyond power of doubt that in him the Renaissance
+was not merely no longer medi&aelig;val, but most intensely
+modern. This poem is the "Ambra." It is simply an
+allegorical narrative of the inundation, by the river
+Ombrone, of a portion, called Ambra, of the great
+Medicean villa of Poggio a Caiano. Lorenzo's object
+was evidently to write a semi-Ovidian poem, of a kind
+common in his day, and common almost up to our
+own: a river-god, bearded, crown of reeds, urn, general
+dampness and uproariousness of temper, all quite correct;
+and a nymph, whom he pursues, who prays to the
+Virgin huntress to save her from his love, and who,
+just in the nick of time, is metamorphosed into a
+mossy stone, dimly showing her former woman's
+shape; the style of thing, charming, graceful, insipid,
+of which every one can remember a dozen instances,
+and which immediately brings up to the mind a vision
+of grand-ducal gardens, where, among the clipped ilexes
+and the cypress trunks, great lumbering water-gods
+and long-limbed nymphs splash, petrified and covered
+with melancholy ooze and yellow lichen, among the
+stagnant grotto waters. In some respects, therefore,
+there is in the "Ambra" somewhat more artificial,
+more barrocco than that early Renaissance of Politian
+and Pontano would warrant. There also several bits,
+half graceful, half awkward, pedantic, constrained,
+childish, delightful, like the sedge-crowned rivers
+telling each other anecdotes of the ways and customs
+of their respective countries, and especially the charming
+dance of zephyr with the flowers on the lawns of
+Cyprus, which must immediately suggest pictures by
+Piero di Cosimo and by Botticelli. So far, therefore,
+there is plenty to enjoy, but nothing to astonish, in
+the "Ambra." But the Magnificent Lorenzo has had
+the extraordinary whim of beginning his allegory with
+a description, twenty-one stanzas long, of the season
+of floods. A description, full of infinitely delicate
+minute detail: of the plants which have kept their
+foliage while the others are bare&mdash;the prickly juniper,
+the myrtle and bay; of the flocks of cranes printing the
+sky with their queer shapes, of the fish under the ice,
+and the eagle circling slowly round the ponds&mdash;little
+things which affect us mixed up as they are with
+all manner of stiff classic allusions, very much as do
+the carefully painted daisies and clover among the
+embossed and gilded unrealities of certain old pictures.
+From these rather finikin details, Lorenzo passes,
+however, to details which are a good deal more than
+details, things little noticed until almost recently: the
+varying effect of the olives on the hillside&mdash;a grey,
+green mass, a silver ripple, according as the wind stirs
+them; the golden appearance of the serene summer
+air, and so forth; details no longer, in short, but
+essentially, however minute, effects. And then,
+suddenly leaving such things behind, he rushes into
+the midst of a real picture, a picture which you might
+call almost impressionistic, of the growth of rivers
+and the floods. The floods are a grand sight; more
+than a sight&mdash;a grand performance, a drama; sometimes,
+God knows, a tragedy. Last night, under a
+warm, hazy sky, through whose buff-tinted clouds
+the big moon crept in and out, the mountain stream
+was vaguely visible&mdash;a dark riband in its wide shingly
+bed, when the moon was hidden; a narrow, shallow,
+broken stream, sheets of brilliant metallic sheen, and
+showers of sparkling facets, when the moon was out;
+a mere drowsy murmur mixing with the creaking and
+rustling of dry reeds in the warm, wet wind. Thus
+in the evening. Look down from your window next
+morning. A tremendous rushing mass of waters, thick,
+turbid, reddish, with ominous steel-like lustre where
+its coppery surface reflects the moist blue sky, now
+fills the whole bed, shaking its short fringe of foam,
+tossing the spray as it swirls round each still projecting
+stone, angrily tugging at the reeds and alders which
+flop their draggled green upon its surface; eddying
+faster and faster, encircling each higher rock or sandbank,
+covering it at last with its foaming red mass.
+Meanwhile, the sky is covered in with vaporous grey
+clouds, which enshroud the hills; the clear runnels,
+dash over the green banks, spirt through the walls,
+break their way across the roads; the little mountain
+torrents, dry all summer, descend, raging rivers, red
+with the hill soil; and with every gust of warm wind
+the river rises higher and rushes along tremendously
+impetuous. Down in the plain it eats angrily at the
+soft banks, and breaks its muddy waters, fringed on
+the surface with a sort of ominous grime of broken
+wood and earth, higher and higher against the pierheads
+of the bridges; shaking them to split their
+masonry, while crowds of men and women look on,
+staring at the rising water, at the planks, tables, beams,
+cottage thatches, nay, whole trees, which it hurls at
+the bridge piers. And then, perhaps, the terrible,
+soft, balmy flood-wind persisting, there comes suddenly
+the catastrophe; the embankment, shaken by the
+resistless current, cracks, fissures gives way; and the
+river rushes into the city, as it has already rushed into
+the fields, to spread in constantly rising, melancholy
+livid pools, throughout the streets and squares.
+This Lorenzo saw, and, wonderful to say, in this
+soiled and seething river, in these torn and crumbling
+banks, in all the dreadfulness of these things, he saw
+a beauty and a grandeur. But he saw not merely the
+struggle of the waters and of the land; he&mdash;the
+heartless man who laid his hand even upon the saved-
+up money of orphan girls in order to keep up the
+splendour of his house and of his bank&mdash;saw the misfortunes
+of the peasantry; the mill, the cottage by the
+riverside, invaded by the flood; the doors burst open by
+the tremendous rushing stream, the stables and garners
+filled with the thick and oozy waters; the poor
+creatures, yesterday prosperous, clinging to the roof,
+watching their sheep and cows, their hay, and straw,
+and flour, the hemp bleached in the summer, the
+linen spun and woven in the long winter, their
+furniture and chattels, their labour and their hope
+whirled along by the foaming river.</p>
+
+<p>Thus by this versatile Lorenzo dei Medici, this
+flippant, egotistic artist and despot, has at last been
+broken the long spell of the Middle Ages. The
+Renaissance has sung no longer of knights and of
+spring, but of peasants and of autumn. An immoral
+and humanistic time, an immoral and humanistic
+man, have had at length a heart for the simpler, ruder
+less favoured classes of mankind; an eye for the
+bolder, grander, more solemn sights of Nature: modern
+times have begun, modern sympathies, modern art are
+in full swing.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="SYMMETRIA_PRISCA" id="SYMMETRIA_PRISCA"></a>SYMMETRIA PRISCA.</h2>
+
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Mirator veterum, discipulusque memor,<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Defuit mini symmetria prisca. Peregi<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Quod potui; Veniam da mihi, posteritas.<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">&mdash;<i>Lionardo da Vinci's epitaph by Platino Piatto.</i><br /></span></p>
+
+
+<p>Into the holy enclosure which had received the
+precious shiploads of earth from Calvary, the Pisans
+of the thirteenth century carried the fragments of
+ancient sculpture brought from Rome and from
+Greece; and in the Gothic cloister enclosing the
+green sward and dark cypresses of the graveyard of
+Pisa, the art of the Middle Ages came for the first
+time face to face with the art of Antiquity. There,
+among pagan sarcophagi turned into Christian tombs,
+with heraldic devices chiselled on their arabesques
+and vizored helmets surmounting their garlands, the
+great unsigned artist of the fourteenth century,
+Orcagna of Florence, or Lorenzetti of Siena, painted
+the typical masterpiece of medi&aelig;val art, the great
+fresco of the Triumph of Death. With wonderful
+realization of character and situation he painted the
+prosperous of the world, the dapper youths and
+damsels seated with dogs and falcons beneath the
+orchard trees, amusing themselves with Decameronian
+tales and sound of lute and psaltery, unconscious of
+the colossal scythe wielded by the gigantic dishevelled
+Death, and which, in a second, will descend and mow
+them to the ground; while the crowd of beggars,
+ragged, maimed, paralyzed, leprous, grovelling on
+their withered limbs, see and implore Death, and cry
+stretching forth their arms, their stumps, and their
+crutches. Further on, three kings in long embroidered
+robes and gold-trimmed shovel caps, Lewis the
+Emperor, Uguccione of Pisa, and Castruccio of Lucca,
+with their retinue of ladies and squires, and hounds
+and hawks, are riding quietly through a wood. Suddenly
+their horses stop, draw back; the Emperor's
+bay stretches out his long neck sniffing the air; the
+kings strain forward to see, one holding his nose for
+the stench of death which meets him; and before
+them are three open coffins, in which lie, in three
+loathsome stages of corruption, from blue and bloated
+putrescence to well-nigh fleshless decay, three crowned
+corpses. This is the triumph of Death; the grim and
+horrible jest of the Middle Ages: equality in decay;
+kings, emperors, ladies, knights, beggars, and cripples,
+this is what we all come to be, stinking corpses;
+Death, our lord, our only just and lasting sovereign,
+reigns impartially over all.</p>
+
+<p>But opposite, all along the sides of the painted
+cloister, the Amazons are wrestling with the youths
+on the stone of the sarcophagi; the chariots are dashing
+forward, the Tritons are splashing in the marble
+waves; the Bacchant&aelig; are striking their timbrels in
+their dance with the satyrs; the birds are pecking at
+the grapes, the goats are nibbling at the vines; all is
+life, strong and splendid in its marble eternity. And
+the mutilated Venus smiles towards the broken
+Hermes; the stalwart Hercules, resting against his
+club, looks on quietly, a smile beneath his beard; and
+the gods murmur to each other, as they stand in the
+cloister filled with earth from Calvary, where hundreds
+of men lie rotting beneath the cypresses, "Death will
+not triumph for ever; our day will come."</p>
+
+<p>We have all seen them opposite to each other, these
+two arts, the art born of Antiquity and the art born
+of the Middle Ages; but whether this meeting was
+friendly or hostile or merely indifferent, is a question
+of constant dispute. To some, medi&aelig;val art has
+appeared being led, Dante-like, by a magician Virgil
+through the mysteries of nature up to a Christian
+Beatrice, who alone can guide it to the kingdom of
+heaven; others have seen medi&aelig;val art, like some
+strong, chaste Sir Guyon turning away resolutely from
+the treacherous sorceress of Antiquity, and pursuing
+solitarily the road to the true and the good; for some
+the antique has been an impure goddess Venus,
+seducing and corrupting the Christian artist; the
+antique has been for others a glorious Helen, an unattainable
+perfection, ever pursued by the medi&aelig;val
+craftsman, but seized by him only as a phantom.
+Magician or witch, voluptuous, destroying Venus or
+cold and ungrasped Helen, what was the antique to
+the art born of the Middle Ages and developed during
+the Renaissance? Was the relation between them
+that of tuition, cool and abstract; or of fruitful love;
+or of deluding and damning example?</p>
+
+<p>The art which came to maturity in the late fifteenth
+and early sixteenth centuries was generated in the
+early medi&aelig;val revival. The seeds may, indeed, have
+come down from Antiquity, but they remained for
+nearly a thousand years hidden in the withered, rotting
+remains of former vegetation; and it was not
+till that vegetation had completely decomposed and
+become part of the soil, it was not till putrefaction
+had turned into germination, that artistic organism
+timidly reappeared. The new art-germ developed
+with the new civilization which surrounded it. Manufacture
+and commerce reappeared: the artizans and
+merchants formed into communities; the communities
+grew into towns, the towns into cities; in the
+city arose the cathedral; the Lombard or Byzantine
+mouldings and traceries of the cathedral gave birth to
+figure-sculpture; its mosaics gave birth to painting;
+every forward movement of the civilization unfolded
+as it were a new form or detail of the art, until, when
+medi&aelig;val civilization was reaching its moment of
+consolidation, when the cathedrals of Lucca and Pisa
+stood completed, when Niccolo and Giovanni Pisano
+had sculptured their pulpits and sepulchres; painting,
+in the hands of Cimabue and Duccio, of Giotto and
+of Guido da Siena, freed itself from the tradition of
+the mosaicists as sculpture had freed itself from the
+practice of the stone-masons, and stood forth an independent
+and organic art.</p>
+
+<p>Thus painting was born of a new civilization, and
+grew by its own vital force; a thing of the Middle
+Ages, original and spontaneous. But contemporaneous
+with the medi&aelig;val revival was the resuscitation
+of Antiquity; in proportion as the new civilization
+developed, the old civilization was exhumed; real
+Latin began to be studied only when real Italian
+began to be written; Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio
+were at once the founders of modern literature and
+the exponents of the literature of antiquity; the
+strong young present was to profit by the experience
+of the past.</p>
+
+<p>As it was with literature, so likewise was it with
+art. The most purely medi&aelig;val sculpture, the sculpture
+which has, as it were, just detached itself from
+the capitals and porches of the cathedral, is the direct
+pupil of the antique; and the three great Gothic
+sculptors, Niccol&oacute;, Giovanni, and Andrea of Pisa, learn
+from fragments of Greek and Roman sculpture how
+to model the figure of the Redeemer and how to
+chisel the robe of the Virgin. This spontaneous
+medi&aelig;val sculpture, aided by the antique, preceded
+by a full half-century the appearance of medi&aelig;val
+painting; and it was from the study of the works of
+the Pisan sculptors that Cimabue and Giotto learned
+to depart from the mummified monstrosities of the
+hieratic, Byzantine and Roman style of Giunta and
+Berlinghieri. Thus, through the sculpture of the
+Pisans the painting of the school of Giotto received
+at second-hand the teachings of Antiquity. Sculpture
+had created painting; painting now belonged to the
+painters. In the hands of Giotto it developed within
+a few years into an art which seemed almost mature,
+an art dealing victoriously with its materials, triumphantly
+solving its problems, executing as if by
+miracle all that was demanded of it. But Giottesque
+art appeared perfect merely because it was limited;
+it did all that was required of it, because that which
+was required was little; it was not asked to reproduce
+the real nor to represent the beautiful; it was
+asked merely to suggest a character, a situation, a
+story.</p>
+
+<p>The artistic development of a nation has its exact
+parallel in the artistic development of an individual.
+The child uses his pencil to tell a story, satisfied with
+balls and sticks as body, head, and legs; provided he
+and his friends can associate with them the ideas in
+their minds. The youth sets himself to copy what he
+sees, to reproduce forms and effects, without any aim
+beyond the mere pleasure of copying. The mature
+artist strives to obtain forms and effects of which he
+approves, he seeks for beauty. In the life of Italian
+painting the generation of men who flourished at the
+beginning of the sixteenth century are the mature
+artists; the men of the fifteenth century are the inexperienced
+youths; the Giottesques are the children&mdash;
+children Titanic and seraph-like, but children nevertheless;
+and, like all children, learning more perhaps
+in their few years than can the youth and the man
+learn in a lifetime.</p>
+
+<p>Like the child, the Giottesque painter wished to
+show a situation or express a story, and for this
+purpose the absolute realization of objects was unnecessary.
+Giottesque art is not incorrect art, it is
+generalized art; it is an art of mere outline. The
+Giottesques could draw with great accuracy the hand:
+the form of the fingers, the bend of the limb, they
+could give to perfection its whole gesture and movement,
+they could produce a correct and spirited outline,
+but within this correct outline marked off in dark paint
+there is but a vague, uniform mass of pale colour; the
+body of the hand is missing, and there remains only its
+ghost, visible indeed, but unsubstantial, without weight
+or warmth, eluding the grasp. The difference between
+this spectre hand of the Giottesques, and the sinewy,
+muscular hand which can shake and crush of Masaccio
+and Signorelli; or the soft hand with throbbing pulse
+and warm pressure of Perugino and Bellini,&mdash;this
+difference is typical of the difference between the art
+of the fourteenth century and the art of the fifteenth
+century: the first suggests, the second realizes; the
+one gives impalpable outlines, the other gives tangible
+bodies. The Giottesque cares for the figure only
+inasmuch as it displays an action; he reduces it to a
+semblance, a phantom, to the mere exponent of an
+idea; the man of the Renaissance cares for the figure
+inasmuch as it is a living organism, he gives it
+substance and weight, he makes it stand out as an
+animate reality. Thence, despite its early triumphs,
+the Giottesque style, by its inherent nature, forbade
+any progress; it reached its limits at once, and the
+followers of Giotto look almost as if they were his
+predecessors, for the simple reason that, being unable
+to advance, they were forced to retrograde. The
+limited amount of artistic realization required to
+present to the mind of the spectator a situation or
+an allegory, had been obtained by Giotto himself, and
+bequeathed by him to his followers; who, finding it
+more than sufficient for their purposes, and having no
+incentive to further acquisition in the love of form
+and reality for their own sake, worked on with their
+master's materials, composing and recomposing, but
+adding nothing of their own. Giotto had observed
+Nature with passionate interest, because, although its
+representation was only a means to an end, it was a
+means which required to be mastered; and as such
+became in itself a sort of secondary aim; but the
+followers of Giotto merely utilized his observations
+of Nature, and in so doing gradually conventionalized
+and debased these second-hand observations. Giotto's
+forms are wilfully incomplete, because they aim at
+mere suggestion, but they are not conventional: they
+are diagrams, not symbols, and thence it is that Giotto
+seems nearer to the Renaissance than do his latest
+followers, not excepting even Orcagna. Painting,
+which had made the most prodigious strides from
+Giunta to Cimabue, and from Cimabue to Giotto, had
+got enclosed within a vicious circle, in which it moved
+for nearly a century neither backwards nor forwards:
+painters were satisfied with suggestion; and as long
+as they were satisfied, no progress was possible.
+From this Giottesque treadmill, painting was released
+by the intervention of another art. The painters were
+hopelessly mediocre; their art was snatched from them
+by the sculptors. Orcagna himself, perhaps the only
+Giottesque who gave painting an onward push, had
+modelled and cast one of the bronze gates of the
+Florence baptistery; the generation of artists who
+arose at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and
+who opened the period of the Renaissance, were
+sculptors or pupils of sculptors. When we see these
+vigorous lovers of nature, these heroic searchers after
+truth, suddenly pushing aside the decrepit Giottesque
+allegory-mongers, we ask ourselves in astonishment
+whence they have arisen, and how those broken-down
+artists of effete art could have begotten such a generation
+of giants. Whence do they come? Certainly
+not from the studios of the Giottesques. No, they issue
+out of the workshops of the stone-mason, of the
+goldsmith, of the worker in bronze, of the sculptor.
+Vasari has preserved the tradition that Masolino and
+Paolo Uccello were apprentices of Ghiberti; he has
+remarked that their greatest contemporary, Masaccio,
+"trod in the steps of Brunelleschi and of Donatello."
+Pollaiolo and Verrocchio we know to have been equally
+excellent as painters and as workers in bronze. Sculp-
+ture, at once more naturalistic and more constantly
+under the influence of the antique, had for the second
+time laboured for painting. Itself a subordinate art,
+without much vitality, without deep roots in the civilization,
+sculpture was destined to remain the unsuccessful
+pupil of the antique, and the unsuccessful
+rival of painting; but sculpture had for its mission to
+prepare the road for painting and to prepare painting
+for antique influence; and the noblest work of Ghiberti
+and Donatello was Masaccio, as the most lasting glory-
+to the Pisani had been Giotto.</p>
+
+<p>With Masaccio began the study of nature for its
+own sake, the desire of reproducing external objects,
+without any regard to their significance as symbols,
+or as parts of a story; the passionate wish to arrive
+at absolute realization. The merely suggestive outline
+art of the Giottesques had come to an end; the
+suggestion became a matter of indifference, the realization
+became a paramount interest; the story was
+forgotten in the telling, the religious thought was
+lost in the search for the artistic form. The Giottesques
+had used debased conventionalism to represent
+action with wonderful narrative and logical power;
+the artists of the early Renaissance became unskilful
+narrators and foolish allegorists almost in proportion
+as they became skilful draughtsmen and colourists;
+the saints had become to Masaccio merely so many
+lay figures on to which to cast drapery; for Fra Filippo
+the Madonna was a mere peasant model; for Filippino
+Lippi and for Ghirlandajo, a miracle meant merely an
+opportunity of congregating a number of admirable
+portrait figures in the dress of the day; the Baptism
+for Verrocchio had significance only as a study of
+muscular legs and arms; and the sacrifice of Noah
+had no importance for Uccello save as a grand opportunity
+for foreshortenings. In the hands of the
+Giottesques, interested in the subject and indifferent
+to the representation, painting had remained stationary
+for eighty years; for eighty years did it develope in
+the hands of the men of the fifteenth century, indifferent
+to the subject and passionately interested in
+the representation. The unity, the appearance of
+comparative perfection of the art had disappeared
+with the limits within which the Giottesques had
+been satisfied to move; instead of the intelligible
+and solemn conventionalism of the Giottesques, we
+see only disorder, half-understood ideas and abortive
+attempts, confusion which reminds us of those enigmatic
+sheets on which Leonardo or Michael Angelo
+scrawled out their ideas&mdash;drawings within drawings,
+plans of buildings scratched over Madonna heads,
+single flowers upside down next to flayed arms, calculations,
+monsters, sonnets; a very chaos of thoughts
+and of shapes, in which the plan of the artist is
+inextricably lost, which mean everything and nothing,
+but out of whose unintelligible network of lines and
+curves have issued masterpieces, and which only the
+foolish or the would-be philosophical would exchange
+for some intelligible, hopelessly finished and finite
+illustration out of a Bible or a book of travels.
+Anatomy, perspective, colour, drapery, effects of
+light, of water, of shadow, forms of trees and flowers,
+converging lines of architecture, all this at once absorbed
+and distracted the attention of the artists of
+the early Renaissance; and while they studied, copied,
+and calculated, another thought began to haunt them,
+another eager desire began to pursue them: by the side
+of Nature, the manifold, the baffling, the bewildering,
+there rose up before them another divinity, another
+sphinx, mysterious in its very simplicity and serenity
+&mdash;the Antique.</p>
+
+<p>The exhumation of the antique had, as we have
+seen, been contemporaneous with the birth of painting;
+nay, the study of the remains of antique sculpture
+had, in contributing to form Niccold Pisano, indirectly
+helped to form Giotto; the very painter of the Triumph
+of Death had inserted into his terrible fresco two-
+winged genii, upholding a scroll, copied without any
+alteration from some coarse Roman sarcophagus, in
+which they may have sustained the usual Dis Maniibus
+Sacrum. There had been, on the part of both sculptors
+and painters, a constant study of the antique; but during
+the Giottesque period this study had been limited to
+technicalities, and had in no way affected the conception
+of art. The medi&aelig;val artists, surrounded by
+physical deformities, and seeing sanctity in sickness
+and dirt, little accustomed to observe the human figure,
+were incapable, both as men and as artists, of at all
+entering into the spirit of antique art. They could
+not perceive the superior beauty of the antique; they
+could recognize only its superior science and its
+superior handicraft, and these alone they studied to
+obtain.</p>
+
+<p>Giovanni Pisano sculpturing the unfleshed, caried
+carcases of the devils who leer, writhe, crunch, and
+tear on the outside of Orvieto Cathedral; and the
+Giottesques painting those terrible green, macerated
+Christs, hanging livid and broken from the cross,
+which abound in Tuscany and Umbria; the artists
+who produced these loathsome and lugubrious works
+were indubitably students of the antique; but they
+had learned from it not a love for beautiful form and
+noble drapery, but merely the general shape of the
+limbs and the general fall of the garments: the
+anatomical science and technical processes of Antiquity
+were being used to produce the most intensely
+un-antique, the most intensely medi&aelig;val works. Thus
+matters stood in the time of Giotto. His followers,
+who studied only arrangement, probably consulted
+the antique as little as they consulted nature; but
+the contemporary sculptors were brought by the very
+constitution of their art into close contact both with
+Nature and with the antique; they studied both with
+determination, and handed over the results of their
+labours to the sculptor-taught painters of the fifteenth
+century.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, were the two great factors in the art of
+the Renaissance&mdash;the study of nature, and the study
+of the Antique: both understand slowly, imperfectly;
+the one counteracting the effect of the other; the
+study of nature now scaring away all antique influence,
+the study of the antique now distorting all imitation
+of nature; rival forces confusing the artist and marring
+the work, until, when each could receive its due, the
+one corrected the other, and they combined, producing
+by this marriage of the living reality with the dead
+but immortal beauty, the great art of Michael Angelo,
+of Raphael, and of Titian: double, like its origin,
+antique and modern, real and ideal.</p>
+
+<p>The study of the antique is thus placed opposite
+to the study of nature, the comprehension of the
+works of Antiquity is the momentary antagonist of
+the comprehension of the works of nature. And this
+may seem strange, when we consider that antique art
+was itself due to perfect comprehension of nature.
+But the contradiction is easily explained. The study
+of nature, as it was carried on in the Renaissance,
+comprised the study of effects which had remained
+unnoticed by Antiquity; and the study of the statue,
+--colourless, without light, shade, or perspective, hampered,
+and was hampered by, the study of colour, of
+light and shade, of perspective, and of all that a generation
+of painters would seek to learn from nature.
+Nor was this all; the influence of the civilization of
+the Renaissance, of a civilization directly issued from
+the Middle Ages, was entirely at variance with the
+influence of antique civilization through the medium
+of ancient art; the Middle Ages and Antiquity,
+Christianity and Paganism, were even more opposed
+to each other than could be the statue and the easel
+picture, the fresco and the bas-relief.</p>
+
+<p>First, then, we have the hostility between painting
+--and sculpture, between the modus operandi of the
+modern and the modus operandi of the ancient art.
+Antique art is, in the first place, purely linear art,
+&brvbar;colourless, tintless, without light and shade; next, it
+is essentially the art of the isolated figure, without
+background, grouping, or perspective. As linear art
+it could directly affect only that branch of painting
+which was itself linear; and as art of the isolated
+figure it was ever being contradicted by the constantly
+developing arts of perspective and landscape. The
+antique never directly influenced the Venetians, not
+from reasons of geography and culture, but from
+the fact that Venetian painting, founded from the
+earliest times upon a system of colour, could not be
+affected by antique sculpture, based upon a system of
+modelled, colourless form; the men who saw form only
+through the medium of colour could not learn much
+from purely linear form; hence it is that even after a
+certain amount of antique imitation had passed into
+Venetian painting, through the medium of Mantegna,
+the Venetian painters display comparatively little
+antique influence. In Bellini, Carpaccio, Cima, and
+other early masters, the features, forms, and dress are
+mainly modern and Venetian; and Giorgione, Titian,
+and even the eclectic Tintoret, were more interested
+in the bright lights of a steel breastplate than in the
+shape of a limb; and preferred in their hearts a shot
+brocade of the sixteenth century to the finest drapery
+ever modelled by an ancient.</p>
+
+<p>The antique influence was naturally strongest
+among the Tuscan schools; because the Tuscan
+schools were essentially schools of drawing, and the
+draughtsman recognized in antique sculpture the highest
+perfection of that linear form which was his own
+domain. Yet while the antique appealed most to the
+linear schools, even in these it could strongly influence
+only the purely linear part; it is strong in the drawings
+and weak in the paintings. As long as the
+artists had only the pencil or pen, they could reproduce
+much of the linear perfection of the antique;
+they were, so to speak, alone with it; but as soon as
+they brought in colour, perspective, and scenery, the
+linear perfection was lost in attempts at something
+new; the antique was put to flight by the modern.
+Botticelli's crayon study for his Venus is almost
+antique; his tempera picture of Venus, with the pale
+blue scaly sea, the laurel grove, the flower-embroidered
+garments, the wisps of tawny hair, is comparatively
+medi&aelig;val; Pinturicchio's sketch of Pans and satyrs
+contrasts strangely with his frescoes in the library of
+Siena; Mantegna himself, supernaturally antique in
+his engravings, becomes comparatively trivial and
+modern in his oil-paintings. Do what they might,
+draw from the antique and calculate its proportions,
+the artists of the Renaissance found themselves baffled
+as soon as they attempted to apply the result of then
+linear studies to coloured pictures; as soon as they
+tried to make the antique unite with the modern, one
+of the two elements was sure to succumb. In Botticelli,
+draughtsman and student though he was, the
+modern, the medi&aelig;val, that part of the art which had
+arisen in the Middle Ages, invariably had the upper
+hand; his Venus, despite her forms studied from the
+antique and her gesture imitated from some earlier
+discovered copy of the Medicean Venus, has the woe-
+begone prudery of a Madonna or of an abbess; she
+shivers physically and morally in her unaccustomed
+nakedness, and the goddess of Spring, who comes
+skipping up from beneath the laurel copse, does well
+to prepare her a mantle, for in the pallid tempera
+colour, against the dismal background of rippled sea,
+this medi&aelig;val Venus, at once indecent and prudish, is
+no very pleasing sight. In the Allegory of Spring in
+the Academy of Florence, we again have the antique;
+goddesses and nymphs whose clinging garments the
+gentle Sandro Botticelli has assuredly studied from
+some old statue of Agrippina or Faustina; but what
+strange livid tints are there beneath those draperies,
+what eccentric gestures are those of the nymphs, what
+a green, ghostlike light illumines this garden of
+Venus Are these goddesses and nymphs immortal
+women such as the ancients conceived, or are they not
+rather fantastic fairies or nixen, Titanias and Undines,
+incorporeal daughters of dew and gossamer and mist?
+In Sandro Botticelli the teachings of the statue are
+forgotten or distorted when the artist takes up his
+palette and brushes; in his greater contemporary,
+Andrea Mantegna, the ever-present antique chills and
+arrests the vitality of the modern. Mantegna, the
+pupil of the ancient marbles of Squarcione's workshop
+even more than the pupil of Donatello, studies for his
+paintings not from nature, but from sculpture; his
+figures are seen in strange projection and foreshortening,
+like figures in a high relief seen from below;
+despite his mastery of perspective, they seem hewn
+out of the background; despite the rich colours which
+he displays in his Veronese altar-piece, they look like
+painted marbles, with their hard clots of stonelike
+hair and beard, with their vacant glance and their
+wonderful draperies, clinging and weighty like the
+wet draperies of ancient sculpture. They are beautiful
+petrifactions, or vivified statues; Mantegna's masterpiece,
+the sepia "Judith" in Florence, is like an exquisite,
+pathetically lovely Eurydice, who has stepped
+unconscious and lifeless out of a Praxitelian bas-relief.
+And there are stranger works than even the Judith;
+strange statuesque fancies, like the fight of Marine
+Monsters and the Bacchanal among Mantegna's engravings.
+The group of three wondrous creatures, at
+once men, fish, and gods, is as grand and even more
+fantastic than Leonardo's Battle of the Standard: a
+Triton, sturdy and muscular, with sea-weed beard and
+hair, wheels round his finned horse, preparing to strike
+his adversary with a bunch of fish which he brandishes
+above him; on him is rushing, careering on an
+osseous sea-horse, a strange, lank, sinewy being, fury
+stretching every tendon, his long-clawed feet striking
+into the flanks of his steed, his sharp, reed-crowned
+head turned fiercely, with clenched teeth, on his opponent,
+and stretching forth a truncheon, ready to run
+down his enemy as a ship runs down another; and
+further off a young Triton, with clotted hair and
+heavy eyes, seems ready to sink wounded below the
+rippling wavelets, with the massive head and marble
+agony of the dying Alexander; enigmatic figures,
+grand and grotesque, lean, haggard, vehement, and
+yet, in the midst of violence and monstrosity, unaccountably
+antique.. The other print, called the
+Bacchanal, has no background: half a dozen male
+figures stand separate and naked as in a bas-relief.
+Some are leaning against a vine-wreathed tub; a
+satyr, with acanthus-leaves growing wondrously out of
+him, half man, half plant, is emptying a cup; a heavy
+Silenus is prone upon the ground; a faun, seated
+upon the vat, is supporting in his arms a beautiful
+sinking youth; another youth, grand, muscular, and
+grave as a statue, stands on the further side. Is this
+really a bacchanal? Yes, for there is the paunchy
+Silenus, there are the fauns, there the vat and vine-
+wreaths and drinking-horns. And yet it cannot be a
+bacchanal. Compare with it one of Rubens's orgies,
+where the overgrown, rubicund men and women and
+fauns tumble about in tumultuous, riotous intoxication:
+that is a bacchanal; they have been drinking,
+those magnificent brutes, there is wine firing their
+blood and weighing down their heads. But here all
+is different, in this so-called Bacchanal of Mantegna.
+This heavy Silenus is supine like a mass of marble;
+these fauns are shy and mute; these youths are grave
+and sombre; there is no wine in the cups, there are
+no lees in the vat, there is no life in these magnificent
+colossal forms; there is no blood in their grandly
+bent lips, no light in their wide-opened eyes; it is not
+the drowsiness of intoxication which is weighing
+down the youth sustained by the faun; it is no grapejuice
+which gives that strange, vague glance. No;
+they have drunk, but not of any mortal drink; the
+grapes are grown in Persephone's garden, the vat contains
+no fruits that have ripened beneath our sun.
+These strange, mute, solemn revellers have drunk of
+Lethe, and they are growing cold with the cold of
+death and of marble; they are the ghosts of the dead
+ones of antiquity, revisiting the artist of the Renaissance,
+who paints them, thinking he is painting life,
+while that which he paints is in reality death.
+This anomaly, this unsatisfactory character of the
+works of both Botticelli and Mantegna, is mainly
+technical; the antique is frustrated in Botticelli, not
+so much by the Christian, the medi&aelig;val, the modern
+mode of feeling, as by the new methods and aims of
+the new art which disconcert the methods and aims of
+the old art; and that which arrests Mantegna in his
+development as a painter is not the spirit of Paganism
+deadening the spirit of Christianity, but the laws of
+sculpture hampering painting. But this technical
+contest between two arts, the one not yet fully developed,
+the other not yet fully understood, is as nothing
+compared with the contest between the two civilizations,
+the antique and the modern; between the
+habits and tendencies of the contemporaries of the
+artists of the Renaissance and of the artists themselves,
+and the habits and tendencies of the antique
+artists and their contemporaries. We are apt to think
+of the Renaissance as of a period closely resembling
+antiquity, misled by the inevitable similarity between
+southern and democratic countries of whatever age;
+misled still less pardonably by the Ciceronian pedantries
+and pseudo-antique obscenities of a few humanists,
+nd by the pseudo-Corinthian arabesques and
+capitals of a few learned architects. But all this was
+mere arch&aelig;ological finery borrowed by a civilization
+in itself entirely unlike that of ancient Greece.
+The Renaissance, let us remember, was merely the
+flowering time of that great medi&aelig;val movement
+which had germinated early in the twelfth century; it
+was merely a more advanced stage of the civilization
+which had produced Dante and Giotto, of the civilization
+which was destined to produce Luther and Rabelais.
+The fifteenth century was merely the continuation
+of the fourteenth century, as the fourteenth had
+been of the thirteenth; there had been growth and
+improvement; development of the more modern,
+diminishing of the more medi&aelig;val elements; but,
+despite growth and the changes due to growth, the
+Renaissance was part and parcel of the Middle Ages.
+The life, thought, aspirations, and habits were medi&aelig;val;
+opposed to the open-air life, the physical training
+and the materialistic religion of Antiquity. The
+surroundings of Masaccio and of Signorelli, nay, even
+of Raphael, were very different from those of Phidias
+or Praxiteles. Let us think what were the daily and
+hourly impressions given by the Renaissance to its
+artists. Large towns, in which thousands of human
+beings were crowded together, in narrow, gloomy
+streets, with but a strip of blue visible between the
+projecting roofs; and in these cities an incessant
+commercial activity, with no relief save festivals at the
+churches, brawls at the taverns, and carnival buffooneries.
+Men and women pale and meagre for want of
+air, and light, and movement; undeveloped, untrained
+bodies, warped by constant work at the loom or at
+the desk, at best with the lumpish freedom of the
+soldier and the vulgar nimbleness of the prentice.
+And these men and women dressed in the dress of
+the Middle Ages, gorgeous perhaps in colour, but
+heavy, miserable, grotesque, nay, sometimes ludicrous
+in form; citizens in lumpish robes and long-tailed
+caps; ladies in stiff and foldless brocade hoops and
+stomachers; artizans in striped and close-adhering
+hose and egg-shaped padded jerkin; soldiers in lumbering
+armour-plates, ill-fitted over ill-fitting leather,
+a shapeless shell of iron, bulging out and angular, in
+which the body was buried as successfully as in the
+robes of the magistrates. Thus we see the men and
+women of the Renaissance in the works of all its
+painters: heavy in Ghirlandajo, vulgarly jaunty in
+Filippino, preposterously starched and prim in Mantegna,
+ludicrously undignified in Signorelli; while
+medi&aelig;val stiffness, awkwardness, and absurdity reach
+their acme perhaps in the little boys, companions of
+the Medici children, introduced into Benozzo Gozzoli's
+Building of Babel. These are the prosperous townsfolk,
+among whom the Renaissance artist is but too
+glad to seek for models; but besides these there are
+lamentable sights, medi&aelig;val beyond words, at every
+street corner: dwarfs and cripples, maimed and
+diseased beggars of all degrees of loathsomeness,
+lepers and epileptics, and infinite numbers of monks,
+brown, grey, and black, in sack-shaped frocks and
+pointed hoods, with shaven crown and cropped beard,
+emaciated with penance or bloated with gluttony.
+And all this the painter sees, daily, hourly; it is his
+standard of humanity, and as such finds its way into
+every picture. It is the living; but opposite it arises
+the dead. Let us turn aside from the crowd of the
+medi&aelig;val city, and look at what the workmen have
+just laid bare, or what the merchant has just brought
+from Rome or from Greece. Look at this: it is
+corroded by oxides, battered by ill-usage, stained with
+earth: it is not a group, not even a whole statue, it
+has neither head nor arms remaining; it is a mere
+broken fragment of antique sculpture,&mdash;a naked body
+with a fold or two of drapery; it is not by Phidias
+nor by Praxiteles, it may not even be Greek; it may
+be some cheap copy, made for a garden or a bath, in
+the days of Hadrian. But to the artist of the fifteenth
+century it is the revelation of a whole world, a world
+in itself. We can scarcely realize all this; but let us
+look and reflect, and even we may feel as must have
+felt the man of the Renaissance in the presence of
+that mutilated, stained, battered torso. He sees in
+that broken stump a grandeur of outline, a magnificence
+of osseous structure, a breadth of muscle and
+sinew, a smooth, firm covering of flesh, such as he
+would vainly seek in any of his living models; he
+sees a delicate and infinite variety of indentures, of
+projections, of creases following the bend of every
+limb; he sees, where the surface still exists intact, an
+elasticity of skin, a buoyancy of hidden life such as all
+the colours of his palette are unable to imitate; and
+in this piece of drapery, negligently gathered over the
+hips or rolled upon the arm, he sees a magnificent
+alternation of large folds and small plaits, of straight
+lines, and broken lines, and curves. He sees all this;
+but he sees more: the broken torso is, as we have
+said, not merely a world in itself, but the revelation
+of a world. It is the revelation of antique civilization,
+of the pal&aelig;stra and the stadium, of the sanctification
+of the body, of the apotheosis of man, of the religion
+of life and nature and joy; revealed to the man of the
+Middle Ages, who has hitherto seen in the untrained,
+diseased, despised body but a deformed piece of baseness,
+which his priests tell him belongs to the worms
+and to Satan; who has been taught that the monk
+living in solitude and celibacy, filthy, sick, worn out
+with fastings and bleeding with flagellation, is the
+nearest approach to divinity; who has seen Divinity
+itself, pale, emaciated, joyless, hanging bleeding from
+the cross; and who is for ever reminded that the
+kingdom of this Godhead is not of this world.
+What passes in the mind of that artist? What
+surprise, what dawning doubts, what sickening fears,
+what longings and what remorse are not the fruit of
+this sight of Antiquity? Is he to yield or to resist?
+Is he to forget the saints and Christ, and give himself
+over to Satan and to Antiquity? Only one man boldly
+answered, Yes. Mantegna abjured his faith, abjured
+the Middle Ages, abjured all that belonged to his
+time; and in so doing cast away from him the living
+art and became the lover, the worshipper of shadows.
+And only one man turned completely aside from the
+antique as from the demon, and that man was a saint,
+Fra Angelico da Fiesole. And with the antique, Fra
+Angelico rejected all the other artistic influences and
+aims of his time, the time not of Giotto or of Orcagna,
+but of Masaccio and Uccello, of Pollaiolo and Donatello.
+For the mild, meek, angelic monk dreaded the life of
+his days; dreaded to leave the cloister where the sunshine
+was tempered and the noise reduced to a mere
+faint hum, and where the flower-beds were tidy and
+prim; dreaded to soil or rumple his spotless white
+robe and his shining black cowl; a spiritual sybarite,
+shrinking from the sight of the crowd seething in the
+streets, shrinking from the idea of stripping the rags
+off the beggar in order to see his tanned and gnarled
+limbs; shuddering at the thought of seeking for
+muscles in the dead, cut-open body; fearful of every
+whiff of life that might mingle with the incense atmosphere
+of his chapel, of every cry of human passion
+which might break through the well-ordered sweetness
+of his chants. No; the Renaissance did not exist for
+him who lived in a world of diaphanous form, colour
+and character, unsubstantial and unruffled; dreaming
+feebly and sweetly of transparent-cheeked Madonnas
+with no limbs beneath their robes; of smooth-faced
+saints with well-combed beard and placid, vacant
+gaze, seated in well-ordered masses, holy with the
+purity of inanity; of divine dolls with pallid flaxen
+locks, floating between heaven and earth, playing
+upon lute and viol and psaltery; raised to faint
+visions of angels and blessed, moving noiseless, feelingless,
+meaningless, across the flowerets of Paradise;
+of assemblies of saints seated, arrayed in pure pink,
+and blue and lilac, in an atmosphere of liquid gold, in
+glory. And thus Fra Angelico worked on, content
+with the dearly purchased science of his masters,
+placid, beatic, effeminate, in an æsthetical paradise of
+his own, a paradise of sloth and sweetness, a paradise
+for weak souls, weak hearts, and weak eyes; patiently
+repeating the same fleshless angels, the same boneless
+saints, the same bloodless virgins; happy in smoothing
+the unmixed, unshaded tints of the sky, and earth,
+and dresses; laying on the gold of the fretted skies,
+and of the iridescent wings, embroidering robes, instruments
+of music, halos, flowers, with threads of
+gold.... Sweet, simple artist saint, reducing art to
+&mdash;something akin to the delicate pearl and silk embroidery
+of pious nuns, to the exquisite sweetmeat cookery
+of pious monks; a something too delicately gorgeous,
+too deliciously insipid for human wear or human food;
+no, the Renaissance does not exist for thee, either in
+its study of the existing reality, or in its study of
+antique beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Mantegna, the learned, the arch&aelig;ological, the pagan,
+who renounces his times and his faith; and Angelico,
+the monk, the saint, who shuts and bolts his monastery
+doors and sprinkles holy water in the face of the
+antique; the two extremes, are both exceptions. The
+innumerable artists of the Renaissance remained in
+hesitation; tried to court both the antique and the
+modern, to unite the Pagan and the Christian&mdash;some,
+like Ghirlandajo, in cold indifference to all but mere
+artistic science, encrusting marble bacchanals into the
+walls of the Virgin's paternal house, bringing together,
+unthinkingly, antique-draped women carrying baskets,
+and noble Strozzi and Ruccellai ladies with gloved
+hands folded over their gold brocaded skirts; others,
+with cheerful and childlike pleasure in both antique
+and modern, like Benozzo, crowding together half-
+naked youths and nymphs treading the grapes and
+scaling the trellise with Florentine magnificos in
+plaited skirts and starched collars, among the pines,
+and porticos, the sprawling children, barking dogs,
+peacocks sunning themselves, and partridges picking
+up grain, of his Pisan frescoes; yet others using the
+antique as mere pageant shows, allegorical mummeries,
+destined to amuse some Duke of Ferrara or Marquis
+of Mantua, together with the hurdle races of Jews,
+hags, and riderless donkeys.</p>
+
+<p>Thus little by little the antique amalgamates with
+the modern; the art born of the Middle Ages absorbs
+the art born of Paganism; but how slowly, and with
+what fantastic and ludicrous results at first; as when
+the anatomical sculptor Pollaiolo gives scenes of naked
+Roman prize-fighters as martyrdoms of St. Sebastian;
+or when the pious Perugino (pious at least with his
+brush) dresses up his sleek, hectic, beardless archangels
+as Roman warriors, and makes them stand, straddling
+beatically on thin little dapper legs, wistfully gazing
+from beneath their wondrously ornamented helmets
+on the walls of the Cambio at Perugia; when he
+masquerades meditative fathers of the Church as
+Socrates and haggard anchorites as Numa Pompilius;
+most ludicrous of all, when he attires in scantiest of
+--clinging antique drapery his mild and pensive Madonnas,
+and, with daintily pointed toes, places them
+to throne bashfully on allegorical chariots as Venus
+or Diana.</p>
+
+<p>Long is the period of amalgamation, and small are
+the results throughout that long early Renaissance.
+Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Melozzo, Ghirlandajo,
+Filippino, Botticelli, Verrocchio, have none
+of them shown us the perfect fusion of the two elements
+whose union is to give us Michael Angelo, Raphael,
+and all the great perfect artists of the early sixteenth
+century; the two elements are for ever ill-combined
+and hostile to each other; the modern vulgarizes the
+antique, the antique paralyzes the modern. And
+meanwhile the fifteenth century, the century of study,
+of conflict, and of confusion, is rapidly drawing to a
+close; eight or ten more years, and it will be gone.
+Is the new century to find the antique still dead and
+the modern still medi&aelig;val?</p>
+
+<p>The antique and the modern had met for the first
+time and as irreconcilable enemies in the cloisters of
+Pisa; and the modern had triumphed in the great
+medi&aelig;val fresco of the Triumph of Death.. By a
+strange coincidence, by a sublime jest of accident, the
+antique and the modern were destined to meet again,
+and this time indissolubly united, in a painting representing
+the Resurrection. Yes, Signorelli's fresco in
+Orvieto Cathedral is indeed a resurrection, the resurrection
+of human beauty after the long death-slumber
+of the Middle Ages. And the artist would seem to
+have been dimly conscious of the great allegory he
+was painting. Here and there are strewn skulls;
+skeletons stand leering by, as if in remembrance of
+the ghastly past, and as a token of former death; but
+magnificent youths are breaking through the crust of
+the earth, emerging, taking shape and flesh; arising,
+strong and proud, ready to go forth at the bidding of
+the Titanic angels who announce from on high with
+trumpet blast and waving banners, that the death of
+the world has come to an end, and that humanity
+has arisen once more in the youth and beauty of
+Antiquity.</p>
+
+<p>Signorelli's frescoes at Orvieto, at once the "latest
+works of the fifteenth century, and the latest works
+of an old man nurtured in the traditions of Benozzo
+Gozzoli and of Piero della Francesca, mark the beginning
+of the maturity and perfection of Italian art.
+From them Michael Angelo learns what he could not
+be taught even by his master Ghirlandajo, the grand
+and cold realist. He learns; and what he has learned
+at Orvieto he teaches with doubled force in Rome;
+and the ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel, the superb and
+heroic nudities, the majestic draperies, the reappearance
+in the modern art of painting of the spirit and hand
+of Phidias, give a new impulse and hasten on perfection.
+When the doors of the chapel are at length
+opened, Raphael forgets Perugino; Fra Bartolomeo
+forgets Botticelli; Sodoma forgets Leonardo; the
+narrower hesitating styles of the fifteenth century are
+abandoned, as the great example is disseminated
+throughout Italy; and even the tumult of angels in
+glory which the Lombard Correggio is to paint in
+far-off Parma, and the daringly simple Bacchus and
+Ariadne with which Tintoret will decorate the Ducal
+Palace more than fifty years later&mdash;all that is great
+and bold, all that is a re-incarnation of the spirit of
+Antiquity, all that marks the culmination of Renaissance
+art, seems due to the impulse of Michael Angelo,
+and, through him, to the example of Signorelli. From
+the celestial horseman and bounding avenging angels
+of Raphael's Heliodorus, to the St. Sebastian of
+Sodoma, with exquisite limbs and head, rich with
+tendril-like locks, delicate against the brown Umbrian
+sunset; from the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto seated,
+with the head and drapery of a Niobe, by the sack of
+flour in the Annunziata cloister, to the voluptuous
+goddess, with purple mantle half concealing her body
+of golden white, who leans against the sculptured
+fountain in Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, with the
+greenish blue sky and hazy light of evening behind
+her; from the most extreme examples of the most
+extreme schools of Lombardy and Venetia, to the
+most intense examples of the remotest schools of
+Tuscany and Umbria; throughout the art of the early
+sixteenth century, of those thirty years which were the
+years of perfection, we see, more or less marked, but
+always distinct, the union of the living art born of the
+Middle Ages with the dead art left by Antiquity, a
+union producing life and perfection, producing the
+great art of the Renaissance.</p>
+
+<p>This much is clear and easy of definition; but what
+is neither clearly understood nor easily defined is the
+nature of this union, the manner in which the antique
+and the modern did thus amalgamate. It is easy to
+speak of a vague union of spirit, of the antique idea
+having permeated the modern; but all this explains
+but little: art is not a metaphysical figment, and all its
+phases and revolutions are concrete, and, so to speak,
+physically explicable and definable. The union of
+the antique with the modern meant simply the absorption
+by the art of the Renaissance of elements of
+civilization necessary for its perfection, but not existing
+in the medieval civilization of the fifteenth century;
+of elements of civilization which gave what the civilization
+of the fifteenth century&mdash;which could give
+colour, perspective, grouping, and landscape&mdash;could
+never have afforded: the nude, drapery, and gesture.
+The naked human body, which the Greeks had
+trained, studied, and idolized, did not exist in the
+fifteenth century; in its stead there was only the undressed
+body, ill-developed, untrained, pinched, and
+distorted by the garments only just cast off; cramped
+and bent by sedentary occupations, livid with the
+plague-spots of the Middle Ages, scarred by the whipmarks
+of asceticism. This stripped body, unseen and
+unfit to be seen, unaccustomed to the air and to the
+eyes of others, shivered and cowered for cold and for
+shame. The Giottesques ignored its very existence,
+conceiving humanity as a bodiless creature, with face
+and hands to express emotion, and just enough malformed
+legs and feet to be either standing or moving;
+further, beneath the garments, there was nothing.
+The realists of the fifteenth century tore off the clothes
+and drew the ugly thing beneath; and bought the
+corpses from the lazar-houses, and stole them from
+the gallows; in order to see how bone fitted into bone,
+and muscle was stretched over muscle. They learned
+to perfection the anatomy of the human frame, but
+they could not learn its beauty; they became even
+reconciled to the ugliness they were accustomed to
+see; and, with their minds full of antique examples,
+Verrocchio, Donatello, Pollaiolo, and Ghirlandajo, the
+greatest anatomists of the fifteenth century, imitated
+their coarse and ill-made living models when they
+imagined that they were imitating antique marbles.
+So much for the nude. Drapery, as the ancients
+understood it in the delicate plaits of Greek chiton and
+tunic, in the grand folds of Roman toga, the fifteenth
+century could not show; it knew only the stiff, scanty
+raiment of the active classes; the shapeless masses of
+lined cloth of the merchants and magistrates; the
+prudish and ostentatious starched dress of the women;
+and the coarse, lumpish garb of the monks.
+The artist of the fifteenth century knew drapery
+only as an exotic, an exotic with whose representation
+the habit of seeing medi&aelig;val costume was for ever
+interfering; on the stripped, unseemly, indecent body
+he places, with the stiffness of artificiality, drapery
+such as he has never seen upon any living creature;
+the result is awkwardness and rigidity. And what
+attitude, what gesture, can he expect from this stripped
+and artificially draped model? None, for the model
+scarce knows how to stand in so unaccustomed a condition
+of body. The artist must seek for attitude and
+gesture among his townsfolk, and among them he can
+find only trivial, awkward, often vulgar movement.</p>
+
+<p>They have never been taught how to stand or to move
+with grace and dignity; the artist must study attitude
+and gesture in the market-place or the bull-baiting
+ground, where Ghirlandajo found his jauntily strutting
+idlers, and Verrocchio his brutally staggering prize-
+fighters. Between the constrained attitudinizing of
+Byzantine and Giottesque tradition, and the imitation
+of the movements of clodhoppers and ragamuffins,
+the realist of the fifteenth century would wander hopelessly
+were it not for the antique. Genius and science
+are of no avail; the position of Christ in baptism in
+the paintings of Verrocchio and Ghirlandajo is mean
+and servile; the movements of the "Thunder-stricken"
+in Signorelli's lunettes is an inconceivable mixture of the
+brutish, the melodramatic, and the comic; the magnificently
+drawn youth at the door of the prison in Filippino's
+Liberation of St. Peter is gradually going to sleep
+and collapsing in a fashion which is truly ignoble.
+And the same applies to sculptured figures or to
+figures standing isolated like statues; no Greek would
+have ventured upon the swaggering position, with
+legs apart and elbows out, of Donatello's St. George,
+or Perugino's St. Michael; and a young Athenian
+who should have assumed the attitude of Verrocchio's
+David, with tripping legs and hand clapped on his
+hip, would have been sent to sit in a corner as a saucy
+little ragamuffin.</p>
+
+<p>Coarse nude, stiff drapery, vulgar attitude, was all
+that the fifteenth century could offer to its artists;
+but Antiquity could offer more and very different
+things: the naked body developed by the most
+artistic training, drapery the most natural and refined,
+and attitude and gesture regulated by an education
+the most careful and artistic; and all these things
+Antiquity did give to the artists of the Renaissance.
+They did not copy antique statues as living naked men
+and women, but they corrected the faults of their
+living models by the example of the statues; they did
+not copy antique stone draperies in coloured pictures,
+but they arranged the robes on their models with the
+antique folds well in their memory; they did not give
+the gestures of statues to living figures, but they made
+the living figures move in accordance with those
+principles of harmony which they had found exemplified
+in the statues.</p>
+
+<p>They did not imitate the antique, they studied
+it; they obtained through the fragments of antique
+sculpture a glimpse into the life of antiquity, and that
+glimpse served to correct the vulgarism and distortion
+of the medi&aelig;val life of the fifteenth century. In the
+perfection of Italian painting, the union of antique
+and modern being consummated, it is perhaps difficult
+to disentangle what really is antique from what is
+modern; but in the earlier times, when the two elements
+were still separate, we can see them opposite each
+other and compare them in the works of the greatest
+artists. Wherever, in the paintings of the early Renaissance,
+there is realism, marked by the costume of
+the times, there is ugliness of form and vulgarity of
+movement; where there is idealism, marked by imitation
+of the antique, the nude, and drapery, there is
+beauty and dignity. We need only compare Filippino's
+Scene before the Proconsul with his Raising of
+the King's Son in the Brancacci Chapel; the grand
+attitude and draperies of Ghirlandajo's Zachariah
+with the vulgar dress and movements of the Florentine
+citizens surrounding him; Benozzo Gozzoli's noble
+naked figure of Noah with his ungainly, hideously
+dressed figure of Cosimo de' Medici; Mantegna's
+exquisite Judith with his preposterous Marquis of
+Mantua; in short, all the purely realistic with all the
+purely idealistic painting of the fifteenth century. We
+may give one last instance. In Signorelli's Orvieto
+frescoes there is a figure of a young man, with aquiline
+features, long crisp hair and strongly developed throat,
+which reappears unmistakably in all the compositions,
+and in some of them twice and thrice in various positions.
+His naked figure is magnificent, his attitudes
+splendid, his thrown-back head superb, whether he be
+slowly and painfully emerging from the earth, staggered
+and gasping with his newly infused life, or sinking
+oppressed on the ground, broken and crushed by the
+sound of the trumpet of judgment; or whether he be
+moving forward with ineffable longing towards the
+angel about to award him the crown of the blessed;
+in all these positions he is heroically beautiful. We
+meet him again, unmistakable, but how different, in the
+realistic group of the "Thunder-stricken"&mdash;the long,
+lank youth, with spindle-shanks and egg-shaped body,
+bounding forward, with most grotesque strides, over
+the uncouth heap of dead bodies, ungainly masses
+with soles and nostrils uppermost, lying in beast-like
+confusion. This youth, with something of a harlequin
+in his jumps and his ridiculous thin legs and preposterous
+round body, is evidently the model for the
+naked demi-gods of the Resurrection and the Paradise:
+he is the handsome boy as the fifteenth century
+gave him to Signorelli; opposite, he is the living
+youth of the fifteenth century idealized by the study
+of ancient sculpture; just as the "Thunder-stricken"
+may be some scene of street massacre such as Signorelli
+might have witnessed at Cortona or Perugia; while
+the agonies of the "Hell" are the grouped and superb
+agonies taught by the antique; just as the two arch-angels
+of the "Hell," in their armour of Baglioni's
+heavy cavalry, may represent the modern element,
+and the same archangels, naked, with magnificent flying
+draperies, blowing the trumpets of the Resurrection,
+may show the antique element in Renaissance art.
+The antique influence was not, indeed, equally
+strong throughout Italy; it was strongest in the
+Tuscan school, which, seeking for perfection of linear
+form, found that perfection in the antique; it was
+weakest in the Lombard and Venetian schools, which
+sought for what the antique could not give, light and
+shade and colour; the antique was most efficacious
+where it was most indispensable, and it was more
+necessary to a Tuscan, strong only with his charcoal
+or pencil, than to Leonardo da Vinci, who could make
+an imperfect figure, beckoning mysteriously from out
+of the gloom, more fascinating than the finest drawn
+Florentine Madonna, and could surround an insignificant
+childish head with the wondrous sheen and
+ripple of hair, as with an aureole of poetry; it was
+also less necessary to Giorgione and Titian, who
+could hide coarse limbs beneath their draperies of
+precious ruby, and transfigure, by the liquid gold of
+their palettes, a peasant woman into a goddess. But
+even the Lombards, even the Venetians, required the
+antique influence. They could not perhaps have
+obtained it direct like the Tuscans: the colourists
+and masters of light and shade might never have
+understood the blank lines and faint shadows of the
+marble; but they received the antique influence, strong
+but modified by the medium through which it had
+passed, from Mantegna; and the relentless self-sacrifice
+to Antiquity, the self-paralyzation of the great
+artist, was not without its use: from Venetian Padua,
+Mantegna influenced the Bellini and Giorgione; from
+Lombard Mantua, he influenced Leonardo; and Mantegna's
+influence was that of the antique.</p>
+
+<p>What would have been the art of the Renaissance
+without the antique? The speculation is vain, for
+the antique had influenced it, had been goading it on
+ever since the earliest times; it had been present at
+its birth, it had affected Giotto through Niccolo Pisano,
+and Masaccio through Ghiberti; the antique influence
+cannot be conceived as absent in the history of Italian
+painting. So far, as a study of the impossible, the
+speculation respecting the fate of Renaissance art had
+it not been influenced by the antique would be childishly
+useless. But lest we forget that this antique
+influence did exist, lest, grown ungrateful and blind,
+we refuse it its immense share in producing Michael
+Angelo, Raphael, and Titian, we may do well to turn
+to an art born and bred like Italian art, in the Middle
+Ages; like it, full of strength and power of self-
+development, but which, unlike Italian art, was not
+influenced by the antique. This art is the great
+German art of the early sixteenth century; the art
+of Martin Schongauer, of Aldegrever, of Altdorfer, of
+Wohlgemuth, of Kranach, of Albrecht Durer and
+Hans Holbein, whom they resemble as Pinturicchio
+and Lo Spagna resemble Perugino, as Palma and
+Paris Bordone resemble Titian. This is an art born
+in a civilization less perfect indeed than that of Italy,
+narrower, as N&uuml;rnberg or Basle is narrower than
+Florence; but resembling it in habits, dress, religion,
+above all, the main characteristic of being medi&aelig;val;
+and its masters, as great as their Italian contemporaries
+in all the technicalities of the art, and In
+absolute honesty of endeavour, may show what the
+Italian art of the sixteenth century might have been
+without the antique. Let us therefore open a port-
+folio of those wonderful minute yet grand engravings
+of the old Germans. They are for the most part
+Scriptural scenes or allegories, quite analogous to
+those of the Italians, but purely realistic, conscious
+of no world beyond that of an Imperial City of the
+year 1520. Here we have the whole turn-out, male
+and female, of a German free-town, in the shape of
+scenes from the lives of the Virgin and saints; here
+are short fat burghers, with enormous blotchy, bloated
+faces and little eyes set in fat, their huge stomachs
+protruding from under their jackets; here are blear-
+eyed ladies, tall, thin, wrinkled though not old, with
+figures like hungry harpies, stalking about in high
+headgears and stiff gowns, or sitting by the side of
+lean and stunted pages, singing (with dolorous voice)
+to lutes; or promenading under trees with long-
+shanked, high-shouldered gentlemen, with vacant
+sickly face and long scraggy hair and beard, their
+bony elbows sticking out of their slashed doublets.
+These courtly figures culminate in D&uuml;rer's magnificent
+plate of the wild man of the woods kissing the
+hideous, leering Jezebel in her brocade and jewels.
+These aristocratic women are terrible; prudish, malicious,
+licentious, never modest because they are
+always ugly. Even the poor Madonnas, seated in
+front of village hovels or windmills, smile the smile
+of starved, sickly sempstresses. It is a stunted,
+poverty-stricken, plague-sick society, this medi&aelig;val
+society of burghers and burghers' wives; the air
+seems bad and heavy, and the light wanting physically
+and morally, in these old free-towns; there is
+intellectual sickness as well as bodily in those musty
+gabled houses; the medi&aelig;val spirit blights what
+revival of healthiness may exist in these commonwealths.
+And feudalism is outside the gates. There
+are the brutal, leering men-at-arms, in slashed, puffed
+doublets and heavy armour, face and dress as unhuman
+as possible, standing grimacing at the blood
+spirting from John the Baptist's decapitated trunk,
+as in Kranach's horrible print, while gaping spectators
+fill the castle-yard; there are the castles high on
+rocks amidst woods, with miserable villages below,
+where the Prodigal Son wallows among the swine,
+and the tattered boors tumble about in drunkenness,
+or rest wearied on their spades. There are the Middle
+Ages in full force. But had these Germans of the
+days of Luther really no thought beyond their own
+times and their own country? Had they really no
+knowledge of the antique? Not so; they had heard
+from their learned men, from Willibald Pirkheimer
+and Ulrich von Hutten, that the world had once been
+peopled with naked gods and goddesses. Nay, the
+very year perhaps that Raphael handed to his engraver,
+Marc Antonio, his magnificent drawing of the
+Judgment of Paris, Lukas Kranach bethought him to
+represent the story of the good Knight Paris giving
+the apple to the Lady Venus. So Kranach took up
+his steady pencil and sharp chisel, and in strong, clear,
+minute lines of black and white showed us the scene.
+There, on Mount Ida, with a castellated rock in the
+distance, the charger of Paris browses beneath some
+stunted larches; the Trojan knight's helmet, with its
+monstrous beak and plume, lies on the ground; and
+near it reclines Paris himself, lazy, in complete armour,
+with frizzled fashionable beard. To him, all wrinkled
+and grinning with brutal lust, comes another bearded
+knight, with wings to his vizored helmet, Sir Mercury,
+leading the three goddesses, short, fat-cheeked German
+wenches, housemaids stripped of their clothes,
+stupid, brazen, indifferent. And Paris is evidently
+prepared with his choice: he awards the apple to the
+fattest, for among a half-starved, plague-stricken people
+like this, the chosen of gods and men must needs
+be the fattest.</p>
+
+<p>No, such pagan scenes are mere burlesques, coarse
+mummeries, such as may have amused N&uuml;rnberg and
+Augsburg during Shrovetide, when drunken louts
+figured as Bacchus and sang drinking songs by Hans
+Sachs. There is no reality in all this; there is no
+belief in pagan gods. If we would see the haunting
+divinity of the German Renaissance, we shall find
+him prying and prowling in nearly every scene of real
+life; him, the ever present, the king of the Middle
+Ages, whose triumph we have seen on the cloister
+wall at Pisa, the Lord Death. His fleshless face peers
+from behind a bush at Zatzinger's stunted, fever-
+stricken lady and imbecile gentleman; he sits grinning
+on a tree in Orso Grafs allegory, while the cynical
+knights, with haggard, sensual faces, crack dirty jokes
+with the fat, brutish woman squatted below; he puts
+his hand into the basket of D&uuml;rer's tattered pedlar;
+he leers hideously at the stirrup of D&uuml;rer's armed and
+stalwart knight. No gods of youth and nature, no
+Hercules, no Hermes, no Venus, have invaded his
+German territories, as they invaded even his own
+palace, the burial-ground at Pisa; the antique has
+not perverted D&uuml;rer and his fellows, as it perverted
+Masaccio and Signorelli and Mantegna, from the
+medi&aelig;val worship of Death.</p>
+
+<p>The Italians had seen the antique and had let themselves
+be seduced by it, despite their civilization and
+their religion. Let us only rejoice thereat. There
+are indeed some, and among them the great English
+critic who is irrefutable when he is a poet, and irrational
+when he becomes a philosopher;&mdash;there are
+some who tell us that in its union with antique art,
+the art of the followers of Giotto embraced death, and
+rotted away ever after. There are others, more moderate
+but less logical, who would teach us that in uniting
+with the antique, the medi&aelig;val art of the fifteenth
+century purified and sanctified the beautiful but evil
+child of Paganism; that the goddess of Scopas and
+the athlete of Polyclete were raised to a higher sphere
+when Raphael changed the one into a Madonna, and
+Michael Angelo metamorphosed the other into a
+prophet. But both schools of criticism are wrong.
+Every civilization has its inherent evil; Antiquity had
+its inherent evils, as the Middle Ages had theirs; Antiquity
+may have bequeathed to the Renaissance the
+bad with the good, as the Middle Ages had bequeathed
+to the Renaissance the good with the bad. But the
+art of Antiquity was not the evil, it was the good of
+Antiquity; it was born of its strength and its purity
+only, and it was the incarnation of its noblest qualities.
+It could not be purified, because it was spotless; it
+could not be sanctified, because it was holy. It could
+gain nothing from the art of the Middle Ages, alternately
+strong in brutal reality, and languid in mystic
+inanity; the men of the Renaissance could, if they
+influenced it at all, influence the antique only for evil;
+they belonged to an inferior artistic civilization, and
+if we conscientiously seek for the spiritual improvements
+brought by them into antique types, we shall
+see that they consist in spoiling their perfect proportions;
+in making necks longer and muscles more prominent;
+in rendering more or less flaccid, or meagre
+or coarse, the grand and delicate forms of antique
+art. And when we have examined into this purified
+art of the Renaissance, when we have compared coolly
+and equitably, we may perhaps confess that, while
+the Renaissance added immense wealth of beauty in
+colour, perspective, and grouping, it took away something
+of the perfection of simple lines and modest
+light and shade of the antique; we may admit to ourselves
+that the grandest saint by Raphael is meagre
+and stunted; and the noblest Virgin by Titian is overblown
+and sensual by the side of the demi-gods and
+amazons of antique sculpture.</p>
+
+<p>The antique perfected the art of the Renaissance,
+it did not corrupt it. The art of the Renaissance fell
+indeed into shameful degradation soon after the period
+of its triumphant union with the antique; and
+Raphael's grand gods and goddesses, his exquisite
+Eros and radiant Psyche of the Farnesina, are indeed
+succeeded but too soon by the Olympus of Giulio
+Romano, an Olympus of harlots and acrobats, who
+smirk and mouth and wriggle and sprawl ignobly on
+the walls and ceilings of the dismantled palace which
+crumbles away among the stunted willows, the stagnant
+pools, and rank grass of the marshes of Mantua.
+But this is no more the fault of Antiquity than it is
+the fault of the Middle Ages; it is the fault of that
+great principle of life and of change which makes all
+things organic, be they physical or intellectual, germinate,
+grow, attain maturity, and then fade, wither,
+and rot. The dead art of Antiquity could never have
+brought the art of the Renaissance to an untimely
+end; the art of the Renaissance decayed because it
+was mature, and died because it had lived.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Euphorion, by Vernon Lee
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+</html>
diff --git a/31303.txt b/31303.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Euphorion, by Vernon Lee
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Euphorion
+       Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the
+       Renaissance - Vol. I
+
+Author: Vernon Lee
+
+Release Date: February 17, 2010 [EBook #31303]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EUPHORION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marc D'Hooghe
+
+
+
+
+EUPHORION:
+
+BEING STUDIES OF THE ANTIQUE AND THE MEDIAEVAL IN THE RENAISSANCE
+
+BY
+
+VERNON LEE
+
+_Author of "Studies of the 18th Century in Italy," "Belcaro" etc._
+
+
+VOL. I.
+
+                WALTER PATER,
+IN APPRECIATION OF THAT WHICH, IN EXPOUNDING THE
+  BEAUTIFUL THINGS OF THE PAST, HE HAS ADDED TO
+      THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS OF THE PRESENT.
+
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS.
+
+
+Introduction
+The Sacrifice
+The Italy of the Elizabethan Dramatists
+The Out-Door Poetry
+Symmetria Prisca
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+     _Faustus is therefore a parable of the impotent yearnings of the
+     Middle Ages--its passionate aspiration, its conscience-stricken
+     desire, its fettered curiosity amid the tramping limits of
+     imperfect knowledge and irrational dogmatism. The indestructible
+     beauty of Greek art,--whereof Helen was an emblem, became, through
+     the discovery of classic poetry and sculpture, the possession of
+     the modern world. Mediaevalism took this Helen to wife, and their
+     offspring, the Euphorion of Goethe's drama, is the spirit of the
+     modern world._--J.A. Symonds, "Renaissance In Italy," vol. ii. p.
+     54.
+
+
+Euphorion is the name given by Goethe to the marvellous child born of
+the mystic marriage of Faust and Helena. Who Faust is, and who Helena,
+we all know. Faust, of whom no man can remember the youth or childhood,
+seems to have come into the world by some evil spell, already old and
+with the faintness of body and of mind which are the heritage of age;
+and every additional year of mysterious study and abortive effort has
+made him more vacillating of step and uncertain of sight, but only more
+hungry of soul. Postponed and repressed by reclusion from the world, and
+desperate tension over insoluble problems; diverted into the channels of
+mere thought and vision; there boils within him the energy, the passion,
+of retarded youth: its appetites and curiosities, which, cramped by the
+intolerant will, and foiled by many a sudden palsy of limb and mind,
+torment him with mad visions of unreal worlds, mock him with dreams of
+superhuman powers, from which he awakes in impotent and apathetic
+anguish. But these often-withstood and often-baffled cravings are not
+those merely of scholar or wizard, they are those of soldier and poet
+and monk, of the mere man: lawless desires which he seeks to divert, but
+fails, from the things of the flesh and of the world to the things of
+the reason; supersensuous desires for the beautiful and intangible,
+which he strives to crush, but in vain, with the cynical scepticism of
+science, which derides the things it cannot grasp. In this strange
+Faustus, made up of so many and conflicting instincts; in this old man
+with ever-budding and ever-nipped feelings of youthfulness, muddling the
+hard-won secrets of nature in search after impossibilities; in him so
+all-sided, and yet so wilfully narrowed, so restlessly active, yet so
+often palsied and apathetic; in this Faustus, who has laboured so much
+and succeeded in so little, feeling himself at the end, when he has
+summed up all his studies, as foolish as before--which of us has not
+learned to recognize the impersonated Middle Ages? And Helena, we know
+her also, she is the spirit of Antiquity. Personified, but we dare
+scarcely say, embodied; for she is a ghost raised by the spells of
+Faustus, a simulacrum of a thing long dead; yet with such continuing
+semblance of life, nay, with all life's real powers, that she seems the
+real, vital, living one, and Faustus yonder, thing as he is of the
+present, little better than a spectre. Yet Helena has been ages before
+Faust ever was; nay, by an awful mystery like those which involve the
+birth of Pagan gods, she whom he has evoked to be the mother of his only
+son has given, centuries before, somewhat of her life to make this
+self-same Faust. A strange mystery of Fate's necromancy this, and with
+strange anomalies. For opposite this living, decrepit Faust, Helena, the
+long dead, is young; and she is all that which Faust is not. Knowing
+much less than he, who has plunged his thoughts like his scalpel into
+all the mysteries of life and death, she yet knows much more, can tell
+him of the objects and aims of men and things; nay, with little more
+than the unconscious faithfulness to instinct of the clean-limbed,
+placid brute, she can give peace to his tormented conscience; and, while
+he has suffered and struggled and lashed himself for every seeming
+baseness of desire, and loathed himself for every imagined microscopic
+soiling, she has walked through good and evil, letting the vileness of
+sin trickle off her unhidden soul, so quietly and majestically that all
+thought of evil vanishes; and the self-tormenting wretch, with macerated
+flesh hidden beneath the heavy garments of mysticism and philosophy,
+suddenly feels, in the presence of her unabashed nakedness, that he,
+like herself, is chaste.
+
+Such are the parents, Faustus and Helena; we know them; but who is this
+son Euphorion? To me it seems as if there could be but one answer--the
+Renaissance. Goethe indeed has told us (though, with his rejuvenation of
+Faustus, unknown to the old German legend and to our Marlowe, in how
+bungling a manner!) the tale of that mystic marriage; but Goethe could
+not tell us rightly, even had he attempted, the real name of its
+offspring. For even so short a time ago, the Middle Ages were only
+beginning to be more than a mere historical expression, Antiquity was
+being only then critically discovered; and the Renaissance, but vaguely
+seen and quite unformulated by the first men, Gibbon and Roscoe, who
+perceived it at all, was still virtually unknown. To Goethe, therefore,
+it might easily have seemed as if the antique Helena had only just been
+evoked, and as if of her union with the worn-out century of his birth, a
+real Euphorion, the age in which ourselves are living, might have been
+born. But, at the distance of additional time, and from the undreamed-of
+height upon which recent historical science has enabled us to stand, we
+can easily see that in this he would have been mistaken. Not only is our
+modern culture no child of Faustus and Helena, but it is the complex
+descendant, strangely featured by atavism from various sides, of many
+and various civilizations; and the eighteenth century, so far from being
+a Faustus evoking as his bride the long dead Helen of Antiquity, was in
+itself a curiously varied grandchild or great-grandchild of such a
+marriage, its every moral feature, its every intellectual movement
+proclaiming how much of its being was inherited from Antiquity. No
+allegory, I well know, and least of all no historical allegory, can ever
+be strained to fit quite tight--the lives of individuals and those of
+centuries, their modes of intermixture, genesis, and inheritance are far
+different; but if an allegory is to possess any meaning at all, we must
+surely apply it wherever it will fit most easily and completely; and the
+beautiful allegory prepared by the tradition of the sixteenth century
+for the elaborating genius of Goethe, can have a real meaning only if we
+explain Faust as representing the Middle Ages, Helena as Antiquity, and
+Euphorion as that child of the Middle Ages, taking life and reality from
+them, but born of and curiously nurtured by the spirit of Antiquity, to
+which significant accident has given the name of Renaissance.
+
+After Euphorion I have therefore christened this book; and this not from
+any irrational conceit of knowing more (when I am fully aware that I
+know infinitely less) than other writers about the life and character of
+this wonderful child of Helena and Faustus, but merely because it is
+more particularly as the offspring of this miraculous marriage, and with
+reference to the harmonies and anomalies which therefrom resulted, that
+Euphorion has exercised my thoughts.
+
+The Renaissance has interested and interests me, not merely for what it
+is, but even more for what it sprang from, and for the manner in which
+the many things inherited from both Middle Ages and Renaissance, the
+tendencies and necessities inherent in every special civilization, acted
+and reacted upon each other, united in concord or antagonism; forming,
+like the gases of the chemist, new things, sometimes like and sometimes
+unlike themselves and each other; producing now some unknown substance
+of excellence and utility, at other times some baneful element, known
+but too well elsewhere, but unexpected here. But not the watching of the
+often tragic meeting of these great fatalities of inherited spirit and
+habit only: for equally fascinating almost has been the watching of the
+elaboration by this double-natured period of things of little weight,
+mere trifles of artistic material bequeathed to it by one or by the
+other of its spiritual parents. The charm for me--a charm sometimes
+pleasurable, but sometimes also painful, like the imperious necessity
+which we sometimes feel to see again and examine, seemingly uselessly,
+some horrible evil--the charm, I mean the involuntary compulsion of
+attention, has often been as great in following the vicissitudes of a
+mere artistic item, like the Carolingian stories or the bucolic element,
+as it has been in looking on at the dissolution of moral and social
+elements. And in this, that I have tried to understand only where my
+curiosity was awakened, tried to reconstruct only where my fancy was
+taken; in short, studied of this Renaissance civilization only as much
+or as little as I cared, depends all the incompleteness and irrelevancy
+and unsatisfactoriness of this book, and depends also whatever addition
+to knowledge or pleasure it may afford; Were I desirous of giving a
+complete, clear notion of the very complex civilization of the
+Renaissance, a kind of encyclopaedic atlas of that period, where (by a
+double power which history alone possesses) you could see at once the
+whole extent and shape of this historical territory, and at the same
+time, with all its bosses of mountain and furrows of valley, the exact
+composition of all its various earths and waters, the exact actual
+colour and shape of all its different vegetations, not to speak of its
+big towns and dotting villages;--were I desirous of doing this, I should
+not merely be attempting a work completely beyond my faculties, but a
+work moreover already carried out with all the perfection due to
+specially adapted gifts, to infinite patience and ingenuity,
+occasionally amounting almost to genius. Such is not at all within my
+wishes, as it assuredly would be totally without my powers.
+
+But besides such marvels of historic mapping as I have described, where
+every one can find at a glance whatever he may be looking for, and get
+the whole topography, geological and botanical, of an historic tract at
+his fingers' ends, there are yet other kinds of work which may be done.
+For a period in history is like a more or less extended real landscape:
+it has, if you will, actual, chemically defined colours in this and
+that, if you consider this and that separate and unaffected by any kind
+of visual medium; and measurable distances also between this point and
+the other, if you look down upon it as from a balloon. But, like a real
+landscape, it may also be seen from different points of view, and under
+different lights; then, according as you stand, the features of the
+scene will group themselves--this ridge will disappear behind that, this
+valley will open out before you, that other will be closed. Similarly,
+according to the light wherein the landscape is seen, the relative scale
+of colours and tints of objects, due to pervading light and to
+distances--what painters call the values--will alter: the scene will
+possess one or two predominant effects, it will produce also one or, at
+most, two or three (in which case co-ordinated) impressions. The art
+which deals with impressions, which tries to seize the real relative
+values of colours and tints at a given moment, is what you call
+new-fangled: its doctrines and works are still subject to the reproach
+of charlatanry. Yet it is the only truly realistic art, and it only, by
+giving you a thing as it appears at a given moment, gives it you as it
+really ever is; all the rest is the result of cunning abstraction, and
+representing the scene as it is always, represents it (by striking an
+average) as it never is at all. I do not pretend that in questions of
+history we can proceed upon the principles of modern landscape painting:
+we do not know what were the elevations which made perspective, what
+were the effects of light which created scales of tints, in that far
+distant country of the past; and it is safer certainly, and doubtless
+much more useful, to strike an average, and represent the past as seen
+neither from here nor from there, neither in this light nor that, and
+let each man imagine his historical perspective and colour value to the
+best of his powers. Yet it is nevertheless certain that the past, to the
+people who were in it, was not a miraculous map or other marvellous
+diagram constructed on the principle of getting at the actual qualities
+of things by analysis; that it must have been, to its inhabitants, but a
+series of constantly varied perspectives and constantly varied schemes
+of colour, according to the position of each individual, and the light
+in which that individual viewed it. To attempt to reconstruct those
+various perspective-making heights, to rearrange those various
+value-determining lights, would be to the last degree disastrous; we
+should have valleys where there existed mountains, and brilliant warm
+schemes of colour where there may have been all harmonies of pale and
+neutral tints. Still the perspective and colour valuation of individual
+minds there must have been; and since it is not given to us to reproduce
+those of the near spectator in a region which we can never enter, we may
+yet sometimes console ourselves for the too melancholy abstractness and
+averageness of scientific representations, by painting that distant
+historic country as distant indeed, but as its far-off hill ranges and
+shimmering plains really appear in their combination of form and colour,
+from the height of an individual interest of our own, and beneath the
+light of our individual character. We see only very little at a time,
+and that little is not what it appeared to the men of the past; but we
+see at least, if not the same things, yet in the same manner in which
+they saw, as we see from the standpoints of personal interest and in the
+light of personal temper. Scientifically we doubtless lose; but is the
+past to be treated only scientifically? and can it not give us, and do
+we not owe it, something more than a mere understanding of why and how?
+Is it a thing so utterly dead as to be fit only for the scalpel and the
+microscope?
+
+Surely not so. The past can give us, and should give us, not merely
+ideas, but emotions: healthy pleasure which may make us more light of
+spirit, and pain which may make us more earnest of mind; the one, it
+seems to me, as necessary for our individual worthiness as is the other.
+For to each of us, as we watch the past, as we lie passive and let it
+slowly circulate around us, there must come sights which, in their
+reality or in their train of associations, and to the mind of each
+differently, must gladden as with a sense of beauty, or put us all into
+a sullen moral ache. I should hate to be misunderstood in this more,
+perhaps, than in anything else in the world. I speak not of any dramatic
+emotion, of such egotistic, half-artistic pleasure as some may get from
+the alternation of cheerfulness and terror, from the excitement caused
+by evil from which we are as safely separated as are those who look on
+from the enfuriate bulls in an arena. To such, history, and the history
+especially of the Renaissance, has been made to pander up but too much.
+The pain I speak of is the pain which must come to every morally
+sentient creature with the contemplation of some one of the horrible
+tangles of evil, of the still fouler intermeshing of evil with good,
+which history brings up ever and anon. Evil which is past, it is true,
+but of which the worst evil almost of all, the fact of its having been,
+can never be past, must ever remain present; and our trouble and
+indignation at which is holy, our pain is healthy: holy and healthy,
+because every vibration of such pain as that makes our moral fibre more
+sensitive; because every immunity from such sensation deadens our higher
+nature: holy and healthy also because, just as no image of pleasurable
+things can pass before us without gathering about it other images of
+some beauty which have long lain by in each individual mind, so also no
+thought of great injustice of man or of accident, of signal whitewashing
+of evil or befouling of good, but must, in striking into our soul, put
+in motion there the salutary thought of some injustice or lying
+legitimation or insidious pollution, smaller indeed perhaps, but perhaps
+also nearer to ourselves.
+
+Be not therefore too hard upon me if in what I have written of the
+Renaissance, there is too little attempt to make matters scientifically
+complete, and too much giving way to personal and perhaps sometimes
+irrelevant impressions of pleasure and of pain; if I have followed up
+those pleasurable and painful impressions rather more than sought to
+discover the exact geography of the historical tract which gave them.
+Consider, moreover, that this very cause of deficiency may have been
+also the cause of my having succeeded in achieving anything at all.
+Personal impression has led me, perhaps, sometimes away from the direct
+road; but had it not beckoned me to follow, I should most likely have
+simply not stirred. Pleasant impression and painful, as I have said; and
+sometimes the painful has been more efficacious than the other. I do not
+know whether the interest which I have always taken in the old squabble
+of real and ideal has enabled me to make at all clearer the different
+characteristics of painting and sculpture in Renaissance portraiture,
+the relation of the art of Raphael to the art of Velasquez and the art
+of Whistler. I can scarcely judge whether the pleasure which I owe to
+the crowding together, the moving about in my fancy, of the heroes and
+wizards and hippogriffs of the old tales of Oberon and Ogier; the
+association with the knights and ladies of Boiardo and Ariosto, of this
+or that figure out of a fresco of Pinturicchio, or a picture by Dosso,
+has made it easier or more difficult for me to sum up the history of
+mediaeval romance in Renaissance Italy; nor whether the recollection of
+certain Tuscan farms, the well-known scent of the sun-dried fennel and
+mint under the vine-trellis, the droning song of the contadino ploughing
+or pruning unseen in the valley, the snatches of peasants' rhymes, the
+outlines of peasants' faces--things all these of this our own time, of
+yesterday or to-day; whether all this, running in my mind like so many
+scribbly illustrations and annotations along the margin of Lorenzo dei
+Medici's poems, has made my studies of rustic poetry more clear or more
+confused. But this much I know as a certainty, that never should I have
+tried to unravel the causes of the Renaissance's horrible anomaly of
+improvement and degradation, had not that anomaly returned and returned
+to make me wretched with its loathsome mixture of good and evil; its
+detestable alternative of endurance of vile solidarities in the souls of
+our intellectual forefathers, or of unjust turning away from the men and
+the times whose moral degradation paid the price of our moral dignity. I
+also have the further certainty of its having been this long-endured
+moral sickening at the sight of this moral anomaly, which enabled me to
+realize the feelings of such of our nobler Elizabethan playwrights as
+sought to epitomize in single tales of horror the strange impressions
+left by the accomplished and infamous Italy of their day; and which made
+it possible for me to express perhaps some of the trouble which filled
+the mind of Webster and of Tourneur merely by expressing the trouble
+which filled my own.
+
+The following studies are not samples, fragments at which one tries
+one's hand, of some large and methodical scheme of work. They are mere
+impressions developed by means of study: not merely currents of thought
+and feeling which I have singled out from the multifold life of the
+Renaissance; but currents of thought and feeling in myself, which have
+found and swept along with them certain items of Renaissance lore. For
+the Renaissance has been to me, in the small measure in which it has
+been anything, not so much a series of studies as a series of
+impressions. I have not mastered the history and literature of the
+Renaissance (first-hand or second-hand, perfectly or imperfectly),
+abstract and exact, and then sought out the places and things which
+could make that abstraction somewhat more concrete in my mind; I have
+seen the concrete things, and what I might call the concrete realities
+of thought and feeling left behind by the Renaissance, and then tried to
+obtain from books some notion of the original shape and manner of
+wearing these relics, rags and tatters of a past civilization.
+
+For Italy, beggared and maimed (by her own unthrift, by the rapacity of
+others, by the order of Fate) at the beginning of the sixteenth century,
+was never able to weave for herself a new, a modern civilization, as did
+the nations who had shattered her looms on which such woofs are made,
+and carried off her earnings with which such things may be bought; and
+she had, accordingly, to go through life in the old garments, still half
+mediaeval in shape, which had been fashioned for her during the
+Renaissance: apparel of the best that could then be made, beautiful and
+strong in many ways, so beautiful and strong indeed as to impose on
+people for a good long time, and make French, and Germans, and
+Spaniards, and English believe (comparing these brilliant tissues with
+the homespun they were providing for themselves) that it must be all
+brand new, and of the very latest fashion. But the garments left to
+Italy by those latest Middle Ages which we call Renaissance, were not
+eternal: wear and tear, new occupations, and the rough usage of other
+nations, rent them most sorely; their utter neglect by the long
+seventeenth century, their hasty patchings up (with bits of odd stuff
+and all manner of coloured thread and string, so that a harlequin's
+jacket could not look queerer) by the happy-go-lucky practicalness of
+the eighteenth century and the Revolution, reduced them thoroughly to
+rags; and with these rags of Renaissance civilization, Italy may still
+be seen to drape herself. Not perhaps in the great centres, where the
+garments of modern civilization, economical, unpicturesque, intended to
+be worn but a short time, have been imported from other countries; but
+yet in many places. Yes, you may still see those rags of the Renaissance
+as plainly as you see the tattered linen fluttering from the twisted
+iron hooks (made for the display of precious brocades and carpets on
+pageant days) which still remain in the stained whitewash, the seams of
+battered bricks of the solid old escutcheoned palaces; see them
+sometimes displayed like the worm-eaten squares of discoloured
+embroidery which the curiosity dealers take out of their musty oak
+presses; and sometimes dragging about mere useless and befouled odds and
+ends, like the torn shreds which lie among the decaying kitchen refuse,
+the broken tiles and plaster, the nameless filth and ooze which attracts
+the flies under every black archway, in every steep bricked lane
+descending precipitously between the high old houses. Old palaces,
+almost strongholds, and which are still inhabited by those too poor to
+pull them down and build some plastered bandbox instead; poems and prose
+tales written or told five hundred years ago, edited and re-edited by
+printers to whom there come no modern poems or prose tales worth editing
+instead; half-pagan, mediaeval priest lore, believed in by men and women
+who have not been given anything to believe instead; easy-going,
+all-permitting fifteenth century scepticism, not yet replaced by the
+scientific and socialistic disbelief which is puritanic and
+iconoclastic; sly and savage habits of vengeance still doing service
+among the lower classes instead of the orderly chicanery of modern
+justice;--these are the things, and a hundred others besides, concrete
+and spiritual, things too magnificent, too sordid, too irregular, too
+nauseous, too beautiful, and, above all, too utterly unpractical and
+old-fashioned for our times, which I call the rags of the Renaissance,
+and with which Italy still ekes out her scanty apparel of modern
+thoughts and things.
+
+It is living among such things, turn by turn delighted by their beauty
+and offended by their foulness, that one acquires the habit of spending
+a part only of one's intellectual and moral life in the present, and the
+rest in the past. Impressions are not derived from description, and
+thoughts are not suggested by books. The juxtaposition of concrete
+objects invites the making of a theory as the jutting out of two
+branches invites the spinning of a spider's web. You find everywhere
+your facts without opening a book. The explanation which I have tried to
+give of the exact manner in which mediaeval art was influenced by the
+remains of antiquity, came like a flash during a rainy morning in the
+Pisan Campo Santo; the working out and testing of that explanation in
+its details was a matter of going from one church or gallery to the
+other, a reference or two to Vasari for some date or fact being the only
+necessary reading; and should any one at this moment ask me for
+substantiation of that theory, instead of opening books I would take
+that person to this Sienese Cathedral, and there bid him compare the
+griffins and arabesques, the delicate figure and foliage ornaments
+carved in wood and marble by the latter Middle Ages, with the griffins
+and arabesques, the boldly bossed horsemen, the exquisite fruit garlands
+of a certain antique altar stone which the builders of the church used
+as a base to a pillar, and which must have been a never-ceasing-object
+of study to every draughtsman and stoneworker in Siena.
+
+Nor are such everywhere-scattered facts ready for working into theoretic
+shape, the most which Italy still affords to make the study of the
+Renaissance an almost involuntary habit. In certain places where only
+decay has altered things from what they were four centuries ago,
+Perugia, Orvieto, S. Gimignano, in the older quarters of Florence,
+Venice, and Verona, but nowhere I think so much as in this city of Siena
+(as purely mediaeval as the suits of rusted armour which its townsfolk
+patch up and bury themselves in during their August pageants), we are
+subjected to receive impressions of the past so startlingly lifelike as
+to get quite interwoven with our impressions of the present; and from
+that moment the past must share, in a measure, some of the everyday
+thoughts which we give to the present. In such a city as this, the
+sudden withdrawal, by sacristan or beggar-crone, of the curtain from
+before an altar-piece is many a time much more than the mere displaying
+of a picture: it is the sudden bringing us face to face with the real
+life of the Renaissance. We have ourselves, perhaps not an hour before,
+sauntered through squares and dawdled beneath porticos like those which
+we see filled with the red-robed and plumed citizens and patricians, the
+Jews and ruffians whom Pinturicchio's parti-coloured men-at-arms are
+dispersing to make room for the followers of AEneas Sylvius; or clambered
+up rough lanes, hedged in between oak woods and oliveyards, which we
+might almost swear were the very ones through which are winding Sodoma's
+cavalcades of gallantly dressed gentlemen, with their hawks and hounds,
+and negro jesters and apes and beautiful pages, cantering along on
+shortnecked little horses with silver bits and scarlet trappings, on the
+pretence of being the Kings from the East, carrying gold and myrrh to
+the infant Christ. It seems as if all were astoundingly real, as if, by
+some magic, we were actually going to mix in the life of the past. But
+it is in reality but a mere delusion, a deceit like those dioramas which
+we have all been into as children, and where, by paying your shilling,
+you were suddenly introduced into an oasis of the desert, or into a
+recent battle-field: things which surprised us, real palm trunks and
+Arabian water jars, or real fascines and cannon balls, lying about for
+us to touch; roads opening on all sides into this simulated desert,
+through this simulated battle-field. So also with these seeming
+realities of Renaissance life. We can touch the things scattered on the
+foreground, can handle the weapons, the furniture, the books and musical
+instruments; we can see, or think we see, most plainly the streets and
+paths, the faces and movements of that Renaissance world; but when we
+try to penetrate into it, we shall find that there is but a slip of
+solid ground beneath us, that all around us is but canvas and painted
+wall, perspectived and lit up by our fancy; and that when we try to
+approach to touch one of those seemingly so real men and women, our eyes
+find only daubs of paint, our hands meet only flat and chilly stucco.
+Turn we to our books, and seek therein the spell whereby to make this
+simulacrum real; and I think the plaster will still remain plaster, the
+stones still remain stone. Out of the Renaissance, out of the Middle
+Ages, we must never hope to evoke any spectres which can talk with us
+and we with them; nothing of the kind of those dim but familiar ghosts,
+often grotesque rather than heroic, who come to us from out of the
+books, the daubed portraits of times nearer our own, and sit opposite
+us, making us laugh, and also cry, with humdrum stories and humdrum woes
+so very like our own. No; such ghosts the Renaissance has not left
+behind it. From out of it there come to us no familiars. They are all
+faces--those which meet us in the pages of chronicles and in the frames
+of pictures: they are painted records of the past--we may understand
+them by scanning well their features, but they cannot understand, they
+cannot perceive us. Such, when all is said, are my impressions of the
+Renaissance. The moral atmosphere of those days is as impossible for us
+to breathe as would be the physical atmosphere of the moon: could we,
+for a moment, penetrate into it, we should die of asphyxia. Say what we
+may against both Protestant reformation and Catholic reaction, these two
+began to make an atmosphere (pure or foul) different from that of the
+Middle Ages and the Renaissance, an atmosphere in which lived creatures
+like ourselves, into which ourselves might penetrate.
+
+A crotchet this, perhaps, of my own; but it is my feeling, nevertheless.
+The Renaissance is, I say again, no period out of which we must try and
+evoke ghostly companions. Let us not waste our strength in seeking to do
+so; but be satisfied if it teaches us strange truths, scientific and
+practical; if its brilliant and solemn personalities, its bright and
+majestic art can give us pleasure; if its evils and wrongs, its
+inevitable degradation, can move us to pity and to indignation.
+
+Siena, _September_, 1882.
+
+
+
+THE SACRIFICE.
+
+
+     Ihr fuehrt ins Leben uns hinein;
+     Ihr laesst den armen schuldig werden;
+     Dann uebergiebt Ihr ihm der Pein,
+     Denn alle Schuld raecht sich auf Erden.
+
+
+At the end of the fifteenth century, Italy was the centre of European
+civilization: while the other nations were still plunged in a feudal
+barbarism which seems almost as far removed from all our sympathies as
+is the condition of some American or Polynesian savages, the Italians
+appear to us as possessing habits of thought, a mode of life, political,
+social, and literary institutions, not unlike those of to-day; as men
+whom we can thoroughly understand, whose ideas and aims, whose general
+views, resemble our own in that main, indefinable characteristic of
+being modern. They had shaken off the morbid monastic ways of feeling,
+they had thrown aside the crooked scholastic modes of thinking, they had
+trampled under foot the feudal institutions of the Middle Ages; no
+symbolical mists made them see things vague, strange, and distorted;
+their intellectual atmosphere was as clear as our own, and, if they saw
+less than we do, what they did see appeared to them in its true shape
+and proportions. Almost for the first time since the ruin of antique
+civilization, they could show well-organized, well-defined States;
+artistically disciplined armies; rationally devised laws; scientifically
+conducted agriculture; and widely extended, intelligently undertaken
+commerce. For the first time, also, they showed regularly built,
+healthy, and commodious towns; well-drained fields; and, more important
+than all, hundreds of miles of country owned not by feudal lords, but by
+citizens; cultivated not by serfs, but by free peasants. While in the
+rest of Europe men were floundering among the stagnant ideas and
+crumbling institutions of the effete Middle Ages, with but a vague
+half-consciousness of their own nature, the Italians walked calmly
+through a life as well arranged as their great towns, bold, inquisitive,
+and sceptical: modern administrators, modern soldiers, modern
+politicians, modern financiers, scholars, and thinkers. Towards the end
+of the fifteenth century, Italy seemed to have obtained the philosophic,
+literary, and artistic inheritance of Greece; the administrative, legal,
+and military inheritance of Rome, increased threefold by her own strong,
+original, essentially modern activities.
+
+Yet, at that very time, and almost in proportion as all these advantages
+developed, the moral vitality of the Italians was rapidly decreasing,
+and a horrible moral gangrene beginning to spread: liberty was
+extinguished; public good faith seemed to be dying out; even private
+morality flickered ominously; every free State became subject to a
+despot, always unscrupulous and often infamous; warfare became a mere
+pretext for the rapine and extortions of mercenaries; diplomacy grew to
+be a mere swindle; the humanists inoculated literature with the
+filthiest refuse cast up by antiquity; nay, even civic and family ties
+were loosened; assassinations and fratricides began to abound, and all
+law, human and divine, to be set at defiance.
+
+The nations who came into contact with the Italians opened their eyes
+with astonishment, with mingled admiration and terror; and we, people of
+the nineteenth century, are filled with the same feeling, only much
+stronger and more defined, as we watch the strange ebullition of the
+Renaissance, seething with good and evil, as we contemplate the
+enigmatic picture drawn by the puzzled historian, the picture of a
+people moving on towards civilization and towards chaos. Our first
+feeling is perplexity; our second feeling, anger; we do not at first
+know whether we ought to believe in such an anomaly; when once we do
+believe in it, we are indignant at its existence. We accuse these
+Italians of the Renaissance of having wilfully and shamefully perverted
+their own powers, of having wantonly corrupted their own civilization,
+of having cynically destroyed their own national existence, of having
+boldly called down the vengeance of Heaven; we lament and we accuse,
+naturally enough, but perhaps not justly.
+
+Let us ask ourselves what the Renaissance really was, and what was its
+use; how it was produced, and how it necessarily ended. Let us try to
+understand its inherent nature, and the nature of what surrounded it,
+which, taken together, constitute its inevitable fate; let us seek the
+explanation of that strange, anomalous civilization, of that life in
+death, and death in life. The Renaissance, inasmuch as it is something
+which we can define, and not a mere vague name for a certain epoch, is
+not a period, but a condition; and if we apply the word to any period in
+particular, it is because in it that condition was peculiarly marked.
+
+The Renaissance may be defined as being that phase in mediaeval history
+in which the double influence, feudal and ecclesiastic, which had
+gradually crushed the spontaneous life of the early mediaeval revival,
+and reduced all to a dead, sterile mass, was neutralized by the
+existence of democratic and secular communities; that phase in which,
+while there existed not yet any large nations, or any definite national
+feeling, there existed free towns and civic democracies. In this sense
+the Renaissance began to exist with the earliest mediaeval revival, but
+its peculiar mission could be carried out only when that general revival
+had come to an end. In this sense, also, the Renaissance did not exist
+all over Italy, and it existed outside Italy; but in Italy it was far
+more universal than elsewhere: there it was the rule, elsewhere the
+exception. There was no Renaissance in Savoy, nor in Naples, nor even in
+Rome; but north of the Alps there was Renaissance only in individual
+towns like Nuernberg, Augsburg, Bruges, Ghent, &c. In the North the
+Renaissance is dotted about amidst the stagnant Middle Ages; in Italy
+the Middle Ages intersect and interrupt the Renaissance here and there:
+the consequence was that in the North the Renaissance was crushed by the
+Middle Ages, whereas in Italy the Middle Ages were crushed by the
+Renaissance. Wherever there was a free town, without direct dependence
+on feudal or ecclesiastical institutions, governed by its own citizens,
+subsisting by its own industry and commerce; wherever the burghers built
+walls, slung chains across their streets, and raised their own
+cathedral; wherever, be it in Germany, in Flanders, or in England, there
+was a suspension of the deadly influences of the later Middle Ages;
+there, to greater or less extent, was the Renaissance.
+
+But in the North this rudimentary Renaissance was never suffered to
+spread beyond the walls of single towns; it was hemmed in on all sides
+by feudal and ecclesiastical institutions, which restrained it within
+definite limits. The free towns of Germany were mostly dependent upon
+their bishops or archbishops; the more politically important cities of
+Flanders were under the suzerainty of a feudal family; they were subject
+to constant vexations from their suzerains, and their very existence was
+endangered by an attempt at independence; Liege was well-nigh destroyed
+by the supporters of her bishop, and Ghent was ruined by the revenge of
+the Duke of Burgundy. In these northern cities, therefore, the
+commonwealth was restricted to a sort of mercantile
+corporation--powerful within the town, but powerless without it; while
+outside the town reigned feudalism, with its robber nobles, free
+companies, and bands of outlawed peasants, from whom the merchant
+princes of Bruges and Nuernberg could scarcely protect their wares. To
+this political feebleness and narrowness corresponded an intellectual
+weakness and pettiness: the burghers were mere self-ruling tradesfolk;
+their interests did not extend far beyond their shops and their houses;
+literature was cramped in guilds, and reflection and imagination were
+confined within the narrow limits of town life. Everything was on a
+small scale; the Renaissance was moderate and inefficient, running no
+great dangers and achieving no great conquests. There was not enough
+action to produce reaction; and, while the Italian free States were
+ground down by foreign tyrannies, the German and Flemish cities
+insensibly merged into the vast empire of the House of Austria. While
+also the Italians of the sixteenth century rushed into moral and
+religious confusion, which only Jesuitism could discipline, the Germans
+of the same time quietly and comfortably adopted the Reformation.
+
+The main cause of this difference, the main explanation of the fact that
+while in the North the Renaissance was cramped and enfeebled, in Italy
+it carried everything before it, lies in the circumstance that feudalism
+never took deep root in Italy. The conquered Latin race was enfeebled,
+it is true, but it was far more civilized than the conquering Teutonic
+peoples; the Barbarians came down, not on to a previous layer of
+Barbarians, but on to a deep layer of civilized men; the nomads of the
+North found in Italy a people weakened and corrupt, but with a long and
+inextinguishable habit of independence, of order, of industry. The
+country had been cultivated for centuries, the Barbarians could not turn
+it into a desert; the inhabitants had been organized as citizens for a
+thousand years, the Barbarians could not reorganize them feudally. The
+Barbarians who settled in Italy, especially the latest of them, the
+Lombards, were not only in a minority, but at an immense disadvantage.
+They founded kingdoms and dukedoms, where German was spoken and German
+laws were enacted; but whenever they tried to communicate with their
+Italian subjects, they found themselves forced to adopt the Latin
+language, manners, and laws; their domination became real only in
+proportion as it ceased to be Teutonic, and the Barbarian element was
+swallowed up by what remained of Roman civilization. Little by little
+these Lombard monarchies, without roots in the soil, and surrounded by
+hostile influences, died out, and there remained of the invaders only a
+certain number of nobles, those whose descendants were to bear the
+originally German names of Gherardesca, Rolandinghi, Soffredinghi,
+Lambertazzi, Guidi, and whose suzerains were the Bavarian and Swabian
+dukes and marquises of Tuscan. Meanwhile the Latin element revived;
+towns were rebuilt; a new Latin language was formed; and the burghers of
+these young communities gradually wrested franchises and privileges from
+the weak Teutonic rulers, who required Italian agriculture, industry,
+and commerce, without which they and their feudal retainers would have
+starved. Feudalism became speedily limited to the hilly country; the
+plain became the property of the cities which it surrounded; the nobles
+turned into mere robber chieftains, then into mercenary soldiers, and
+finally, as the towns gained importance, they gradually descended into
+the cities and begged admission into the guilds of artizans and
+tradesfolk. Thus they grew into citizens and Italians; but for a long
+time they kept hankering after feudalism, and looking towards the German
+emperors who claimed the inheritance of the Lombard kings. The struggle
+between Guelphs and Ghibellines, between the German feudal element and
+the Latin civic one, ended in the complete annihilation of the former in
+all the north and centre of Italy. The nobles sank definitely into
+merchants, and those who persisted in keeping their castles were
+speedily ousted by the commissaries of the free towns. Such is the
+history of feudalism in Italy--the history of Barbarian minority
+engulphed in Latin civilization; of Teutonic counts and dukes turned
+into robber nobles, hunted into the hills by the townsfolk, and finally
+seeking admission into the guilds of wool-spinners or money-changers;
+and in it is the main explanation of the fact that the Italian
+republics, instead of remaining restricted within their city walls like
+those of the North, spread over whole provinces, and became real
+politically organized States. And in such States having a free
+political, military, and commercial life, uncramped by ecclesiastic or
+feudal influence, in them alone could the great revival of human
+intelligence and character thoroughly succeed. The commune was the only
+species of free government possible during the Middle Ages, the only
+form which could resist that utterly prostrating action of later
+mediaevalism. Feudalism stamped out civilization; monasticism warped it;
+in the open country it was burnt, trampled on, and uprooted; in the
+cloister it withered and shrank and perished; only within the walls of a
+city, protected from the storm without, and yet in the fresh atmosphere
+of life, could it develope, flourish, and bear fruit.
+
+But this system of the free town contained in itself, as does every
+other institution, the seed of death--contained it in that expanding
+element which developes, ripens, rots, and finally dissolves all living
+organisms. A little town is formed in the midst of some feudal state, as
+Pisa, Florence, Lucca, and Bologna were formed in the dominions of the
+lords of Tuscany; the _elders_ govern it; it is protected from without;
+it obtains privileges from its suzerain, always glad to oppose anything
+to his vassals, and who, unlike them, is too far removed in the feudal
+scale to injure the commune, which is under his supreme jurisdiction but
+not in his land. The town can thus develope regularly, governing itself,
+taxing itself, defending itself against encroaching neighbours; it
+gradually extends beyond its own walls, liberates its peasantry, extends
+its commerce, extinguishes feudalism, beats back its suzerain or buys
+privileges from him; in short, lives the vigorous young life of the
+early Italian commonwealths. But now the danger begins. The original
+system of government, where every head of a family is a power in the
+State, where every man helps to govern, without representation or
+substitution, could exist only as long as the commune remained small
+enough for the individual to be in proportion with it; as long as the
+State remained small enough for all its citizens to assemble in the
+market-place and vote, for every man to know every detail of the
+administration, every inch of the land. When the limits were extended,
+the burgher had to deal with towns and villages and men and things which
+he did not know, and which he probably hated, as every small community
+hated its neighbour; witness the horrible war, lasting centuries,
+between the two little towns of Dinant and Bouvines on the Meuse. Still
+more was this the case with an important city: the subjugated town was
+hated all the more for being a rival centre; the burghers of Florence,
+inspired only by their narrow town interest, treated Pisa according to
+its dictates, that is, tried to stamp it out. Thence the victorious
+communes came to be surrounded by conquered communes, which they dared
+not trust with any degree of power; and which, instead of being so many
+allies in case of invasion, were merely focuses of revolt, or at best
+inert impediments. Similarly, when the communes enlarged, and found it
+indispensable to delegate special men, who could attend to political
+matters more thoroughly than the other citizens, they were constantly
+falling under the tyranny of their _captains of the people_, of their
+_gonfalonieri_, and of all other heads of the State; or else, as in
+Florence, they were frightened by this continual danger into a system of
+perpetual interference with the executive, which was thus rendered
+well-nigh helpless. To this rule Venice forms the only exception, on
+account of her exceptional position and history: the earliest burghers
+turning into an intensely conservative and civic aristocracy, while
+everywhere else the feudal nobles turned into petty burghers, entirely
+subversive of communal interests. Venice had the yet greater safeguard
+of being protected both from her victorious enemies and her own
+victorious generals; who, however powerful on the mainland, could not
+seriously endanger the city itself, which thus remained a centre of
+reorganization in time of disaster. In this Venice was entirely unique,
+as she was unique in the duration of her institutions and independence.
+In the other towns of Italy, where there existed no naturally governing
+family or class, where every citizen had an equal share in government,
+and there existed no distinction save that of wealth and influence,
+there was a constant tendency to the illegitimate preponderance of every
+man or every family that rose above the average; and in a democratic,
+mercantile State, not a day passed without some such elevation. In a
+systematic, consolidated State, where the power is in the hands of a
+hereditary sovereign or aristocracy, a rich merchant remains a rich
+merchant, a victorious general remains a victorious general, an eloquent
+orator remains an eloquent orator; but in a shapeless, flunctuating
+democracy like those of Italy, the man who has influence over his
+fellow-citizens, whether by his money, his soldiers, or his eloquence,
+necessarily becomes the head of the State; everything is free and
+unoccupied, only a little superior strength is required to push into it.
+Cosimo de' Medici has many clients, many correspondents, many debtors;
+he can bind people by pecuniary obligations: he becomes prince. Sforza
+has a victorious army, whom he can either hound on to the city or
+restrain into a protection of its interests: he becomes prince.
+Savonarola has eloquence that makes the virtuous start up and the wicked
+tremble: he becomes prince. The history of the Italian commonwealths
+shows us but one thing: the people, the only legal possessors of
+political power, giving it over to their bankers (Medici, Pepoli); to
+their generals (Della Torre, Visconti, Scaligeri); to their monkish
+reformers (Fra Bussolaro, Fra Giovanni da Vincenza, Savonarola). Here
+then we have the occasional but inevitable usurpers, who either
+momentarily or finally disorganize the State. But this is not all. In
+such a State every family hate, every mercantile hostility, means a
+corresponding political division. The guilds are sure to be rivals, the
+larger wishing to exclude the smaller from government: the lower working
+classes (the _ciompi_ of Florence) wish to upset the guilds completely;
+the once feudal nobles wish to get back military power; the burghers
+wish entirely to extirpate the feudal nobles; the older families wish to
+limit the Government, the newer prefer democracy and Caesarism. Add to
+this the complications of private interests, the personal jealousies and
+aversions, the private warfare, inevitable in a town where legal justice
+is not always to be had, while forcible retaliation is always within
+reach; and the result is constant party spirit, insults, scuffles,
+conspiracies: the feudal nobles build towers in the streets, the
+burghers pull them down; the lower artizans set fire to the warehouses
+of the guilds, the magistrates take part in the contest; blood is spilt,
+magistrates are beheaded or thrown out of windows, a foreign State is
+entreated to interfere, and a number of citizens are banished by the
+victorious party. This latter result creates a new and terrible danger
+for the State, in the persons of so many exiles, ready to do anything,
+to join with any one, in order to return to the city and drive out their
+enemies in their turn. The end of such constant upheavings is that the
+whole population is disarmed, no party suffering its rival to have any
+means of offence or defence. Moreover, as industry and commerce
+develope, the citizens become unwilling to fight, while on the other
+hand the invention of firearms, subverting the whole system of warfare,
+renders special military training more and more necessary. In the days
+of the Lombard League, of Campaldino and Montaperti, the citizens could
+fight, hand to hand, round their _carroccio_ or banner, without much
+discipline being required; but when it came to fortifying towns against
+cannon, to drilling bodies of heavily armed cavalry, acting by the mere
+dexterity of their movements; when war became a science and an art, then
+the citizen had necessarily to be left out, and adventurers and poor
+nobles had to form armies of mercenaries, making warfare their sole
+profession. This system of mercenary troops, so bitterly inveighed
+against by Machiavelli (who, of course, entirely overlooked its
+inevitable origin and viewed it as a voluntarily incurred pest), added
+yet another and, perhaps, the very worst danger to civil liberty. It
+gave enormous, irresistible power to adventurers unscrupulous by nature
+and lawless by education, the sole object of whose career it became to
+obtain possession of States; by no means a difficult enterprise,
+considering that they and their fellows were the sole possessors of
+military force in the country. At the same time, this system of
+mercenaries perfected the condition of utter defencelessness in which
+the gradual subjection of rival cities, the violent party spirit, and
+the general disarming of the burghers, had placed the great Italian
+cities. For these troops, being wholly indifferent as to the cause for
+which they were fighting, turned war into the merest game of
+dodges--half-a-dozen men being killed at a great battle like that of
+Anghiari--and they at the same time protracted campaigns beyond every
+limit, without any decisive action taking place. The result of all these
+inevitable causes of ruin, was that most of the commonwealths fell into
+the hands of despots; while those that did not were paralyzed by
+interior factions, by a number of rebellious subject towns, and by
+generals who, even if they did not absolutely betray their employers,
+never efficiently served them.
+
+Such a condition of civic disorder lasted throughout the Middle Ages,
+until the end of the fifteenth century, without any further evils
+arising from it. The Italians made endless wars with each other,
+conquered each other, changed their government without end, fell into
+the power of tyrants; but throughout these changes their civilization
+developed unimpeded; because, although one of the centres of national
+life might be momentarily crushed, the others remained in activity, and
+infused vitality even into the feeble one, which would otherwise have
+perished. All these ups and downs seemed but to stir the life in the
+country: and no vital danger appeared to threaten it; nor did any, so
+long as the surrounding countries--France, Germany, and Spain--remained
+mere vast feudal nebulae, formless, weightless, immovable. The Italians
+feared nothing from them; they would call down the King of France or the
+Emperor of Germany without a moment's hesitation, because they knew that
+the king could not bring France, nor the emperor bring Germany, but only
+a few miserable, hungry retainers with him; but Florence would watch the
+growth of the petty State of the Scaligers, and Venice look with terror
+at the Duke of Milan, because they knew that _there_ there was
+concentrated life, and an organization which could be wielded as'
+perfectly as a sword by the head of the State. In the last decade of the
+fifteenth century the Italians called in the French to put down their
+private enemies: Lodovico of Milan called down Charles VIII. to rid him
+of his nephew and of the Venetians; the Venetians to rid them of
+Lodovico: the Medici to establish them firmly in Florence; the party of
+freedom to drive out the Medici. Each State intended to use the French
+to serve their purpose, and then to send back Charles VIII. with a
+little money and a great deal of derision, as they had done with kings
+and emperors of earlier days. But Italian politicians suddenly
+discovered that they had made a fatal mistake; that they had reckoned in
+ignorance, and that instead of an army they had called down a nation:
+for during the interval since their last appeal to foreign interference,
+that great movement had taken place which had consolidated the
+heterogeneous feudal nebulae into homogeneous and compact kingdoms.
+
+Single small States, relying upon mercenary troops, could not for a
+moment resist the shock of such an agglomeration of soldiery as that of
+the French, and of their successors the Spaniards and Germans. Sismondi
+asks indignantly, Why did the Italians not form a federation as soon as
+the strangers appeared? He might as well ask, Why did the commonwealths
+not turn into a modern monarchy? The habit of security from abroad and
+of jealousy within; the essential nature of a number of rival trading
+centres, made such a thing not only impossible of execution, but for a
+while impossible of conception; confederacies had become possible only
+when Burlamacchi was decapitated by the imperialists; popular resistance
+had become a reality only when Feruccio was massacred by the Spaniards;
+a change of national institutions was feasible only when all national
+institutions had been destroyed; when the Italians, having recognized
+the irresistible force of their adversaries, had ceased to form
+independent States and larger and smaller guilds; when all the
+characteristics of Italian civilization had been destroyed; when, in
+short, it was too late to do anything save theorize with Machiavelli and
+Guicciardini as to what ought to have been done. We must not hastily
+accuse the volition of the Italians of the Renaissance; they may have
+been egotistic and timid, but had they been (as some most certainly
+were) heroic and self-sacrificing to the utmost degree, they could not
+have averted the catastrophe. The nature of their civilization prevented
+not only their averting the peril, but even their conceiving its
+existence; the very nature of their political forms necessitated such a
+dissolution of them. The commune grows from within; it is a little speck
+which gradually extends its circumference, and the further this may be
+from the original centre, the less do its parts coalesce. The modern
+monarchy grows from external pressure, and towards the centre; it is a
+huge mass consolidating into a hard, distinct shape. Thence it follows
+that the more the commonwealth developes, the weaker it grows, because
+its tendency is to spread and fall to pieces; whereas the more the
+monarchy developes, the stronger it becomes, because it fills up towards
+the centre, and becomes more vigorously knit together. The city ceases
+to be a city when extended over hundreds of miles; the nation becomes
+all the more a nation for being compressed towards a central point.
+
+The entire political collapse of Italy in the sixteenth century was not
+only inevitable, from the essential nature of the civilization of the
+Renaissance, but it was also indispensable in order that this
+civilization might fulfil its mission. Civilization cannot spread so
+long as it is contained within a national mould, and only a vanquished
+nation can civilize its victors. The Greece of Pericles could not
+Hellenize Rome, but the Greece of the weak successors of Alexander
+could; the Rome of Caesar did not Romanize the Teutonic races as did the
+Rome of Theodosius; no amount of colonizing among the vanquished can
+ever produce the effect of a victorious army, of a whole nation,
+suddenly finding itself in the midst of the superior civilization of a
+conquered people. Michelet may well call the campaign of Charles VIII.
+the discovery of Italy. His imaginative mind seized at once the vast
+importance of this descent of the French into Italy, which other
+historians have been too prone to view in the same light as any other
+invasion. It is from this moment that dates the _modernisation_, if we
+may so express ourselves, of the North. The barbarous soldiers of Gaston
+de Foix, of Frundsberg, and of Gonsalvo, were the unconscious bearers of
+the seeds of the ages of Elizabeth, of Louis XIV., and of Goethe. These
+stupid and rapacious ruffians, while they wantonly destroyed the works
+of Italian civilization, rendered possible the existence of a Montaigne,
+a Shakespeare, and a Cervantes.
+
+Italy was as a vast store-house, sheltered from all the dangers of
+mediaeval destruction; in which, while all other nations were blindly and
+fiercely working out their national existence, the inheritance of
+Antiquity and the produce of the earliest modern civilization had been
+peaceably garnered up. When the store-house was full, its gates had to
+be torn open and its riches plundered and disseminated by the
+intellectual starvelings of the North; thus only could the rest of
+mankind feed on these riches, regain and develope their mental life.
+
+What were those intellectual riches of the Renaissance? What was that
+strong intellectual food which revived the energies and enriched the
+blood of the Barbarians of the sixteenth century? The Renaissance
+possessed the germs of every modern thing, and much that was far more
+than a mere germ: it possessed the habit of equality before the law, of
+civic organization, of industry and commerce developed to immense and
+superb proportions. It possessed science, literature, and art; above
+all, that which at once produced and was produced by all these--thorough
+perception of what exists, thorough consciousness of our own freedom and
+powers: self-cognizance. In Italy there was intellectual light, enabling
+men to see and judge all around them, enabling them to act wittingly and
+deliberately. In this lies the immense greatness of the Renaissance; to
+this are due all its achievements in literature and science, and, above
+all, in art: that, for the first time since the dissolution of antique
+civilization, men were free agents, both in thought and in deed; that
+there was an end of that palsying slavery of the Middle Ages, slavery of
+body and of mind, slavery to stultified ideas and effete forms, which
+made men endure every degree of evil and believe every degree of
+absurdity. For the first time since Antiquity, man walks free of all
+political and intellectual trammels, erect, conscious of his own
+thoughts, master of his own actions; ready to seek for truth across the
+ocean like Columbus, or across the heavens like Copernicus; to seek it
+in criticism and analysis like Machiavelli or Guicciardini, boldly to
+reproduce it in its highest, widest sense like Michael Angelo and
+Raphael.
+
+The men of the Renaissance had to pay a heavy price for this
+intellectual freedom and self-cognizance which they not only enjoyed
+themselves, but transmitted to the rest of the world; the price was the
+loss of all moral standard, of all fixed public feeling. They had thrown
+aside all accepted rules and criteria, they had cast away all faith in
+traditional institutions, they had destroyed, and could not yet rebuild.
+In their instinctive and universal disbelief in all that had been taught
+them, they lost all respect for opinion, for rule, for what had been
+called right and wrong. Could it be otherwise? Had they not discovered
+that what had been called right had often been unnatural, and what had
+been called wrong often natural? Moral teachings, remonstrances, and
+judgments belonged to that dogmatism from which they had broken loose;
+to those schools and churches where the foolish and the unnatural had
+been taught and worshipped; to those priests and monks who themselves
+most shamefully violated their teachings. To profess morality was to be
+a hypocrite; to reprobate others was to be narrow-minded. There was so
+much error mixed up with truth that truth had to share the discredit of
+error; so many innocent things had been denounced as sins that sinful
+ones at length ceased to be reprobated; people had so often found
+themselves sympathizing with supposed criminals, that they soon lost
+their horror of real ones. Damnation came to be disassociated from moral
+indignation: it was the retribution, not of the unnatural and immoral,
+but of the unlawful; and unlawful with respect to a law made without
+reference to reason and instinct. As reason and instinct were thus set
+at defiance, but could not be silenced, the law was soon acquiesced in
+without being morally supported; thus, little by little, moral feeling
+became warped. This was already the case in Dante's day. Farinata is
+condemned to the most horrible punishment, which to Dante seems just,
+because in accordance with an accepted code; yet Dante cannot but admire
+him and cannot really hate him, for there is nothing in him to hate; he
+is a criminal and yet respected--fatal combination! Dante punishes
+Francesca, Pier delle Vigne, and Brunetto Latini, but he shows no
+personal horror of them; in the one case his moral instinct refrains
+from censuring the comparatively innocent, in the other it has ceased to
+revolt from the really infamous. Where Dante does feel real indignation,
+is most often in cases unprovided for by the religious codes, as with
+those low, grovelling, timid natures (the very same with whom
+Machiavelli, the admirer of great villains, fairly loses patience),
+those creatures whom Dante personally despises, whom he punishes with
+filthy devices of his own, whom he passes by with words such as he never
+addresses to Semiramis, Brutus, or Capaneus. This toleration of vice,
+while acquiescing in its legal punishment, increased in proportion to
+the development of individual judgment, and did not cease till all the
+theories of the lawful and unlawful had been so completely demolished as
+to permit of their being rebuilt on solid bases.
+
+This work of demolition had not yet ceased in the beginning of the
+sixteenth century; and the moral confusion due to it was increased by
+various causes dependent on political and other circumstances. The
+despots in whose hands it was the inevitable fate of the various
+commonwealths to fall, were by their very position immoral in all their
+dealings: violent, fraudulent, suspicious, and, from their life of
+constant unnatural tension of the feelings, prone to every species of
+depravity; while, on the other hand, in the feudal parts of Italy--which
+had merely received a superficial Renaissance varnish imported from
+other places with painters and humanists--in Naples, Rome, and the
+greater part of Umbria and the Marches, the upper classes had got into
+that monstrous condition which seems to have been the inevitable final
+product of feudalism, and which, while it gave France her Armagnacs, her
+Foix, and her Retz, gave Italy their counterparts in her hideously
+depraved princelets, the Malatestas, Varanos, Vitelli, and Baglioni.
+Both these classes of men, despots and feudal nobles, had a wide field
+for their ambition among the necessarily dissolved civic institutions;
+and their easy success contributed to confirm the general tendency of
+the day to say with Commines, "Qui a le succes a l'honneur," and to
+confound these two words and ideas. Nor was this yet all: the men of the
+Renaissance discovered the antique world, and in their wild, blind
+enthusiasm, in their ardent, insatiable thirst for its literature,
+swallowed it eagerly, dregs and all, till they were drunk and poisoned.
+
+These are the main causes of the immorality of the Renaissance: first,
+the general disbelief in all accepted doctrines, due to the falseness
+and unnaturalness of those hitherto prevalent; secondly, the success of
+unscrupulous talent in a condition of political disorder; thirdly, the
+wholesale and unjudging enthusiasm for all that remained of Antiquity,
+good or bad. These three great causes, united in a general intellectual
+ebullition, are the explanation of the worst feature of the Renaissance:
+not the wickedness of numberless single individuals, but the universal
+toleration of it by the people at large. Men like Sigismondo Malatesta,
+Sixtus IV., Alexander VI., and Caesar Borgia might be passed over as
+exceptions, as monstrous aberrations which cannot affect our judgment of
+their time and nation; but the general indifference towards their vices
+shown by their contemporaries and countrymen is a conclusive and
+terrible proof of the moral chaos of the Renaissance. It is just the
+presence of so much instinctive simplicity and virtue, of childlike
+devotion to great objects, of patriarchal simplicity of manners, of all
+that is loveable in the books of men like Vespasiano da Bisticci and
+Leon Battista Albert; of so much that seems like the realization of the
+idyllic home and merchant life of Schiller's "Song of the Bell," by the
+side of all the hideous lawlessness and vice of the despots and
+humanists; that makes the Renaissance so drearily painful a spectacle.
+The presence of the good does not console us for that of the evil,
+because it neither mitigates nor even shrinks from it; we merely lose
+our pleasure in the good nature and simplicity of AEneas Sylvius when we
+see his cool admiration for a man of fraud and violence like Sforza; we
+begin to mistrust the purity and integrity of the upright Guarino da
+Verona when we hear his lenient judgment of the infamous Beccadelli; we
+require of the virtuous that they should not only be incapable of vice,
+but abhorrent of it; and this is what even the best men of the
+Renaissance rarely were.
+
+Such a state of moral chaos there has constantly been when an old effete
+mode of thought required to be destroyed. Such work is always attended,
+in greater or less degree, by this subversion of all recognized
+authority, this indifference to evil, this bold tasting of the
+forbidden. In the eighteenth century France plays the same part that was
+played in the fifteenth by Italy: again we meet the rebellion against
+all that has been consecrated by time and belief, the toleration of
+evil, the praise of the abominable, in the midst of the search for the
+good. These two have been the great fever epochs of modern history;
+fever necessary for a subsequent steady growth. Both gave back truth to
+man, and man to nature, at the expense of temporary moral uncertainty
+and ruthless destruction. The Renaissance reinstated the individual in
+his human dignity, as a thinking, feeling, and acting being; the
+Eighteenth Century reconstructed society as a homogeneous free
+existence; both at the expense of individual degradation and social
+disorder. Both were moments of ebullition in which horrible things rose
+to the surface, but after which what remained was purer than it had ever
+been before.
+
+This is no plea for the immorality of the Renaissance: evil is none the
+less evil for being inevitable and necessary; but it is nevertheless
+well that we should understand its necessity. It certainly is a terrible
+admission, but one which must be made, that evil is part of the
+mechanism for producing good; and had the arrangement of the universe
+been entrusted to us, benevolent and equitable people of an enlightened
+age, there would doubtless have been invented some system of evolution
+and progression differing from the one which includes such machinery as
+hurricanes and pestilences, carnage and misery, superstition and
+license, Renaissance and Eighteenth Century. But unfortunately Nature
+was organized in a less charitable and intelligent fashion; and, among
+other evils required for the final attainment of good, we find that of
+whole generations of men being condemned to moral uncertainty and error
+in order that other generations may enjoy knowledge peacefully and
+guiltlessly. Let us remember this, and let us be more generous towards
+the men who were wicked that we might be enlightened. Above all, let us
+bear in mind, in judging the Renaissance, that the sacrifice which it
+represents could be useful only in so far as it was complete and
+irretrievable. Let us remember that the communal system of government,
+on whose development the Renaissance mainly depended, inevitably
+perished in proportion as it developed; that the absolute subjugation of
+Italy by Barbarous nations was requisite to the dissemination of the
+civilization thus obtained; that the Italians were politically
+annihilated before they had time to recover a normal condition, and were
+given up crushed and broken spirited, to be taught righteousness by
+Spaniards and Jesuits. That, in short, while the morality of the
+Italians was sacrificed to obtain the knowledge on which modern society
+depends, the political existence of Italy was sacrificed to the
+diffusion of that knowledge, and that the nation was not only doomed to
+immorality, but doomed also to the inability to reform. Perhaps, if we
+think of all this, and weigh the tremendous sacrifice to which we owe
+our present intellectual advantages, we may still feel sad, but sad
+rather with remorse than with indignation, in contemplating the
+condition of Italy in the first years of the sixteenth century; in
+looking down from our calm, safe, scientific position, on the murder of
+the Italian Renaissance: great and noble at heart, cut off pitilessly at
+its prime; denied even an hour to repent and amend; hurried off before
+the tribunal of posterity, suddenly, unexpectedly, and still bearing its
+weight of unexpiated, unrecognized guilt.
+
+
+
+
+THE ITALY OF THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
+
+
+I.
+
+The chroniclers of the last years of the fifteenth century have recorded
+how the soldiery of Charles VIII. of France amused the tedious leisure
+of their sullen and suspicious occupation of Rome, by erecting in the
+camp a stage of planks, and performing thereon a rude mystery-play. The
+play thus improvised by a handful of troopers before this motley
+invading army: before the feudal cavalry of Burgundy, strange steel
+monsters, half bird, half reptile, with steel beaked and winged helmets
+and claw-like steel shoes, and jointed steel corselet and rustling steel
+mail coat; before the infantry of Gascony, rapid and rapacious with
+their tattered doublets and rag-bound feet; before the over-fed,
+immensely plumed, and slashed and furbelowed giants of Switzerland, and
+the starved, half-naked savages of Brittany and the Marches--before this
+multifaced, many-speeched army, gathered from the rich cities of the
+North and the devastated fields of the South, and the wilds and rocks of
+the West and the East, alike in nothing save in its wonder and dread and
+delight and horror at this strange invaded Italy--the play performed for
+the entertainment of this encamped army was no ordinary play. No clerkly
+allegorical morality; no mouthing and capering market-place farce; no
+history of Joseph and his brethren, of the birth of the Saviour, or of
+the temptations of St. Anthony. It was the half-allegorical,
+half-dramatic representation of the reigning Borgia pope and his
+children; it was the rude and hesitating moulding into dramatic shape of
+those terrible rumours of simony and poison, of lust and of violence, of
+mysterious death and abominable love, which had met the invaders as they
+had first set their feet in Italy; which had become louder and clearer
+with every onward step through the peninsula, and now circulated around
+them, with frightful distinctness, in the very capital of Christ's vicar
+on earth. This blundering mystery-play of the French troopers is the
+earliest imaginative fruit of that first terrified and fascinated
+glimpse of the men of the barbarous North at the strange Italy of the
+Renaissance; it is the first manifestation of that strong tragic impulse
+due to the sudden sight, by rude and imaginative young nations, of the
+splendid and triumphant wickedness of Italy.
+
+The French saw, wondered, shuddered, and played upon their camp stage
+the tragedy of the Borgias. But the French remained in Italy, became
+familiar with its ways, and soon merely shrugged their shoulders and
+smiled where they had once stared in horror. They served under the flags
+of Sforzas, Borgias, Baglionis, and Vitellis, by the side of the bravos
+of Naples and Umbria; they saw their princes wed the daughters of
+evil-famed Italian sovereigns, and their princes' children, their own
+Valois and Guises, develope into puny, ambiguous, and ominous Medicis
+and Gonzagas, surrounded by Italian minions and poison distillers, and
+buffoons and money-lenders. The French of the sixteenth century, during
+their long Neapolitan and Lombard wars and negotiations, and time to
+learn all that Italy could teach; to become refined, subtle,
+indifferent, and cynical: bastard Italians, with the bastard Italian art
+of Goujon and Philibert Delorme, and the bastard Italian poetry of Du
+Bellay and Ronsard. The French of the sixteenth century therefore
+translated Machiavel and Ariosto and Bandello; but they never again
+attempted such another play as that which they had improvised while
+listening to the tales of Alexander VI. and Caesar and Lucrezia, in their
+camp in the meadows behind Sant' Angelo. The Spaniards then came to
+Italy, and the Germans: strong mediaeval nations, like the French, with
+the creative power of the Middle Ages still in them, refreshed by the
+long rest of the dull fifteenth century. But Spaniards and Germans came
+as mere greedy and besotten and savage mercenaries: the scum of their
+countries, careless of Italian sights and deeds, thinking only of
+torturing for hidden treasure, or swilling southern wines; and they
+returned to Spain and to Germany, to persecutions of Moriscos and
+plundering of abbeys, as savage and as dull as they had arrived. A
+smattering of Italian literature, art, and manners was carried back to
+Spain and Germany by Spanish and German princes and governors, to be
+transmitted to a few courtiers and humanists; but the imagination of the
+lower classes of Spain and of Germany, absorbed in the Quixotic
+Catholicism of Loyola and the biblical contemplation of Luther, never
+came into fertilizing contact with the decaying Italy of the
+Renaissance.
+
+The mystery-play of the soldiers of Charles VIII. seemed destined to
+remain an isolated and abortive attempt. But it was not so. The
+invasions had exhausted themselves; the political organization of Italy
+was definitely broken up; its material wealth was exhausted; the French,
+Germans, and Spaniards had come and gone, and returned and gone again;
+they had left nothing to annex or to pillage; when, about the middle of
+the sixteenth century, the country began to be overrun by a new horde of
+barbarians: the English. The English came neither as invaders nor as
+marauders; they were peaceable students and rich noblemen, who, so far
+from trying to extort money or annex territory, rather profited the
+ruined Italians by the work which they did and the money which they
+squandered. Yet these quiet and profitable travellers, before whom the
+Italians might safely display their remaining wealth, were in reality as
+covetous of the possessions of Italy and as resolute to return home
+enriched as any tattered Gascon men-at-arms or gluttonous Swiss or
+grinding Spaniards. They were, one and all, consciously and
+unconsciously, dragged to Italy by the irresistible instinct that Italy
+possessed that which they required; by the greed of intellectual gain.
+That which they thus instinctively knew that Italy possessed, that which
+they must obtain, was a mode of thought, a habit of form; philosophy,
+art, civilization: all the materials for intellectual manipulation. For,
+in the sixteenth century, on awakening from its long evil sleep, haunted
+by the nightmare of civil war, of the fifteenth century, the English
+mind had started up in the vigour of well-nigh mature youth, fed up and
+rested by the long inactivity in which it had slept through its period
+of assimilation and growth. It had awakened at the first touch of
+foreign influence, and had grown with every fresh contact with the outer
+world: with the first glance at Plato and Xenophon suddenly opened by
+Erasmus and Colet, at the Bible suddenly opened by Cranmer; it had grown
+with its sob of indignation at the sight of the burning faggots
+surrounding the martyrs, with its joyous heart-throbs at the sight of
+the seas and islands of the New World; it had grown with the sudden
+passionate strain of every nerve and every muscle when the galleys of
+Philip had been sighted in the Channel. And when it had paused, taken
+breath, and looked calmly around it, after the tumult of all these
+sights and sounds and actions, the English mind, in the time of
+Elizabeth, had found itself of a sudden full-grown and blossomed out
+into superb manhood, with burning activities and indefatigable powers.
+But it had found itself without materials for work. Of the scholastic
+philosophy and the chivalric poetry of the Middle Ages there remained
+but little that could be utilized: the few bungled formulae, the few
+half-obsolete rhymes still remaining, were as unintelligible, in their
+spirit of feudalism and monasticism and mysticism, as were the Angevin
+English and the monkish Latin in which they were written to these men of
+the sixteenth century. All the intellectual wealth of England remained
+to be created; but it could not be created out of nothing. Spenser,
+Shakespeare, and Bacon could not be produced out of the half-effete
+and scattered fragments of Chaucer, of Scotus, and of Wycliffe. The
+materials on which English genius was to work must be sought abroad, and
+abroad they could be found only in Italy. For in the demolished Italy of
+the sixteenth century lay the whole intellectual wealth of the world:
+the great legacy of Antiquity, the great work of the Middle Ages had
+been stored up, and had been increased threefold, and sorted and
+classified by the Renaissance; and now that the national edifice had
+been dismantled and dilapidated, and the national activity was
+languishing, it all lay in confusion, awaiting only the hand of those
+who would carry it away and use it once more. To Italy therefore
+Englishmen of thought and fancy were dragged by an impulse of adventure
+and greed as irresistible as that which dragged to Antwerp and the Hanse
+ports, to India and America, the seekers for gold and for soil. To Italy
+they flocked and through Italy they rambled, prying greedily into each
+cranny and mound of the half-broken civilization, upturning with avid
+curiosity all the rubbish and filth; seeking with aching eyes and
+itching fingers for the precious fragments of intellectual splendour;
+lingering with fascinated glance over the broken remnants and deep,
+mysterious gulfs of a crumbling and devastated civilization. And then,
+impatient of their intoxicating and tantalizing search, suddenly grown
+desperate, they clutched and stored away everything, and returned home
+tattered, soiled, bedecked with gold and with tinsel, laden with an
+immense uncouth burden of jewels, and broken wealth, and refuse and
+ordure, with pseudo-antique philosophy, with half-mediaeval Dantesque and
+Petrarchesque poetry, with Renaissance science, with humanistic pedantry
+and obscenity, with euphuistic conceits and casuistic quibble, with art,
+politics, metaphysics--civilization embedded in all manner of rubbish
+and abomination, soiled with all manner of ominous stains. All this did
+they carry home and throw helter-skelter into the new-kindled fire of
+English intellectual life, mingling with it many a humble-seeming
+Northern alloy; cleaning and compounding, casting into shapes, mediaeval
+and English, this strange Corinthian brass made of all these
+heterogeneous remnants, classical, Italian, Saxon, and Christian. A
+strange Corinthian brass indeed; and as various in tint, in weight, and
+in tone, in manifold varieties of mixture, as were the moulds into which
+it was cast: the white and delicate silver settling down in the gracious
+poetic moulds of Sidney and Spenser; the glittering gold, which can buy
+and increase, in the splendid, heavy mould of Bacon's prose; and the
+copper, the iron, the silver and gold in wondrous mixture, with wondrous
+iridescences of colour and wondrous scale of tone, all poured into the
+manifold moulds, fantastic and beautiful and grand, of Shakespeare. And
+as long as all this dross and ore and filth brought from the ruins of
+Italy was thus mingling in the heat of English genius, while it was yet
+but imperfectly fused, while already its purest and best compounded
+portion was being poured in Shakespeare's mould, and when already there
+remained only a seething residue; as long as there remained aught of the
+glowing fire and the molten mass, some of it all, of the pure metal
+bubbling up, of the scum frothing round, nay, of the very used-up dregs,
+was ever and anon being ladled out--gold, dross, filth, all
+indiscriminately--and cast into shapes severe, graceful, or uncouth. And
+this somewhat, thus pilfered from what was to make, or was making, or
+had made, the works of Shakespeare; this base and noble, still unfused
+or already exhausted alloy, became the strange heterogeneous works of
+the Elizabethan dramatists: of Webster, of Ford, of Tourneur, of Ben
+Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, and of their minor brethren; from the
+splendid ore of Marlowe, only half molten and half freed from dross,
+down to the shining metal, smooth and silvery as only tinsel can be, of
+Massinger.
+
+In all the works of our Elizabethans, we see not only the assimilated
+intellectual wealth of Italy, but we see the deep impression, the
+indelible picture in the memory, of Italy itself; the positive,
+unallegorical, essentially secular mode of thought; the unascetic,
+aesthetic, eminently human mode of feeling; the artistic desire of clear
+and harmonious form; the innumerable tendencies and habits which sever
+the Elizabethans so completely from the Middle Ages, and bring them so
+near at once to ourselves and to the ancients, making them at once
+antique and modern, in opposition to mediaeval; these essential
+characters and the vast bulk of absolute scientific fact and formula, of
+philosophic opinion, of artistic shape, of humanistic learning, are only
+one-half of the debt of our sixteenth century to the Italy of the
+Renaissance. The delicate form of the Italian sonnet, as copied by
+Sidney from Bembo and Molza and Costanzo, contained within it the exotic
+and exquisite ideal passion of the "Vita Nuova" and Petrarch. With the
+bright, undulating stanza Spenser received from Ariosto and Tasso the
+richly coloured spirit of the Italian descriptive epic. With the
+splendid involutions of Machiavelli's and Guicciardini's prose Bacon
+learned their cool and disimpassioned philosophy. From the reading of
+Politian and Lorenzo dei Medici, from the sight of the Psyche of
+Raphael, the Europa of Veronese, the Ariadne of Tintoret, men like
+Greene and Dorset learned that revival of a more luscious and pictorial
+antique which was brought to perfection in Shakespeare's "Venus and
+Adonis" and Marlowe's "Sestiad." From the Platonists and Epicureans of
+Renaissance Italy our greatest dramatists learned that cheerful and
+serious love of life, that solemn and manly facing of death, that sense
+of the finiteness of man, the inexhaustibleness of nature, which shines
+out in such grand, paganism, with such Olympian serenity, as of the bent
+brows and smiling lips of an antique Zeus, in Shakespeare, in Marlowe,
+in Beaumont and Fletcher, even in the sad and savage Webster. But with
+the abstract, with the imbibed modes of thought and feeling, with the
+imitated forms, the Elizabethans brought back from Italy the concrete,
+the individual, the personal. They filled their works with Italian
+things: from the whole plot of a play borrowed from an Italian novel, to
+the mere passing allusion to an Italian habit, or the mere quotation of
+an Italian word; from the full-length picture of the actions of Italian
+men and women, down to the mere sketch, in two or three words, of a bit
+of Italian garden or a group of Italian figures; nay, to the innumerable
+scraps of tiny detail, grotesque, graceful, or richly coloured, which
+they stuffed into all their works: allusions to the buffoons of the mask
+comedy, to the high-voiced singers, to the dress of the Venetian
+merchants, to the step of a dance; to the pomegranate in the garden or
+the cypress on the hillside; mere names of Italian things: the _lavolta_
+and _corranto_ dances, the _Traglietto_ ferry, the Rialto bridge;
+countless little touches, trifling to us, but which brought home to the
+audience at the Globe or at Blackfriars that wonderful Italy which every
+man of the day had travelled through at least in spirit, and had loved
+at least in imagination. And of this wonderful Italy the Englishmen of
+the days of Elizabeth and of James knew yet another side; were familiar,
+whether travelled or untravelled, with yet other things besides the
+buffoons and singers and dancers, the scholars and learned ladies, the
+pomegranates, and cypresses and roses and nightingales; were fascinated
+by something besides the green lagoons, the clear summer nights, the
+soft spring evenings of which we feel as it were the fascination in the
+words of Jessica and Portia and Juliet. The English knew and were
+haunted by the crimes of Italy: the terrible and brilliant, the
+mysterious and shadowy crimes of lust and of blood which, in their most
+gigantic union and monstrous enthronement on the throne of the vicar of
+Christ, had in the first terrified glimpse awakened the tragic impulse
+in the soldiers of Charles VIII.
+
+We can imagine the innumerable English travellers who went to Italy
+greedy for life and knowledge or merely obeying a fashion of the
+day--travellers forced into far closer contact with the natives than the
+men of the time of Walpole and of Beckford, who were met by
+French-speaking hosts and lacqueys and officials--travellers also
+thirsting to imbibe the very spirit of the country as the travellers of
+the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries never thirsted; we can imagine
+these Englishmen possessed by the morbid passion for the stories of
+abominable and unpunished crime--crime of the learned, the refined, the
+splendid parts of society--with which the Italy of the deeply corrupted
+sixteenth century was permeated. We can imagine how the prosaic
+merchants' clerks from London; the perfumed dandies, trying on Italian
+clothes, rehearsing Italian steps and collecting Italian oaths, the
+Faulcon-bridges of Shakespeare and Mr. Gingleboys of Beaumont and
+Fletcher, sent to Italy to be able gracefully to
+
+
+         Kiss the hand and cry, "sweet lady!"
+     Say they had been at Rome and seen the relics,
+     Drunk your Verdea wine, and rid at Naples--
+
+
+how all these privileged creatures ferreted about for monstrous crimes
+with which to horrify their stay-at-home countrymen; how the rich young
+lords, returning home with mincing steps and high-pitched lisp,
+surrounded by a train of parti-coloured, dialect-jabbering Venetian
+clowns, deft and sinister Neapolitan fencing masters, silver-voiced
+singing boys decoyed from some church, and cynical humanists escaped
+from the faggot or the gallows, were expected to bring home, together
+with the newest pastoral dramas, lewd novels, Platonic philosophy and
+madrigals set in complicated counterpoint; stories of hideous
+wickedness, of the murders and rapes and poisonings committed by the
+dukes and duchesses, the nobles and senators, in whose palaces they had
+so lately supped and danced. The crimes of Italy fascinated Englishmen
+of genius with a fascination even more potent than that which they
+exercised over the vulgar imagination of mere foppish and swashbuckler
+lovers of the scandalous and the sensational: they fascinated with the
+attraction of tragic grandeur, of psychological strangeness, of moral
+monstrosity, a generation in whom the passionate imagination of the
+playwright was curiously blent with the metaphysical analysis of the
+philosopher and the ethical judgment of the Puritan. To these men, ardent
+and serious even in their profligacy; imaginative and passionate even in
+their Puritanism, all sucking avidly at this newly found Italian
+civilization; the wickedness of Italy was more than morbidly attractive
+or morbidly appalling: it was imaginatively and psychologically
+fascinating. Whether they were as part of the action or as allusions, as
+in Webster's two great plays, in which there occurs poisoning by means
+of the leaves of a book, poisoning by the poisoned lips of a picture,
+poisoning by a helmet, poisoning by the pommel of a saddle; crimes were
+multiplied by means of subordinate plots and unnecessary incidents, like
+the double vengeance of Richardetto and of Hippolita in Ford's "Giovanni
+and Annabella," where both characters are absolutely unnecessary to the
+main story of the horrible love of the hero and heroine; like the
+murders of Levidulcia and Sebastian in Tourneur's "Atheist's Tragedy,"
+and the completely unnecessary though extremely pathetic death of young
+Marcello in Webster's "White Devil;" until the plays were brought to a
+close by the gradual extermination of all the principal performers, and
+only a few confidants and dummies remained to bury the corpses which
+strewed the stage. Imaginary monsters were fashioned out of half-a-dozen
+Neapolitan and Milanese princes, by Ford, by Beaumont and Fletcher, by
+Middleton, by Marston, even by the light and graceful Philip Massinger:
+mythical villains, Ferdinands, Lodowicks, and Fernezes, who yet fell
+short of the frightful realities of men like Sigismondo Malatesta,
+Alexander VI., and Pier Luigi Farnese; nay, more typical monsters, with
+no name save their vices, Lussuriosos, Gelosos, Ambitiosos, and
+Vindicis, like those drawn by the strong and savage hand of Cyril
+Tourneur.
+
+Nothing which the English stage could display seemed to the minds of
+English playwrights and the public to give an adequate picture of the
+abominations of Italy; much as they heaped up horrors and combined them
+with artistic skill, much as they forced into sight, there yet remained
+an abyss of evil which the English tongue refused to mention, but which
+weighed upon the English mind; and which, unspoken, nay (and it is the
+glory of the Elizabethan dramatists excepting Ford), unhinted, yet
+remained as an incubus in the consciousness of the playwrights and the
+public, was in their thoughts when they wrote and heard such savage
+misanthropic outbursts as those of Tourneur and of Marston. The sense of
+the rottenness of the country whence they were obtaining their
+intellectual nourishment, haunted with a sort of sickening fascination
+the imaginative and psychological minds of the late sixteenth century,
+of the men who had had time to outgrow the first cynical plunge of the
+rebellious immature intellects of the contemporaries of Greene, Peele,
+and Marlowe into that dissolved civilization. And of the great men who
+were thus enthralled by Italy and Italian evil, only Shakespeare and
+Massinger maintain or regain their serenity and hopefulness of spirit,
+resist the incubus of horror: Shakespeare from the immense scope of his
+vision, which permitted him to pass over the base and frightful parts of
+human nature and see its purer and higher sides; Massinger from the very
+superficiality of his insight and the narrowness of his sympathies,
+which prevented his ever thoroughly realizing the very horrors he had
+himself invented. But on the minds less elastic than that of
+Shakespeare, and less superficial than that of Massinger, the Italian
+evil weighed like a nightmare. With an infinitely powerful and
+passionate imagination, and an exquisitely subtle faculty of mental
+analysis; only lately freed from the dogma of the Middle Ages; unsettled
+in their philosophy; inclined by wholesale classical reading to a sort
+of negative atheism, a fatalistic and half-melancholy mixture of
+epicurism and stoicism; yet keenly alive, from study of the Bible and of
+religious controversies, to all questions of right and wrong; thus
+highly wrought and deeply perplexed, the minds of the Elizabethan poets
+were impressed by the wickedness of Italy as by the horrible deeds of
+one whom we are accustomed to venerate as our guide, whom we cannot but
+love as our benefactor, whom we cannot but admire as our superior: it
+was a sense of frightful anomaly, of putrescence in beauty and
+splendour, of death in life and life in death, which made the English
+psychologist-poets savage and sombre, cynical and wrathful and hopeless.
+The influence is the same on all, and the difference of attitude is
+slight, and due to individual characters; but the gloom is the same in
+each of them. In Webster--no mere grisly inventor of Radcliffian
+horrors, as we are apt to think of the greatest of our dramatists--after
+Shakespeare--in the noble and tender nature of Webster the sense is one
+of ineffable sadness, unmarred by cynicism, but unbrightened by hope.
+The villains, even if successful till death overtake them, are mere
+hideous phantoms--
+
+
+                       these wretched eminent things
+     Leave no more fame behind 'em, than should one
+     Fall in a frost, and leave his print in snow--
+
+
+the victims of tortured conscience, or, worse still, the owners of
+petrified hearts; there is nothing to envy in them. But none the better
+is it for the good: if Ferdinands, Bosolas, Brachianos, and Flaminios
+perish miserably, it is only after having done to death the tender and
+brave Duchess, the gentle Antonio, the chivalric Marcello; there is
+virtue on earth, but there is no justice in heaven. The half-pagan,
+half-puritanic feeling of Webster bursts out in the dying speech of the
+villain Bosola--
+
+
+                    O, this gloomy world!
+     In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness,
+     Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!
+     Let worthy minds ne'er stagger in distrust
+     To suffer death or shame for what is just.
+
+
+Of real justice in this life or compensation in another, there is no
+thought: Webster, though a Puritan in spirit, is no Christian in faith.
+On Ford the influence is different; although equal, perhaps, in genius
+to Webster, surpassing him even in intense tragic passion, he was far
+below Webster, and, indeed, far below all his generation, in moral
+fibre. The sight of evil fascinates him; his conscience staggers, his
+sympathies are bedraggled in foulness; in the chaos of good and evil he
+loses his reckoning, and recognizes the superiority only of strength of
+passion, of passion for good or evil: the incestuous Giovanni, daring
+his enemies like a wild beast at bay and cheating them of their revenge
+by himself murdering the object of his horrible passion, is as heroic in
+the eyes of Ford as the magnanimous Princess of Sparta, bearing with
+unflinching spirit the succession of misfortunes poured down upon her,
+and leading off the dance while messenger succeeds messenger of evil;
+till, free from her duties as a queen, she sinks down dead. Cyril
+Tourneur and John Marston are far more incomplete in genius than either
+Webster or Ford, although Tourneur sometimes obtains a lurid and ghastly
+tragic intensity which more than equals Ford when at his best; and
+Marston, in the midst of crabbedness and dulness, sometimes has touches
+of pathos and Michelangelesque foreshortenings of metaphor worthy of
+Webster. But Tourneur and Marston have neither the constant sympathy
+with oppressed virtue of the author of the "Duchess of Malfy," nor the
+blind fury of passion of the poet of "Giovanni and Annabella;" they look
+on grim and hopeless spectators at the world of fatalistic and insane
+wickedness which they have created, in which their heroes and heroines
+and villains are slowly entangled in inextricable evil. The men and
+women of Tourneur and Marston are scarcely men and women at all: they
+are mere vague spectres, showing their grisly wounds and moaning out
+their miserable fate. There is around them a thick and clammy moral
+darkness, dispelled only by the ghastly flashes of lurid virtue of
+maniacs like Tourneur's Vindici and Hippolito; a crypt-like moral
+stillness, haunted by strange evil murmurs, broken only by the
+hysterical sobs and laughs of Marston's Antonios and Pandulphos. At the
+most there issues out of the blood-reeking depth a mighty yell of pain,
+a tremendous imprecation not only at sinful man but at unsympathizing
+nature, like that of Marston's old Doge, dethroned, hunted down, crying
+aloud into the grey dawn-mists of the desolate marsh by the lagoon--
+
+
+                         O thou all-bearing earth
+     Which men do gape for till thou cram'st their mouths
+     And choak'st their throats for dust: O charme thy breast
+     And let me sinke into thee.  Look who knocks;
+     Andrugio calls. But O, she's deafe and blinde.
+     A wretch but leane relief on earth can finde.
+
+
+The tragic sense, the sense of utter blank evil, is stronger in all
+these Elizabethan painters of Italian crime than perhaps in any other
+tragic writers. There is, in the great and sinister pictures of Webster,
+of Ford, of Tourneur, and of Marston, no spot of light, no distant
+bright horizon. There is no loving suffering, resigned to suffer and to
+pardon, like that of Desdemona, whose dying lips forgive the beloved who
+kills from too great love; no consoling affection like Cordelia's, in
+whose gentle embrace the poor bruised soul may sink into rest; no
+passionate union in death with the beloved, like the union of Romeo and
+Juliet; nothing but implacable cruelty, violent death received with
+agonized protest, or at best as the only release from unmitigated misery
+with which the wretch has become familiar,
+
+     As the tann'd galley slave is with his oar.
+
+Neither is there in these plays that solemn sense of heavenly justice,
+of the fatality hanging over a house which will be broken when guilt
+shall have been expiated, which lends a sort of serene background of
+eternal justice to the terrible tales of Thebes and Argos. There is for
+these men no fatality save the evil nature of man, no justice save the
+doubling of crime, no compensation save revenge: there is for Webster
+and Ford and Tourneur and Marston no heaven above, wrathful but
+placable; there are no Gods revengeful but just: there is nothing but
+this blood-stained and corpse-strewn earth, defiled by lust-burnt and
+death-hungering men, felling each other down and trampling on one
+another blindly in the eternal darkness which surrounds them. The world
+of these great poets is not the open world with its light and its air,
+its purifying storms and lightnings: it is the darkened Italian palace,
+with its wrought-iron bars preventing escape; its embroidered carpets
+muffling the foot steps; its hidden, suddenly yawning trapdoors; its
+arras-hangings concealing masked ruffians; its garlands of poisoned
+flowers; its long suites of untenanted darkened rooms, through which the
+wretch is pursued by the half-crazed murderer; while below, in the
+cloistered court, the clanking armour and stamping horses, and above, in
+the carved and gilded hall, the viols and lutes and cornets make a
+cheery triumphant concert, and drown the cries of the victim.
+
+
+II.
+
+Such is the Italy of the Renaissance as we see it in the works of our
+tragic playwrights: a country of mysterious horror, the sinister
+reputation of which lasted two hundred years; lasted triumphantly
+throughout the light and finikin eighteenth century, and found its
+latest expression in the grim and ghastly romances of the school of Ann
+Radcliff, romances which are but the last puny and grotesque descendants
+of the great stock of Italian tragedies, born of the first
+terror-stricken meeting of the England of Elizabeth with the Italy of
+the late Renaissance. Is the impression received by the Elizabethan
+playwrights a correct impression? Was Italy in the sixteenth century
+that land of horrors? Reviewing in our memory the literature and art of
+the Italian Renaissance, remembering the innumerable impressions of
+joyous and healthy life with which it has filled us; recalling the
+bright and thoughtless rhymes of Lorenzo dei Medici, of Politian, of
+Bern!, and of Ariosto; the sweet and tender poetry of Bembo and Vittoria
+Colonna and Tasso; the bluff sensuality of novelists like Bandello and
+Masuccio, the Aristophanesque laughter of the comedy of Bibbiena and of
+Beolco; seeing in our mind's eye the stately sweet matrons and noble
+senators of Titian, the virginal saints and madonnas of Raphael, the
+joyous angels of Correggio;--recapitulating rapidly all our impressions
+of this splendid time of exuberant vitality, of this strong and serene
+Renaissance, we answer without hesitation, and with only a smile of
+contempt at our credulous ancestors--no. The Italy of the Renaissance
+was, of all things that have ever existed or ever could exist, the most
+utterly unlike the nightmare visions of men such as Webster and Ford,
+Marston and Tourneur. The only Elizabethan drama which really represents
+the Italy of the Renaissance is the comedy of Shakespeare, of Beaumont
+and Fletcher, and of Ben Jonson and Massinger: to the Renaissance belong
+those clear and sunny figures, the Portias, Antonios, Gratianos, Violas,
+Petruchios, Bellarios, and Almiras; their faces do we see on the
+canvases of Titian and the frescoes of Raphael; they are the real
+children of the Italian Renaissance. These frightful Brachianos and
+Annabellas and Ferdinands and Corombonas and Vindicis and Pieros of the
+"White Devil," of the "Duchess of Malfy," of the "Revenger's Tragedy,"
+and of "Antonio and Mellida," are mere fantastic horrors, as false as
+the Counts Udolpho, the Spalatros, the Zastrozzis, and all their
+grotesquely ghastly pseudo-Italian brethren of eighty years ago.
+
+And, indeed, the Italy of the Renaissance, as represented in its
+literature and its art, is the very negation of Elizabethan horrors. Of
+all the mystery, the colossal horror and terror of our dramatists, there
+is not the faintest trace in the intellectual productions of the Italian
+Renaissance. The art is absolutely stainless: no scenes of horror, no
+frightful martyrdoms, as with the Germans under Albrecht Duerer; no
+abominable butcheries, as with the Bolognese of the seventeenth century;
+no macerated saints and tattered assassins, as with the Spaniards; no
+mystery, no contortion, no horrors: vigorous and serene beauty, pure and
+cheerful life, real or ideal, on wall or canvas, in bronze or in marble.
+The literature is analogous to the art, only less perfect, more tainted
+with the weakness of humanity, less ideal, more real. It is essentially
+human, in the largest sense of the word; or if it cease, in creatures
+like Aretine, to be humanly clean, it becomes merely satyr-like,
+swinish, hircose. But it is never savage in lust or violence; it is
+quite free from the element of ferocity. It is essentially light and
+quiet and well regulated, sane and reasonable, never staggering or
+blinded by excess: it is full of intelligent discrimination, of
+intelligent leniency, of well-bred reserved sympathy; it is civilized as
+are the wide well-paved streets of Ferrara compared with the tortuous
+black alleys of mediaeval Paris; as are the well-lit, clean, spacious
+palaces of Michelozzo or Bramante compared with the squalid, unhealthy,
+uncomfortable mediaeval castles of Duerer's etchings. It is indeed a
+trifle too civilized; too civilized to produce every kind of artistic
+fruit; it is--and here comes the crushing difference between the Italian
+Renaissance and our Elizabethans' pictures of it--it is, this beautiful
+rich literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, completely
+deficient in every tragic element; it has intuition neither for tragic
+event nor for tragic character; it affords not a single tragic page in
+its poems and novels; it is incapable, after the most laborious and
+conscientious study of Euripides and Seneca, utterly and miserably
+incapable of producing a single real tragedy, anything which is not a
+sugary pastoral or a pompous rhetorical exercise. The epic poets of the
+Italian Renaissance, Pulci, Boiardo, Berni, and Ariosto, even the
+stately and sentimental Tasso, are no epic poets at all. They are mere
+light and amusing gossips, some of them absolute buffoons. Their
+adventures over hill and dale are mere riding parties; their fights mere
+festival tournaments, their enchantments mere pageant wonders. Events
+like the death of Hector, the slaughter of Penelope's suitors, the
+festive massacre of Chriemhilt, the horrible deceit of Alfonso the
+Chaste sending Bernardo del Carpio his father's corpse on horseback--
+things like these never enter their minds. When tragic events do by some
+accident come into their narration, they cease to be tragic; they are
+frittered away into mere pretty conceits like the death of Isabella and
+the sacrifice of Olympia in the "Orlando Furioso;" or melted down into
+vague pathos, like the burning of Olindo and Sofronia, and the death of
+Clorinda by the sentimental Tasso. Neither poet, the one with his
+cheerfulness, the other with his mild melancholy, brings home, conceives
+the horror of the situation; the one treats the tragic in the spirit
+almost of burlesque, the other entirely in the spirit of elegy. So,
+again, with the novel writers: these professional retailers of anecdotes
+will pick up any subject to fill their volumes. In default of pleasant
+stories of filthy intrigue or lewd jest, men like Cinthio and Bandello
+will gabble off occasionally some tragic story, picked out of a history
+book or recently heard from a gossip: the stories of Harmodius and
+Aristogeiton, of Disdemona and the Moorish Captain, of Romeo Montecchio
+and Giulietta Cappelletti, of the Cardinal d'Aragona and the Duchess of
+Amalfi, of unknown grotesque Persian Sophis and Turkish Bassas--stories
+of murder, massacre, rape, incest, anything and everything, prattled
+off, with a few words of vapid compassion and stale moralizing, in the
+serene, cheerful, chatty manner in which they recount their Decameronian
+escapades or Rabelaisian repartees. As it is with tragic action, so is
+it with tragic character. The literature of the country which suggested
+to our Elizabethans their colossal villains, can display only a few
+conventional monsters, fire-eating, swashbuckler Rodomonts and Sultan
+Malechs, strutting and puffing like the grotesque villains of
+puppet-shows; Aladins and Ismenos, enchanters and ogres fit to be put
+into Don Quixote's library: mere conventional rag puppets, doubtless
+valued as such and no more by the shrewd contemporaries of Ariosto and
+Tasso. The inhabitants of Tasso's world of romance are pale chivalric
+unrealities, lifeless as Spenser's half-allegoric knights and ladies;
+those of Pulci's Ardenne forests and Cathay deserts are buffoons such as
+Florentine shopmen may have trapped out for their amusement in rusty
+armour and garlands of sausages. The only lifelike heroes and heroines
+are those of Ariosto. And they are most untragic, unromantic. The men
+are occasionally small scoundrels, but unintentionally on the part of
+the author. They show no deep moral cancers or plague-spots; they
+display cheerfully all the petty dishonour and small lusts which the
+Renaissance regarded as mere flesh and blood characteristics. So also
+Ariosto's ladies: the charming, bright women, coquettish or Amazonian,
+are frail and fickle to the degree which was permissible to a court
+lady, who should be neither prudish nor coquettish; doing unchaste
+things and listening to unchaste words simply, gracefully, without
+prurience or horror; perfectly well-bred, _gentili_, as Ariosto calls
+them; prudent also, according to the notions of the day, in limiting
+their imprudence. The adventure of Fiordispina with Ricciardetto would
+have branded an English serving-wench as a harlot; the behaviour of
+Roger towards the lady he has just rescued from the sea-monster would
+have blushingly been attributed by Spenser to one of his satyrs; but
+these were escapades quite within Ariosto's notions of what was
+permitted to a _gentil cavaliero_ and a _nobil donzella_; and if
+Fiordispina and Roger are not like Florimell and Sir Calidore, still
+less do they in the faintest degree resemble Tourneur and Marston's
+Levidulcias and Isabellas and Lussuriosos. And with the exception
+perhaps, of this heroine and this hero, we cannot find any very great
+harm in Ariosto's ladies and gentlemen: we may, indeed, feel indignant
+when we think that they replace the chaste and noble impossibilities of
+earlier romance, the Rolands and Percivals, the Beatrices and Lauras of
+the past; when we consider that they represent for Ariosto, not the
+bespattered but the spotless, not the real but the ideal. All this may
+awaken in us contempt and disgust; but if we consider these figures in
+themselves as realities, and compare them with the evil figures of our
+drama, we find that they are mere venial sinners--light, fickle,
+amorous, fibbing--very human in their faults; human, trifling, mild, not
+at all monstrous, like all the art products of the Renaissance.[1]
+
+
+[1] The "Orlando Innamorato" of Boiardo contains, part i, canto 8, a
+story too horrible and grotesque for me to narrate, of a monster born of
+Marchino and his murdered sister-in-law, which forms a strange exception
+to my rule, even as does, for instance, Matteo di Giovanni's massacre of
+the Innocents. Can this story have been suggested, a ghastly nightmare,
+by the frightful tale of Sigismondo Malatesta and the beautiful Borbona,
+which was current in Boiardo's day?
+
+
+A serene and spotless art, a literature often impure but always
+cheerful, rational, civilized--this is what the Italian Renaissance
+displays when we seek in it for spirits at all akin to Webster or Lope
+de Vega, to Holbein or Ribera. To find the tragic we must wait for the
+Bolognese painters of the seventeenth century, for Metastasio and
+Alfieri in the eighteenth; it is useless seeking it in this serene and
+joyous Renaissance. Where, then, in the midst of these spotless virgins,
+these noble saints, these brilliant pseudo-chivalric joustings and
+revels, these sweet and sonneteering pastorals, these scurrilous
+adventures and loose buffooneries; where in this Italian Renaissance are
+the horrors which fascinated so strangely our English playwrights: the
+fratricides and incests, the frightful crimes of lust and blood which
+haunted and half crazed the genius of Tourneur and Marston? Where in
+this brilliant and courteous and humane and civilized nation are the
+gigantic villains whose terrible features were drawn with such superb
+awfulness of touch by Webster and Ford? Where in this Renaissance of
+Italian literature, so cheerful and light of conscience, is the foul and
+savage Renaissance of English tragedy? Does the art of Italy tell an
+impossible, universal lie? or is the art of England the victim of an
+impossible, universal hallucination?
+
+Neither; for art can neither tell lies nor be the victim of
+hallucination. The horror exists, and the light-heartedness exists; the
+unhealthiness and the healthiness. For as, in that weird story by
+Nathaniel Hawthorne, the daughter of the Paduan wizard is nurtured on
+the sap and fruit and the emanations of poisonous plants, till they
+become her natural sustenance, and she thrives and is strong and lovely;
+while the youth, bred in the ordinary pure air and nourished on ordinary
+wholesome food, faints and staggers as soon as he breathes the fatal
+odours of the poison garden, and sinks down convulsed and crazed at the
+first touch of his mistress' blooming but death-breathing lips; so also
+the Italians, steeped in the sin of their country, seeing it daily and
+hourly, remained intellectually healthy and serene; while the English,
+coming from a purer moral atmosphere, were seized with strange moral
+sickness of horror at what they had seen and could not forget. And the
+nation which was chaste and true wrote tales of incest and treachery,
+while the nation which was foul and false wrote poetry of shepherds and
+knights-errant.
+
+The monstrous immorality of the Italian Renaissance, as I have elsewhere
+shown in greater detail, was, like the immorality of any other
+historical period, not a formal rebellion against God, but a natural
+result of the evolution of the modern world. The Italy of the
+Renaissance was one of the many victims which inevitable moral sequence
+dooms to be evil in order that others may learn to be good: it was a
+sacrifice which consisted in a sin, a sacrifice requiring frightful
+expiation on the part of the victim. For Italy was subjected, during
+well-nigh two centuries, to a slow process of moral destruction; a
+process whose various factors--political disorganization, religious
+indifference, scientific scepticism, wholesale enthusiasm for the
+antique, breaking-up of mediaeval standards and excessive growth of
+industry, commerce, and speculative thought at the expense of warlike
+and religious habits--were at the same time factors in the great advent
+of modern civilization, of which Italy was the pioneer and the victim; a
+process whose result was, in Italy, insensibly and inevitably to reduce
+to chaos the moral and political organization of the nation; at once
+rendering men completely unable to discriminate between good and evil,
+and enabling a certain proportion of them to sin with complete impunity:
+creating on the one hand moral indifference, and on the other social
+irresponsibility. Civilization had kept pace with demoralization; the
+faculty of reasoning over cause and effect had developed at the expense
+of the faculty of judging of actions. The Italians of the Renaissance,
+little by little, could judge only of the adaptation of means to given
+ends; whether means or ends were legitimate or illegitimate they soon
+became unable to perceive and even unable to ask. Success was the
+criterion of all action, and power was its limits. Active and furious
+national wickedness there was not: there was mere moral inertia on the
+part of the people. The Italians of the Renaissance neither resisted
+evil nor rebelled against virtue; they were indifferent to both, and a
+little pressure sufficed to determine them to either. In the governed
+classes, where the law was equal between men, and industry and commerce
+kept up healthy activity, the pressure was towards good. The artizans
+and merchants lived decent lives, endowed hospitals, listened to
+edifying sermons, and were even moved (for a few moments) by men like
+San Bernardino or Savonarola. In the governing classes, where all right
+lay in force, where the necessity of self-defence induced treachery and
+violence, and irresponsibility produced excess, the pressure was towards
+evil. The princelets and prelates and mercenery generals indulged in
+every sensuality, turned treachery into a science and violence into an
+instrument; and sometimes let themselves be intoxicated into mad lust
+and ferocity, as their subjects were occasionally intoxicated with mad
+austerity and mysticism; but the excesses of mad vice, like the excesses
+of mad virtue, lasted only a short time, or lasted only in individual
+saints or blood-maniacs; and the men of the Renaissance speedily
+regained their level of indifferent righteousness and of indifferent
+sinfulness. Righteousness and sinfulness both passive, without power of
+aggression or resistance, and consequently in strange and dreadful peace
+with each other. The wicked men did not dislike virtue, nor the good men
+vice: the villain could admire a saint, and the saint could condone a
+villain. The prudery of righteousness was as unknown as the cynicism of
+evil; the good man, like Guarino da Verona, would not shrink from the
+foul man; the foul man, like Beccadelli, would not despise the pure man.
+The ideally righteous citizen of Agnolo Pandolfini does not interfere
+with the ideally unrighteous prince of Machiavelli: each has his own
+position and conduct; and who can say whether, if the positions were
+exchanged, the conduct might not be exchanged also? In such a condition
+of things as this, evil ceases to appear monstrous; it is explained,
+endured, condoned. The stately philosophical historians, so stoically
+grand, and the prattling local chroniclers, so highly coloured and so
+gentle and graceful; Guicciardini and Machiavelli and Valori and Segni,
+on the one hand--Corio, Allegretti, Matarazzo, Infessura, on the other;
+all these, from whom we learn the real existence of immorality far more
+universal and abominable than our dramatists venture to show, relate
+quietly, calmly, with analytical frigidness or gossiping levity, the
+things which we often shrink from repeating, and sometimes recoil from
+believing. Great statesmanlike historians and humble chattering
+chroniclers are alike unaffected by what goes on around them: they
+collect anecdotes and generalize events without the fumes of evil, among
+which they seek for materials in the dark places of national or local
+history, ever going to their imagination, ever making their heart sicken
+and faint, and their fancy stagger and reel. The life of these
+righteous, or at least, not actively sinning men, may be hampered,
+worried, embittered, or even broken by the villainy of their fellow-men;
+but, except in some visionary monk, life can never be poisoned by the
+mere knowledge of evil. Their town maybe betrayed to the enemy, their
+daughters may be dishonoured or poisoned, their sons massacred; they
+may, in their old age, be cast starving on the world, or imprisoned or
+broken by torture; and they will complain and be fierce in diatribe: the
+fiercest diatribe written against any Pope of the Renaissance being,
+perhaps, that of Platina against Paul II., who was a saint compared with
+his successors Sixtus and Alexander, because the writer of the diatribe
+and his friends were maltreated by this pope. When personally touched,
+the Italians of the Renaissance will brook no villainy--the poniard
+quickly despatches sovereigns like Galeazzo Maria Sforza; but when the
+villainy remains abstract, injures neither themselves nor their
+immediate surroundings, it awakens no horror, and the man who commits it
+is by no means regarded as a fiend. The great criminals of the
+Renaissance--traitors and murderers like Lodovico Sforza, incestuous
+parricides like Gianpaolo Baglioni, committers of every iniquity under
+heaven like Caesar Borgia--move through the scene of Renaissance history,
+as shown by its writers great and small, quietly, serenely,
+triumphantly; with gracious and magnanimous bearing; applauded, admired,
+or at least endured. On their passage no man, historian or chronicler,
+unless the agent of a hostile political faction, rises up, confronts
+them and says, "This man is a devil."
+
+And devils these men were not: the judgment of their contemporaries,
+morally completely perverted, was probably psychologically correct; they
+misjudged the deeds, but rarely, perhaps, misjudged the man. To us
+moderns, as to our English ancestors of the sixteenth century, this is
+scarcely conceivable. A man who does devilish deeds is necessarily a
+devil; and the evil Italian princes of the Renaissance, the Borgias,
+Sforzas, Baglionis, Malatestas, and Riarios appear, through the mist of
+horrified imagination, so many uncouth and gigantic monsters, nightmare
+shapes, less like human beings than like the grand and frightful angels
+of evil who gather round Milton's Satan in the infernal council. Such
+they appear to us. But if we once succeed in calmly looking at them,
+seeing them not in the lurid lights and shadows of our fancy, but in the
+daylight of contemporary reality, we shall little by little be forced to
+confess (and the confession is horrible) that most of these men are
+neither abnormal nor gigantic. Their times were monstrous, not they.
+They were not, that is clear, at variance with the moral atmosphere
+which surrounded them; and they were the direct result of the social and
+political condition. This may seem no answer; for although we know the
+causes of monster births, they are monstrous none the less. What we mean
+is not that the existence of men capable of committing such actions was
+normal; we mean that the men who committed them, the conditions being
+what they were, were not necessarily men of exceptional character. The
+level of immorality was so high that a man need be no giant to reach up
+into the very seventh heaven of iniquity. When to massacre at a banquet
+a number of enemies enticed by overtures of peace was considered in
+Caesar Borgia merely a rather audacious and not very holy action,
+indicative of very brilliant powers of diplomacy, then Caesar Borgia
+required, to commit such an action, little more than a brilliant
+diplomatic endowment, unhampered by scruples and timidity; when a brave,
+and gracious prince like Gianpaolo Baglioni could murder his kinsmen and
+commit incest with his sister without being considered less gracious and
+magnanimous, then Gianpaolo Baglioni might indeed be but an indifferent
+villain; when treachery, lust, and bloodshed, although objected to in
+theory, were condoned In practice, and were regarded as venial sins,
+those who indulged in them might be in fact scarcely more than venial
+sinners. In short, where a fiendish action might be committed without
+the perpetrator being considered a fiend, there was no need of his being
+one. And, indeed, the great villains of the Renaissance never take up
+the attitude of fiends; one or two, like certain Visconti or Aragonese,
+were madmen, but the others were more or less normal human beings. There
+was no barrier between them and evil; they slipped into it, remained in
+it, became accustomed to it; but a vicious determination to be wicked, a
+feeling of the fiend within one, like that of Shakespeare's Richard, or
+a gradual, conscious irresistible absorption into recognized iniquity
+like Macbeth's, there was not. The mere sense of absolute power and
+impunity, together with the complete silence of the conscience of the
+public at large, can make a man do strange things. If Caesar Borgia be
+free to practise his archery upon hares and deer, why should he not
+practise it upon these prisoners? Who will blame him? Who can prevent
+him? If he had for his mistress every woman he might single out from
+among his captives, why not his sister? If he have the force to carry
+out a plan, why should a man stand in his way? The complete facility in
+the commission of all actions quickly brings such a man to the limits of
+the legitimate: there is no universal cry to tell him where those limits
+are, no universal arm to pull him back. He pooh-poohs, pushes them a
+little further, and does the iniquity. Nothing prevents his gratifying
+his ambition, his avarice, and his lust, so he gratifies them. Soon,
+seeking for further gratification, he has to cut new paths in villainy:
+he has not been restrained by man, who is silent; he is soon restrained
+no longer by nature, whose only voice is in man's conscience. Pleasure
+in wanton cruelty takes the same course: he prefers to throw javelins at
+men and women to throwing javelins at bulls or bears, even as he prefers
+throwing javelins at bulls or bears rather than at targets; the
+excitement is greater; the instinct is that of the soldiers of Spain and
+of France, who invariably preferred shooting at a valuable fresco like
+Sodoma's Christ, at Siena, or Lo Spagna's Madonna, at Spoleto, to
+practising against a mere worthless piece of wood. Such a man as Caesar
+Borgia is the _nec plus ultra_ of a Renaissance villain; he takes, as
+all do not, absolute pleasure in evil as such. Yet Caesar Borgia is not a
+fiend nor a maniac. He can restrain himself whenever circumstances or
+policy require it; he can be a wise administrator, a just judge. His
+portraits show no degraded criminal; he is, indeed, a criminal in
+action, but not necessarily a criminal in constitution, this fiendish
+man who did not seem a fiend to Machiavel. We are astonished at the
+strange anomaly in the tastes and deeds of these Renaissance villains;
+we are amazed before their portraits. These men, who, in the frightful
+light of their own misdeeds, appear to us as complete demons or complete
+madmen, have yet much that is amiable and much that is sane; they
+stickle at no abominable lust, yet they are no bestial sybarites; they
+are brave, sober, frugal, enduring like any puritan; they are
+treacherous, rapacious, cruel, utterly indifferent to the sufferings of
+their enemies, yet they are gentle in manner, passionately fond of
+letters and art, superb in their works of public utility, and not
+incapable of genuinely admiring men of pure life like Bernardino or
+Savonarola: they are often, strange to say, like the frightful Baglionis
+of Perugia, passionately admired and loved by their countrymen. The
+bodily portraits of these men, painted by the sternly realistic art of
+the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, are even more confusing to
+our ideas than their moral portraits drawn by historians and
+chroniclers. Caesar Borgia, with his long fine features and noble head,
+is a gracious and refined prince; there is, perhaps, a certain duplicity
+in the well-cut lips; the beard, worn full and peaked in Spanish
+fashion, forms a sort of mask to the lower part of the face, but what we
+see is noble and intellectual. Sigismondo Malatesta has on his medals a
+head whose scowl has afforded opportunity for various fine descriptions
+of a blood maniac; but the head, thus found so expressive, of this
+monster, is infinitely more human than the head on the medals of
+Lionello d'Este, one of the most mild and cultivated of the decently
+behaved Ferrarese princes. The very flower of precocious iniquity, the
+young Baglionis, Vitellis, and Orsinis, grouped round Signorelli's
+preaching Antichrist at Orvieto, are, in their gallantly trimmed jerkins
+and jewelled caps, the veriest assemblage of harmless young dandies,
+pretty and insipid; we can scarcely believe that these mild beardless
+striplings, tight-waisted and well-curled like girls of sixteen, are the
+terrible Umbrian brigand condottieri--Gianpaolos, Simonettos,
+Vitellozzos, and Astorres--whose abominable deeds fill the pages of the
+chronicles of Matarazzo, of Frolliere, of Monaldeschi. Nowhere among the
+portraits of Renaissance monsters do we meet with anything like those
+Roman emperors, whose frightful effigies, tumid, toad-like Vitelliuses
+or rage-convulsed Caracallas, fill all our museums in marble or bronze
+or loathsome purple porphyry; such types as these are as foreign to the
+reality of the Italian Renaissance as are the Brachianos and
+Lussuriosos, the Pieros and Corombonas, to the Italian fiction of the
+sixteenth century.
+
+Nor must such anomalies between the type of the men and their deeds,
+between their abominable crimes and their high qualities, be merely made
+a subject for grandiloquent disquisition. The man of the Renaissance, as
+we have said, had no need to be a monster to do monstrous things; a
+crime did not necessitate such a moral rebellion as requires complete
+unity of nature, unmixed wickedness; it did not precipitate a man for
+ever into a moral abyss where no good could ever enter. Seeing no
+barrier between the legitimate and the illegitimate, he could alternate
+almost unconsciously between them. He was never shut out from evil, and
+never shut out from good; the judgment of men did not dress him in a
+convict's jacket which made evil his only companion; it did not lock him
+up in a moral dungeon where no ray of righteousness could enter; he was
+not condemned, like the branded harlot, to hopeless infamy. He need be
+bad only as much and as long as he chose. Hence, on the part of the
+evil-doer of the Renaissance, no necessity either for violent rebellion
+or for sincere repentance; hence the absence of all characters such as
+the tragic writer seeks, developed by moral struggle, warped by the
+triumph of vice, or consciously soiled in virtue. What a "Revenger's
+Tragedy" might not Cyril Tourneur have made, had he known all the
+details, of the story of Alessandro de' Medici's death! What a Vindici
+he would have made of the murderer Lorenzino; with what a strange lurid
+grandeur he would have surrounded the plottings of the pander Brutus.
+But Lorenzino de' Medici had none of the feeling of Tourneur's Vindici;
+there was in him none of the ghastly spirit of self-immolation of the
+hero of Tourneur in his attendance upon the foul creature whom he leads
+to his death. Lorenzino had the usual Brutus mania of his day, but
+unmixed with horror. To be the pander and jester of the Duke was no pain
+to his nature; there was probably no sense of debasement in the
+knowledge either of his employer or of his employment. To fasten on
+Alexander, to pretend to be his devoted slave and server of his lust,
+this piece of loathsome acting, merely enhanced, by the ingenuity it
+required, the attraction of what to Lorenzino was an act of heroism. His
+ambition was to be a Brutus; that he had bespattered the part probably
+never occurred to him. The indifference to good and evil permitted the
+men of the Renaissance to mix the two without any moral sickness, as it
+permitted them to alternate them without a moral struggle. Such is the
+wickedness of the Renaissance: not a superhuman fury of lust and
+cruelty, like Victor Hugo's Lucrezia Borgia; but an indifferent, a
+characterless creature like the Lucrezia Borgia of history: passive to
+surrounding influences, blind to good and evil, infamous in the infamous
+Rome, among her father and brother's courtesans and cut-throats; grave
+and gracious! in the grave and gracious Ferrara, among the Platonic
+poets and pacific courtiers of the court of the Estensi. Thus, in the
+complete prose and colourlessness of reality, has the evil of the
+Renaissance been understood and represented only by one man, and
+transmitted to us in one pale and delicate psychological masterpiece far
+more loathsome than any elaborately hideous monster painting by Marston
+or Tourneur. The man who thus conceived the horrors of the Italian
+Renaissance in the spirit in which they were committed is Ford. In his
+great play he has caught the very tone of the Italian Renaissance: the
+abominableness of the play consisting not in the coarse slaughter scenes
+added merely to please the cockpit of an English theatre, but in the
+superficial innocence of tone; in its making evil lose its appearance of
+evil, even as it did to the men of the Renaissance. Giovanni and
+Annabella make love as if they were Romeo and Juliet: there is scarcely
+any struggle, and no remorse; they weep and pay compliments and sigh and
+melt in true Aminta style. There is in the love of the brother and
+sister neither the ferocious heat of tragic lust, nor the awful shudder
+of unnatural evil; they are lukewarm, neither good nor bad. Their
+abominable love is in their own eyes a mere weakness of the flesh; there
+is no sense of revolt against man and nature and God; they are neither
+dragged on by irresistible demoniac force nor held back by the grip of
+conscience; they slip and slide, even like Francesca and Paolo. They pay
+each other sweet and mawkish compliments. The ferocious lust of
+Francesco Cenci is moral compared with the way in which the "trim youth"
+Giovanni praises Annabella's beauty; the blushing, bride-like way in
+which Annabella, "white in her soul," acknowledges her long love. The
+atrociousness of all this is, that if you strike out a word or two the
+scene may be read with perfect moral satisfaction, with the impression
+that this is really "sacred love." For in these scenes Ford wrote with a
+sweetness and innocence truly diabolical, not a shiver of horror passing
+through him--serene, unconscious; handling the filthy without sense of
+its being unclean, to the extent, the incredible extent, of making
+Giovanni and Annabella swear on their mother's ashes eternal fidelity in
+incest: horror of horrors, to which no Walpurgis Night abomination could
+ever approach, this taking as witness of the unutterable, not an obscene
+Beelzebub with abominable words and rites, but the very holiest of
+holies. If ever Englishman approached the temper of the Italian
+Renaissance, it was not Tourneur, nor Shelley with his cleansing hell
+fires of tragic horror, but this sweet and gentle Ford. If ever an
+artistic picture approached the reality of such a man as Gianpaolo
+Baglioni, the incestuous murderer whom the Frolliere chronicler,
+enthusiastic like Matarazzo, admires, for "his most beautiful person,
+his benign and amiable manner and lordly bearing," it is certainly not
+the elaborately villainous Francesco Cenci of Shelley, boasting like
+another Satan of his enormous wickedness, exhausting in his picture of
+himself the rhetoric of horror, committing his final enormity merely to
+complete the crown of atrocities in which he glories; it is no such
+tragic impossibility of moral hideousness as this; it is the Giovanni of
+Ford, the pearl of virtuous and studious youths, the spotless, the
+brave, who, after a moment's reasoning, tramples on a vulgar
+prejudice--"Shall a peevish sound, a customary form from man to man, of
+brother and of sister, be a bar 'twixt my eternal happiness and me?" who
+sins with a clear conscience, defies the world, and dies, bravely,
+proudly, the "sacred name" of Annabella on his lips, like a chivalrous
+hero. The pious, pure Germany of Luther will give the world the tragic
+type of the science-damned Faustus; the devout and savage Spain of
+Cervantes will give the tragic type of Don Juan, damned for mockery of
+man and of death and of heaven; the Puritan England of Milton will give
+the most sublimely tragic type of all, the awful figure of him who says,
+"Evil, be thou my good." What tragic type can this evil Italy of
+Renaissance give to the world? None: or at most this miserable, morbid,
+compassionated Giovanni: whom Ford would have us admire, and whom we can
+only despise.
+
+The blindness to evil which constitutes the criminality of the
+Renaissance is so great as to give a certain air of innocence. For the
+men of that time were wicked solely from a complete sophistication of
+ideas, a complete melting away (owing to slowly operating political and
+intellectual tendencies) of all moral barriers. They walked through the
+paths of wickedness with the serenity with which they would have trod
+the ways of righteousness; seeing no boundary, exercising their psychic
+limbs equally in the open and permitted spaces and in the forbidden.
+They plucked the fruit of evil without a glance behind them, without a
+desperate setting of their teeth; plucked it openly, calmly, as they
+would have plucked the blackberries in the hedge; bit into it, ate it,
+with perfect ease and serenity, saying their prayers before and after,
+as if it were their natural daily bread mentioned in the Lord's Prayer;
+no grimace or unseemly leer the while; no moral indigestion or nightmare
+(except very rarely) in consequence. Hence the serenity of their
+literature and art. These men and women of the Italian Renaissance have,
+in their portraits, a very pleasing nobility of aspect: serene,
+thoughtful, healthy, benign. Titian's courtesans are our archetypes of
+dignified womanhood; we might fancy Portia or Isabella with such calm,
+florid beauty, so wholly unmeretricious and uncankered. The humanists
+and priests who lie outstretched on the acanthus-leaved and
+flower-garlanded sarcophagi by Desiderio and Rossellino are the very
+flowers of refined and gentle men of study; the youths in Botticelli's
+"Adoration of The Magi," for instance, are the ideal of Boiardo's
+chivalry, Rinaldos and Orlandos every one; the corseleted generals of
+the Renaissance, so calm and stern and frank, the Bartolomeo Colleoni of
+Verrocchio, the Gattamelata by Giorgione (or Giorgione's pupil), look
+fit to take up the banner of the crusade: that Gattamelata in the Uffizi
+gallery especially looks like a sort of military Milton: give him a pair
+of wings and he becomes at once Signorelli's archangel, clothed in
+heavenly steel and unsheathing the flaming sword of God. Compare with
+these types Holbein's courtiers of Henry VIII.; what scrofulous hogs!
+Compare Sanchez Coello's Philip II. and Don Carlos; what monomaniacs.
+Compare even Duerer's magnificent head of Willibald Pirkheimer: how the
+swine nature is blended with the thinker. And the swine will be subdued,
+the thinker will triumph. Why? Just because there is a contest--because
+the thinker-Willibald is conscious of the swine-Willibald. In this
+coarse, brutal, deeply stained Germany of the time of Luther, affording
+Duerer and Holbein, alas! how many besotten and bestial types, there will
+arise a great conflict: the obscene leering Death--Death-in-Life as he
+really is--will skulk everywhere, even as in the prints of the day,
+hideous and powerful, trying, with hog's snout, to drive Christ Himself
+out of limbo; but he is known, seen, dreaded. The armed knight of Duerer
+turns away from his grimacings, and urges on his steel-covered horse. He
+visits even the best, even Luther in the Wartburg; but the good men open
+their Bibles, cry "Vade retro!" and throw their inkstands at him,
+showing themselves terrified and ruffled after the combat. And these
+Germans of Luther's are disgustingly fond of blood and horrors: they
+like to see the blood spirt from the decapitated trunk, to watch its
+last contortions; they hammer with a will (in Duerer's "Passion") the
+nails of the cross, they peel off strips of skin in the flagellation.
+But then they can master all that; they can be pure, charitable; they
+have gentleness for the hare and the rabbit, like Luther; they kneel
+piously before the cross-bearing stag, like Saint Hubert. Not so the
+Italians. They rarely or never paint horrors, or death, or abominations.
+Their flagellated Christ, their arrow-riddled Sebastian, never writhe or
+howl with pain; indeed, they suffer none. Judith, in Mantegna's print,
+puts the head of Holophernes into her bag with the serenity of a muse;
+and the head is quite clean, without loathsome drippings or torn
+depending strings of muscle; unconvulsed, a sort of plaster cast. The
+tragedy of Christ, the tragedy of Judith; the physical agency shadowing
+the moral agony; the awfulness of victim and criminal--the whole tragic
+meaning was unknown to the light and cheerful contemporaries of Ariosto,
+the cold and cynical contemporaries of Machiavelli.
+
+The tragic passion and imagination which, in the noble and grotesque
+immaturity of the Middle Ages, had murmured confusedly in the popular
+legends which gave to Ezzelin the Fiend as a father, and Death and Sin
+as adversaries at dice; which had stammered awkwardly but grandly in the
+school Latin of Mussato's tragedy of "Eccerinis;" which had wept and
+stormed and imprecated and laughed for horror in the infinite
+tragedy--pathetic, grand, and grotesque, like all great tragedy--of
+Dante; this tragic passion and imagination, this sense of the horrible
+and the terrible, had been forfeited by the Italy of the Renaissance,
+lost with its sense of right and wrong. The Italian Renaissance, supreme
+in the arts which require a subtle and strong perception of the
+excellence of mere lines and colours and lights and shadows, which
+demand unflinching judgment of material qualities; was condemned to
+inferiority in the art which requires subtle and strong perception of
+the excellence of human emotion and action; in the art which demands
+unflinching judgment of moral motives. The tragic spirit is the
+offspring of the conscience of a people. The sense of the imaginative
+grandeur of evil may perhaps be a forerunner of demoralization; but such
+a sense of wonder and awe, such an imaginative fascination of the
+grandly, superhumanly wicked such a necessity to magnify a villain into
+a demon with archangelic splendour of power of evil, can exist only in
+minds pure and strong, braced up to virtue, virgin of evil, with a
+certain childlike power of wonder; minds to whom it appears that to be
+wicked requires a powerful rebellion; minds accustomed to nature and
+nature's plainness, to whom the unnatural can be no subject of
+sophistication and cynicism, but only of wonder. While, in Italy,
+Giraldi Cinthio prattles off to a gay party of ladies and gentlemen
+stories of murder and lust as frightful as those of "Titus' Andronicus,"
+of "Giovanni and Annabella," and of the "Revenger's Tragedy," in the
+intelligent, bantering tone in which he tells his Decameronian tales; in
+England, Marston, in his superb prologue to the second part of "Antonio
+and Mellida," doubts whether all his audience can rise to the conception
+of the terrible passions he wishes to display:
+
+
+     If any spirit breathes within this round
+     Uncapable of weighty passion,
+     Who winks and shuts his apprehension up
+     From common sense of what men were and are,
+     Who would not know what men must be: let such
+     Hurry amain from our black visaged shows;
+     We shall affright their eyes.
+
+
+The great criminals of Italy were unconscious of being criminals; the
+nation was unconscious of being sinful. Bembo's sonnets were the fit
+reading for Lucrezia Borgia; pastorals by Guarini the dramatic
+amusements of Rannuccio Farnesi; if Vittoria Accoramboni and Francesco
+Cenci read anything besides their prayerbook or ribald novels, it was
+some sugary "Aminta" or "Pastor Fido:" their own tragedies by Webster
+and Shelley they could never have understood.
+
+And thus the Italians of the Renaissance walked placidly through the
+evil which surrounded them; for them, artists and poets, the sky was
+always blue and the sun always bright, and their art and their poetry
+were serene. But the Englishmen of the sixteenth century were astonished
+and fascinated by the evil of Italy: the dark pools of horror, the dabs
+of infamy which had met them ever and anon in the brilliant southern
+cities, haunted them like nightmare, bespattered for them the clear blue
+sky, and danced, black and horrible spots, before the face of the sun.
+The remembrance of Italian wickedness weighed on them like an incubus,
+clung to them with a frightful fascination. While the foulest criminals
+of Italy discussed the platonic vapidnesses of Bembo's sonnets, and wept
+at the sweet and languid lamentations of Guarini's shepherds and nymphs;
+the strong Englishmen of the time of Shakespeare, the men whose children
+were to unsheathe under Cromwell the sword of righteousness, listened
+awe-stricken and fascinated with horror to the gloomy and convulsed, the
+grand and frightful plays of Webster and of Tourneur. And the sin of the
+Renaissance, which the art of Italy could neither pourtray nor perceive;
+appeared on the stage decked in superb and awful garb by the tragic
+imagination of Elizabethan England.
+
+
+
+
+THE OUTDOOR POETRY.
+
+
+The thought of winter is bleak and barren to our mind; the late year is
+chary of aesthetic as of all other food. In the country it does not bring
+ugliness; but it terribly reduces and simplifies things, depriving them
+of two-thirds of their beauty. In sweeping away the last yellow leaves,
+the last crimson clouds, and in bleaching the last green grass, it
+effaces a whole wealth of colour. It deprives us still more by actually
+diminishing the number of forms: for what summer had left rich, various,
+complex, winter reduces to blank uniformity. There is a whole world of
+lovely things, shapes and tints, effects of light, colour, and
+perspective in a wood, as long as it is capriciously divided into a
+thousand nooks and crannies by projecting boughs, bushes, hedges, and
+hanging leaves; and this winter clears away and reduces to a
+Haussmanized simplicity of plan. There is a smaller world, yet one quite
+big enough for a summer's day, in any hay field, among the barren oats,
+the moon-daisies, the seeded grasses, the sorrel, the buttercups, all
+making at a distance a wonderful blent effect of luminous brown and
+lilac and russet foamed with white; and forming, when you look close
+into it, an unlimited forest of delicately separate stems and bloom and
+seed; every plant detaching itself daintily from an undefinable
+background of things like itself. This winter turns into a rusty brown
+and green expanse, or into a bog, or a field of frozen upturned clods.
+The very trees, stripped of their leaves, look as if prepared for
+diagrams of the abstraction tree. Everything, in short, is reduced most
+philosophically to its absolutely ultimate elements; and beauty is got
+rid of almost as completely as by a metaphysical definition. This
+aesthetic barrenness of winter is most of all felt in southern climates,
+to which it brings none of the harsh glitter and glamour of snow and
+ice; but leaves the frozen earth and leafless trees merely bare, without
+the crisp sheen of snow, the glint and glimmer of frost and icicles,
+forming for the denuded rigging of branches a fantastic system of ropes
+and folded sails. In the South, therefore, unless you go where winter
+never comes, and autumn merely merges into a lengthened spring, winter
+is more than ever negative, dreary, barren to our fancy. Yet even this
+southern winter gives one things, very lovely things: things which one
+scarcely notices perhaps, yet which would baffle the most skilled
+painter to imitate, the most skilled poet to describe. Thus, for
+instance, there is a peculiar kind of morning by no means uncommon in
+Tuscany in what is completely winter, not a remnant of autumn or a
+beginning of spring. It is cold, but windless; the sky full of sun, the
+earth full of mist. Sun and mist uniting into a pale luminousness in
+which all things lose body, become mere outline; bodiless hills taking
+shape where they touch the sky with their curve; clear line of irregular
+houses, of projecting ilex roundings and pointed cypresses marking the
+separation between hill and sky, the one scarcely more solid, corporeal
+than the other; the hill almost as blue as the sky, the sky almost as
+vaporous as the hill; the tangible often more ghostlike than the
+intangible. But the sun has smitten the higher hills, and the vapours
+have partially rolled down, in a scarcely visible fold, to their feet;
+and the high hill, not yet rock or earth, swells up into the sky as
+something real, but fluid and of infinite elasticity. All in front the
+plain is white with mist; or pinkish grey with the unseen agglomeration
+of bare tree boughs and trunks, of sere field; till, nearer us, the
+trees become more visible, the short vinebearing elms in the fields,
+interlacing their branches compressed by distance, the clumps of
+poplars, so scant and far between from nearly, so serried and compact
+from afar; and between them an occasional flush, a tawny vapour of the
+orange twigged osiers; and then, still nearer, the expanse of sere
+field, of mottled, crushed-together, yellowed grass and grey brown
+leaves; things of the summer which winter is burying to make room for
+spring. Along the reaches of the river the clumps of leafless poplars
+are grey against the pale, palest blue sky; grey but with a warmth of
+delicate brown, almost of rosiness. Grey also the shingle in the river
+bed; the river itself either (if after rain) pale brown, streaked with
+pale blue sky reflections; or (after a drought), low, grey, luminous
+throughout its surface, you might think, were it not that the metallic
+sheen, the vacillating sparkles of where the sun, smiting down, frets it
+into a shifting mass of scintillating facets, gives you the impression
+that this other luminousness of silvery water must be dull and dead.
+And, looking up the river, it gradually disappears, its place marked
+only, against the all-pervading pale blue haze, by the brownish grey
+spectre of the furthest poplar clumps.
+
+This, I have said, is an effect which winter produces, nay, even a
+southern winter, with those comparatively few and slight elements at its
+disposal. We see it, notice it, and enjoy its delicate loveliness; but
+while so doing we do not think, or we forget, that the habit of
+noticing, nay, the power of perceiving such effects as this, is one of
+those habits and powers which we possess, so to speak, only since
+yesterday. The possibility of reproducing in painting effects like this
+one; or, more truthfully, the wish to reproduce them, is scarcely as old
+as our own century; it is, perhaps, the latest born of all our artistic
+wishes and possibilities. But the possibility of any visible effect
+being perceived and reproduced by the painter, usually precedes--at
+least where any kind of pictorial art already exists--the perception of
+such effects by those who are not painters, and the attempt to reproduce
+them by means of words. We do not care to admit that our grandfathers
+were too unlike ourselves, lest ourselves should be found too unlike our
+grandchildren. We hold to the metaphysic fiction of man having always
+been the same, and only his circumstances having changed; not admitting
+that the very change of circumstances implies something new in the man
+who altered them; and similarly we shrink from the thought of the many
+things which we used never to notice, and which it has required a class
+of men endowed with special powers of vision to find out, copy, and
+teach us to see and appreciate. Yet there is scarcely one of us who has
+not a debt towards some painter or writer for first directing his
+attention to objects or effects which may have abounded around him, but
+unnoticed or confused with others. The painters, as I have said, the men
+who see more keenly and who study what they have seen, naturally come
+first; nor does the poet usually describe what his contemporary painter
+attempts not to paint. An exception might, perhaps, require to be made
+for Dante, who would seem to have seen and described many things left
+quite untouched by Giotto, and even by Raphael; but in estimating Dante
+we must be careful to distinguish the few touches which really belong to
+him, from the great mass of colour and detail which we have
+unconsciously added thereto, borrowing from our own experience and from
+innumerable pictures and poems which, at the moment, we may not in the
+least remember; and having done so, we shall be led to believe that
+those words which suggest to us so clear and coloured a vision of scenes
+often complex and uncommon, presented to his own mind only a
+comparatively simple and incomplete idea: the atmospheric effects,
+requiring a more modern painter than Turner, which we read between the
+lines of the "Inferno" and the "Purgatorio," most probably existed as
+little for Dante as they did for Giotto; the poet seeing and describing
+in reality only salient forms of earth and rock, monotonous in tint and
+deficient in air, like those in the backgrounds of mediaeval Tuscan
+frescoes and panels. Be this as it may, the fact grows daily on me that
+men have not at all times seen in the same degree the nature which has
+always equally surrounded them; and that during some periods they have,
+for explicable reasons, seen less not only than their successors, but
+also than their predecessors; and seen that little in a manner
+conventional in proportion to its monotony. There are things about which
+certain historic epochs are strangely silent; so much so, indeed, that
+the breaking of the silence impresses us almost as the more than human
+breaking of a spell; and that silence Is the result of a grievous wrong,
+of a moral disease which half closes the eyes of the fancy, or of a
+moral poison which presents to those sorely aching eyes only a glimmer
+amid darkness. And it is as the most singular instance of such
+conditions that I should wish to study, in themselves, their causes and
+effects, the great differences existing between the ancients and
+ourselves on the one hand, and the men of the genuine Middle Ages on the
+other, in the degree of interest taken respectively by each in external
+nature, the seasons and that rural life which seems to bring us into
+closest contact with them both.
+
+There is, of course, a considerable difference between the manner in
+which the country, its aspects and occupations, are treated by the poets
+of Antiquity and by those of our own day; in the mode of enjoying them
+of an ancient who had read Theocritus and Virgil and Tibullus, and a
+modern whose mind is unconsciously full of the influence of Wordsworth
+or Shelley or Ruskin. But it is a mere difference of mode; and is not
+greater, I think, than the difference between the descriptions in the
+"Allegro," and the descriptions in "Men and Women;" than the difference
+between the love of our Elizabethans for the minuter details of the
+country, the flowers by the stream, the birds in the bushes, the
+ferrets, frogs, lizards, and similar small creatures; and the pleasure
+of our own contemporaries in the larger, more shifting, and perplexing
+forms and colours of cloud, sunlight, earth, and rock. The description
+of effects such as these latter ones, nay, the attention and
+appreciation given to them, are things of our own century, even as is
+the power and desire of painting them. Landscape, in the sense of our
+artists of to-day, is a very recent thing; so recent that even in the
+works of Turner, who was perhaps the earliest landscape painter in the
+modern sense, we are forced to separate from the real rendering of real
+effects, a great deal in which the tints of sky and sea are arranged and
+distributed as a mere vast conventional piece of decoration. Nor could
+it be otherwise. For, in poetry as in painting, landscape could become a
+separate and substantive art only when the interest in the mere ins and
+outs of human adventure, in the mere structure and movement of human
+limbs, had considerably diminished. There is room, in epic or drama,
+only for such little scraps of description as will make clearer, without
+checking, the human action; as there is place, in a fresco of a miracle,
+or a little picture of carousing and singing bacchantes and Venetian
+dandies, only for such little bits of laurel grove, or dim plain, or
+blue alpine crags, as can be introduced in the gaps between head and
+head, or figure and figure.
+
+Thus, therefore, a great difference must exist between what would be
+felt and written about the country and the seasons by an ancient, by a
+man of the sixteenth century, or by a contemporary of our own: a
+difference, however, solely of mode; for we feel sure that of the three
+men each would find something to delight himself and wherewith to
+delight others among the elm-bounded English meadows, the fiat
+cornfields of central France, the vine and olive yards of Italy--
+wherever, in short, he might find himself face to face and, so to
+speak, hand in hand with Nature. But about the man of the Middle Ages
+(unless, perhaps, in Italy, where the whole Middle Ages were merely an
+earlier Renaissance) we could have no such assurance; nay, we might be
+persuaded that, however great his genius, be he even a Gottfried von
+Strassburg, or a Walther von der Vogelweide, or the unknown Frenchman
+who has left us "Aucassin et Nicolette," he would bring back impressions
+only of two things, authorized and consecrated by the poetic routine of
+his contemporaries--of spring and of the woods.
+
+There is nothing more characteristic of mediaeval poetry than this
+limitation. Of autumn, of winter; of the standing corn, the ripening
+fruit of summer; of all these things so dear to the ancients and to all
+men of modern times, the Middle Ages seem to know nothing. The autumn
+harvests, the mists and wondrous autumnal transfiguration of the
+humblest tree, or bracken, or bush; the white and glittering splendour
+of winter, and its cosy life by hearth or stove; the drowsiness of
+summer, its suddenly inspired wish for shade and dew and water, all this
+left them stolid. To move them was required the feeling of spring, the
+strongest, most complete and stirring impression which, in our temperate
+climates, can be given by Nature. The whole pleasurableness of warm air,
+clear moist sky, the surprise of the shimmer of pale green, of the
+yellowing blossom on tree tops, the first flicker of faint shadow where
+all has been uniform, colourless, shadeless; the replacing of the long
+silence by the endless twitter and trill of birds, endless in its way as
+is the sea, twitter and trill on every side, depths and depths of it, of
+every degree of distance and faintness, a sea of bird song; and along
+with this the sense of infinite renovation to all the earth and to man's
+own heart. Of all Nature's effects this one alone goes sparkling to the
+head; and it alone finds a response in mediaeval poetry. Spring, spring,
+endless spring--for three long centuries throughout the world a dreary
+green monotony of spring all over France, Provence, Italy, Spain,
+Germany, England; spring, spring, nothing but spring even in the
+mysterious countries governed by the Grail King, by the Fairy Morgana,
+by Queen Proserpine, by Prester John; nay, in the new Jerusalem, in the
+kingdom of Heaven itself, nothing but spring; till one longs for a bare
+twig, for a yellow leaf, for a frozen gutter, as for a draught of water
+in the desert. The green fields and meadows enamelled with painted
+flowers, how one detests them! how one would rejoice to see them well
+sprinkled with frost or burnt up to brown in the dry days! the birds,
+the birds which warble through every sonnet, canzone, sirventes, glosa,
+dance lay, roundelay, virelay, rondel, ballade, and whatsoever else it
+may be called,--how one wishes them silent for ever, or their twitter,
+the tarantarantandei of the eternal German nightingale especially,
+drowned by a good howling wind J After any persistent study of mediaeval
+poetry, one's feeling towards spring is just similar to that of the
+morbid creature in Schubert's "Muellerin," who would not stir from home
+for the dreadful, dreadful greenness, which he would fain bleach with
+tears, all around:
+
+
+     Ich moechte ziehn in die Welt hinaus, hinaus in die weite
+         Welt,
+     Wenn's nur so gruen, so gruen nicht war da draussen in
+         Wald und Feld.
+
+
+Moreover this mediaeval spring is the spring neither of the shepherd, nor
+of the farmer, nor of any man to whom spring brings work and anxiety and
+hope of gain; it is a mere vague spring of gentle-folk, or at all events
+of well-to-do burgesses, taking their pleasure on the lawns of castle
+parks, or the green holiday places close to the city, much as we see
+them in the first part of "Faust;" a sweet but monotonous charm of
+grass, beneath green lime tree, or in the South the elm or plane; under
+which are seated the poet and the fiddler, playing and singing for the
+young women, their hair woven with chaplets of fresh flowers, dancing
+upon the sward. And poet after poet, Provencal, Italian, and German,
+Nithart and Ulrich, and even the austere singer of the Holy Grail,
+Wolfram, pouring out verse after verse of the songs in praise of spring,
+which they make even as girls wind their garlands: songs of quaint and
+graceful ever-changing rythm, now slowly circling, now bounding along,
+now stamping out the measure like the feet of the dancers, now winding
+and turning as wind and twine their arms in the long-linked mazes; while
+the few and ever-repeated ideas, the old, stale platitudes of praise of
+woman, love pains, joys of dancing, pleasure of spring (spring, always
+spring, eternal, everlasting spring) seem languidly to follow the life
+and movement of the mere metre. Poets, these German, Provencal, French,
+and early Italian lyrists, essentially (if we venture to speak heresy)
+not of ideas or emotions, but of metre, of rythm and rhyme; with just
+the minimum of necessary thought, perpetually presented afresh just as
+the words, often and often repeated and broken up and new combined, of a
+piece of music--poetry which is in truth a sort of music, dance or dirge
+or hymn music as the case may be, more than anything else.
+
+As it is in mediaeval poetry with the seasons, so it is likewise with the
+country and its occupations: as there is only spring, so there is only
+the forest. Of the forest, mediaeval poetry has indeed much to say; more
+perhaps, and more familiar with its pleasures, than Antiquity. There is
+the memorable forest where the heroes of the Nibelungen go to hunt,
+followed by their waggons of provisions and wine; where Siegfried
+overpowers the bear, and returns to his laughing comrades with the huge
+thing chained to his saddle; where, in that clear space which we see so
+distinctly, a lawn on to which the blue black firs are encroaching,
+Siegfried stoops to drink of the spring beneath the lime tree, and Hagen
+drives his boarspear straight through the Nibelung's back. There is the
+thick wood, all a golden haze through the young green, and with an
+atmosphere of birds' song, where King Mark discovers Tristram and Iseult
+in the cave, the deceitful sword between them, as Gottfried von
+Strassburg relates with wonderful luscious charm. The forest, also, more
+bleak and austere, where the four outlawed sons of Aymon live upon roots
+and wild animals, where they build their castle by the Meuse. Further,
+and most lovely of all, the forest in which Nicolette makes herself a
+hut of branches, bracken, and flowers, through which the stars peep down
+on her whiteness as she dreams of her Lord Aucassin. The forest where
+Huon meets Oberon; and Guy de Lusignan, the good snake-lady; and
+Parzival finds on the snow the feathers and the drops of blood which
+throw him into his long day-dream; and Owen discovers the tomb of
+Merlin; the forest, in short, which extends its interminable glades and
+serried masses of trunks and arches of green from one end to the other
+of mediaeval poetry. It is very beautiful, this forest of the Middle
+Ages; but it is monotonous, melancholy; and has a terrible eeriness in
+its endlessness. For there is nothing else. There are no meadows where
+the cows lie lazily, no fields where the red and purple kerchiefs of the
+reapers overtop the high corn; no orchards, no hayfields; nothing like
+those hill slopes where the wild herbs encroach upon the vines, and the
+goats of Corydon and Damoetas require to be kept from mischief; where, a
+little lower down, the Athenian shopkeeper of Aristophanes goes daily to
+look whether yesterday's hard figs may not have ripened, or the vine
+wreaths pruned last week grown too lushly. Nor anything of the sort of
+those Umbrian meadows, where Virgil himself will stop and watch the
+white bullocks splashing slowly into the shallow, sedgy Clitumnus; still
+less like those hamlets in the cornfields through which Propertius would
+stroll, following the jolting osier waggon, or the procession with
+garlands and lights to Pales or to the ochre-stained garden god. Nothing
+of all this: there are no cultivated spots in mediaeval poetry; the city
+only, and the castle, and the endless, all-encompassing forest.
+
+And to this narrowness of mediaeval notions of outdoor life, inherited
+together with mediaeval subjects by the poets even of the sixteenth
+century, must be referred the curious difference existing between the
+romance poets of antiquity, like Homer in the Odyssey, and the romance
+poets--Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Camoens--of modern times, in
+the matter of--how shall I express it?--the ideal life, the fortunate
+realms, the "Kennaqwhere." In Homer, in all the ancients, the ideal
+country is merely a more delightful reality; and its inhabitants happier
+everyday men and women; in the poetry sprung from the Middle Ages it is
+always a fairy-land constructed by mechanicians and architects. For, as
+we have seen, the Middle Ages could bequeath to the sixteenth century no
+ideal of peaceful outdoor enjoyment. Hence, in the poetry of the
+sixteenth century, still permeated by mediaeval traditions, an appalling
+artificiality of delightfulness. Fallerina, Alcina, Armida, Acrasia, all
+imitated from the original Calypso, are not strong and splendid
+god-women, living among the fields and orchards, but dainty ladies
+hidden in elaborate gardens, all bedizened with fashionable
+architecture: regular palaces, pleasaunces, with uncomfortable edifices,
+artificial waterfalls, labyrinths, rare and monstrous plants, parrots,
+apes, giraffes; childish splendours of gardening and engineering and
+menageries, which we meet already in "Ogier the Dane" and "Huon of
+Bordeaux," and which later poets epitomized out of the endless
+descriptions of Colonna's "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," the still more
+frightful inventories of the Amadis romances. They are, each of them, a
+kind of anticipated Marly, Versailles, Prince Elector's Friedrichsruhe
+or Nymphenburg, with clipped cypresses and yews, doubtless, and (O Pales
+and Pan!) flower-beds filled with coloured plaster and spas, and
+cascades spirting out (thanks to fifty invisible pumps) under your feet
+and over your head. All the vineyards and cornfields have been swept
+away to make these solemn terraces and water-works; all the cottages
+which, with their little wooden shrine, their humble enclosure of
+sunflowers and rosemary and fruit trees, their buzzing hives and barking
+dogs, were loved and sung even by town rakes like Catullus and smart
+coffeehouse wits like Horace; all these have been swept away to be
+replaced by the carefully constructed (? wire) bowers, the aviaries, the
+porticoes, the frightful circular edifice (_tondo e il ricco edificio_),
+a masterpiece of Palladian stucco work, in which Armida and Rinaldo,
+Acrasia and her Knight, drearily disport themselves. What has become of
+Calypso's island? of the orchards of Alcinous? What would the noble
+knights and ladies of Ariosto and Spenser think of them? What would they
+say, these romantic, dainty creatures, were they to meet Nausicaa with
+the washed linen piled on her waggon? Alas! they would take her for a
+laundress. For it is the terrible aristocratic idleness of the Middle
+Ages, their dreary delicacy, which hampers Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso,
+Spenser, even in the midst of their most unblushing plagiarisms from
+Antiquity: their heroes and heroines have been brought up, surrounded by
+equerries and duennas, elegant, useless things, or at best (the knights
+at least) good only for aristocratic warfare. Plough or prune! defile
+the knightly hands! wash or cook, ply the loom like Nausicaa, Calypso,
+or Penelope! The mere thought sends them very nearly into a faint. No:
+the ladies of mediaeval romance must sit quiet, idle; at most they may
+sing to the lute; and if they work with their hands, it must be some
+dreary, strictly useless, piece of fancy work; they are hot-house
+plants, all these dainty folk.
+
+Had they no eyes, then, these poets of the Middle Ages, that they could
+see, among all the things of Nature, only those few which had been seen
+by their predecessors? At first one feels tempted to think so, till the
+recollection of many vivid touches in spring and forest descriptions
+persuades one that, enormous as was the sway of tradition among these
+men, they were not all of them, nor always, repeating mere conventional
+platitudes. This singular limitation in the mediaeval perceptions of
+Nature--a limitation so important as almost to make it appear as if the
+Middle Ages had not perceived Nature at all--is most frequently
+attributed to the prevalence of asceticism, which, according to some
+critics, made all mediaeval men into so many repetitions of Bernard of
+Clairvaux, of whom it is written that, being asked his opinion of Lake
+Leman, he answered with surprise that, during his journey from Geneva to
+the Rhone Valley, he had remarked no lake whatever, so absorbed had he
+been in spiritual meditations. But the predominance of asceticism has
+been grossly exaggerated. It was a state of moral tension which could
+not exist uninterruptedly, and could exist only in the classes for whom
+poetry was not written. The mischief done by asceticism was the warping
+of the moral nature of men, not of their aesthetic feelings; it had no
+influence upon the vast numbers, the men and women who relished the
+profane and obscene fleshliness and buffoonery of stage plays and
+fabliaux, and those who favoured the delicate and exquisite immoralities
+of Courtly poetry. Indeed, the presence of whole classes of writings, of
+which such things as Boccaccio's Tales, "The Wife of Bath," and Villon's
+"Ballades," on the one hand, and the songs of the troubadours, the poem
+of Gottfried, and the romance or rather novel of "Flamenca," are
+respectively but the most conspicuous examples, ought to prove only too
+clearly that the Middle Ages, for all their asceticism, were both as
+gross and as aesthetic in sensualism as antiquity had been before them.
+We must, therefore, seek elsewhere than in asceticism, necessarily
+limited, and excluding the poetry-reading public, for an explanation of
+this peculiarity of mediaeval poetry. And we shall find it, I think, in
+that which during the Middle Ages could, because it was an
+all-regulating social condition, really create universal habits of
+thought and feeling, namely, feudalism. A moral condition like
+asceticism must leave unbiassed all such minds as are incapable of
+feeling it; but a social institution like feudalism walls in the life of
+every individual, and forces his intellectual movements into given
+paths; nor is there any escape, excepting in places where, as in Italy
+and in the free towns of the North, the feudal conditions are wholly or
+partially unknown. To feudalism, therefore, would I ascribe this, which
+appears at first so purely aesthetic, as opposed to social, a
+characteristic of the Middle Ages. Ever since Schiller, in his "Gods of
+Greece," spoke for the first time of undivinized Nature (_die
+entgoetterte Natur_), it has been the fashion among certain critics to
+fall foul of Christianity for having robbed the fields and woods of
+their gods, and reduced to mere manured clods the things which had been
+held sacred by antiquity. Desecrated in those long mediaeval centuries
+Nature may truly have been, but not by the holy water of Christian
+priests. Desecrated because out of the fields and meadows was driven a
+divinity greater than Pales or Vertumnus or mighty Pan, the divinity
+called _Man_. For in the terrible times when civilization was at its
+lowest, the things of the world had been newly allotted; and by this new
+allotment, man--the man who thinks and loves and hopes and strives, man
+who fights and sings--was shut out from the fields and meadows,
+forbidden the labour, nay, almost the sight, of the earth; and to the
+tending of kine, and sowing of crops, to all those occupations which
+antiquity had associated with piety and righteousness, had deemed worthy
+of the gods themselves, was assigned, or rather condemned, a creature
+whom every advancing year untaught to think or love, or hope, or fight,
+or strive; but taught most utterly to suffer and to despair. For a man
+it is difficult to call him, this mediaeval serf, this lump of earth
+detached from the field and wrought into a semblance of manhood, merely
+that the soil of which it is part should be delved and sown, and then
+manured with its carcass or its blood; nor as a man did the Middle Ages
+conceive it. The serf was not even allowed human progenitors: his foul
+breed had originated in an obscene miracle; his stupidity and ferocity
+were as those of the beasts; his cunning was demoniac; he was born under
+God's curse; no words could paint his wickedness, no persecutions could
+exceed his deserts; the whole world turned pale at his crime, for he it
+was, he and not any human creature, who had nailed Christ upon the
+cross. Like the hunger and sores of a fox or a wolf, his hunger and his
+sores are forgotten, never noticed. Were it not that legal and
+ecclesiastical narratives of trials (not of feudal lords for crushing
+and contaminating their peasants, but of peasants for spitting out and
+trampling on the consecrated wafer) give us a large amount of
+pedantically stated detail; tell us how misery begat vice, and filth and
+starvation united families in complicated meshes of incest, taught them
+depopulation as a virtue and a necessity; and how the despair of any joy
+in nature, of any mercy from God, hounded men and women into the
+unspeakable orgies, the obscene parodies, of devil worship; were it not
+for these horrible shreds of judicial evidence (as of tatters of clothes
+or blood-clotted hairs on the shoes of a murderer) we should know little
+or nothing of the life of the men and women who, in mediaeval France and
+Germany, did the work which had been taught by Hesiod and Virgil. About
+all these tragedies the literature of the Middle Ages, ready to show us
+town vice and town horror, dens of prostitution and creaking,
+overweighted gibbets, as in Villon's poems, utters not a word. All that
+we can hear is the many-throated yell of mediaeval poets, noble and
+plebeian, French, Provencal, and German, against the brutishness, the
+cunning, the cruelty, the hideousness, the heresy of the serf, whose
+name becomes synonymous with every baseness; which, in mock grammatical
+style, is declined into every epithet of wickedness; whose punishment is
+prayed for from the God whom he outrages by his very existence; a
+hideous clamour of indecent jibe, of brutal vituperation, of senseless
+accusation, of every form of words which furious hatred can assume,
+whose echoes reached even countries like Tuscany, where serfdom was well
+nigh unknown, and have reached even to us in the scraps of epigram still
+bandied about by the townsfolk against the peasants, nay, by the
+peasants against themselves.[1] A monstrous rag doll, dressed up in
+shreds of many-coloured villainy without a recognizable human feature,
+dragged in mud, pilloried with unspeakable ordure, paraded in mock
+triumph like a King of Fools, and burnt in the market-place like
+Antichrist, such is the image which mediaeval poetry has left us of the
+creature who was once the pious rustic, the innocent god-beloved
+husbandman, on whose threshold justice stopped a while when she fled
+from the towns of Antiquity.
+
+
+[1] The reader may oppose to my views the existence of the--class of
+poems, French, Latin, and German, of which the Provencal Pastourela is
+the original type, and which represent the courting, by the poet, who
+is, of course, a knight, of a beautiful country-girl, who is shown us as
+feeding her sheep or spinning with her distaff. But these poems are, to
+the best of my knowledge, all of a single pattern, and extremely
+insincere and artificial in tone, that I feel inclined to class them
+with the pastorals--Dresden china idylls by men who had never looked a
+live peasant in the face--of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
+--as distant descendants from the pastoral poetry of antiquity, of which
+the chivalric poets may have got some indirect notions as they did of
+the antique epics. It is moreover extremely the likely that these love
+poems, in which, successfully or unsuccessfully, the poet usually offers
+a bribe to the woman of low degree, conceal beneath the conventional
+pastoral trappings the intrigues of minnesingers and troubadours with
+women of the small artizan or village proprietor class. The real peasant
+woman--the female of the villain--could scarcely have been above the
+notice of the noblemen's servants; and, in countries where the
+seigneurial rights were in vigour, would scarcely have been offered
+presents and fine words. As regards the innumerable poems against the
+peasantry, I may refer the reader to an extremely curious publication of
+"Carmina Medii AEvi," recently made by Sig. Francesco Novati, and which
+contains, besides a selection of specimens, a list of references on the
+subject of poems "De Natura Rusticorum." One of the satirical
+declensions runs as follows:
+
+Singulariter.                         Pluraliter.
+Nom.   Hic villanus.                  Nom.   Hi maledicti.
+Gen.   Huius rustici.                 Gen.   Horum tristium.
+Dat.   Huic tferfero (_sic_).           Dat.   His mendacibus.
+Acc.   Hunc furem.                    Acc.   Hos nequissimos.
+Voc.   O latro.                       Voc.   O pessimi.
+Abl.   Ab hoc depredatore.            Abl.   Ab his infidelibus.
+
+The accusation of heresy and of crucifying Christ is evidently
+due to the devil-worship prevalent among the serfs, and is thus,
+alluded to in a north Italian poem, probably borrowed from the
+French:
+
+    Christo fo da villan crucifio,
+    E stagom sempre in pioza, in vento, e in neve,
+    Perche havom fato cosi gran pecca.
+
+
+This feeling is exactly analogous to that existing nowadays in
+semi-barbarous countries against the Jews. The idle hated the
+industrious, and hated them all the more when their industry brought
+them any profit.]
+
+
+Yet not so; I can recall one, though only one, occasion in which
+mediaeval literature shows us the serf. The place is surely the most
+unexpected, the charming thirteenth century tale of "Aucassin et
+Nicolette." In his beautiful essay upon that story, Mr. Pater has
+deliberately omitted this episode, which is indeed like a spot of
+blood-stained mud upon some perfect tissue of silver flowers on silver
+ground. It is a piece of cruellest realism, because quite quiet and
+unforced, in the midst of a kind of fairy-land idyl of almost childish
+love, the love of the beautiful son of the lord of Beaucaire for a
+beautiful Saracen slave girl. For, although Aucassin and Nicolette are
+often separated, and always disconsolate--she in her wonderfully
+frescoed vaulted room, he in his town prison--there is always
+surrounding them a sort of fairy land of trees and flowers, a constant
+song of birds; although they wander through the woods and tear their
+delicate skin, and catch their hair in brambles and briars, we have
+always the sense of the daisies bending beneath their tread, of the
+green leaves rustling aside from their heads covered with hair--"blond
+et menu crespele." Their very hardships are lovely, like the hut of
+flowering branches and grapes, which Nicolette builds for herself, and
+through whose fissures the moonlight shines and the little stars
+twinkle: so much so, that when they weep, these two beautiful and dainty
+creatures, we listen as if to singing, and with no more sense of grief
+than at some pathetic little snatch of melody. And in the midst of this
+idyl of lovely things; in the midst of all these delicate patternings,
+whose minuteness and faint tint merge into one vague pleasurable
+impression; stands out, unintentionally placed there by the author,
+little aware of its terrible tragic realism, the episode which I am
+going to translate.
+
+     "Thus Aucassin wandered all day through the forest, without hearing
+     any news of his sweet love; and when he saw that dusk was
+     spreading, he began bitterly to weep. As he was riding along an old
+     road, where weeds and grass grew thick and high, he suddenly saw
+     before him, in the middle of this road, a man such as I am going to
+     describe to you. He was tall, ugly; nay, hideous quite
+     marvellously. His face was blacker than smoked meat, and so wide,
+     that there was a good palm's distance between his eyes; his cheeks
+     were huge, his nostrils also, with a very big flat nose; thick lips
+     as red as embers, and long teeth yellow and smoke colour. He wore
+     leathern shoes and gaiters, kept up with string at the knees; on
+     his back was a parti-coloured coat. He was leaning upon a stout
+     bludgeon. Aucassin was startled and fearful, and said:
+
+     "'Fair brother ("beau frere"--a greeting corresponding to the
+     modern "bon homme")! God be with thee!'
+
+     "'God bless you!' answered the man.
+
+     "'What dost thou here?' asked Aucassin.
+
+     "'What is that to you?' answered the man.
+
+     "'I ask thee from no evil motive.'
+
+     "'Then tell me why,' said the man, 'you yourself are weeping with
+     such grief? Truly, were I a rich man like you, nothing in the world
+     should make me weep.'
+
+     "'And how dost thou know me?'
+
+     "'I know you to be Aucassin, the son of the Count; and if you will
+     tell me why you weep, I will tell you why I am here.'
+
+     "'I will tell thee willingly,' answered Aucassin. 'This morning I
+     came to hunt in the forest; I had a white leveret, the fairest in
+     the world; I have lost him--that is why I am weeping.'
+
+     "'What!' cried the man;' it is for a stinking hound that you waste
+     the tears of your body? Woe to those who shall pity you; you, the
+     richest man of this country. If your father wanted fifteen or
+     twenty white leverets, he could get them. I am weeping and mourning
+     for more serious matters.'
+
+     "'And what are these?'
+
+     "'I will tell you. I was hired to a rich farmer to drive his
+     plough, dragged by four bullocks. Three days ago, I lost a red
+     bullock, the best of the four. I left the plough, and sought the
+     red bullock on all sides, but could not find him. For three days I
+     have neither eaten nor drunk, and have been wandering thus. I have
+     been afraid of going to the town, where they would put me in jail,
+     because I have not wherewith to pay for the bullock. All I possess
+     are the clothes on my back. I have a mother; and the poor woman had
+     nothing more valuable than me; since she had only an old smock
+     wherewith to cover her poor old limbs. They have torn the smock off
+     her back, and now she has to lie on the straw. It is about her that
+     I am afflicted more than about myself, because, as to me, I may get
+     some money some day or other, and as to the red bullock, he may be
+     paid for when he may. And I should never weep for such a trifle as
+     that. Ah! woe betide those who shall make sorrow with you!'"
+
+
+Inserted merely to give occasion to show Aucassin's good heart in paying
+the twenty _sols_ for the man's red bullock; perhaps for no reason at
+all, but certainly with no idea of making the lover's misery seem by
+comparison trifling--there are, nevertheless, few things in literature
+more striking than the meeting in the wood of the daintily nurtured boy,
+weeping over the girl whom he loves with almost childish love of the
+fancy; and of that ragged, tattered, hideous serf, at whose very aspect
+the Bel Aucassin stops in awe and terror. And the attitude is grand of
+this unfortunate creature, who neither begs nor threatens, scarcely
+complains, and not at all for himself; but merely tells his sordid
+misfortune with calm resignation, as if used to such everyday miseries,
+roused to indignation only at the sight of the tears which the fine-bred
+youth is shedding. We feel the dreadful solemnity of the man's words; of
+the reproach thus thrown by the long-suffering serf, accustomed to
+misfortunes as the lean ox is to blows, to that delicate thing weeping
+for his lady love, for the lady of his fancy. It is the one occasion
+upon which that delicate and fantastic mediaeval love poetry, that
+fanciful, wistful stripling King Love of the Middle Ages, in which he
+keeps high court, and through which he rides in triumphal procession;
+that King Love laughing and fainting by turns with all his dapper
+artificiality of woes; is confronted with the sordid reality, the tragic
+impersonation of all the dumb miseries, the lives and loves, crushed and
+defiled unnoticed, of the peasantry of those days. Yes, while they
+sing--Provencals, minnesingers, Sicilians, sing of their earthly lady
+and of their paramour in heaven--the hideous peasant, whose naked granny
+is starving on the straw, looks on with dull and tearless eyes; crying
+out to posterity, as the serf cries to Aucassin: "Woe to those who shall
+sorrow at the tears of such as these."
+
+
+
+II.
+
+But meanwhile, during those centuries which lie between the dark ages
+and modern times, the Middle Ages (inasmuch as they mean not a mere
+chronological period, but a definite social and mental condition)
+fortunately did not exist everywhere. Had they existed, it is almost
+impossible to understand how they would ever throughout Europe have come
+to an end; for as the favourite proverb of Catharine of Siena has it,
+one dead man cannot bury another dead man; and the Middle Ages, after
+this tedious dying of the fifteenth century, required to be shovelled
+into the tomb, nay, rather, given the final stroke, by the Renaissance.
+This that we foolishly call--giving a quite incorrect notion of sudden
+and miraculous birth--the Renaissance, and limit to the time of the
+revival of Greek humanities, really existed, as I have repeatedly
+suggested wherever, during the mediaeval centuries, the civilization of
+which the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were big was not, by the
+pressure of feudalism and monasticism, made to be abortive or stillborn.
+Low as was Italy at the very close of the dark ages, and much as she
+borrowed for a long while from the more precocious northern nations,
+especially France and Provence; Italy had, nevertheless, an enormous
+advantage in the fact that her populations were not divided into victor
+and vanquished, and that the old Latin institutions of town and country
+were never replaced, except in certain northern and southern districts,
+by feudal arrangements. The very first thing which strikes us in the
+obscure Italian commonwealths of early times, is that in these
+resuscitated relics of Roman or Etruscan towns there is no feeling of
+feudal superiority and inferiority; that there is no lord, and
+consequently no serf. Nor is this the case merely within the city walls.
+The never sufficiently appreciated difference between the Italian free
+burghs and those of Germany, Flanders, and Provence, is that the
+citizens depend only in the remotest and most purely fictitious way upon
+any kind of suzerain; and moreover that the country, instead of
+belonging to feudal nobles, belong every day more and more completely to
+the burghers. The peasant is not a serf, but one of three things--a
+hired labourer, a possessor of property, or a farmer, liable to no
+taxes, paying no rent, and only sharing with the proprietor the produce
+of the land. By this latter system, existing, then as now, throughout
+Tuscany, the peasantry was an independent and well-to-do class. The land
+owned by one man (who, in the commonwealths, was usually a shopkeeper or
+manufacturer in the town) was divided into farms small enough to be
+cultivated--vines, olives, corn, and fruit--by one family of peasants,
+helped perhaps by a paid labourer. The thriftier and less scrupulous
+peasants could, in good seasons, put by sufficient profit from their
+share of the produce to suffice after some years, and with the addition
+of what the women might make by washing, spinning, weaving, plaiting
+straw hats (an accomplishment greatly insisted upon by Lorenzo dei
+Medici), and so forth, to purchase some small strip of land of their
+own. Hence, a class of farmers at once living on another man's land and
+sharing its produce with him, and cultivating and paying taxes upon land
+belonging to themselves.
+
+Of these Tuscan peasants we get occasional glimpses in the mediaeval
+Italian novelists--a well-to-do set of people, in constant communication
+with the town where they sell their corn, oil, vegetables, and wine, and
+easily getting confused with the lower class of artizans with whom they
+doubtless largely intermarried. These peasants whom we see in tidy
+kilted tunics and leathern gaiters, driving their barrel-laden bullock
+carts, or riding their mules up to the red city gates in many a
+Florentine and Sienese painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth
+centuries, were in many respects better off than the small artizans of
+the city, heaped up in squalid houses, and oppressed by the greater and
+smaller guilds. Agnolo Pandolfini, teaching thrift to his sons in
+Alberti's charming treatise on "The Government of the Family,"
+frequently groans over the insolence, the astuteness of the peasantry;
+and indeed seems to consider that it is impossible to cope with them--a
+conclusion which would have greatly astounded the bailiffs of the feudal
+proprietors in the Two Sicilies and beyond the Alps. Indeed it is
+impossible to conceive a stranger contrast than that between the
+northern peasant, the starved and stunted serf, whom Holbein drew,
+driving his lean horses across the hard furrow, with compassionate Death
+helping along the plough, and the Tuscan farmer, as shown us by Lorenzo
+dei Medici--the young fellow who, while not above minding his cows or
+hoeing up his field, goes into Florence once a week, offers his
+sweetheart presents of coral necklaces, silk staylaces, and paint for
+her cheeks and eyelashes; who promises, to please her, to have his hair
+frizzled (as only the youths of the Renaissance knew how to be frizzled
+and fuzzed) by the barber, and even dimly hints that some day he may
+appear in silken jerkin and tight hose, like a well-to-do burgess. No
+greater contrast perhaps, unless indeed we should compare his
+sweetheart, Lorenzo's beautiful Nenciozza, with her box full of jewels,
+her Sunday garb of damask kirtle and gold-worked bodice, her almost
+queenly ways towards her adorers, with the wretched creature, not a
+woman, but a mere female animal, cowering among her starving children in
+her mud cottage, and looking forward, in dull lethargy, after the
+morning full of outrages at the castle, to the night, the night on the
+heath, lit with mysterious flickers, to the horrible joys of the
+sacrifice which the oppressed brings to the dethroned, the serf to
+Satan; when, in short, we compare the peasant woman described by Lorenzo
+with the female serf resuscitated by the genius of Michelet; nay, more
+poignant still, with that mother in the "Dance of Death," seated on the
+mud flood of the broken-roofed, dismantled hovel, stewing something on a
+fire of twigs, and stretching out vain arms to her poor tattered
+baby-boy, whom, with the good-humoured tripping step of an old nurse,
+the kindly skeleton is leading away out of this cruel world.
+
+Such were the conditions of the peasantry of the great Italian
+commonwealths. They were, as much as the northern serfs were the
+reverse, creatures pleasant to deal with, pleasant to watch.
+
+The upper classes, on the other hand, differed quite as much from the
+upper classes of feudal countries. They were, be it remembered, men of
+business, constantly in contact with the working classes; Albizis,
+Strozzis, Pandolfinis, Guinigis, Tolomeis, no matter what their name,
+these men who built palaces and churches which outdid the magnificence
+of northern princes, and who might, at any moment, be sent ambassadors
+from Florence, Lucca, or Siena, to the French or English kings, to the
+Emperor or the Pope, spent a large portion of their days at their office
+desk, among the bales of their warehouses, behind the counter of their
+shops; they wore the same dress, had the same habits, spoke the same
+dialect, as the weavers and dyers, the carriers and porters whom they
+employed, and whose sons might, by talent and industry, amass a fortune,
+build palaces, and go ambassadors to kings in their turn. When,
+therefore, these merchant nobles turned to the country for rest and
+relief from their cares, it was not to the country as it existed for the
+feudal noble of the North. Boar and stag hunts had no attraction for
+quiet men of business; forests stocked with wild beasts where vineyard
+and cornfield might have extended, would have seemed to them the very
+height of wastefulness, discomfort, and ugliness. Pacific and
+businesslike, they merely transferred to the country the habits of
+thought and of life which had arisen in the city. Not for them any
+imitation of the feudal castle, turreted and moated, cut up into dark
+irregular rooms and yards, filled with noisy retainers and stinking
+hounds. On some gentle hillside a well-planned palace, its rooms
+spacious and lofty, and sparely windowed for coolness in summer; with a
+neat cloistered court in the centre, ventilating the whole house, and
+affording a cool place, full of scent of flowers and sound of fountains
+for the burning afternoons; a belvedere tower also, on which to seek a
+breeze on stifling nights, when the very stars seem faint for heat, and
+the dim plumy heads of cypress and poplar are motionless against the
+misty blue sky. In front a broad terrace, whence to look down towards
+the beloved city, a vague fog of roofs in the distance; on the side and
+behind, elaborate garden walks walled with high walls of box and oak and
+laurel, in which stand statues in green niches; gardens with little
+channels to bring water, even during droughts, to the myrtles, the
+roses, the stocks and clove pinks, over which bend with blossoms
+brilliant against the pale blue sky the rose-flowered oleander, the
+scarlet-flowered pomegranate; also aviaries and cages full of odd and
+harmless creatures, ferrets, guinea pigs, porcupines, squirrels, and
+monkeys; arbours where wife, daughters, and daughters-in-law may sew and
+make music; and neat lawns where the young men may play at quoits,
+football, or swordsticks and bucklers; and then, sweeping all round the
+house and gardens and terraces an undulating expanse of field and
+orchard, smoke-tinted with olive, bright green in spring with budding
+crops, russet in autumn with sere vines; and from which, in the burning
+noon, rises the incessant sawing noise of the cicalas, and ever and anon
+the high, nasal, melancholy chant of the peasant, lying in the shade of
+barn door or fig tree till the sun shall sink and he can return to his
+labour. If the house in town, with its spacious store-rooms, its carved
+chapel, and painted banqueting hall, large enough to hold sons' children
+and brothers' wives and grandchildren, and a whole host of poor
+relatives, whom the wise father (as Pandolfini teaches) employs rather
+than strangers for his clerks and overseers--if this town house was the
+pride of the Italian burgess; the villa, with its farms and orchards,
+was the real joy, the holiday paradise of the over-worked man. To read
+in the cool house, with cicala's buzz and fountain plash all round, the
+Greek and Latin authors; to discuss them with learned men; to watch the
+games of the youths and the children, this was the reward for years of
+labour and intelligence; but sweeter than all this (how we feel it in
+Agnolo Pandolfini's speeches!) were those occupations which the city
+could not give: the buying and selling of plants, grain, and kine, the
+meddling with new grafted trees, the mending of spaliers, the
+straightening of fences, the going round (with the self-importance and
+impatience of a cockney) to see what flowers had opened, what fruit had
+ripened over-night; to walk through the oliveyards, among the vines; to
+pry into stable, pig-stye, and roosting-place, taking up handfuls of
+drying grain, breaking twigs of olives, to see how things were doing;
+and to have long conversations with the peasants, shrewd enough to
+affect earnest attention when the master was pleased to vent his
+town-acquired knowledge of agriculture and gardening. Sweet also,
+doubtless, for younger folk, or such perhaps as were fonder of teaching
+new lute tunes to the girls than of examining into cabbages, and who
+read Dante and Boccaccio more frequently than Cicero or Sallust; though
+sweet perhaps only as a vague concomitant of their lazy pleasures, to
+listen to those songs of the peasantry rising from the fields below,
+while lying perhaps on one's back in the shaded grass, watching the
+pigeons whirring about the belvedere tower. Vaguely pleasant this also,
+doubtless; but for a long while only vaguely. For, during more than two
+centuries, the burgesses of Italy were held enthralled by the Courtly
+poets of other countries; listening to, and reading, at first, only
+Provencals and Sicilians, or Italians, like Sordello, pretending to be
+of Provence or Sicily; and even later, enduring in their own poets,
+their own Guittones, Cavalcantis, Cinos, Guinicellis, nay even in Dante
+and Petrarch's lyrics, only the repetition (however vivified by genius)
+of the old common-places of Courtly love, and artificial spring, of the
+poetry of feudal nations. But the time came when not only Provencal and
+Sicilian, but even Tuscan, poetry was neglected, when the revival of
+Greek and Latin letters made it impossible to rewrite the threadbare
+mediaeval prettinesses, or even to write in earnest in the modern tongue,
+so stiff and thin (as it seemed) and like some grotesque painted saint,
+when compared with the splendidly fleshed antique languages, turning and
+twining in graceful or solemn involutions, as of a Pyrrhic or a maidens'
+dance. And it was during this period, from Petrarch to Politian, that,
+as philologists have now proved beyond dispute, the once fashionable
+chivalric romance, and the poetry of Provencal and Sicilian school, cast
+off by the upper classes, was gradually picked up by the lower and
+especially by the rural classes. Vagabond ballad-singers and
+story-tellers--creatures who wander from house to house, mending broken
+pottery, collecting rags or selling small pedlar's wares--were the old
+clothesmen who carried about these bits of tarnished poetic finery. The
+people of the town, constantly in presence of the upper classes, and
+therefore sooner or later aware of what was or was not in fashion, did
+not care long for the sentimental daintiness of mediaeval poetry;
+besides, satire and scurrility are as inevitable in a town as are dogs
+in gutters and cats on roofs; and the townsfolk soon set their own
+buffoonish or satirical ideas to whatever remained of the music of
+mediaeval poetry: already early in the fifteenth century the sonnet had
+become for the Florentine artizans a mere scurrilous epigram. It was
+different in the country. The peasant, at least the Tuscan peasant, is
+eminently idealistic and romantic in his literary tastes; it may be that
+he has not the intellectual life required for any utterances or forms of
+his own, and that he consequently accepts poetry as a ready-made
+ornament, something pretty and exotic, which is valued in proportion to
+its prettiness and rarity. Be the reason whatever it may, certain it is
+that nothing can be too artificial or high-flown to please the Italian
+peasantry: its tales are all of kings; princesses, fairies, knights,
+winged horses, marvellous jewels, and so forth; its songs are almost
+without exception about love, constancy, moon, stars, flowers. Such
+things have not been degraded by familiarity and parody as in the town;
+they retain for the country folk the vague charm (like that of music,
+automatic and independent of thorough comprehension) of belonging to a
+sphere of the marvellous; hence they are repeated and repeated with
+almost religious servility, as any one may observe who will listen to
+the stories and verses told and sung even nowadays in the Tuscan
+country, or who will glance over the splendid collections of folklore
+made in the last twenty years. Such things, must suffer alteration from
+people who can neither read nor write, and who cannot be expected to
+remember very clearly details which, in many cases, must have for them
+only the vaguest meaning. The stories split in process of telling and
+re-telling, and are completed with bits of other stories; details are
+forgotten and have to be replaced; the same happens with poetry: songs
+easily get jumbled together, their meaning is partially obliterated, and
+has to be restored or, again, an attempt is made by bold men to adapt
+some seemingly adaptable old song to a new occasion an old love ditty
+seems fit to sing to a new sweetheart.--names, circumstances, and
+details require arranging for this purpose; and hence more alterations.
+Now, however much a peasant may enjoy the confused splendours of Court
+life and of Courtly love, he cannot, with the best will in the world,
+restore their details or colouring if they happen to become obliterated.
+If he chance to forget that when the princess first met the wizard she
+was riding forth on a snow-white jennet with a falcon on her glove,
+there is nothing to prevent his describing her as walking through the
+meadow in charge of a flock of geese; and similarly, should he happen to
+forget that the Courtly lover compares the skin of his mistress to ivory
+and her eyes to Cupid's torches, he is quite capable of filling up the
+gap by saying that the girl is as white as a turnip and as bright-eyed
+as a ferret. As with details of description and metaphors, so also with
+the emotional and social parts of the business. The peasant has not been
+brought up in the idea that the way to gain a woman's affection is to
+stick her glove on a helmet and perform deeds of prowess closely
+resembling those of Don Quixote in the Sierra Morena; so he attempts to
+ingratiate himself by offering her presents of strawberries, figs,
+buttons, hooks-and-eyes, and similar desirable things. Again, were the
+peasant to pay attentions to a married woman, he would merely get (what
+noble husbands were too well bred to dream of) a sound horsewhipping, or
+perhaps even a sharp knife thrust in his stomach; so that he takes good
+care to address his love songs only to marriageable young women. In this
+way, without any deliberate attempt .at originality, the old Courtly
+poetry becomes, when once removed to the country, thoroughly patched and
+seamed with rustic ideas, feelings, and images; while never ceasing to
+be, in its general stuff and shape, of a kind such as only professional
+poets of the upper classes can produce. The Sicilian lyrics collected by
+Signor Pitre, still more the Tuscan poems of Tigri's charming volume,
+are, therefore, a curious mixture of high-flown sentiment, dainty
+imagery, and most artistic arrangements of metre and diction (especially
+in the rispetto, where metrical involution is accompanied by logical
+involution of the most refined mediaeval sort), with hopes and complaints
+such as only a farmer could frame, with similes and descriptions such as
+only the business of the field, vineyard, and dairy could suggest. A
+mixture, but not a jumble. For as in this slow process of assimilation
+and alteration only that was remembered by the peasant which the peasant
+could understand and sympathize with; and only that was welded into the
+once Courtly poetry which was sufficiently refined to please the people
+who delighted in the exotic refinement--as, in short, everything came
+about perfectly simply and unconsciously, there resulted what in good
+sooth may be considered as a perfectly substantive and independent form
+of art, with beauties and refinements of its own. And, indeed, it
+appears to me that one might say, without too much paradox, that in
+these peasant songs only does the poetry of minnesingers and
+troubadours, become thoroughly enjoyable; that only when the
+conventionality of feeling and imagery is corrected by the freshness,
+the straightforwardness, nay, even the grotesqueness of rural likings,
+dislikings, and comparisons, can the dainty beauty of mediaeval Courtly
+poetry ever really satisfy our wishes. Comparing together Tigri's
+collection of Tuscan folk poetry with any similar anthology that might
+be made of middle-high German and Provencal, and early Italian lyrics, I
+feel that the adoption of Courtly mediaeval poetry by the Italian
+peasantry of the Renaissance can be compared more significantly than at
+first seemed with the adoption of a once fashionable garb by country
+folk. The peasant pulled about this Courtly lyrism, oppressively tight
+in its conventional fit and starched with elaborate rhetorical
+embroideries; turned it inside out, twisted a bit here, a bit there,
+ripped open seam after seam, patched and repatched with stuffs and
+stitches of its own; and then wore the whole thing as it had never been
+intended to be worn; until this cast-off poetic apparel, stretched on
+the freer moral limbs of natural folk, faded and stained by weather and
+earth into new and richer tints, had lost all its original fashionable
+stiffness, and crudeness of colour, and niminy-piminy fit, and had
+acquired instead I know not what grace of unexpectedness,
+picturesqueness, and ease.[1]
+
+
+[1] Any one who is sceptical of the Courtly derivation of the Italian
+popular song may, besides consulting the admirable book of Prof.
+d'Ancona, compare with the contents of Tigri's famous "Canti popolari
+Toscani," the following scraps of Sicilian and early Italian lyrics:--
+
+The Emperor Frederick II. writes: "Rosa di maggio--Colorita e
+fresca--Occhi hai fini--E non rifini--Di gioie dare--Lo tuo parlare--La
+gente innamora--Castella ed altura."
+
+Jacopo Pugliesi says of his lady: "Chiarita in viso piu che
+argento--Donami allegrezze--Ben eo son morto--E mal colto--Se non mi dai
+conforto--_Fior dell' orto_."
+
+Inghilfredi Siciliano: "Gesu Cristo ideolla in paradiso--E poi la fece
+angelo incarnando--Gioia aggio preso di giglio novello--E vago, che
+sormonta ogni ricchezza--Sua dottrina m' affrezza--Cosi mi coglie e
+olezza--Come pantera le bestie selvagge."
+
+Jacopo da Lentino: "E di virtute tutte l' altre avanza--E somigliante a
+stella e di splendore--Colla sua conta (_cf_. Provencal _coindeta_,
+gentille) e gaia innamoranza--E piu bella e che rosa e che fiore--Cristo
+le doni vita ed allegranza--E si la cresca in gran pregio ed onore."
+
+I must finish off what might be a much longer collection with a charming
+little scrap, quite in rispetto tone, by Guinicelli: "Vedut 'ho la
+lucente stella diana--Ch' appare anzi che 'l giorno renda albore--Ch' a
+preso forma di figura umana--Sovr' ogni altra mi par che dia
+splendore--Viso di neve colorato in grana--Occhi lucenti, gai e pien
+d'amore--Non credo che nel mondo sia cristiana--Si piena di beltate e di
+valore."]
+
+
+Well; for many a year did the song of the peasants rise up from the
+fields and oliveyards unnoticed by the good townsfolk taking their
+holiday at the Tuscan villa; but one day, somewhere in the third quarter
+of the fifteenth century, the long-drawn chant of the rispetto, telling
+perhaps how the singer's sweetheart was beautiful as the star Diana, so
+beautiful as a baby that the Pope christened her with his own hands; the
+quavering nasal cadence of the stornello saying by chance--
+
+
+     Flower of the Palm, &c.,
+
+
+did at last waken the attention of one lettered man, a man of curious
+and somewhat misshapen body and mind, of features satyr-like in
+ugliness, yet moody and mystical in their very earthiness; a man
+essentially of the senses, yet imperfect in them, without taste or
+smell, and, over and above, with a marvellously supple intellect; weak
+and coarse and idealistic; and at once feebly the slave of his times,
+and so boldly, spontaneously innovating as to be quite unconscious of
+innovation: the mixed nature, or rather the nature in many heterogeneous
+bits, of the man of letters who is artistic almost to the point of being
+an actor, natural in every style because morally connected with no style
+at all. The man was Lorenzo di Piero dei Medici, for whom posterity has
+exclusively reserved the civic title of all his family and similar town
+despots, calling him the Magnificent. It is the fashion at present to
+give Lorenzo only the leavings, as it were, of our admiration for the
+weaker, less original, nay, considerably enervate, humanistic exquisite
+Politian; and this absurd injustice appears to me to show that the very
+essence and excellence of Lorenzo is not nowadays perceived. The
+Renaissance produced several versatile and charming poets; and, in the
+midst of classic imitation, one or two, of whom one is certainly
+Boiardo, of real freshness and raciness. But of this new element in the
+Renaissance, this element which is neither imitation of antiquity nor
+revival of mediaeval, which is original, vital, fruitful, in short,
+modern, Lorenzo is the most versatile example. He is new, Renaissance,
+modern; not merely in this or that quality, he is so all round. And this
+in the first place because he is so completely the man of impressions;
+the man not uttering wonderful things, nor elaborating exquisite ones,
+but artistically embodying with marvellous versatility whatever strikes
+his fancy and feeling--fancy and feeling which are as new as the
+untouched sculptor's clay. And this extraordinary temper of art for
+art's sake, or rather effect for effect and form's sake, was possible in
+that day only in a man equally without strong passions, and without
+strong convictions. He is naturally attracted most by what is most
+opposed to the academic, Virgilian, Horatian, or Petrarchesque
+aestheticism of his contemporaries; he is essentially a realist, and all
+the effects, which he produces, all the beauty, charm, or beastliness of
+his work, corresponds to beauty, charm, or beastliness in the reality of
+things. If Lorenzo writes at one moment carnival songs of ribald
+dirtiness, at the next hymns full of holy solemnity; it is, I think,
+merely because this versatile artist takes pleasure in trying whether
+his face may not be painted into grinning drunkenness, and then
+elongated and whitened into ascetic gentleness. Instead of seeking, like
+most of his contemporaries, to be Greek, Roman, or mediaeval by turns, he
+preferred trying on all the various tricks of thought and feeling which
+he remarked among his unlettered townsfolk. His realism naturally drew
+him towards the classes where realism can deal with the real; and not
+the affected, the self-conscious, the deliberately attempted. Hence
+those wonderful little poems, the carnival songs of the gold-thread
+spinners, of the pastry-cooks, of the shoemakers, which give us so
+completely, so gracefully, the whole appearance, work, manner, gesture
+of the people; give them to us with ease and rapidity so perfect, that
+we scarcely know how they are given; that we almost forget verses and
+song, and actually see the pulling, twisting, and cutting of the
+gold-threads; that we see and hear the shoemaker's hands smoothing down
+the leather of the shoe in his hand, to convince his customers of its
+pliability; that we see and smell the dear little pale yellow pasties
+nestling in the neat white baskets, after having stood by and watched
+the dough being kneaded, chopped, and floured over, the iron plates
+heated in the oven, the soft, half-baked paste twisted and bent; nay, we
+feel almost as if we had eaten of them, those excellent things which
+seem such big mouthfuls but are squeezed and crunched at one go like
+nothing at all. Hence, I mean from this love of watching effects and
+reproducing them, originated also the masterpiece of Lorenzo dei Medici,
+the "Nencia da Barberino."
+
+This poem, of some fifty octaves, is the result of those Tuscan peasant
+songs, of which I have told you the curious Courtly descent, at last
+having struck the fancy of a real poet. It is, what Lorenzo's
+masterpiece necessarily must be, in the highest degree a modern
+performance; as modern as a picture by Bastien Lepage; as an opera,
+founded upon local music, by Bizet. For it is not by any manner of means
+a pastoral, a piece of conventional poetic decoration, with just a
+little realistic detail, more of the mere conventional or more of the
+realistic dominating according as it is a pastoral by Theocritus, or a
+pastoral by Quinault or Metastasio. It is the very reverse of this: it
+is the attempt to obtain a large and complete, detailed and balanced
+impression by the cunning arrangement of a number of small effects which
+the artist has watched in reality; it is the making into a kind of
+little idyl, something half narrative, half drama, with distinct figures
+and accessories and background, of a whole lot of little fragments
+imitated from the peasant poetry, and set in thin, delicate rims of
+imitation no longer of the peasant's songs, but of the peasant's
+thoughts and speech; a perfect piece of impressionist art, marred only
+in rare places by an attempt (inevitable in those days) to force the
+drawing and colour into caricature. The construction, which appears to
+be nowhere, is in reality a masterpiece; for, without knowing it, you
+are shown the actors, the background, the ups and downs of temper, the
+variation of the seasons; above all you are shown the heroine through
+the medium of the praises, the complaints, the narratives of the past,
+the imaginings of the future, of the hero, whose incoherent rhapsodizing
+constitutes the whole poem. He, Vallera, is a well-to-do young farmer;
+she, Nencia, is the daughter of peasant folk of the castellated village
+of Barberino in the Mugello; he is madly in love, but shy, and (to all
+appearance) awkward, so that we feel convinced that of all these
+speeches in praise of his Nenciozza, in blame of his indifference,
+highly poetic flights and most practical adjurations to see all the
+advantages of a good match, the young woman hears few or none; Vallera
+is talking not to her, but at her, or rather, he is rehearsing to
+himself all the things which he cannot squeeze out in her presence. It
+is the long day-dream, poetic, prosaic, practical, and imaginative, of a
+love-sick Italian peasant lad, to whom his sweetheart is at once an
+ideal thing of beauty, a goddess at whose shrine songs must be sung and
+wreaths twined; and a very substantial lass, who cannot be indifferent
+to sixpenny presents, and whom he cannot conceive as not ultimately
+becoming the sharer of his cottage, the cooker of his soup, the mender
+of his linen, the mother of his brats--a dream in which image is effaced
+by image, and one thought is expelled, unfinished, by another. She is to
+him like the Fairy Morgana, the fairy who kept so much of chivalry in
+her enchanted island; she is like the evening star when above his
+cottage it slowly pierces the soft blue sky with its white brilliancy;
+she is purer than the water in the well, and sweeter than the malmsey
+wine, and whiter than the miller's flour; but her heart is as hard as a
+pebble, and she loves driving to distraction a whole lot of youths who
+dangle behind her, captives of those heart-thievish eyes of hers. But
+she is also a most excellent housewife, can stand any amount of hard
+field labour, and makes lots of money by weaving beautiful woollen
+stuff. To see her going, to church of a morning, she is a little pearl!
+her bodice is of damask, and her petticoat of bright, colour, and she
+kneels down carefully where she may be seen, being so smart. And then,
+when she dances!--a born dancer, bouncing like a little goat, and
+twirling more than a mill-wheel; and when she has finished she makes you
+such a curtsey; no citizen's wife in Florence can curtsey as she does.
+It was in April that he first fell in love. She was picking salad in the
+garden; he begged her for a little, and she sent him about his business;
+las, alas! ever since then his peace has been gone; he cannot sleep, he
+can only think of her, and follow her about; he has become quite
+good-for-nothing as to his field work,--yet he hears all the people
+around laughing and saying, "Of course Vallera will get her." Only _she_
+will pay no heed to him. She is finer to look at than the Pope, whiter
+than the whitest wood core: she is more delectable than are the young
+figs to the earwigs, more beautiful than the turnip flower, sweeter than
+honey. He is more in love with her than the moth is in love with the
+lamp; she loves to see him perishing for her. If he could cut himself in
+two without too much pain, he would, just to let her see that he carries
+her in his heart. No; he would cut out his heart, and when she has
+touched it with that slender hand of hers, it would cry out, "Nencia,
+Nencia bella." But, after all, he is not to be despised: he is an
+excellent labourer, most learned in buying--and selling pigs, he can
+play the bagpipe beautifully; he is rich, is willing to go to any
+expense to please her, nay, even to pay the barber double that his hair
+may be nice and fuzzy from the crimping irons; and if only he were to
+get himself tight hose and a silk jerkin, he would be as good as any
+Florentine burgess. But she will not listen; or, rather, she listens and
+laughs. Yes, she sits up in bed at night and laughs herself to death at
+the mere thought of him, that is all he gets. But he knows what it is!
+There is a fellow who will keep sneaking about her; if Vallera only
+catch him near his cottage, won't he give him a taste of his long new
+knife! nay, rip him up and throw his bowels, like those of a pig, to dry
+on a roof! He is sorry--perhaps he bores her--God bless you, Nencia!--he
+had better go and look after his sheep.
+
+All this is not the poetry of the Renaissance peasant; it is the poem
+made out of his reality; the songs which Vallera sang in the fields
+about his Nencia we must seek in the volume of Tigri; those rispetti and
+stornelli of to-day are the rispetti and stornelli of four centuries
+ago; they are much more beautiful and poetic than any of Lorenzo's work;
+but Lorenzo has given us not merely a peasant's love-song; he has given
+us a peasant's thoughts, actions, hopes, fears; he has given us the
+peasant himself, his house, his fields, and his sweetheart, as they
+exist even now. For Lorenzo is gone, and, greater than he, the paladins
+and ladies of Boiardo and Ariosto, have followed the saints and virgins
+of Dante into the limbo of fair unrealities; and the very Greek and
+Roman heroes of a hundred years ago, the very knights and covenanters of
+forty years since, have joined them; but Vallera exists still, and still in
+the flesh exists his Nenciozza. Everything changes, except the country
+and the peasant. For, in the long farms of Southern Tuscany, with double
+row of blackened balcony all tapestried with heavy ingots of Indian
+corn, and spread out among the olives of the hillside, up which twists
+the rough bullock road protected by its vine trellis; and in the little
+farms, with queer hood-shaped double roofs (as if to pull over the face
+of the house when it blows hard), and pigeon towers which show that some
+day they must have been fortified, all about Florence; farms which I
+pass every day, with their sere trees all round, their rough gardens of
+bright dahlias and chrysanthemums draggled by the autumn rains--in these
+there are, do not doubt it, still Nencias: magnificent creatures, fit
+models for Amazons, only just a trifle too full-blown and matronly; but
+with real Amazonian limbs, firm and delicate, under their red and purple
+striped print frocks; creatures with heads set on necks like towers or
+columns, necks firm in broad, well-fleshed chest as branches in a tree's
+trunk; great penthouses of reddish yellow or lustreless black crimped
+hair over the forehead; the forehead, like the cheeks, furrowed a good
+deal--perhaps we dainty people might say, faded and wrinkled by work in
+the burning sun and the wind; women whom you see shovelling bread into
+the heated ovens, or plashing in winter with bare arms in half-frozen
+streams, or digging up a turnip field in the drizzle; or on a Sunday,
+standing listless by their door, surrounded by rolling and squalling
+brats, and who, when they slowly look up at the passer-by, show us, on
+those monumental faces of theirs, a strange smile, a light of bright
+eyes and white teeth; a smile which to us sophisticated townspeople is
+as puzzling as certain sudden looks in some comely animal, but which yet
+makes us understand instinctively that we have before us a Nencia; and
+that the husband yonder, though he now swears at his wife, and perhaps
+occasionally beats her, has nevertheless, in his day, dreamed, argued,
+raged, and sung to himself just like Lorenzo's Vallera.
+
+The "Nencia da Barberino" is certainly Lorenzo dei Medici's masterpiece:
+it is completely and satisfactorily worked out. Yet we may strain
+possibilities to the point of supposing (which, however, I cannot for a
+moment suppose) that this "Nencia" is a kind of fluke; that by an
+accident a beautiful and seemingly appreciative poem has resulted where
+the author, a mediaeval realist of a superior Villon sort, had intended
+only a piece of utter grotesqueness. But important as is the "Nencia,"
+Lorenzo has left behind him another poem, greatly inferior in
+completeness, but which settles beyond power of doubt that in him the
+Renaissance was not merely no longer mediaeval, but most intensely
+modern. This poem is the "Ambra." It is simply an allegorical narrative
+of the inundation, by the river Ombrone, of a portion, called Ambra, of
+the great Medicean villa of Poggio a Caiano. Lorenzo's object was
+evidently to write a semi-Ovidian poem, of a kind common in his day, and
+common almost up to our own: a river-god, bearded, crown of reeds, urn,
+general dampness and uproariousness of temper, all quite correct; and a
+nymph, whom he pursues, who prays to the Virgin huntress to save her
+from his love, and who, just in the nick of time, is metamorphosed into
+a mossy stone, dimly showing her former woman's shape; the style of
+thing, charming, graceful, insipid, of which every one can remember a
+dozen instances, and which immediately brings up to the mind a vision of
+grand-ducal gardens, where, among the clipped ilexes and the cypress
+trunks, great lumbering water-gods and long-limbed nymphs splash,
+petrified and covered with melancholy ooze and yellow lichen, among the
+stagnant grotto waters. In some respects, therefore, there is in the
+"Ambra" somewhat more artificial, more _barrocco_ than that early
+Renaissance of Politian and Pontano would warrant. There also several
+bits, half graceful, half awkward, pedantic, constrained, childish,
+delightful, like the sedge-crowned rivers telling each other anecdotes
+of the ways and customs of their respective countries, and especially
+the charming dance of zephyr with the flowers on the lawns of Cyprus,
+which must immediately suggest pictures by Piero di Cosimo and by
+Botticelli. So far, therefore, there is plenty to enjoy, but nothing to
+astonish, in the "Ambra." But the Magnificent Lorenzo has had the
+extraordinary whim of beginning his allegory with a description,
+twenty-one stanzas long, of the season of floods. A description, full of
+infinitely delicate minute detail: of the plants which have kept their
+foliage while the others are bare--the prickly juniper, the myrtle and
+bay; of the flocks of cranes printing the sky with their queer shapes,
+of the fish under the ice, and the eagle circling slowly round the
+ponds--little things which affect us mixed up as they are with all
+manner of stiff classic allusions, very much as do the carefully painted
+daisies and clover among the embossed and gilded unrealities of certain
+old pictures. From these rather finikin details, Lorenzo passes,
+however, to details which are a good deal more than details, things
+little noticed until almost recently: the varying effect of the olives
+on the hillside--a grey, green mass, a silver ripple, according as the
+wind stirs them; the golden appearance of the serene summer air, and so
+forth; details no longer, in short, but essentially, however minute,
+effects. And then, suddenly leaving such things behind, he rushes into
+the midst of a real picture, a picture which you might call almost
+impressionistic, of the growth of rivers and the floods. The floods are
+a grand sight; more than a sight--a grand performance, a drama;
+sometimes, God knows, a tragedy. Last night, under a warm, hazy sky,
+through whose buff-tinted clouds the big moon crept in and out, the
+mountain stream was vaguely visible--a dark riband in its wide shingly
+bed, when the moon was hidden; a narrow, shallow, broken stream, sheets
+of brilliant metallic sheen, and showers of sparkling facets, when the
+moon was out; a mere drowsy murmur mixing with the creaking and rustling
+of dry reeds in the warm, wet wind. Thus in the evening. Look down from
+your window next morning. A tremendous rushing mass of waters, thick,
+turbid, reddish, with ominous steel-like lustre where its coppery
+surface reflects the moist blue sky, now fills the whole bed, shaking
+its short fringe of foam, tossing the spray as it swirls round each
+still projecting stone, angrily tugging at the reeds and alders which
+flop their draggled green upon its surface; eddying faster and faster,
+encircling each higher rock or sandbank, covering it at last with its
+foaming red mass. Meanwhile, the sky is covered in with vaporous grey
+clouds, which enshroud the hills; the clear runnels, dash over the green
+banks, spirt through the walls, break their way across the roads; the
+little mountain torrents, dry all summer, descend, raging rivers, red
+with the hill soil; and with every gust of warm wind the river rises
+higher and rushes along tremendously impetuous. Down in the plain it
+eats angrily at the soft banks, and breaks its muddy waters, fringed on
+the surface with a sort of ominous grime of broken wood and earth,
+higher and higher against the pierheads of the bridges; shaking them to
+split their masonry, while crowds of men and women look on, staring at
+the rising water, at the planks, tables, beams, cottage thatches, nay,
+whole trees, which it hurls at the bridge piers. And then, perhaps, the
+terrible, soft, balmy flood-wind persisting, there comes suddenly the
+catastrophe; the embankment, shaken by the resistless current, cracks,
+fissures gives way; and the river rushes into the city, as it has
+already rushed into the fields, to spread in constantly rising,
+melancholy livid pools, throughout the streets and squares.
+
+This Lorenzo saw, and, wonderful to say, in this soiled and seething
+river, in these torn and crumbling banks, in all the dreadfulness of
+these things, he saw a beauty and a grandeur. But he saw not merely the
+struggle of the waters and of the land; he--the heartless man who laid
+his hand even upon the saved-up money of orphan girls in order to keep
+up the splendour of his house and of his bank--saw the misfortunes of
+the peasantry; the mill, the cottage by the riverside, invaded by the
+flood; the doors burst open by the tremendous rushing stream, the
+stables and garners filled with the thick and oozy waters; the poor
+creatures, yesterday prosperous, clinging to the roof, watching their
+sheep and cows, their hay, and straw, and flour, the hemp bleached in
+the summer, the linen spun and woven in the long winter, their furniture
+and chattels, their labour and their hope whirled along by the foaming
+river.
+
+Thus by this versatile Lorenzo dei Medici, this flippant, egotistic
+artist and despot, has at last been broken the long spell of the Middle
+Ages. The Renaissance has sung no longer of knights and of spring, but
+of peasants and of autumn. An immoral and humanistic time, an immoral
+and humanistic man, have had at length a heart for the simpler, ruder
+less favoured classes of mankind; an eye for the bolder, grander, more
+solemn sights of Nature: modern times have begun, modern sympathies,
+modern art are in full swing.
+
+
+
+
+SYMMETRIA PRISCA.
+
+
+    Mirator veterum, discipulusque memor,
+    Defuit mini symmetria prisca. Peregi
+    Quod potui; Veniam da mihi, posteritas.
+          --_Lionardo da Vinci's epitaph by Platino Piatto_.
+
+Into the holy enclosure which had received the precious shiploads of
+earth from Calvary, the Pisans of the thirteenth century carried the
+fragments of ancient sculpture brought from Rome and from Greece; and in
+the Gothic cloister enclosing the green sward and dark cypresses of the
+graveyard of Pisa, the art of the Middle Ages came for the first time
+face to face with the art of Antiquity. There, among pagan sarcophagi
+turned into Christian tombs, with heraldic devices chiselled on their
+arabesques and vizored helmets surmounting their garlands, the great
+unsigned artist of the fourteenth century, Orcagna of Florence, or
+Lorenzetti of Siena, painted the typical masterpiece of mediaeval art,
+the great fresco of the Triumph of Death. With wonderful realization of
+character and situation he painted the prosperous of the world, the
+dapper youths and damsels seated with dogs and falcons beneath the
+orchard trees, amusing themselves with Decameronian tales and sound of
+lute and psaltery, unconscious of the colossal scythe wielded by the
+gigantic dishevelled Death, and which, in a second, will descend and mow
+them to the ground; while the crowd of beggars, ragged, maimed,
+paralyzed, leprous, grovelling on their withered limbs, see and implore
+Death, and cry stretching forth their arms, their stumps, and their
+crutches. Further on, three kings in long embroidered robes and
+gold-trimmed shovel caps, Lewis the Emperor, Uguccione of Pisa, and
+Castruccio of Lucca, with their retinue of ladies and squires, and
+hounds and hawks, are riding quietly through a wood. Suddenly their
+horses stop, draw back; the Emperor's bay stretches out his long neck
+sniffing the air; the kings strain forward to see, one holding his nose
+for the stench of death which meets him; and before them are three open
+coffins, in which lie, in three loathsome stages of corruption, from blue
+and bloated putrescence to well-nigh fleshless decay, three crowned
+corpses. This is the triumph of Death; the grim and horrible jest of the
+Middle Ages: equality in decay; kings, emperors, ladies, knights,
+beggars, and cripples, this is what we all come to be, stinking corpses;
+Death, our lord, our only just and lasting sovereign, reigns impartially
+over all.
+
+But opposite, all along the sides of the painted cloister, the Amazons
+are wrestling with the youths on the stone of the sarcophagi; the
+chariots are dashing forward, the Tritons are splashing in the marble
+waves; the Bacchantae are striking their timbrels in their dance with the
+satyrs; the birds are pecking at the grapes, the goats are nibbling at
+the vines; all is life, strong and splendid in its marble eternity. And
+the mutilated Venus smiles towards the broken Hermes; the stalwart
+Hercules, resting against his club, looks on quietly, a smile beneath
+his beard; and the gods murmur to each other, as they stand in the
+cloister filled with earth from Calvary, where hundreds of men lie
+rotting beneath the cypresses, "Death will not triumph for ever; our day
+will come."
+
+We have all seen them opposite to each other, these two arts, the art
+born of Antiquity and the art born of the Middle Ages; but whether this
+meeting was friendly or hostile or merely indifferent, is a question of
+constant dispute. To some, mediaeval art has appeared being led,
+Dante-like, by a magician Virgil through the mysteries of nature up to a
+Christian Beatrice, who alone can guide it to the kingdom of heaven;
+others have seen mediaeval art, like some strong, chaste Sir Guyon
+turning away resolutely from the treacherous sorceress of Antiquity, and
+pursuing solitarily the road to the true and the good; for some the
+antique has been an impure goddess Venus, seducing and corrupting the
+Christian artist; the antique has been for others a glorious Helen, an
+unattainable perfection, ever pursued by the mediaeval craftsman, but
+seized by him only as a phantom. Magician or witch, voluptuous,
+destroying Venus or cold and ungrasped Helen, what was the antique to
+the art born of the Middle Ages and developed during the Renaissance?
+Was the relation between them that of tuition, cool and abstract; or of
+fruitful love; or of deluding and damning example?
+
+The art which came to maturity in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
+centuries was generated in the early mediaeval revival. The seeds may,
+indeed, have come down from Antiquity, but they remained for nearly a
+thousand years hidden in the withered, rotting remains of former
+vegetation; and it was not till that vegetation had completely
+decomposed and become part of the soil, it was not till putrefaction had
+turned into germination, that artistic organism timidly reappeared. The
+new art-germ developed with the new civilization which surrounded it.
+Manufacture and commerce reappeared: the artizans and merchants formed
+into communities; the communities grew into towns, the towns into
+cities; in the city arose the cathedral; the Lombard or Byzantine
+mouldings and traceries of the cathedral gave birth to figure-sculpture;
+its mosaics gave birth to painting; every forward movement of the
+civilization unfolded as it were a new form or detail of the art, until,
+when mediaeval civilization was reaching its moment of consolidation,
+when the cathedrals of Lucca and Pisa stood completed, when Niccolo and
+Giovanni Pisano had sculptured their pulpits and sepulchres; painting,
+in the hands of Cimabue and Duccio, of Giotto and of Guido da Siena,
+freed itself from the tradition of the mosaicists as sculpture had freed
+itself from the practice of the stone-masons, and stood forth an
+independent and organic art.
+
+Thus painting was born of a new civilization, and grew by its own vital
+force; a thing of the Middle Ages, original and spontaneous. But
+contemporaneous with the mediaeval revival was the resuscitation of
+Antiquity; in proportion as the new civilization developed, the old
+civilization was exhumed; real Latin began to be studied only when real
+Italian began to be written; Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio were at once
+the founders of modern literature and the exponents of the literature of
+antiquity; the strong young present was to profit by the experience of
+the past.
+
+As it was with literature, so likewise was it with art. The most purely
+mediaeval sculpture, the sculpture which has, as it were, just detached
+itself from the capitals and porches of the cathedral, is the direct
+pupil of the antique; and the three great Gothic sculptors, Niccolo,
+Giovanni, and Andrea of Pisa, learn from fragments of Greek and Roman
+sculpture how to model the figure of the Redeemer and how to chisel the
+robe of the Virgin. This spontaneous mediaeval sculpture, aided by the
+antique, preceded by a full half-century the appearance of mediaeval
+painting; and it was from the study of the works of the Pisan sculptors
+that Cimabue and Giotto learned to depart from the mummified
+monstrosities of the hieratic, Byzantine and Roman style of Giunta and
+Berlinghieri. Thus, through the sculpture of the Pisans the painting of
+the school of Giotto received at second-hand the teachings of Antiquity.
+Sculpture had created painting; painting now belonged to the painters.
+In the hands of Giotto it developed within a few years into an art which
+seemed almost mature, an art dealing victoriously with its materials,
+triumphantly solving its problems, executing as if by miracle all that
+was demanded of it. But Giottesque art appeared perfect merely because
+it was limited; it did all that was required of it, because that which
+was required was little; it was not asked to reproduce the real nor to
+represent the beautiful; it was asked merely to suggest a character, a
+situation, a story.
+
+The artistic development of a nation has its exact parallel in the
+artistic development of an individual. The child uses his pencil to tell
+a story, satisfied with balls and sticks as body, head, and legs;
+provided he and his friends can associate with them the ideas in their
+minds. The youth sets himself to copy what he sees, to reproduce forms
+and effects, without any aim beyond the mere pleasure of copying. The
+mature artist strives to obtain forms and effects of which he approves,
+he seeks for beauty. In the life of Italian painting the generation of
+men who flourished at the beginning of the sixteenth century are the
+mature artists; the men of the fifteenth century are the inexperienced
+youths; the Giottesques are the children--children Titanic and
+seraph-like, but children nevertheless; and, like all children, learning
+more perhaps in their few years than can the youth and the man learn in
+a lifetime.
+
+Like the child, the Giottesque painter wished to show a situation or
+express a story, and for this purpose the absolute realization of
+objects was unnecessary. Giottesque art is not incorrect art, it is
+generalized art; it is an art of mere outline. The Giottesques could
+draw with great accuracy the hand: the form of the fingers, the bend of
+the limb, they could give to perfection its whole gesture and movement,
+they could produce a correct and spirited outline, but within this
+correct outline marked off in dark paint there is but a vague, uniform
+mass of pale colour; the body of the hand is missing, and there remains
+only its ghost, visible indeed, but unsubstantial, without weight or
+warmth, eluding the grasp. The difference between this spectre hand of
+the Giottesques, and the sinewy, muscular hand which can shake and crush
+of Masaccio and Signorelli; or the soft hand with throbbing pulse and
+warm pressure of Perugino and Bellini,--this difference is typical of
+the difference between the art of the fourteenth century and the art of
+the fifteenth century: the first suggests, the second realizes; the one
+gives impalpable outlines, the other gives tangible bodies. The
+Giottesque cares for the figure only inasmuch as it displays an action;
+he reduces it to a semblance, a phantom, to the mere exponent of an
+idea; the man of the Renaissance cares for the figure inasmuch as it is
+a living organism, he gives it substance and weight, he makes it stand
+out as an animate reality. Thence, despite its early triumphs, the
+Giottesque style, by its inherent nature, forbade any progress; it
+reached its limits at once, and the followers of Giotto look almost as
+if they were his predecessors, for the simple reason that, being unable
+to advance, they were forced to retrograde. The limited amount of
+artistic realization required to present to the mind of the spectator a
+situation or an allegory, had been obtained by Giotto himself, and
+bequeathed by him to his followers; who, finding it more than sufficient
+for their purposes, and having no incentive to further acquisition in
+the love of form and reality for their own sake, worked on with their
+master's materials, composing and recomposing, but adding nothing of
+their own. Giotto had observed Nature with passionate interest, because,
+although its representation was only a means to an end, it was a means
+which required to be mastered; and as such became in itself a sort of
+secondary aim; but the followers of Giotto merely utilized his
+observations--of Nature, and in so doing gradually conventionalized and
+debased these second-hand observations. Giotto's forms are wilfully
+incomplete, because they aim at mere suggestion, but they are not
+conventional: they are diagrams, not symbols, and thence it is that
+Giotto seems nearer to the Renaissance than do his latest followers, not
+excepting even Orcagna. Painting, which had made the most prodigious
+strides from Giunta to Cimabue, and from Cimabue to Giotto, had got
+enclosed within a vicious circle, in which it moved for nearly a century
+neither backwards nor forwards: painters were satisfied with suggestion;
+and as long as they were satisfied, no progress was possible.
+
+From this Giottesque treadmill, painting was released by the
+intervention of another art. The painters were hopelessly mediocre;
+their art was snatched from them by the sculptors. Orcagna himself,
+perhaps the only Giottesque who gave painting an onward push, had
+modelled and cast one of the bronze gates of the Florence baptistery;
+the generation of artists who arose at the beginning of the fifteenth
+century, and who opened the period of the Renaissance, were sculptors or
+pupils of sculptors. When we see these vigorous lovers of nature, these
+heroic searchers after truth, suddenly pushing aside the decrepit
+Giottesque allegory-mongers, we ask ourselves in astonishment whence
+they have arisen, and how those broken-down artists of effete art could
+have begotten such a generation of giants. Whence do they come?
+Certainly not from the studios of the Giottesques. No, they issue out of
+the workshops of the stone-mason, of the goldsmith, of the worker in
+bronze, of the sculptor. Vasari has preserved the tradition that
+Masolino and Paolo Uccello were apprentices of Ghiberti; he has remarked
+that their greatest contemporary, Masaccio, "trod in the steps of
+Brunelleschi and of Donatello." Pollaiolo and Verrocchio we know to have
+been equally excellent as painters and as workers in bronze. Sculpture,
+at once more naturalistic and more constantly under the influence of the
+antique, had for the second time laboured for painting. Itself a
+subordinate art, without much vitality, without deep roots in the
+civilization, sculpture was destined to remain the unsuccessful pupil of
+the antique, and the unsuccessful rival of painting; but sculpture had
+for its mission to prepare the road for painting and to prepare painting
+for antique influence; and the noblest work of Ghiberti and Donatello
+was Masaccio, as the most lasting glory to the Pisani had been Giotto.
+
+With Masaccio began the study of nature for its own sake, the desire of
+reproducing external objects, without any regard to their significance
+as symbols, or as parts of a story; the passionate wish to arrive at
+absolute realization. The merely suggestive outline art of the
+Giottesques had come to an end; the suggestion became a matter of
+indifference, the realization became a paramount interest; the story was
+forgotten in the telling, the religious thought was lost in the search
+for the artistic form. The Giottesques had used debased conventionalism
+to represent action with wonderful narrative and logical power; the
+artists of the early Renaissance became unskilful narrators and foolish
+allegorists almost in proportion as they became skilful draughtsmen and
+colourists; the saints had become to Masaccio merely so many lay figures
+on to which to cast drapery; for Fra Filippo the Madonna was a mere
+peasant model; for Filippino Lippi and for Ghirlandajo, a miracle meant
+merely an opportunity of congregating a number of admirable portrait
+figures in the dress of the day; the Baptism for Verrocchio had
+significance only as a study of muscular legs and arms; and the
+sacrifice of Noah had no importance for Uccello save as a grand
+opportunity for foreshortenings. In the hands of the Giottesques,
+interested in the subject and indifferent to the representation,
+painting had remained stationary for eighty years; for eighty years did
+it develope in the hands of the men of the fifteenth century,
+indifferent to the subject and passionately interested in the
+representation. The unity, the appearance of comparative perfection of
+the art had disappeared with the limits within which the Giottesques had
+been satisfied to move; instead of the intelligible and solemn
+conventionalism of the Giottesques, we see only disorder,
+half-understood ideas and abortive attempts, confusion which reminds us
+of those enigmatic sheets on which Leonardo or Michael Angelo scrawled
+out their ideas--drawings within drawings, plans of buildings scratched
+over Madonna heads, single flowers upside down next to flayed arms,
+calculations, monsters, sonnets; a very chaos of thoughts and of shapes,
+in which the plan of the artist is inextricably lost, which mean
+everything and nothing, but out of whose unintelligible network of lines
+and curves have issued masterpieces, and which only the foolish or the
+would-be philosophical would exchange for some intelligible, hopelessly
+finished and finite illustration out of a Bible or a book of travels.
+
+Anatomy, perspective, colour, drapery, effects of light, of water, of
+shadow, forms of trees and flowers, converging lines of architecture,
+all this at once absorbed and distracted the attention of the artists of
+the early Renaissance; and while they studied, copied, and calculated,
+another thought began to haunt them, another eager desire began to
+pursue them: by the side of Nature, the manifold, the baffling, the
+bewildering, there rose up before them another divinity, another sphinx,
+mysterious in its very simplicity and serenity--the Antique.
+
+The exhumation of the antique had, as we have seen, been contemporaneous
+with the birth of painting; nay, the study of the remains of antique
+sculpture had, in contributing to form Niccolo Pisano, indirectly helped
+to form Giotto; the very painter of the Triumph of Death had inserted
+into his terrible fresco two-winged genii, upholding a scroll, copied
+without any alteration from some coarse Roman sarcophagus, in which they
+may have sustained the usual _Dis Manibus Sacrum_. There had been, on
+the part of both sculptors and painters, a constant study of the
+antique; but during the Giottesque period this study had been limited to
+technicalities, and had in no way affected the conception of art. The
+mediaeval artists, surrounded by physical deformities, and seeing
+sanctity in sickness and dirt, little accustomed to observe the human
+figure, were incapable, both as men and as artists, of at all entering
+into the spirit of antique art. They could not perceive the superior
+beauty of the antique; they could recognize only its superior science
+and its superior handicraft, and these alone they studied to obtain.
+
+Giovanni Pisano sculpturing the unfleshed, caried carcases of the devils
+who leer, writhe, crunch, and tear on the outside of Orvieto Cathedral;
+and the Giottesques painting those terrible green, macerated Christs,
+hanging livid and broken from the cross, which abound in Tuscany and
+Umbria; the artists who produced these loathsome and lugubrious works
+were indubitably students of the antique; but they had learned from it
+not a love for beautiful form and noble drapery, but merely the general
+shape of the limbs and the general fall of the garments: the anatomical
+science and technical processes of Antiquity were being used to produce
+the most intensely un-antique, the most intensely mediaeval works. Thus
+matters stood in the time of Giotto. His followers, who studied only
+arrangement, probably consulted the antique as little as they consulted
+nature; but the contemporary sculptors were brought by the very
+constitution of their art into close contact both with Nature and with
+the antique; they studied both with determination, and handed over the
+results of their labours to the sculptor-taught painters of the
+fifteenth century.
+
+Here, then, were the two great factors in the art of the
+Renaissance--the study of nature, and the study of the Antique: both
+understand slowly, imperfectly; the one counteracting the effect of the
+other; the study of nature now scaring away all antique influence, the
+study of the antique now distorting all imitation of nature; rival
+forces confusing the artist and marring the work, until, when each could
+receive its due, the one corrected the other, and they combined,
+producing by this marriage of the living reality with the dead but
+immortal beauty, the great art of Michael Angelo, of Raphael, and of
+Titian: double, like its origin, antique and modern, real and ideal.
+
+The study of the antique is thus placed opposite to the study of nature,
+the comprehension of the works of Antiquity is the momentary antagonist
+of the comprehension of the works of nature. And this may seem strange,
+when we consider that antique art was itself due to perfect
+comprehension of nature. But the contradiction is easily explained. The
+study of nature, as it was carried on in the Renaissance, comprised the
+study of effects which had remained unnoticed by Antiquity; and the
+study of the statue,--colourless, without light, shade, or perspective,
+hampered, and was hampered by, the study of colour, of light and shade,
+of perspective, and of all that a generation of painters would seek to
+learn from nature. Nor was this all; the influence of the civilization
+of the Renaissance, of a civilization directly issued from the Middle
+Ages, was entirely at variance with the influence of antique
+civilization through the medium of ancient art; the Middle Ages and
+Antiquity, Christianity and Paganism, were even more opposed to each
+other than could be the statue and the easel picture, the fresco and the
+bas-relief.
+
+First, then, we have the hostility between painting--and sculpture,
+between the _modus operandi_ of the modern and the _modus operandi_ of
+the ancient art. Antique art is, in the first place, purely linear art,
+colourless, tintless, without light and shade; next, it is essentially
+the art of the isolated figure, without background, grouping, or
+perspective. As linear art it could directly affect only that branch of
+painting which was itself linear; and as art of the isolated figure it
+was ever being contradicted by the constantly developing arts of
+perspective and landscape. The antique never' directly influenced the
+Venetians, not from reasons of geography and culture, but from the fact
+that Venetian painting, founded from the earliest times upon a system of
+colour, could not be affected by antique sculpture, based upon a system
+of modelled, colourless form; the men who saw form only through the
+medium of colour could not learn much from purely linear form; hence it
+is that even after a certain amount of antique imitation had passed into
+Venetian painting, through the medium of Mantegna, the Venetian painters
+display comparatively little antique influence. In Bellini, Carpaccio,
+Cima, and other early masters, the features, forms, and dress are mainly
+modern and Venetian; and Giorgione, Titian, and even the eclectic
+Tintoret, were more interested in the bright lights of a steel
+breastplate than in the shape of a limb; and preferred in their hearts a
+shot brocade of the sixteenth century to the finest drapery ever
+modelled by an ancient.
+
+The antique influence was naturally strongest among the Tuscan schools;
+because the Tuscan schools were essentially schools of drawing, and the
+draughtsman recognized in antique sculpture the highest perfection of
+that linear form which was his own domain. Yet while the antique
+appealed most to the linear schools, even in these it could strongly
+influence only the purely linear part; it is strong in the drawings and
+weak in the paintings. As long as the artists had only the pencil or
+pen, they could reproduce much of the linear perfection of the antique;
+they were, so to speak, alone with it; but as soon as they brought in
+colour, perspective, and scenery, the linear perfection was lost in
+attempts at something new; the antique was put to flight by the modern.
+Botticelli's crayon study for his Venus is almost antique; his tempera
+picture of Venus, with the pale blue scaly sea, the laurel grove, the
+flower-embroidered garments, the wisps of tawny hair, is comparatively
+mediaeval; Pinturicchio's sketch of Pans and satyrs contrasts strangely
+with his frescoes in the library of Siena; Mantegna himself,
+supernaturally antique in his engravings, becomes comparatively trivial
+and modern in his oil-paintings. Do what they might, draw from the
+antique and calculate its proportions, the artists of the Renaissance
+found themselves baffled as soon as they attempted to apply the result
+of then linear studies to coloured pictures; as soon as they tried to
+make the antique unite with the modern, one of the two elements was sure
+to succumb. In Botticelli, draughtsman and student though he was, the
+modern, the mediaeval, that part of the art which had arisen in the
+Middle Ages, invariably had the upper hand; his Venus, despite her forms
+studied from the antique and her gesture imitated from some earlier
+discovered copy of the Medicean Venus, has the woe-begone prudery of a
+Madonna or of an abbess; she shivers physically and morally in her
+unaccustomed nakedness, and the goddess of Spring, who comes skipping up
+from beneath the laurel copse, does well to prepare her a mantle, for in
+the pallid tempera colour, against the dismal background of rippled sea,
+this mediaeval Venus, at once indecent and prudish, is no very pleasing
+sight. In the Allegory of Spring in the Academy of Florence, we again
+have the antique; goddesses and nymphs whose clinging garments the
+gentle Sandro Botticelli has assuredly studied from some old statue of
+Agrippina or Faustina; but what strange livid tints are there beneath
+those draperies, what eccentric gestures are those of the nymphs, what a
+green, ghostlike light illumines this garden of Venus Are these
+goddesses and nymphs immortal women such as the ancients conceived, or
+are they not rather fantastic fairies or nixen, Titanias and Undines,
+incorporeal daughters of dew and gossamer and mist?
+
+In Sandro Botticelli the teachings of the statue are forgotten or
+distorted when the artist takes up his palette and brushes; in his
+greater contemporary, Andrea Mantegna, the ever-present antique chills
+and arrests the vitality of the modern. Mantegna, the pupil of the
+ancient marbles of Squarcione's workshop even more than the pupil of
+Donatello, studies for his paintings not from nature, but from
+sculpture; his figures are seen in strange projection and
+foreshortening, like figures in a high relief seen from below; despite
+his mastery of perspective, they seem hewn out of the background;
+despite the rich colours which he displays in his Veronese altar-piece,
+they look like painted marbles, with their hard clots of stonelike hair
+and beard, with their vacant glance and their wonderful draperies,
+clinging and weighty like the wet draperies of ancient sculpture. They
+are beautiful petrifactions, or vivified statues; Mantegna's
+masterpiece, the sepia "Judith" in Florence, is like an exquisite,
+pathetically lovely Eurydice, who has stepped unconscious and lifeless
+out of a Praxitelian bas-relief. And there are stranger works than even
+the Judith; strange statuesque fancies, like the fight of Marine
+Monsters and the Bacchanal among Mantegna's engravings. The group of
+three wondrous creatures, at once men, fish, and gods, is as grand and
+even more fantastic than Leonardo's Battle of the Standard: a Triton,
+sturdy and muscular, with sea-weed beard and hair, wheels round his
+finned horse, preparing to strike his adversary with a bunch of fish
+which he brandishes above him; on him is rushing, careering on an
+osseous sea-horse, a strange, lank, sinewy being, fury stretching every
+tendon, his long-clawed feet striking into the flanks of his steed, his
+sharp, reed-crowned head turned fiercely, with clenched teeth, on his
+opponent, and stretching forth a truncheon, ready to run down his enemy
+as a ship runs down another; and further off a young Triton, with
+clotted hair and heavy eyes, seems ready to sink wounded below the
+rippling wavelets, with the massive head and marble agony of the dying
+Alexander; enigmatic figures, grand and grotesque, lean, haggard,
+vehement, and yet, in the midst of violence and monstrosity,
+unaccountably antique. The other print, called the Bacchanal, has no
+background: half a dozen male figures stand separate and naked as in a
+bas-relief. Some are leaning against a vine-wreathed tub; a satyr, with
+acanthus-leaves growing wondrously out of him, half man, half plant, is
+emptying a cup; a heavy Silenus is prone upon the ground; a faun, seated
+upon the vat, is supporting in his arms a beautiful sinking youth;
+another youth, grand, muscular, and grave as a statue, stands on the
+further side. Is this really a bacchanal? Yes, for there is the paunchy
+Silenus, there are the fauns, there the vat and vine-wreaths and
+drinking-horns. And yet it cannot be a bacchanal. Compare with it one of
+Rubens's orgies, where the overgrown, rubicund men and women and fauns
+tumble about in tumultuous, riotous intoxication: that is a bacchanal;
+they have been drinking, those magnificent brutes, there is wine firing
+their blood and weighing down their heads. But here all is different, in
+this so-called Bacchanal of Mantegna. This heavy Silenus is supine like
+a mass of marble; these fauns are shy and mute; these youths are grave
+and sombre; there is no wine in the cups, there are no lees in the vat,
+there is no life in these magnificent colossal forms; there is no blood
+in their grandly bent lips, no light in their wide-opened eyes; it is
+not the drowsiness of intoxication which is weighing down the youth
+sustained by the faun; it is no grapejuice which gives that strange,
+vague glance. No; they have drunk, but not of any mortal drink; the
+grapes are grown in Persephone's garden, the vat contains no fruits that
+have ripened beneath our sun. These strange, mute, solemn revellers have
+drunk of Lethe, and they are growing cold with the cold of death and of
+marble; they are the ghosts of the dead ones of antiquity, revisiting
+the artist of the Renaissance, who paints them, thinking he is painting
+life, while that which he paints is in reality death.
+
+This anomaly, this unsatisfactory character of the works of both
+Botticelli and Mantegna, is mainly technical; the antique is frustrated
+in Botticelli, not so much by the Christian, the mediaeval, the modern
+mode of feeling, as by the new methods and aims of the new art which
+disconcert the methods and aims of the old art; and that which arrests
+Mantegna in his development as a painter is not the spirit of Paganism
+deadening the spirit of Christianity, but the laws of sculpture
+hampering painting. But this technical contest between two arts, the one
+not yet fully developed, the other not yet fully understood, is as
+nothing compared with the contest between the two civilizations, the
+antique and the modern; between the habits and tendencies of the
+contemporaries of the artists of the Renaissance and of the artists
+themselves, and the habits and tendencies of the antique artists and
+their contemporaries. We are apt to think of the Renaissance as of a
+period closely resembling antiquity, misled by the inevitable similarity
+between southern and democratic countries of whatever age; misled still
+less pardonably by the Ciceronian pedantries and pseudo-antique
+obscenities of a few humanists, and by the pseudo-Corinthian arabesques
+and capitals of a few learned architects. But all this was mere
+archaeological finery borrowed by a civilization in itself entirely
+unlike that of ancient Greece.
+
+The Renaissance, let us remember, was merely the flowering time of that
+great mediaeval movement which had germinated early in the twelfth
+century; it was merely a more advanced stage of the civilization which
+had produced Dante and Giotto, of the civilization which was destined to
+produce Luther and Rabelais. The fifteenth century was merely the
+continuation of the fourteenth century, as the fourteenth had been of
+the thirteenth; there had been growth and improvement; development of
+the more modern, diminishing of the more mediaeval elements; but, despite
+growth and the changes due to growth, the Renaissance was part and
+parcel of the Middle Ages. The life, thought, aspirations, and habits
+were mediaeval; opposed to the open-air life, the physical training and
+the materialistic religion of Antiquity. The surroundings of Masaccio
+and of Signorelli, nay, even of Raphael, were very different from those
+of Phidias or Praxiteles. Let us think what were the daily and hourly
+impressions given by the Renaissance to its artists. Large towns, in
+which thousands of human beings were crowded together, in narrow, gloomy
+streets, with but a strip of blue visible between the projecting roofs;
+and in these cities an incessant commercial activity, with no relief
+save festivals at the churches, brawls at the taverns, and carnival
+buffooneries. Men and women pale and meagre for want of air, and light,
+and movement; undeveloped, untrained bodies, warped by constant work at
+the loom or at the desk, at best with the lumpish freedom of the soldier
+and the vulgar nimbleness of the prentice. And these men and women
+dressed in the dress of the Middle Ages, gorgeous perhaps in colour, but
+heavy, miserable, grotesque, nay, sometimes ludicrous in form; citizens
+in lumpish robes and long-tailed caps; ladies in stiff and foldless
+brocade hoops and stomachers; artizans in striped and close-adhering
+hose and egg-shaped padded jerkin; soldiers in lumbering armour-plates,
+ill-fitted over ill-fitting leather, a shapeless shell of iron, bulging
+out and angular, in which the body was buried as successfully as in the
+robes of the magistrates. Thus we see the men and women of the
+Renaissance in the works of all its painters: heavy in Ghirlandajo,
+vulgarly jaunty in Filippino, preposterously starched and prim in
+Mantegna, ludicrously undignified in Signorelli; while mediaeval
+stiffness, awkwardness, and absurdity reach their acme perhaps in the
+little boys, companions of the Medici children, introduced into Benozzo
+Gozzoli's Building of Babel. These are the prosperous townsfolk, among
+whom the Renaissance artist is but too glad to seek for models; but
+besides these there are lamentable sights, mediaeval beyond words, at
+every street corner: dwarfs and cripples, maimed and diseased beggars of
+all degrees of loathsomeness, lepers and epileptics, and infinite
+numbers of monks, brown, grey, and black, in sack-shaped frocks and
+pointed hoods, with shaven crown and cropped beard, emaciated with
+penance or bloated with gluttony. And all this the painter sees, daily,
+hourly; it is his standard of humanity, and as such finds its way into
+every picture. It is the living; but opposite it arises the dead. Let us
+turn aside from the crowd of the mediaeval city, and look at what the
+workmen have just laid bare, or what the merchant has just brought from
+Rome or from Greece. Look at this: it is corroded by oxides, battered by
+ill-usage, stained with earth: it is not a group, not even a whole
+statue, it has neither head nor arms remaining; it is a mere broken
+fragment of antique sculpture,--a naked body with a fold or two of
+drapery; it is not by Phidias nor by Praxiteles, it may not even be
+Greek; it may be some cheap copy, made for a garden or a bath, in the
+days of Hadrian. But to the artist of the fifteenth century it is the
+revelation of a whole world, a world in itself. We can scarcely realize
+all this; but let us look and reflect, and even we may feel as must have
+felt the man of the Renaissance in the presence of that mutilated,
+stained, battered torso. He sees in that broken stump a grandeur of
+outline, a magnificence of osseous structure, a breadth of muscle and
+sinew, a smooth, firm covering of flesh, such as he would vainly seek in
+any of his living models; he sees a delicate and infinite variety of
+indentures, of projections, of creases following the bend of every limb;
+he sees, where the surface still exists intact, an elasticity of skin, a
+buoyancy of hidden life such as all the colours of his palette are
+unable to imitate; and in this piece of drapery, negligently gathered
+over the hips or rolled upon the arm, he sees a magnificent alternation
+of large folds and small plaits, of straight lines, and broken lines,
+and curves. He sees all this; but he sees more: the broken torso is, as
+we have said, not merely a world in itself, but the revelation of a
+world. It is the revelation of antique civilization, of the palaestra
+and the stadium, of the sanctification of the body, of the apotheosis of
+man, of the religion of life and nature and joy; revealed to the man of
+the Middle Ages, who has hitherto seen in the untrained, diseased,
+despised body but a deformed piece of baseness, which his priests tell
+him belongs to the worms and to Satan; who has been taught that the monk
+living in solitude and celibacy, filthy, sick, worn out with fastings
+and bleeding with flagellation, is the nearest approach to divinity; who
+has seen Divinity itself, pale, emaciated, joyless, hanging bleeding
+from the cross; and who is for ever reminded that the kingdom of this
+Godhead is not of this world.
+
+What passes in the mind of that artist? What surprise, what dawning
+doubts, what sickening fears, what longings and what remorse are not the
+fruit of this sight of Antiquity? Is he to yield or to resist? Is he to
+forget the saints and Christ, and give himself over to Satan and to
+Antiquity? Only one man boldly answered, Yes. Mantegna abjured his
+faith, abjured the Middle Ages, abjured all that belonged to his time;
+and in so doing cast away from him the living art and became the lover,
+the worshipper of shadows. And only one man turned completely aside from
+the antique as from the demon, and that man was a saint, Fra Angelico da
+Fiesole. And with the antique, Fra Angelico rejected all the other
+artistic influences and aims of his time, the time not of Giotto or of
+Orcagna, but of Masaccio and Uccello, of Pollaiolo and Donatello. For the
+mild, meek, angelic monk dreaded the life of his days; dreaded to leave
+the cloister where the sunshine was tempered and the noise reduced to a
+mere faint hum, and where the flower-beds were tidy and prim; dreaded to
+soil or rumple his spotless white robe and his shining black cowl; a
+spiritual sybarite, shrinking from the sight of the crowd seething in
+the streets, shrinking from the idea of stripping the rags off the
+beggar in order to see his tanned and gnarled limbs; shuddering at the
+thought of seeking for muscles in the dead, cut-open body; fearful of
+every whiff of life that might mingle with the incense atmosphere of his
+chapel, of every cry of human passion which might break through the
+well-ordered sweetness of his chants. No; the Renaissance did not exist
+for him who lived in a world of diaphanous form, colour and character,
+unsubstantial and unruffled; dreaming feebly and sweetly of
+transparent-cheeked Madonnas with no limbs beneath their robes; of
+smooth-faced saints with well-combed beard and placid, vacant gaze,
+seated in well-ordered masses, holy with the purity of inanity; of
+divine dolls with pallid flaxen locks, floating between heaven and
+earth, playing upon lute and viol and psaltery; raised to faint visions
+of angels and blessed, moving noiseless, feelingless, meaningless,
+across the flowerets of Paradise; of assemblies of saints seated,
+arrayed in pure pink, and blue and lilac, in an atmosphere of liquid
+gold, in glory. And thus Fra Angelico worked on, content with the dearly
+purchased science of his masters, placid, beatic, effeminate, in an
+aesthetical paradise of his own, a paradise of sloth and sweetness, a
+paradise for weak souls, weak hearts, and weak eyes; patiently repeating
+the same fleshless angels, the same boneless saints, the same bloodless
+virgins; happy in smoothing the unmixed, unshaded tints of the sky, and
+earth, and dresses; laying on the gold of the fretted skies, and of the
+iridescent wings, embroidering robes, instruments of music, halos,
+flowers, with threads of gold.... Sweet, simple artist saint, reducing
+art to--something akin to the delicate pearl and silk embroidery of
+pious nuns, to the exquisite sweetmeat cookery of pious monks; a
+something too delicately gorgeous, too deliciously insipid for human
+wear or human food; no, the Renaissance does not exist for thee, either
+in its study of the existing reality, or in its study of antique beauty.
+
+Mantegna, the learned, the archaeological, the pagan, who renounces his
+times and his faith; and Angelico, the monk, the saint, who shuts and
+bolts his monastery doors and sprinkles holy water in the face of the
+antique; the two extremes, are both exceptions. The innumerable artists
+of the Renaissance remained in hesitation; tried to court both the
+antique and the modern, to unite the Pagan and the Christian--some, like
+Ghirlandajo, in cold indifference to all but mere artistic science,
+encrusting marble bacchanals into the walls of the Virgin's paternal
+house, bringing together, unthinkingly, antique-draped women carrying
+baskets, and noble Strozzi and Ruccellai ladies with gloved hands folded
+over their gold brocaded skirts; others, with cheerful and childlike
+pleasure in both antique and modern, like Benozzo, crowding together
+half-naked youths and nymphs treading the grapes and scaling the
+trellise with Florentine magnificos in plaited skirts and starched
+collars, among the pines, and porticos, the sprawling children, barking
+dogs, peacocks sunning themselves, and partridges picking up grain, of
+his Pisan frescoes; yet others using the antique as mere pageant shows,
+allegorical mummeries, destined to amuse some Duke of Ferrara or Marquis
+of Mantua, together with the hurdle races of Jews, hags, and riderless
+donkeys.
+
+Thus little by little the antique amalgamates with the modern; the art
+born of the Middle Ages absorbs the art born of Paganism; but how
+slowly, and with what fantastic and ludicrous results at first; as when
+the anatomical sculptor Pollaiolo gives scenes of naked Roman
+prize-fighters as martyrdoms of St. Sebastian; or when the pious
+Perugino (pious at least with his brush) dresses up his sleek, hectic,
+beardless archangels as Roman warriors, and makes them stand, straddling
+beatically on thin little dapper legs, wistfully gazing from beneath
+their wondrously ornamented helmets on the walls of the Cambio at
+Perugia; when he masquerades meditative fathers of the Church as
+Socrates and haggard anchorites as Numa Pompilius; most ludicrous of
+all, when he attires in scantiest of--clinging antique drapery his mild
+and pensive Madonnas, and, with daintily pointed toes, places them to
+throne bashfully on allegorical chariots as Venus or Diana.
+
+Long is the period of amalgamation, and small are the results throughout
+that long early Renaissance. Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Melozzo,
+Ghirlandajo, Filippino, Botticelli, Verrocchio, have none of them shown
+us the perfect fusion of the two elements whose union is to give us
+Michael Angelo, Raphael, and all the great perfect artists of the early
+sixteenth century; the two elements are for ever ill-combined and
+hostile to each other; the modern vulgarizes the antique, the antique
+paralyzes the modern. And meanwhile the fifteenth century, the century
+of study, of conflict, and of confusion, is rapidly drawing to a close;
+eight or ten more years, and it will be gone. Is the new century to find
+the antique still dead and the modern still mediaeval?
+
+The antique and the modern had met for the first time and as
+irreconcilable enemies in the cloisters of Pisa; and the modern had
+triumphed in the great mediaeval fresco of the Triumph of Death. By a
+strange coincidence, by a sublime jest of accident, the antique and the
+modern were destined to meet again, and this time indissolubly united,
+in a painting representing the Resurrection. Yes, Signorelli's fresco in
+Orvieto Cathedral is indeed a resurrection, the resurrection of human
+beauty after the long death-slumber of the Middle Ages. And the artist
+would seem to have been dimly conscious of the great allegory he was
+painting. Here and there are strewn skulls; skeletons stand leering by,
+as if in remembrance of the ghastly past, and as a token of former
+death; but magnificent youths are breaking through the crust of the
+earth, emerging, taking shape and flesh; arising, strong and proud,
+ready to go forth at the bidding of the Titanic angels who announce from
+on high with trumpet blast and waving banners, that the death of the
+world has come to an end, and that humanity has arisen once more in the
+youth and beauty of Antiquity.
+
+
+II.
+
+
+Signorelli's frescoes at Orvieto, at once the latest works of the
+fifteenth century, and the latest works of an old man nurtured in the
+traditions of Benozzo Gozzoli and of Piero della Francesca, mark the
+beginning of the maturity and perfection of Italian art. From them
+Michael Angelo learns what he could not be taught even by his master
+Ghirlandajo, the grand and cold realist. He learns; and what he has
+learned at Orvieto he teaches with doubled force in Rome; and the
+ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel, the superb and heroic nudities, the
+majestic draperies, the reappearance in the modern art of painting of
+the spirit and hand of Phidias, give a new impulse and hasten on
+perfection. When the doors of the chapel are at length opened, Raphael
+forgets Perugino; Fra Bartolomeo forgets Botticelli; Sodoma forgets
+Leonardo; the narrower hesitating styles of the fifteenth century are
+abandoned, as the great example is disseminated throughout Italy; and
+even the tumult of angels in glory which the Lombard Correggio is to
+paint in far-off Parma, and the daringly simple Bacchus and Ariadne with
+which Tintoret will decorate the Ducal Palace more than fifty years
+later--all that is great and bold, all that is a re-incarnation of the
+spirit of Antiquity, all that marks the culmination of Renaissance art,
+seems due to the impulse of Michael Angelo, and, through him, to the
+example of Signorelli. From the celestial horseman and bounding avenging
+angels of Raphael's Heliodorus, to the St. Sebastian of Sodoma, with
+exquisite limbs and head, rich with tendril-like locks, delicate against
+the brown Umbrian sunset; from the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto seated,
+with the head and drapery of a Niobe, by the sack of flour in the
+Annunziata cloister, to the voluptuous goddess, with purple mantle half
+concealing her body of golden white, who leans against the sculptured
+fountain in Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, with the greenish blue sky
+and hazy light of evening behind her; from the most extreme examples of
+the most extreme schools of Lombardy and Venetia, to the most intense
+examples of the remotest schools of Tuscany and Umbria; throughout the
+art of the early sixteenth century, of those thirty years which were the
+years of perfection, we see, more or less marked, but always distinct,
+the union of the living art born of the Middle Ages with the dead art
+left by Antiquity, a union producing life and perfection, producing the
+great art of the Renaissance.
+
+This much is clear and easy of definition; but what is neither clearly
+understood nor easily defined is the nature of this union, the manner in
+which the antique and the modern did thus amalgamate. It is easy to
+speak of a vague union of spirit, of the antique idea having permeated
+the modern; but all this explains but little: art is not a metaphysical
+figment, and all its phases and revolutions are concrete, and, so to
+speak, physically explicable and definable. The union of the antique
+with the modern meant simply the absorption by the art of the
+Renaissance of elements of civilization necessary for its perfection,
+but not existing in the medieval civilization of the fifteenth century;
+of elements of civilization which gave what the civilization of the
+fifteenth century--which could give colour, perspective, grouping, and
+landscape--could never have afforded: the nude, drapery, and gesture.
+
+The naked human body, which the Greeks had trained, studied, and
+idolized, did not exist in the fifteenth century; in its stead there was
+only the undressed body, ill-developed, untrained, pinched, and
+distorted by the garments only just cast off; cramped and bent by
+sedentary occupations, livid with the plague-spots of the Middle Ages,
+scarred by the whipmarks of asceticism. This stripped body, unseen and
+unfit to be seen, unaccustomed to the air and to the eyes of others,
+shivered and cowered for cold and for shame. The Giottesques ignored its
+very existence, conceiving humanity as a bodiless creature, with face
+and hands to express emotion, and just enough malformed legs and feet to
+be either standing or moving; further, beneath the garments, there was
+nothing. The realists of the fifteenth century tore off the clothes and
+drew the ugly thing beneath; and bought the corpses from the
+lazar-houses, and stole them from the gallows; in order to see how bone
+fitted into bone, and muscle was stretched over muscle. They learned to
+perfection the anatomy of the human frame, but they could not learn its
+beauty; they became even reconciled to the ugliness they were accustomed
+to see; and, with their minds full of antique examples, Verrocchio,
+Donatello, Pollaiolo, and Ghirlandajo, the greatest anatomists of the
+fifteenth century, imitated their coarse and ill-made living models when
+they imagined that they were imitating antique marbles.
+
+So much for the nude. Drapery, as the ancients understood it in the
+delicate plaits of Greek chiton and tunic, in the grand folds of Roman
+toga, the fifteenth century could not show; it knew only the stiff,
+scanty raiment of the active classes; the shapeless masses of lined
+cloth of the merchants and magistrates; the prudish and ostentatious
+starched dress of the women; and the coarse, lumpish garb of the monks.
+
+The artist of the fifteenth century knew drapery only as an exotic, an
+exotic with whose representation the habit of seeing mediaeval costume
+was for ever interfering; on the stripped, unseemly, indecent body he
+places, with the stiffness of artificiality, drapery such as he has
+never seen upon any living creature; the result is awkwardness and
+rigidity. And what attitude, what gesture, can he expect from this
+stripped and artificially draped model? None, for the model scarce knows
+how to stand in so unaccustomed a condition of body. The artist must
+seek for attitude and gesture among his townsfolk, and among them he can
+find only trivial, awkward, often vulgar movement. They have never been
+taught how to stand or to move with grace and dignity; the artist must
+study attitude and gesture in the market-place or the bull-baiting
+ground, where Ghirlandajo found his jauntily strutting idlers, and
+Verrocchio his brutally staggering prize-fighters. Between the
+constrained attitudinizing of Byzantine and Giottesque tradition, and
+the imitation of the movements of clodhoppers and ragamuffins, the
+realist of the fifteenth century would wander hopelessly were it not for
+the antique. Genius and science are of no avail; the position of Christ
+in baptism in the paintings of Verrocchio and Ghirlandajo is mean and
+servile; the movements of the "Thunder-stricken" in Signorelli's
+lunettes is an inconceivable mixture of the brutish, the melodramatic,
+and the comic; the magnificently drawn youth at the door of the prison
+in Filippino's Liberation of St. Peter is gradually going to sleep and
+collapsing in a fashion which is truly ignoble.
+
+And the same applies to sculptured figures or to figures standing
+isolated like statues; no Greek would have ventured upon the swaggering
+position, with legs apart and elbows out, of Donatello's St. George, or
+Perugino's St. Michael; and a young Athenian who should have assumed the
+attitude of Verrocchio's David, with tripping legs and hand clapped on
+his hip, would have been sent to sit in a corner as a saucy little
+ragamuffin.
+
+Coarse nude, stiff drapery, vulgar attitude, was all that the fifteenth
+century could offer to its artists; but Antiquity could offer more and
+very different things: the naked body developed by the most artistic
+training, drapery the most natural and refined, and attitude and gesture
+regulated by an education the most careful and artistic; and all these
+things Antiquity did give to the artists of the Renaissance. They did
+not copy antique statues as living naked men and women, but they
+corrected the faults of their living models by the example of the
+statues; they did not copy antique stone draperies in coloured pictures,
+but they arranged the robes on their models with the antique folds well
+in their memory; they did not give the gestures of statues to living
+figures, but they made the living figures move in accordance with those
+principles of harmony which they had found exemplified in the statues.
+
+They did not imitate the antique, they studied it; they obtained through
+the fragments of antique sculpture a glimpse into the life of antiquity,
+and that glimpse served to correct the vulgarism and distortion of the
+mediaeval life of the fifteenth century. In the perfection of Italian
+painting, the union of antique and modern being consummated, it is
+perhaps difficult to disentangle what really is antique from what is
+modern; but in the earlier times, when the two elements were still
+separate, we can see them opposite each other and compare them in the
+works of the greatest artists. Wherever, in the paintings of the early
+Renaissance, there is realism, marked by the costume of the times, there
+is ugliness of form and vulgarity of movement; where there is idealism,
+marked by imitation of the antique, the nude, and drapery, there is
+beauty and dignity. We need only compare Filippino's Scene before the
+Proconsul with his Raising of the King's Son in the Brancacci Chapel;
+the grand attitude and draperies of Ghirlandajo's Zachariah with the
+vulgar dress and movements of the Florentine citizens surrounding him;
+Benozzo Gozzoli's noble naked figure of Noah with his ungainly,
+hideously dressed figure of Cosimo de' Medici; Mantegna's exquisite
+Judith with his preposterous Marquis of Mantua; in short, all the purely
+realistic with all the purely idealistic painting of the fifteenth
+century. We may give one last instance. In Signorelli's Orvieto frescoes
+there is a figure of a young man, with aquiline features, long crisp
+hair and strongly developed throat, which reappears unmistakably in all
+the compositions, and in some of them twice and thrice in various
+positions. His naked figure is magnificent, his attitudes splendid, his
+thrown-back head superb, whether he be slowly and painfully emerging
+from the earth, staggered and gasping with his newly infused life, or
+sinking oppressed on the ground, broken and crushed by the sound of the
+trumpet of judgment; or whether he be moving forward with ineffable
+longing towards the angel about to award him the crown of the blessed;
+in all these positions he is heroically beautiful. We meet him again,
+unmistakable, but how different, in the realistic group of the
+"Thunder-stricken "--the long, lank youth, with spindle-shanks and
+egg-shaped body, bounding forward, with most grotesque strides, over the
+uncouth heap of dead bodies, ungainly masses with soles and nostrils
+uppermost, lying in beast-like confusion. This youth, with something of
+a harlequin in his jumps and his ridiculous thin legs and preposterous
+round body, is evidently the model for the naked demi-gods of the
+Resurrection and the Paradise: he is the handsome boy as the fifteenth
+century gave him to Signorelli; opposite, he is the living youth of the
+fifteenth century idealized by the study of ancient sculpture; just as
+the "Thunder-stricken" may be some scene of street massacre such as
+Signorelli might have witnessed at Cortona or Perugia; while the agonies
+of the "Hell" are the grouped and superb agonies taught by the antique;
+just as the two archangels of the "Hell," in their armour of Baglioni's
+heavy cavalry, may represent the modern element, and the same
+archangels, naked, with magnificent flying draperies, blowing the
+trumpets of the Resurrection, may show the antique element in
+Renaissance art.
+
+The antique influence was not, indeed, equally strong throughout Italy;
+it was strongest in the Tuscan school, which, seeking for perfection of
+linear form, found that perfection in the antique; it was weakest in the
+Lombard and Venetian schools, which sought for what the antique could
+not give, light and shade and colour; the antique was most efficacious
+where it was most indispensable, and it was more necessary to a Tuscan,
+strong only with his charcoal or pencil, than to Leonardo da Vinci, who
+could make an imperfect figure, beckoning mysteriously from out of the
+gloom, more fascinating than the finest drawn Florentine Madonna, and
+could surround an insignificant childish head with the wondrous sheen
+and ripple of hair, as with an aureole of poetry; it was also less
+necessary to Giorgione and Titian, who could hide coarse limbs beneath
+their draperies of precious ruby, and transfigure, by the liquid gold of
+their palettes, a peasant woman into a goddess. But even the Lombards,
+even the Venetians, required the antique influence. They could not
+perhaps have obtained it direct like the Tuscans: the colourists and
+masters of light and shade might never have understood the blank lines
+and faint shadows of the marble; but they received the antique
+influence, strong but modified by the medium through which it had
+passed, from Mantegna; and the relentless self-sacrifice to Antiquity,
+the self-paralyzation of the great artist, was not without its use: from
+Venetian Padua, Mantegna influenced the Bellini and Giorgione; from
+Lombard Mantua, he influenced Leonardo; and Mantegna's influence was
+that of the antique.
+
+What would have been the art of the Renaissance without the antique? The
+speculation is vain, for the antique had influenced it, had been goading
+it on ever since the earliest times; it had been present at its birth,
+it had affected Giotto through Niccolo Pisano, and Masaccio through
+Ghiberti; the antique influence cannot be conceived as absent in the
+history of Italian painting. So far, as a study of the impossible, the
+speculation respecting the fate of Renaissance art had it not been
+influenced by the antique would be childishly useless. But lest we
+forget that this antique influence did exist, lest, grown ungrateful and
+blind, we refuse it its immense share in producing Michael Angelo,
+Raphael, and Titian, we may do well to turn to an art born and bred like
+Italian art, in the Middle Ages; like it, full of strength and power of
+self-development, but which, unlike Italian art, was not influenced by
+the antique. This art is the great German art of the early sixteenth
+century; the art of Martin Schongauer, of Aldegrever, of Altdorfer, of
+Wohlgemuth, of Kranach, of Albrecht Duerer and Hans Holbein, whom they
+resemble as Pinturicchio and Lo Spagna resemble Perugino, as Palma and
+Paris Bordone resemble Titian. This is an art born in a civilization
+less perfect indeed than that of Italy, narrower, as Nuernberg or Basle
+is narrower than Florence; but resembling it in habits, dress, religion,
+above all, the main characteristic of being mediaeval; and its masters,
+as great as their Italian contemporaries in all the technicalities of
+the art, and In absolute honesty of endeavour, may show what the Italian
+art of the sixteenth century might have been without the antique. Let us
+therefore open a portfolio of those wonderful minute yet grand
+engravings of the old Germans. They are for the most part Scriptural
+scenes or allegories, quite analogous to those of the Italians, but
+purely realistic, conscious of no world beyond that of an Imperial City
+of the year 1520. Here we have the whole turn-out, male and female, of a
+German free-town, in the shape of scenes from the lives of the Virgin
+and saints; here are short fat burghers, with enormous blotchy, bloated
+faces and little eyes set in fat, their huge stomachs protruding from
+under their jackets; here are blear-eyed ladies, tall, thin, wrinkled
+though not old, with figures like hungry harpies, stalking about in high
+headgears and stiff gowns, or sitting by the side of lean and stunted
+pages, singing (with dolorous voice) to lutes; or promenading under
+trees with long-shanked, high-shouldered gentlemen, with vacant sickly
+face and long scraggy hair and beard, their bony elbows sticking out of
+their slashed doublets. These courtly figures culminate in Duerer's
+magnificent plate of the wild man of the woods kissing the hideous,
+leering Jezebel in her brocade and jewels. These aristocratic women are
+terrible; prudish, malicious, licentious, never modest because they are
+always ugly. Even the poor Madonnas, seated in front of village hovels
+or windmills, smile the smile of starved, sickly sempstresses. It is a
+stunted, poverty-stricken, plague-sick society, this mediaeval society of
+burghers and burghers' wives; the air seems bad and heavy, and the light
+wanting physically and morally, in these old free-towns; there is
+intellectual sickness as well as bodily in those musty gabled houses;
+the mediaeval spirit blights what revival of healthiness may exist in
+these commonwealths. And feudalism is outside the gates. There are the
+brutal, leering men-at-arms, in slashed, puffed doublets and heavy
+armour, face and dress as unhuman as possible, standing grimacing at the
+blood spirting from John the Baptist's decapitated trunk, as in
+Kranach's horrible print, while gaping spectators fill the castle-yard;
+there are the castles high on rocks amidst woods, with miserable
+villages below, where the Prodigal Son wallows among the swine, and the
+tattered boors tumble about in drunkenness, or rest wearied on their
+spades. There are the Middle Ages in full force. But had these Germans
+of the days of Luther really no thought beyond their own times and their
+own country? Had they really no knowledge of the antique? Not so; they
+had heard from their learned men, from Willibald Pirkheimer and Ulrich
+von Hutten, that the world had once been peopled with naked gods and
+goddesses. Nay, the very year perhaps that Raphael handed to his
+engraver, Marc Antonio, his magnificent drawing of the Judgment of
+Paris, Lukas Kranach bethought him to represent the story of the good
+Knight Paris giving the apple to the Lady Venus. So Kranach took up his
+steady pencil and sharp chisel, and in strong, clear, minute lines of
+black and white showed us the scene. There, on Mount Ida, with a
+castellated rock in the distance, the charger of Paris browses beneath
+some stunted larches; the Trojan knight's helmet, with its monstrous
+beak and plume, lies on the ground; and near it reclines Paris himself,
+lazy, in complete armour, with frizzled fashionable beard. To him, all
+wrinkled and grinning with brutal lust, comes another bearded knight,
+with wings to his vizored helmet, Sir Mercury, leading the three
+goddesses, short, fat-cheeked German wenches, housemaids stripped of
+their clothes, stupid, brazen, indifferent. And Paris is evidently
+prepared with his choice: he awards the apple to the fattest, for among
+a half-starved, plague-stricken people like this, the chosen of gods and
+men must needs be the fattest.
+
+No, such pagan scenes are mere burlesques, coarse mummeries, such as may
+have amused Nuernberg and Augsburg during Shrovetide, when drunken louts
+figured as Bacchus and sang drinking songs by Hans Sachs. There is no
+reality in all this; there is no belief in pagan gods. If we would see
+the haunting divinity of the German Renaissance, we shall find him
+prying and prowling in nearly every scene of real life; him, the ever
+present, the king of the Middle Ages, whose triumph we have seen on the
+cloister wall at Pisa, the Lord Death. His fleshless face peers from
+behind a bush at Zatzinger's stunted, fever-stricken lady and imbecile
+gentleman; he sits grinning on a tree in Orso Grafs allegory, while the
+cynical knights, with haggard, sensual faces, crack dirty jokes with the
+fat, brutish woman squatted below; he puts his hand into the basket of
+Duerer's tattered pedlar; he leers hideously at the stirrup of Duerer's
+armed and stalwart knight. No gods of youth and nature, no Hercules, no
+Hermes, no Venus, have invaded his German territories, as they invaded
+even his own palace, the burial-ground at Pisa; the antique has not
+perverted Duerer and his fellows, as it perverted Masaccio and Signorelli
+and Mantegna, from the mediaeval worship of Death.
+
+The Italians had seen the antique and had let themselves be seduced by
+it, despite their civilization and their religion. Let us only rejoice
+thereat. There are indeed some, and among them the great English critic
+who is irrefutable when he is a poet, and irrational when he becomes a
+philosopher;--there are some who tell us that in its union with antique
+art, the art of the followers of Giotto embraced death, and rotted away
+ever after. There are others, more moderate but less logical, who would
+teach us that in uniting with the antique, the mediaeval art of the
+fifteenth century purified and sanctified the beautiful but evil child
+of Paganism; that the goddess of Scopas and the athlete of Polyclete
+were raised to a higher sphere when Raphael changed the one into a
+Madonna, and Michael Angelo metamorphosed the other into a prophet. But
+both schools of criticism are wrong. Every civilization has its inherent
+evil; Antiquity had its inherent evils, as the Middle Ages had theirs;
+Antiquity may have bequeathed to the Renaissance the bad with the good,
+as the Middle Ages had bequeathed to the Renaissance the good with the
+bad. But the art of Antiquity was not the evil, it was the good of
+Antiquity; it was born of its strength and its purity only, and it was
+the incarnation of its noblest qualities. It could not be purified,
+because it was spotless; it could not be sanctified, because it was
+holy. It could gain nothing from the art of the Middle Ages, alternately
+strong in brutal reality, and languid in mystic inanity; the men of the
+Renaissance could, if they influenced it at all, influence the antique
+only for evil; they belonged to an inferior artistic civilization, and
+if we conscientiously seek for the spiritual improvements brought by
+them into antique types, we shall see that they consist in spoiling
+their perfect proportions; in making necks longer and muscles more
+prominent; in rendering more or less flaccid, or meagre or coarse, the
+grand and delicate forms of antique art. And when we have examined into
+this purified art of the Renaissance, when we have compared coolly and
+equitably, we may perhaps confess that, while the Renaissance added
+immense wealth of beauty in colour, perspective, and grouping, it took
+away something of the perfection of simple lines and modest light and
+shade of the antique; we may admit to ourselves that the grandest saint
+by Raphael is meagre and stunted; and the noblest Virgin by Titian is
+overblown and sensual by the side of the demi-gods and amazons of
+antique sculpture.
+
+The antique perfected the art of the Renaissance, it did not corrupt it.
+The art of the Renaissance fell indeed into shameful degradation soon
+after the period of its triumphant union with the antique; and Raphael's
+grand gods and goddesses, his exquisite Eros and radiant Psyche of the
+Farnesina, are indeed succeeded but too soon by the Olympus of Giulio
+Romano, an Olympus of harlots and acrobats, who smirk and mouth and
+wriggle and sprawl ignobly on the walls and ceilings of the dismantled
+palace which crumbles away among the stunted willows, the stagnant
+pools, and rank grass of the marshes of Mantua. But this is no more the
+fault of Antiquity than it is the fault of the Middle Ages; it is the
+fault of that great principle of life and of change which makes all
+things organic, be they physical or intellectual, germinate, grow,
+attain maturity, and then fade, wither, and rot. The dead art of
+Antiquity could never have brought the art of the Renaissance to an
+untimely end; the art of the Renaissance decayed because it was mature,
+and died because it had lived.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Euphorion, by Vernon Lee
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