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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Miscellaneous Studies, by Walter Pater
+#9 in our series by Walter Pater
+
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+Title: Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays
+
+Author: Walter Horatio Pater
+
+Release Date: May, 2003  [Etext #4059]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[The actual date this file first posted = 10/25/01]
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+Language: English
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Miscellaneous Studies, by Walter Pater
+********This file should be named 4059-8.txt or 4059-8.zip*********
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+
+MISCELLANEOUS STUDIES: A SERIES OF ESSAYS
+WALTER HORATIO PATER
+
+London: 1910. (The Library Edition.)
+
+
+NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:
+
+Notes: The 1910 Library Edition employs footnotes, a
+style inconvenient in an electronic edition.  I have therefore
+placed an asterisk immediately after each of Pater's footnotes
+and a + sign after my own notes, and have listed each chapter's
+notes at that chapter's end.
+
+Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy,
+I have transferred original pagination to brackets.  A bracketed
+numeral such as [22] indicates that the material immediately
+following the number marks the beginning of the relevant page.  I
+have preserved paragraph structure except for first-line indentation.
+
+Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an
+e-text does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.
+
+Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated
+Pater's Greek quotations.  If there is a need for the original Greek, it
+can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a Victorianist
+archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater and many other
+nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.
+
+
+
+
+MISCELLANEOUS STUDIES: A SERIES OF ESSAYS
+WALTER HORATIO PATER
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+C. Shadwell's Preface -- Publication Chronology: 1-7
+
+Prosper Mérimée: 11-37
+
+Raphael: 38-61
+
+Pascal: 62-89
+
+Art Notes in North Italy: 90-108
+
+Notre Dame D'Amiens: 109-125
+
+Vézelay: 126-141
+
+Apollo in Picardy: 142-171
+
+The Child in the House: 172-196
+
+Emerald Uthwart: 197-246
+
+Diaphaneité: 247-254
+
+
+
+CHARLES L. SHADWELL'S PREFACE
+
+[1] The volume of Greek Studies, issued early in the present year,
+dealt with Mr. Pater's contributions to the study of Greek art,
+mythology, and poetry.  The present volume has no such unifying
+principle.  Some of the papers would naturally find their place
+alongside of those collected in Imaginary Portraits, or in
+Appreciations, or in the Studies in the Renaissance.  And there is no
+doubt, in the case of several of them, that Mr. Pater, if he had
+lived, would have subjected them to careful revision before allowing
+them to reappear in a permanent form.  The task, which he left
+unexecuted, cannot now be taken up by any other hand.  But it is
+hoped that students of his writings will be glad to possess, in a
+collected shape, what has hitherto only been accessible in the
+scattered volumes of magazines.  It is with some hesitation that the
+paper on Diaphaneitè, the last in this volume, has been added, as the
+only specimen known to [2] be preserved of those early essays of Mr.
+Pater's, by which his literary gifts were first made known to the
+small circle of his Oxford friends.
+
+Subjoined is a brief chronological list of his published writings.
+It will be observed how considerable a period, 1880 to 1885, was
+given up to the composition of Marius the Epicurean, the most highly
+finished of all his works, and the expression of his deepest thought.
+
+August, 1895.
+
+
+
+A CHRONOLOGY OF PATER'S WORKS, 1866-1895
+
+(Adapted from a compilation by Charles L. Shadwell in the 1895
+Macmillan edition of Miscellaneous Studies.)
+
+1866.
+
+COLERIDGE.  Appeared in Westminster Review, January, 1866.  Reprinted
+1889 in Appreciations.
+
+1867.
+
+WINCKELMANN.  Appeared in Westminster Review, January, 1867.  Reprinted
+1873 in Studies in the Renaissance.
+
+1868.
+
+*AESTHETIC POETRY.  Written in 1868.  First published 1889 in
+Appreciations.  (Not included in the 1910 Macmillan Library Edition,
+but published separately at Project Gutenberg and
+www.ajdrake.com/etexts.)
+
+1869.
+
+NOTES ON LEONARDO DA VINCI.  Appeared in Fortnightly Review in Novermber,
+1869.  Reprinted 1873 in Studies in the Renaissance.
+
+1870.
+
+SANDRO BOTTICELLI.  Appeared in Fortnightly Review in August, 1870,
+entitled "A Fragment on Sandro Botticelli."  Reprinted 1873 in
+Studies in the Renaissance.
+
+1871.
+
+PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA.  Appeared in Fortnightly Review in October, 1871.
+Reprinted 1873 in Studies in the Renaissance.
+
+POETRY OF MICHELANGELO.  Appeared in Fortnightly Review in November,
+1871.  Reprinted 1873 in Studies in the Renaissance.
+
+1873.
+
+STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE.  Published 1873 by Macmillan.
+Contents:
+
+Aucassin and Nicolette.  Entitled in second and later editions, "Two
+Early French Stories."
+
+Pico della Mirandola.  See 1871.
+
+Sandro Botticelli.  See 1870.
+
+Luca della Robbia.
+
+Poetry of Michelangelo.  See 1871.
+
+Leonardo da Vinci.  See 1869.
+
+Joachim du Bellay.
+
+Winckelmann.  See 1867.
+
+Conclusion.
+
+1874.
+
+WORDSWORTH.  Appeared in Fortnightly Review in April, 1874.  Reprinted
+1889 in Appreciations.
+
+MEASURE FOR MEASURE.  Appeared in Fortnightly Review in November, 1874.
+Reprinted 1889 in Appreciations.
+
+1875.
+
+DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE.  Written as two lectures, and delivered in 1875
+at the Birmingham and Midland Institute.  Appeared in Fortnightly
+Review in January and February, 1876.  Reprinted 1895 in Greek
+Studies.
+
+1876.
+
+ROMANTICISM.  Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in November, 1876.
+Reprinted 1889 in Appreciations under the title "Postscript."
+
+A STUDY OF DIONYSUS.  Appeared in Fortnightly Review in December, 1876.
+Reprinted 1895 in Greek Studies.
+
+1877.
+
+THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE.  Appeared in Fortnightly Review in October,
+1877.  Reprinted 1888 in third edition of The Renaissance.
+
+THE RENAISSANCE: STUDIES IN ART AND POETRY.  Second edition.  Macmillan.
+Contents:
+
+Two Early French Stories.
+
+Pico della Mirandola.
+
+Sandro Botticelli.
+
+Luca della Robbia.
+
+The Poetry of Michelangelo.
+
+Leonardo da Vinci.
+
+Joachim du Bellay.
+
+Winckelmann.
+
+1878.
+
+THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE.  Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in August,
+1878, under the heading, "Imaginary Portrait.  The Child in the
+House."  Reprinted 1895 in Miscellaneous Studies.
+
+CHARLES LAMB.  Appeared in Fortnightly Review in October, 1878.
+Reprinted 1889 in Appreciations.
+
+LOVE'S LABOURS LOST.  Written in 1878.  Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine
+in December, 1885.  Reprinted 1889 in Appreciations.
+
+THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES.  Written in 1878.  Appeared in Macmillan's
+Magazine in May, 1889.  Reprinted in Tyrrell's edition of the Bacchae
+in 1892.  Reprinted in 1895 in Greek Studies.
+
+1880.
+
+THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE.  Appeared in Fortnightly Review in
+February and March, 1880.  Reprinted 1895 in Greek Studies.
+
+THE MARBLES OF AEGINA.  Appeared in Fortnightly Review in April, 1880.
+Reprinted 1895 in Greek Studies.
+
+1883.
+
+DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.  Written in 1883.  Published 1889 in
+Appreciations.
+
+1885.
+
+MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.  Published in 1885 by Macmillan.  Two volumes.
+
+A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS.  Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in October,
+1885.  Reprinted 1887 in Imaginary Portraits.
+
+1886.
+
+FEUILLET'S "LA MORTE."  Written in 1886.  Published 1890 in second
+edition of Appreciations.
+
+SIR THOMAS BROWNE.  Written in 1886.  Published 1889 in Appreciations.
+
+SEBASTIAN VAN STORCK.  Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in March, 1886.
+Reprinted 1887 in Imaginary Portraits.
+
+DENYS L'AUXERROIS.  Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in October, 1886.
+Reprinted 1887 in Imaginary Portraits.
+
+1887.
+
+DUKE CARL OF ROSENMOLD.  Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in May, 1887.
+Reprinted the same year in Imaginary Portraits.
+
+IMAGINARY PORTRAITS.  Published 1887 by Macmillan.  Contents:
+
+A Prince of Court Painters.  See 1885.
+
+Denys l'Auxerrois.  See 1886.
+
+Sebastian van Storck.  See 1886.
+
+Duke Carl of Rosenmold.  See above.
+
+1888.
+
+GASTON DE LATOUR.  Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine as under: viz.
+
+Chapter I in June.
+
+Chapter II in July.
+
+Chapter III in August.
+
+Chapter IV in September.
+
+Chapter V in October.
+
+STYLE.  Appeared in Fortnightly Review in December, 1888.  Reprinted
+1889 in Appreciations.
+
+THE RENAISSANCE.  Third Edition.  Macmillan.  Contents:
+
+Two Early French Stories.
+
+Pico della Mirandola.
+
+Sandro Botticelli.
+
+Luca della Robbia.
+
+The Poetry of Michelangelo.
+
+Leonardo da Vinci.
+
+The School of Giorgione.  See 1877.
+
+Joachim du Bellay.
+
+Winckelmann.
+
+Conclusion.
+
+1889.
+
+HIPPOLYTUS VEILED.  Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in August, 1889.
+Reprinted 1895 in Greek Studies.
+
+*GIORDANO BRUNO.  Appeared in Fortnightly Review in August, 1889.  (Not
+included in the 1910 Macmillan Library Edition, but published
+separately online at Project Gutenberg and www.ajdrake.com/etexts.)
+
+APPRECIATIONS, WITH AN ESSAY ON STYLE.  Published 1889 by Macmillan.
+Contents:
+
+Style.  See 1888.
+
+Wordsworth.  See 1874.
+
+Coleridge.  See 1866.
+
+Charles Lamb.  See 1878.
+
+Sir Thomas Browne.  See 1886.
+
+Love's Labours Lost.  See 1878.
+
+Measure for Measure.  See 1874.
+
+Shakespeare's English Kings.
+
+*Aesthetic Poetry.  See 1868.
+
+Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  See 1883.
+
+Postscript.  See under "Romanticism," 1876.
+
+1890.
+
+ART NOTES IN NORTHERN ITALY.  Appeared in New Review in November, 1890.
+Reprinted 1895 in Miscellaneous Studies.
+
+PROSPER MÉRIMÉE.  Delivered as a lecture at Oxford in November, 1890.
+Appeared in Fortnightly Review in December, 1890.  Reprinted 1895 in
+Miscellaneous Studies.
+
+APPRECIATIONS.  Second edition.  Macmillan.  Contents as in first
+edition of 1889, but omitting Aesthetic Poetry and including a paper
+on Feuillet's "La Morte" (See 1886).
+
+1892.
+
+THE GENIUS OF PLATO.  Appeared in Contemporary Review in February,
+1892.  Reprinted 1893 as Chapter VI of Plato and Platonism.
+
+A CHAPTER ON PLATO.  Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in May, 1892.
+Reprinted 1893 as Chapter I of Plato and Platonism.
+
+LACEDAEMON.  Appeared in Contemporary Review in June, 1892.  Reprinted
+1893 as Chapter VIII of Plato and Platonism.
+
+EMERALD UTHWART.  Appeared in New Review in June and July, 1892.
+Reprinted 1895 in Miscellaneous Studies.
+
+RAPHAEL.  Delivered as a lecture at Oxford in August, 1892.  Appeared
+in Fortnightly Review in October, 1892.  Reprinted 1895 in
+Miscellaneous Studies.
+
+1893.
+
+APOLLO IN PICARDY.  Appeared in Harper's Magazine in November, 1893.
+Reprinted 1895 in Miscellaneous Studies.
+
+PLATO AND PLATONISM.  Published 1893 by Macmillan.  Included, as
+Chapters 1, 6, and 8, papers which had already appeared in Magazines
+in 1892.  Contents:
+
+1. Plato and the Doctrine of Motion.
+
+2. Plato and the Doctrine of Rest.
+
+3. Plato and the Doctrine of Number.
+
+4. Plato and Socrates.
+
+5. Plato and the Sophists.
+
+6. The Genius of Plato.
+
+7. The Doctrine of Plato--
+
+         I. The Theory of Ideas.
+
+        II. Dialectic.
+
+8. Lacedaemon.
+
+9. The Republic.
+
+10. Plato's Aesthetics.
+
+1894.
+
+THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN.  Appeared in Contemporary Review in
+February, 1894.  Reprinted 1895 in Greek Studies.
+
+SOME GREAT CHURCHES IN FRANCE.  1) NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS; 2) VÉZELAY.
+Appeared in Nineteenth Century in March and June, 1894.  Reprinted
+1895 in Miscellaneous Studies as two separate essays.
+
+PASCAL.  Written for delivery as a lecture at Oxford in July, 1894.
+Appeared in Contemporary Review in December, 1894.  Reprinted 1895 in
+Miscellaneous Studies.
+
+1895.
+
+GREEK STUDIES.  Published 1895 by Macmillan. Contents:
+
+A Study of Dionysus.  See 1876.
+
+The Bacchanals of Euripides.  See 1878.
+
+The Myth of Demeter and Persephone.  See 1875.
+
+Hippolytus Veiled.  See 1889.
+
+The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture.  See 1880:
+
+        1) The Heroic Age of Greek Art.
+
+        2) The Age of Graven Images.
+
+The Marbles of Aegina.  See 1880.
+
+The Age of Athletic Prizemen.  See 1894.
+
+
+
+PROSPER MÉRIMÉE*
+
+FOR one born in eighteen hundred and three much was recently become
+incredible that had at least warmed the imagination even of the
+sceptical eighteenth century.  Napoleon, sealing the tomb of the
+Revolution, had foreclosed many a problem, extinguished many a hope,
+in the sphere of practice.  And the mental parallel was drawn by
+Heine.  In the mental world too a great outlook had lately been cut
+off.  After Kant's criticism of the mind, its pretensions to pass
+beyond the limits of individual experience seemed as dead as those of
+old French royalty.  And Kant did but furnish its innermost theoretic
+force to a more general criticism, which had withdrawn from every
+department of action, underlying principles once thought eternal.  A
+time of disillusion followed.  The typical personality of the day was
+Obermann, the very genius of ennui, a Frenchman disabused even of
+patriotism, who has hardly strength enough to die.
+
+[12] More energetic souls, however, would recover themselves, and
+find some way of making the best of a changed world.  Art: the
+passions, above all, the ecstasy and sorrow of love: a purely
+empirical knowledge of nature and man: these still remained, at least
+for pastime, in a world of which it was no longer proposed to
+calculate the remoter issues:--art, passion, science, however, in a
+somewhat novel attitude towards the practical interests of life.  The
+désillusionné, who had found in Kant's negations the last word
+concerning an unseen world, and is living, on the morrow of the
+Revolution, under a monarchy made out of hand, might seem cut off
+from certain ancient natural hopes, and will demand, from what is to
+interest him at all, something in the way of artificial stimulus.  He
+has lost that sense of large proportion in things, that all-embracing
+prospect of life as a whole (from end to end of time and space, it
+had seemed), the utmost expanse of which was afforded from a
+cathedral tower of the Middle Age: by the church of the thirteenth
+century, that is to say, with its consequent aptitude for the
+co-ordination of human effort.  Deprived of that exhilarating yet
+pacific outlook, imprisoned now in the narrow cell of its own
+subjective experience, the action of a powerful nature will be
+intense, but exclusive and peculiar.  It will come to art, or
+science, to the experience of life itself, not as to portions of
+human nature's daily food, but as to [13] something that must be, by
+the circumstances of the case, exceptional; almost as men turn in
+despair to gambling or narcotics, and in a little while the narcotic,
+the game of chance or skill, is valued for its own sake.  The
+vocation of the artist, of the student of life or books, will be
+realised with something--say! of fanaticism, as an end in itself,
+unrelated, unassociated.  The science he turns to will be a science
+of crudest fact; the passion extravagant, a passionate love of
+passion, varied through all the exotic phases of French fiction as
+inaugurated by Balzac; the art exaggerated, in matter or form, or
+both, as in Hugo or Baudelaire.  The development of these conditions
+is the mental story of the nineteenth century, especially as
+exemplified in France.
+
+In no century would Prosper Mérimée have been a theologian or
+metaphysician.  But that sense of negation, of theoretic insecurity,
+was in the air, and conspiring with what was of like tendency in
+himself made of him a central type of disillusion.  In him the
+passive ennui of Obermann became a satiric, aggressive, almost angry
+conviction of the littleness of the world around; it was as if man's
+fatal limitations constituted a kind of stupidity in him, what the
+French call bêtise.  Gossiping friends, indeed, linked what was
+constitutional in him and in the age with an incident of his earliest
+years.  Corrected for some childish fault, in passionate distress, he
+overhears a half-pitying laugh at his expense, and has determined,
+[14] in a moment, never again to give credit--to be for ever on his
+guard, especially against his own instinctive movements.  Quite
+unreserved, certainly, he never was again.  Almost everywhere he
+could detect the hollow ring of fundamental nothingness under the
+apparent surface of things.  Irony surely, habitual irony, would be
+the proper complement thereto, on his part.  In his infallible self-
+possession, you might even fancy him a mere man of the world, with a
+special aptitude for matters of fact.  Though indifferent in
+politics, he rises to social, to political eminence; but all the
+while he is feeding all his scholarly curiosity, his imagination, the
+very eye, with the, to him ever delightful, relieving, reassuring
+spectacle, of those straightforward forces in human nature, which are
+also matters of fact.  There is the formula of Mérimée! the
+enthusiastic amateur of rude, crude, naked force in men and women
+wherever it could be found; himself carrying ever, as a mask, the
+conventional attire of the modern world--carrying it with an
+infinite, contemptuous grace, as if that, too, were an all-sufficient
+end in itself.  With a natural gift for words, for expression, it
+will be his literary function to draw back the veil of time from the
+true greatness of old Roman character; the veil of modern habit from
+the primitive energy of the creatures of his fancy, as the Lettres à
+une Inconnue discovered to general gaze, after his death, a certain
+depth of [15] passionate force which had surprised him in himself.
+And how forcible will be their outlines in an otherwise insignificant
+world!  Fundamental belief gone, in almost all of us, at least some
+relics of it remain--queries, echoes, reactions, after-thoughts; and
+they help to make an atmosphere, a mental atmosphere, hazy perhaps,
+yet with many secrets of soothing light and shade, associating more
+definite objects to each other by a perspective pleasant to the
+inward eye against a hopefully receding background of remoter and
+ever remoter possibilities.  Not so with Mérimée!  For him the
+fundamental criticism has nothing more than it can do; and there are
+no half-lights.  The last traces of hypothesis, of supposition, are
+evaporated.  Sylla, the false Demetrius, Carmen, Colomba, that
+impassioned self within himself, have no atmosphere.  Painfully
+distinct in outline, inevitable to sight, unrelieved, there they
+stand, like solitary mountain forms on some hard, perfectly
+transparent day.  What Mérimée gets around his singularly
+sculpturesque creations is neither more nor less than empty space.
+
+So disparate are his writings that at first sight you might fancy
+them only the random efforts of a man of pleasure or affairs, who,
+turning to this or that for the relief of a vacant hour, discovers to
+his surprise a workable literary gift, of whose scope, however, he is
+not precisely aware.  His sixteen volumes nevertheless range
+themselves in three compact groups.  There are his letters [16] --
+those Lettres à une Inconnue, and his letters to the librarian
+Panizzi, revealing him in somewhat close contact with political
+intrigue.  But in this age of novelists, it is as a writer of novels,
+and of fiction in the form of highly descriptive drama, that he will
+count for most:--Colomba, for instance, by its intellectual depth of
+motive, its firmly conceived structure, by the faultlessness of its
+execution, vindicating the function of the novel as no tawdry light
+literature, but in very deed a fine art.  The Chronique du Règne de
+Charles IX., an unusually successful specimen of historical romance,
+links his imaginative work to the third group of Mérimée's writings,
+his historical essays.  One resource of the disabused soul of our
+century, as we saw, would be the empirical study of facts, the
+empirical science of nature and man, surviving all dead metaphysical
+philosophies.  Mérimée, perhaps, may have had in him the making of a
+master of such science, disinterested, patient, exact: scalpel in
+hand, we may fancy, he would have penetrated far.  But quite
+certainly he had something of genius for the exact study of history,
+for the pursuit of exact truth, with a keenness of scent as if that
+alone existed, in some special area of historic fact, to be
+determined by his own peculiar mental preferences.  Power here too
+again,--the crude power of men and women which mocks, while it makes
+its use of, average human nature: it was the magic function of
+history to put one in living [17] contact with that.  To weigh the
+purely physiognomic import of the memoir, of the pamphlet saved by
+chance, the letter, the anecdote, the very gossip by which one came
+face to face with energetic personalities: there lay the true
+business of the historic student, not in that pretended theoretic
+interpretation of events by their mechanic causes, with which he
+dupes others if not invariably himself.  In the great hero of the
+Social War, in Sylla, studied, indeed, through his environment, but
+only so far as that was in dynamic contact with himself, you saw,
+without any manner of doubt, on one side, the solitary height of
+human genius; on the other, though on the seemingly so heroic stage
+of antique Roman story, the wholly inexpressive level of the humanity
+of every day, the spectacle of man's eternal bêtise.  Fascinated,
+like a veritable son of the old pagan Renaissance, by the grandeur,
+the concentration, the satiric hardness of ancient Roman character,
+it is to Russia nevertheless that he most readily turns--youthful
+Russia, whose native force, still unbelittled by our western
+civilisation, seemed to have in it the promise of a more dignified
+civilisation to come.  It was as if old Rome itself were here again;
+as, occasionally, a new quarry is laid open of what was thought long
+since exhausted, ancient marble, cipollino or verde antique.
+Mérimée, indeed, was not the first to discern the fitness for
+imaginative service of the career of "the false Demetrius," pretended
+[18] son of Ivan the Terrible; but he alone seeks its utmost force in
+a calm, matter-of-fact carefully ascertained presentment of the naked
+events.  Yes!  In the last years of the Valois, when its fierce
+passions seemed to be bursting France to pieces, you might have seen,
+far away beyond the rude Polish dominion of which one of those Valois
+princes had become king, a display more effective still of
+exceptional courage and cunning, of horror in circumstance, of
+bêtise, of course, of bêtise and a slavish capacity of being duped,
+in average mankind: all that under a mask of solemn Muscovite court-
+ceremonial.  And Mérimée's style, simple and unconcerned, but with
+the eye ever on its object, lends itself perfectly to such purpose--
+to an almost phlegmatic discovery of the facts, in all their crude
+natural colouring, as if he but held up to view, as a piece of
+evidence, some harshly dyed oriental carpet from the sumptuous floor
+of the Kremlin, on which blood had fallen.
+
+A lover of ancient Rome, its great character and incident, Mérimée
+valued, as if it had been personal property of his, every extant
+relic of it in the art that had been most expressive of its genius--
+architecture.  In that grandiose art of building, the most national,
+the most tenaciously rooted of all the arts in the stable conditions
+of life, there were historic documents hardly less clearly legible
+than the manuscript chronicle.  By the mouth of those stately
+Romanesque [19] churches, scattered in so many strongly characterised
+varieties over the soil of France, above all in the hot, half-pagan
+south, the people of empire still protested, as he understood,
+against what must seem a smaller race.  The Gothic enthusiasm indeed
+was already born, and he shared it--felt intelligently the
+fascination of the Pointed Style, but only as a further
+transformation of old Roman structure; the round arch is for him
+still the great architectural form, la forme noble, because it was to
+be seen in the monuments of antiquity.  Romanesque, Gothic, the
+manner of the Renaissance, of Lewis the Fourteenth:--they were all,
+as in a written record, in the old abbey church of Saint-Savin, of
+which Mérimée was instructed to draw up a report.  Again, it was as
+if to his concentrated attention through many months that deserted
+sanctuary of Benedict were the only thing on earth.  Its beauties,
+its peculiarities, its odd military features, its faded mural
+paintings, are no merely picturesque matter for the pencil he could
+use so well, but the lively record of a human society.  With what
+appetite! with all the animation of George Sand's Mauprat, he tells
+the story of romantic violence having its way there, defiant of law,
+so late as the year 1611; of the family of robber nobles perched, as
+abbots in commendam, in those sacred places.  That grey, pensive old
+church in the little valley of Poitou, was for a time like Santa
+Maria del Fiore to [20] Michelangelo, the mistress of his affections-
+-of a practical affection; for the result of his elaborate report was
+the Government grant which saved the place from ruin.  In
+architecture, certainly, he had what for that day was nothing less
+than intuition--an intuitive sense, above all, of its logic, of the
+necessity which draws  into one all minor changes, as elements in a
+reasonable development.  And his care for it, his curiosity about it,
+were symptomatic of his own genius.  Structure, proportion, design, a
+sort of architectural coherency: that was the aim of his method in
+the art of literature, in that form of it, especially, which he will
+live by, in fiction.
+
+As historian and archaeologist, as a man of erudition turned artist,
+he is well seen in the Chronique du Règne de Charles IX., by which we
+pass naturally from Mérimée's critical or scientific work to the
+products of his imagination.  What economy in the use of a large
+antiquarian knowledge! what an instinct amid a hundred details, for
+the detail that carries physiognomy in it, that really tells!  And
+again what outline, what absolute clarity of outline!  For the
+historian of that puzzling age which centres in the "Eve of Saint
+Bartholomew," outward events themselves seem obscured by the
+vagueness of motive of the actors in them.  But Mérimée, disposing of
+them as an artist, not in love with half-lights, compels events and
+actors alike to the clearness he [21] desired; takes his side without
+hesitation; and makes his hero a Huguenot of pure blood, allowing its
+charm, in that charming youth, even to Huguenot piety.  And as for
+the incidents--however freely it may be undermined by historic doubt,
+all reaches a perfectly firm surface, at least for the eye of the
+reader.  The Chronicle of Charles the Ninth is like a series of
+masterly drawings in illustration of a period--the period in which
+two other masters of French fiction have found their opportunity,
+mainly by the development of its actual historic characters.  Those
+characters--Catherine de Medicis and the rest--Mérimée, with
+significant irony and self-assertion, sets aside, preferring to think
+of them as essentially commonplace.  For him the interest lies in the
+creatures of his own will, who carry in them, however, so lightly! a
+learning equal to Balzac's, greater than that of Dumas.  He knows
+with like completeness the mere fashions of the time--how courtier
+and soldier dressed themselves, and the large movements of the
+desperate game which fate or chance was playing with those pretty
+pieces.  Comparing that favourite century of the French Renaissance
+with our own, he notes a decadence of the more energetic passions in
+the interest of general tranquillity, and perhaps (only perhaps!) of
+general happiness.  "Assassination," he observes, as if with regret,
+"is no longer a part of our manners."  In fact, the duel, and the
+whole [22] morality of the duel, which does but enforce a certain
+regularity on assassination, what has been well called le sentiment
+du fer, the sentiment of deadly steel, had then the disposition of
+refined existence.  It was, indeed, very different, and is, in
+Mérimée's romance.  In his gallant hero, Bernard de Mergy, all the
+promptings of the lad's virile goodness are in natural collusion with
+that sentiment du fer.  Amid his ingenuous blushes, his prayers, and
+plentiful tears between-while, it is a part of his very sex.  With
+his delightful, fresh-blown air, he is for ever tossing the sheath
+from the sword, but always as if into bright natural sunshine.  A
+winsome, yet withal serious and even piteous figure, he conveys his
+pleasantness, in spite of its gloomy theme, into Mérimée's one quite
+cheerful book.
+
+Cheerful, because, after all, the gloomy passions it presents are but
+the accidents of a particular age, and not like the mental conditions
+in which Mérimée was most apt to look for the spectacle of human
+power, allied to madness or disease in the individual.  For him, at
+least, it was the office of fiction to carry one into a different if
+not a better world than that actually around us; and if the Chronicle
+of Charles the Ninth provided an escape from the tame circumstances
+of contemporary life into an impassioned past, Colomba is a measure
+of the resources for mental alteration which may be found even in the
+modern age.  There was a corner of [23] the French Empire, in the
+manners of which assassination still had a large part.
+
+"The beauty of Corsica," says Mérimée, "is grave and sad.  The aspect
+of the capital does but augment the impression caused by the solitude
+that surrounds it.  There is no movement in the streets.  You hear
+there none of the laughter, the singing, the loud talking, common in
+the towns of Italy.  Sometimes, under the shadow of a tree on the
+promenade, a dozen armed peasants will be playing cards, or looking
+on at the game.  The Corsican is naturally silent.  Those who walk
+the pavement are all strangers: the islanders stand at their doors:
+every one seems to be on the watch, like a falcon on its nest.  All
+around the gulf there is but an expanse of tanglework; beyond it,
+bleached mountains.  Not a habitation!  Only, here and there, on the
+heights about the town, certain white constructions detach themselves
+from the background of green.  They are funeral chapels or family
+tombs."
+
+Crude in colour, sombre, taciturn, Corsica, as Mérimée here describes
+it, is like the national passion of the Corsican--that morbid
+personal pride, usurping the place even of grief for the dead, which
+centuries of traditional violence had concentrated into an all-
+absorbing passion for bloodshed, for bloody revenges, in collusion
+with the natural wildness, and the wild social condition of the
+island still unaffected even by the finer [24] ethics of the duel.
+The supremacy of that passion is well indicated by the cry, put into
+the mouth of a young man in the presence of the corpse of his father
+deceased in the course of nature--a young man meant to be
+commonplace.  "Ah!  Would thou hadst died malamorte--by violence!  We
+might have avenged thee!"
+
+In Colomba, Mérimée's best known creation, it is united to a
+singularly wholesome type of personal beauty, a natural grace of
+manner which is irresistible, a cunning intellect patiently diverting
+every circumstance to its design; and presents itself as a kind of
+genius, allied to fatal disease of mind.  The interest of Mérimée's
+book is that it allows us to watch the action of this malignant power
+on Colomba's brother, Orso della Robbia, as it discovers, rouses,
+concentrates to the leaping-point, in the somewhat weakly diffused
+nature of the youth, the dormant elements of a dark humour akin to
+her own.  Two years after his father's murder, presumably at the
+instigation of his ancestral enemies, the young lieutenant is
+returning home in the company of two humorously conventional English
+people, himself now half Parisianised, with an immense natural
+cheerfulness, and willing to believe an account of the crime which
+relieves those hated Barricini of all complicity in its guilt.  But
+from the first, Colomba, with "voice soft and musical," is at his
+side, gathering every accident and echo and circumstance, the very
+lightest circumstance, [25] into the chain of necessity which draws
+him to the action every one at home expects of him as the head of his
+race.  He is not unaware.  Her very silence on the matter speaks so
+plainly.  "You are forming me!" he admits.  "Well! 'Hot shot, or cold
+steel!'--you see I have not forgotten my Corsican."  More and more,
+as he goes on his way with her, he finds himself accessible to the
+damning thoughts he has so long combated.  In horror, he tries to
+disperse them by the memory of his comrades in the regiment, the
+drawing-rooms of Paris, the English lady who has promised to be his
+bride, and will shortly visit him in the humble manoir of his
+ancestors.  From his first step among them the villagers of
+Pietranera, divided already into two rival camps, are watching him in
+suspense--Pietranera, perched among those deep forests where the
+stifled sense of violent death is everywhere.  Colomba places in his
+hands the little chest which contains the father's shirt covered with
+great spots of blood.  "Behold the lead that struck him!" and she
+laid on the shirt two rusted bullets.  "Orso! you will avenge him!"
+She embraces him with a kind of madness, kisses wildly the bullets
+and the shirt, leaves him with the terrible relics already exerting
+their mystic power upon him.  It is as if in the nineteenth century a
+girl, amid Christian habits, had gone back to that primitive old
+pagan version of the story of the Grail, which [26] identifies it not
+with the Most Precious Blood, but only with the blood of a murdered
+relation crying for vengeance.  Awake at last in his old chamber at
+Pietranera, the house of the Barricini at the other end of the
+square, with its rival tower and rudely carved escutcheons, stares
+him in the face.  His ancestral enemy is there, an aged man now, but
+with two well-grown sons, like two stupid dumb animals, whose
+innocent blood will soon be on his so oddly lighted conscience.  At
+times, his better hope seemed to lie in picking a quarrel and killing
+at least in fair fight, one of these two stupid dumb animals; with
+rude ill-suppressed laughter one day, as they overhear Colomba's
+violent utterances at a funeral feast, for she is a renowned
+improvisatrice.  "Your father is an old man," he finds himself
+saying, "I could crush with my hands.  'Tis for you I am destined,
+for you and your brother!"  And if it is by course of nature that the
+old man dies not long after the murder of these sons (self-provoked
+after all), dies a fugitive at Pisa, as it happens, by an odd
+accident, in the presence of Colomba, no violent death by Orso's own
+hand could have been more to her mind.  In that last hard page of
+Mérimée's story, mere dramatic propriety itself for a moment seems to
+plead for the forgiveness, which from Joseph and his brethren to the
+present day, as we know, has been as winning in story as in actual
+life.  Such dramatic propriety, however, was by no means [27] in
+Mérimée's way.  "What I must have is the hand that fired the shot,"
+she had sung, "the eye that guided it; aye! and the mind moreover--
+the mind, which had conceived the deed!"  And now, it is in idiotic
+terror, a fugitive from Orso's vengeance, that the last of the
+Barricini is dying.
+
+Exaggerated art! you think.  But it was precisely such exaggerated
+art, intense, unrelieved, an art of fierce colours, that is needed by
+those who are seeking in art, as I said of Mérimée, a kind of
+artificial stimulus.  And if his style is still impeccably correct,
+cold-blooded, impersonal, as impersonal as that of Scott himself, it
+does but conduce the better to his one exclusive aim.  It is like the
+polish of the stiletto Colomba carried always under her mantle, or
+the beauty of the fire-arms, that beauty coming of nice adaptation to
+purpose, which she understood so well--a task characteristic also of
+Mérimée himself, a sort of fanatic joy in the perfect pistol-shot, at
+its height in the singular story he has translated from the Russian
+of Pouchkine.  Those raw colours he preferred; Spanish, Oriental,
+African, perhaps, irritant certainly to cisalpine eyes, he
+undoubtedly attained the colouring you associate with sun-stroke,
+only possible under a sun in which dead things rot quickly.
+
+Pity and terror, we know, go to the making of the essential tragic
+sense.  In Mérimée, certainly, we have all its terror, but without
+the [28] pity.  Saint-Clair, the consent of his mistress barely
+attained at last, rushes madly on self-destruction, that he may die
+with the taste of his great love fresh on his lips.  All the
+grotesque accidents of violent death he records with visual
+exactness, and no pains to relieve them; the ironic indifference, for
+instance, with which, on the scaffold or the battle-field, a man will
+seem to grin foolishly at the ugly rents through which his life has
+passed.  Seldom or never has the mere pen of a writer taken us so
+close to the cannon's mouth as in the Taking of the Redoubt, while
+Matteo Falcone--twenty-five short pages--is perhaps the cruellest
+story in the world.
+
+Colomba, that strange, fanatic being, who has a code of action, of
+self-respect, a conscience, all to herself, who with all her virginal
+charm only does not make you hate her, is, in truth, the type of a
+sort of humanity Mérimée found it pleasant to dream of--a humanity as
+alien as the animals, with whose moral affinities to man his
+imaginative work is often directly concerned.  Were they so alien,
+after all?  Were there not survivals of the old wild creatures in the
+gentlest, the politest of us?  Stories that told of sudden freaks of
+gentle, polite natures, straight back, not into Paradise, were always
+welcome to men's fancies; and that could only be because they found a
+psychologic truth in them.  With much success, with a credibility
+insured by his literary tact, Mérimée tried his own hand at such
+stories: unfrocked the [29] bear in the amorous young Lithuanian
+noble, the wolf in the revolting peasant of the Middle Age.  There
+were survivals surely in himself, in that stealthy presentment of his
+favourite themes, in his own art.  You seem to find your hand on a
+serpent, in reading him.
+
+In such survivals, indeed, you see the operation of his favourite
+motive, the sense of wild power, under a sort of mask, or assumed
+habit, realised as the very genius of nature itself; and that
+interest, with some superstitions closely allied to it, the belief in
+the vampire, for instance, is evidenced especially in certain
+pretended Illyrian compositions--prose translations, the reader was
+to understand, of more or less ancient popular ballads; La Guzla, he
+called the volume, The Lyre, as we might say; only that the
+instrument of the Illyrian minstrel had but one string.  Artistic
+deception, a trick of which there is something in the historic
+romance as such, in a book like his own Chronicle of Charles the
+Ninth, was always welcome to Mérimée; it was part of the machinery of
+his rooted habit of intellectual reserve.  A master of irony also, in
+Madame Lucrezia he seems to wish to expose his own method cynically;
+to explain his art--how he takes you in--as a clever, confident
+conjuror might do.  So properly were the readers of La Guzla taken in
+that he followed up his success in that line by the Theatre of Clara
+Gazul, purporting to be from a rare Spanish original, the work [30]
+of a nun, who, under tame, conventual reading, had felt the touch of
+mundane, of physical passions; had become a dramatic poet, and
+herself a powerful actress.  It may dawn on you in reading her that
+Mérimée was a kind of Webster, but with the superficial mildness of
+our nineteenth century.  At the bottom of the true drama there is
+ever, logically at least, the ballad: the ballad dealing in a kind of
+short-hand (or, say! in grand, simple, universal outlines) with those
+passions, crimes, mistakes, which have a kind of fatality in them, a
+kind of necessity to come to the surface of the human mind, if not to
+the surface of our experience, as in the case of some frankly
+supernatural incidents which Mérimée re-handled.  Whether human love
+or hatred has had most to do in shaping the universal fancy that the
+dead come back, I cannot say.  Certainly that old ballad literature
+has instances in plenty, in which the voice, the hand, the brief
+visit from the grave, is a natural response to the cry of the human
+creature.  That ghosts should return, as they do so often in
+Mérimée's fiction, is but a sort of natural justice.  Only, in
+Mérimée's prose ballads, in those admirable, short, ballad-like
+stories, where every word tells, of which he was a master, almost the
+inventor, they are a kind of half-material ghosts--a vampire tribe--
+and never come to do people good; congruously with the mental
+constitution of the writer, which, alike in fact and fiction, [31]
+could hardly have horror enough--theme after theme.  Mérimée himself
+emphasises this almost constant motive of his fiction when he adds to
+one of his volumes of short stories some letters on a matter of fact-
+-a Spanish bull-fight, in which those old Romans, he regretted, might
+seem, decadently, to have survived.  It is as if you saw it.  In
+truth, Mérimée was the unconscious parent of much we may think of
+dubious significance in later French literature.  It is as if there
+were nothing to tell of in this world but various forms of hatred,
+and a love that is like lunacy; and the only other world, a world of
+maliciously active, hideous, dead bodies.
+
+Mérimée, a literary artist, was not a man who used two words where
+one would do better, and he shines especially in those brief
+compositions which, like a minute intaglio, reveal at a glance his
+wonderful faculty of design and proportion in the treatment of his
+work, in which there is not a touch but counts.  That is an art of
+which there are few examples in English; our somewhat diffuse, or
+slipshod, literary language hardly lending itself to the
+concentration of thought and expression, which are of the essence of
+such writing.  It is otherwise in French, and if you wish to know
+what art of that kind can come to, read Mérimée's little romances;
+best of all, perhaps, La Vénus d'Ille and Arsène Guillot.  The former
+is a modern version of the beautiful old story of the Ring given to
+Venus, given to her, in [32] this case, by a somewhat sordid creature
+of the nineteenth century, whom she looks on with more than disdain.
+The strange outline of the Canigou, one of the most imposing outlying
+heights of the Pyrenees, down the mysterious slopes of which the
+traveller has made his way towards nightfall into the great plain of
+Toulouse, forms an impressive background, congruous with the many
+relics of irrepressible old paganism there, but in entire contrast to
+the bourgeois comfort of the place where his journey is to end, the
+abode of an aged antiquary, loud and bright just now with the
+celebration of a vulgar worldly marriage.  In the midst of this well-
+being, prosaic in spite of the neighbourhood, in spite of the pretty
+old wedding customs, morsels of that local colour in which Mérimée
+delights, the old pagan powers are supposed to reveal themselves once
+more (malignantly, of course), in the person of a magnificent bronze
+statue of Venus recently unearthed in the antiquary's garden.  On her
+finger, by ill-luck, the coarse young bridegroom on the morning of
+his marriage places for a moment the bridal ring only too effectually
+(the bronze hand closes, like a wilful living one, upon it), and
+dies, you are to understand, in her angry metallic embraces on his
+marriage night.  From the first, indeed, she had seemed bent on
+crushing out men's degenerate bodies and souls, though the
+supernatural horror of the tale is adroitly made credible by a
+certain vagueness in the [33] events, which covers a quite natural
+account of the bridegroom's mysterious death.
+
+The intellectual charm of literary work so thoroughly designed as
+Mérimée's depends in part on the sense as you read, hastily perhaps,
+perhaps in need of patience, that you are dealing with a composition,
+the full secret of which is only to be attained in the last
+paragraph, that with the last word in mind you will retrace your
+steps, more than once (it may be) noting then the minuter structure,
+also the natural or wrought flowers by the way.  Nowhere is such
+method better illustrated than by another of Mérimée's quintessential
+pieces, Arsène Guillotand here for once with a conclusion ethically
+acceptable also.  Mérimée loved surprises in human nature, but it is
+not often that he surprises us by tenderness or generosity of
+character, as another master of French fiction, M. Octave Feuillet,
+is apt to do; and the simple pathos of Arsène Guillot gives it a
+unique place in Mérimée's writings.  It may be said, indeed, that
+only an essentially pitiful nature could have told the exquisitely
+cruel story of Matteo Falcone precisely as Mérimée has told it; and
+those who knew him testify abundantly to his own capacity for
+generous friendship.  He was no more wanting than others in those
+natural sympathies (sending tears to the eyes at the sight of
+suffering age or childhood) which happily are no extraordinary
+component in men's natures.  It was, perhaps, no fitting return for a
+[34] friendship of over thirty years to publish posthumously those
+Lettres à une Inconnue, which reveal that reserved, sensitive, self-
+centred nature, a little pusillanimously in the power, at the
+disposition of another.  For just there lies the interest, the
+psychological interest, of those letters.  An amateur of power, of
+the spectacle of power and force, followed minutely but without
+sensibility on his part, with a kind of cynic pride rather for the
+mainspring of his method, both of thought and expression, you find
+him here taken by surprise at last, and somewhat humbled, by an
+unsuspected force of affection in himself.  His correspondent,
+unknown but for these letters except just by name, figures in them
+as, in truth, a being only too much like himself, seen from one side;
+reflects his taciturnity, his touchiness, his incredulity except for
+self-torment.  Agitated, dissatisfied, he is wrestling in her with
+himself, his own difficult qualities.  He demands from her a freedom,
+a frankness, he would have been the last to grant.  It is by first
+thoughts, of course, that what is forcible and effective in human
+nature, the force, therefore, of carnal love, discovers itself; and
+for her first thoughts Mérimée is always pleading, but always
+complaining that he gets only her second thoughts; the thoughts, that
+is, of a reserved, self-limiting nature, well under the yoke of
+convention, like his own.  Strange conjunction!  At the beginning of
+the correspondence he seems to have been [35] seeking only a fine
+intellectual companionship; the lady, perhaps, looking for something
+warmer.  Towards such companionship that likeness to himself in her
+might have been helpful, but was not enough of a complement to his
+own nature to be anything but an obstruction in love; and it is to
+that, little by little, that his humour turns.  He--the
+Megalopsychus, as Aristotle defines him--acquires all the lover's
+humble habits: himself displays all the tricks of love, its
+casuistries, its exigency, its superstitions, aye! even its
+vulgarities; involves with the significance of his own genius the
+mere hazards and inconsequence of a perhaps average nature; but too
+late in the day--the years.  After the attractions and repulsions of
+half a lifetime, they are but friends, and might forget to be that,
+but for his death, clearly presaged in his last weak, touching
+letter, just two hours before.  There, too, had been the blind and
+naked force of nature and circumstance, surprising him in the
+uncontrollable movements of his own so carefully guarded heart.
+
+The intimacy, the effusion, the so freely exposed personality of
+those letters does but emphasise the fact that impersonality was, in
+literary art, Mérimée's central aim.  Personality versus
+impersonality in art:--how much or how little of one's self one may
+put into one's work: whether anything at all of it: whether one can
+put there anything else:--is clearly a far-reaching and complex
+question.  Serviceable as [36] the basis of a precautionary maxim
+towards the conduct of our work, self-effacement, or impersonality,
+in literary or artistic creation, is, perhaps, after all, as little
+possible as a strict realism.  "It has always been my rule to put
+nothing of myself into my works," says another great master of French
+prose, Gustave Flaubert; but, luckily as we may think, he often
+failed in thus effacing himself, as he too was aware.  "It has always
+been my rule to put nothing of myself into my works" (to be
+disinterested in his literary creations, so to speak), "yet I have
+put much of myself into them": and where he failed Mérimée succeeded.
+There they stand--Carmen, Colomba, the "False" Demetrius--as detached
+from him as from each other, with no more filial likeness to their
+maker than if they were the work of another person.  And to his
+method of conception, Mérimée's much-praised literary style, his
+method of expression, is strictly conformable--impersonal in its
+beauty, the perfection of nobody's style--thus vindicating anew by
+its very impersonality that much worn, but not untrue saying, that
+the style is the man:--a man, impassible, unfamiliar, impeccable,
+veiling a deep sense of what is forcible, nay, terrible, in things,
+under the sort of personal pride that makes a man a nice observer of
+all that is most conventional.  Essentially unlike other people, he
+is always fastidiously in the fashion--an expert in all the little,
+half- [37] contemptuous elegances of which it is capable.  Mérimée's
+superb self-effacement, his impersonality, is itself but an effective
+personal trait, and, transferred to art, becomes a markedly peculiar
+quality of literary beauty.  For, in truth, this creature of
+disillusion who had no care for half-lights, and, like his creations,
+had no atmosphere about him, gifted as he was with pure mind, with
+the quality which secures flawless literary structure, had, on the
+other hand, nothing of what we call soul in literature:--hence, also,
+that singular harshness in his ideal, as if, in theological language,
+he were incapable of grace.  He has none of those subjectivities,
+colourings, peculiarities of mental refraction, which necessitate
+varieties of style--could we spare such?--and render the perfections
+of it no merely negative qualities.  There are masters of French
+prose whose art has begun where the art of Mérimée leaves off.
+
+NOTES
+
+11. *A lecture delivered at the Taylor Institution, Oxford, and at
+the London Institution.  Published in the Fortnightly Review, Dec.
+1890, and now reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.
+
+
+
+RAPHAEL*
+
+[38] By his immense productiveness, by the even perfection of what he
+produced, its fitness to its own day, its hold on posterity, in the
+suavity of his life, some would add in the "opportunity" of his early
+death, Raphael may seem a signal instance of the luckiness, of the
+good fortune, of genius.  Yet, if we follow the actual growth of his
+powers, within their proper framework, the age of the Renaissance--an
+age of which we may say, summarily, that it enjoyed itself, and found
+perhaps its chief enjoyment in the attitude of the scholar, in the
+enthusiastic acquisition of knowledge for its own sake:--if we thus
+view Raphael and his works in their environment we shall find even
+his seemingly mechanical good fortune hardly distinguishable from his
+own patient disposal of the means at hand.  Facile master as he may
+seem, as indeed he is, he is also one of the world's typical
+scholars, with [39] Plato, and Cicero, and Virgil, and Milton.  The
+formula of his genius, if we must have one, is this: genius by
+accumulation; the transformation of meek scholarship into genius--
+triumphant power of genius.
+
+Urbino, where this prince of the Renaissance was born in 1483, year
+also of the birth of Luther, leader of the other great movement of
+that age, the Reformation--Urbino, under its dukes of the house of
+Montefeltro, had wherewithal just then to make a boy of native
+artistic faculty from the first a willing learner.  The gloomy old
+fortress of the feudal masters of the town had been replaced, in
+those later years of the Quattro-cento, by a consummate monument of
+Quattro-cento taste, a museum of ancient and modern art, the owners
+of which lived there, gallantly at home, amid the choicer flowers of
+living humanity.  The ducal palace was, in fact, become nothing less
+than a school of ambitious youth in all the accomplishments alike of
+war and peace.  Raphael's connexion with it seems to have become
+intimate, and from the first its influence must have overflowed so
+small a place.  In the case of the lucky Raphael, for once, the
+actual conditions of early life had been suitable, propitious,
+accordant to what one's imagination would have required for the
+childhood of the man.  He was born amid the art he was, not to
+transform, but to perfect, by a thousand reverential retouchings.  In
+no palace, however, but [40] in a modest abode, still shown,
+containing the workshop of his father, Giovanni Santi.  But here,
+too, though in frugal form, art, the arts, were present.  A store of
+artistic objects was, or had recently been, made there, and now
+especially, for fitting patrons, religious pictures in the old
+Umbrian manner.  In quiet nooks of the Apennines Giovanni's works
+remain; and there is one of them, worth study, in spite of what
+critics say of its crudity, in the National Gallery.  Concede its
+immaturity, at least, though an immaturity visibly susceptible of a
+delicate grace, it wins you nevertheless to return again and again,
+and ponder, by a sincere expression of sorrow, profound, yet
+resigned, be the cause what it may, among all the many causes of
+sorrow inherent in the ideal of maternity, human or divine.  But if
+you keep in mind when looking at it the facts of Raphael's childhood,
+you will recognise in his father's picture, not the anticipated
+sorrow of the "Mater Dolorosa" over the dead son, but the grief of a
+simple household over the mother herself taken early from it.  That
+may have been the first picture the eyes of the world's great painter
+of Madonnas rested on; and if he stood diligently before it to copy,
+and so copying, quite unconsciously, and with no disloyalty to his
+original, refined, improved, substituted,--substituted himself, in
+fact, his finer self--he had already struck the persistent note of
+his career.  As with his age, it is [41] his vocation, ardent worker
+as he is, to enjoy himself--to enjoy himself amiably, and to find his
+chief enjoyment in the attitude of a scholar.  And one by one, one
+after another, his masters, the very greatest of them, go to school
+to him.
+
+It was so especially with the artist of whom Raphael first became
+certainly a learner--Perugino.  Giovanni Santi had died in Raphael's
+childhood, too early to have been in any direct sense his teacher.
+The lad, however, from one and another, had learned much, when, with
+his share of the patrimony in hand, enough to keep him, but not to
+tempt him from scholarly ways, he came to Perugia, hoping still
+further to improve himself.  He was in his eighteenth year, and how
+he looked just then you may see in a drawing of his own in the
+University Galleries, of somewhat stronger mould than less genuine
+likenesses may lead you to expect.  There is something of a fighter
+in the way in which the nose springs from the brow between the wide-
+set, meditative eyes.  A strenuous lad! capable of plodding, if you
+dare apply that word to labour so impassioned as his--to any labour
+whatever done at Perugia, centre of the dreamiest Apennine scenery.
+Its various elements (one hardly knows whether one is thinking of
+Italian nature or of Raphael's art in recounting them), the richly-
+planted lowlands, the sensitive mountain lines in flight one beyond
+the other into clear distance, the cool yet glowing atmosphere, [42]
+the romantic morsels of architecture, which lend to the entire scene
+I know not what expression of reposeful antiquity, arrange themselves
+here as for set purpose of pictorial effect, and have gone with
+little change into his painted backgrounds.  In the midst of it, on
+titanic old Roman and Etruscan foundations, the later Gothic town had
+piled itself along the lines of a gigantic land of rock, stretched
+out from the last slope of the Apennines into the plain.  Between its
+fingers steep dark lanes wind down into the olive gardens; on the
+finger-tips military and monastic builders had perched their towns.
+A place as fantastic in its attractiveness as the human life which
+then surged up and down in it in contrast to the peaceful scene
+around.  The Baglioni who ruled there had brought certain tendencies
+of that age to a typical completeness of expression, veiling crime--
+crime, it might seem, for its own sake, a whole octave of fantastic
+crime--not merely under brilliant fashions and comely persons, but
+under fashions and persons, an outward presentment of life and of
+themselves, which had a kind of immaculate grace and discretion about
+them, as if Raphael himself had already brought his unerring gift of
+selection to bear upon it all for motives of art.  With life in those
+streets of Perugia, as with nature, with the work of his masters,
+with the mere exercises of his fellow-students, his hand rearranges,
+refines, renews, as if by simple contact; [43] but it is met here
+half-way in its renewing office by some special aptitude for such
+grace in the subject itself.  Seemingly innocent, full of natural
+gaiety, eternally youthful, those seven and more deadly sins,
+embodied and attired in just the jaunty dress then worn, enter now
+and afterwards as spectators, or assistants, into many a sacred
+foreground and background among the friends and kinsmen of the Holy
+Family, among the very angels, gazing, conversing, standing firmly
+and unashamed.  During his apprenticeship at Perugia Raphael visited
+and left his work in more modest places round about, along those
+seductive mountain or lowland roads, and copied for one of them
+Perugino's "Marriage of the Virgin" significantly, did it by many
+degrees better, with a very novel effect of motion everywhere, and
+with that grace which natural motion evokes, introducing for a temple
+in the background a lovely bit of his friend Bramante's sort of
+architecture, the true Renaissance or perfected Quattro-cento
+architecture.  He goes on building a whole lordly new city of the
+like as he paints to the end of his life.  The subject, we may note,
+as we leave Perugia in Raphael's company, had been suggested by the
+famous mystic treasure of its cathedral church, the marriage ring of
+the Blessed Virgin herself.
+
+Raphael's copy had been made for the little old Apennine town of
+Città di Castello; and another place he visits at this time is still
+more [44] effective in the development of his genius.  About his
+twentieth year he comes to Siena--that other rocky Titan's hand, just
+lifted out of the surface of the plain.  It is the most grandiose
+place he has yet seen; it has not forgotten that it was once the
+rival of Florence; and here the patient scholar passes under an
+influence of somewhat larger scope than Perugino's.  Perugino's
+pictures are for the most part religious contemplations, painted and
+made visible, to accompany the action of divine service--a visible
+pattern to priests, attendants, worshippers, of what the course of
+their invisible thoughts should be at those holy functions.  Learning
+in the workshop of Perugino to produce the like--such works as the
+Ansidei Madonna--to produce them very much better than his master,
+Raphael was already become a freeman of the most strictly religious
+school of Italian art, the so devout Umbrian soul finding there its
+purest expression, still untroubled by the naturalism, the
+intellectualism, the antique paganism, then astir in the artistic
+soul everywhere else in Italy.  The lovely work of Perugino, very
+lovely at its best, of the early Raphael also, is in fact
+"conservative," and at various points slightly behind its day, though
+not unpleasantly.  In Perugino's allegoric frescoes of the Cambio,
+the Hall of the Money-changers, for instance, under the mystic rule
+of the Planets in person, pagan personages take their place indeed
+side by side with the figures of the New [45] Testament, but are no
+Romans or Greeks, neither are the Jews Jews, nor is any one of them,
+warrior, sage, king, precisely of Perugino's own time and place, but
+still contemplations only, after the manner of the personages in his
+church-work; or, say, dreams--monastic dreams--thin, do-nothing
+creatures, conjured from sky and cloud.  Perugino clearly never broke
+through the meditative circle of the Middle Age.
+
+Now Raphael, on the other hand, in his final period at Rome, exhibits
+a wonderful narrative power in painting; and the secret of that
+power--the power of developing a story in a picture, or series of
+pictures--may be traced back from him to Pinturicchio, as that
+painter worked on those vast, well-lighted walls of the cathedral
+library at Siena, at the great series of frescoes illustrative of the
+life of Pope Pius the Second.  It had been a brilliant personal
+history, in contact now and again with certain remarkable public
+events--a career religious yet mundane, you scarcely know which, so
+natural is the blending of lights, of interest in it.  How unlike the
+Peruginesque conception of life in its almost perverse other-
+worldliness, which Raphael now leaves behind him, but, like a true
+scholar, will not forget.  Pinturicchio then had invited his
+remarkable young friend hither, "to assist him by his counsels," who,
+however, pupil-wise, after his habit also learns much as he thus
+assists.  He stands depicted there in person in the scene [46] of the
+canonisation of Saint Catherine; and though his actual share in the
+work is not to be defined, connoisseurs have felt his intellectual
+presence, not at one place only, in touches at once finer and more
+forcible than were usual in the steady-going, somewhat Teutonic,
+Pinturicchio, Raphael's elder by thirty years.  The meek scholar you
+see again, with his tentative sketches and suggestions, had more than
+learned his lesson; through all its changes that flexible
+intelligence loses nothing; does but add continually to its store.
+Henceforward Raphael will be able to tell a story in a picture,
+better, with a truer economy, with surer judgment, more naturally and
+easily than any one else.
+
+And here at Siena, of all Italian towns perhaps most deeply impressed
+with medieval character--an impress it still retains--grotesque,
+parti-coloured--parti-coloured, so to speak, in its genius--Satanic,
+yet devout of humour, as depicted in its old chronicles, and
+beautiful withal, dignified; it is here that Raphael becomes for the
+first time aware of that old pagan world, which had already come to
+be so much for the art-schools of Italy.  There were points, as we
+saw, at which the school of Perugia was behind its day.  Amid those
+intensely Gothic surroundings in the cathedral library where
+Pinturicchio worked, stood, as it remained till recently, unashamed
+there, a marble group of the three Graces--an average Roman work in
+[47] effect--the sort of thing we are used to.  That, perhaps, is the
+only reason why for our part, except with an effort, we find it
+conventional or even tame.  For the youthful Raphael, on the other
+hand, at that moment, antiquity, as with "the dew of herbs," seemed
+therein "to awake and sing" out of the dust, in all its sincerity,
+its cheerfulness and natural charm.  He has turned it into a picture;
+has helped to make his original only too familiar, perhaps, placing
+the three sisters against his own favourite, so unclassic, Umbrian
+background indeed, but with no trace of the Peruginesque ascetic,
+Gothic meagreness in themselves; emphasising rather, with a hearty
+acceptance, the nude, the flesh; making the limbs, in fact, a little
+heavy.  It was but one gleam he had caught just there in medieval
+Siena of that large pagan world he was, not so long afterwards, more
+completely than others to make his own.  And when somewhat later
+he painted the exquisite, still Peruginesque, Apollo and Marsyas,
+semi-medieval habits again asserted themselves with delightfully
+blent effects.  It might almost pass for a parable--that little
+picture in the Louvre--of the contention between classic art and the
+romantic, superseded in the person of Marsyas, a homely, quaintly
+poetical young monk, surely!  Only, Apollo himself also is clearly of
+the same brotherhood; has a touch, in truth, of Heine's fancied
+Apollo "in exile," who, Christianity now triumphing, has served as
+[48] a hired shepherd, or hidden himself under the cowl in a
+cloister; and Raphael, as if at work on choir-book or missal, still
+applies symbolical gilding for natural sunlight.  It is as if he
+wished to proclaim amid newer lights--this scholar who never forgot a
+lesson--his loyal pupilage to Perugino, and retained still something
+of medieval stiffness, of the monastic thoughts also, that were born
+and lingered in places like Borgo San Sepolcro or Città di Castello.
+Chef-d'oeuvre! you might exclaim, of the peculiar, tremulous, half-
+convinced, monkish treatment of that after all damnable pagan world.
+And our own generation certainly, with kindred tastes, loving or
+wishing to love pagan art as sincerely as did the people of the
+Renaissance, and medieval art as well, would accept, of course, of
+work conceived in that so seductively mixed manner, ten per cent of
+even Raphael's later, purely classical presentments.
+
+That picture was suggested by a fine old intaglio in the Medicean
+collection at Florence, was painted, therefore, after Raphael's
+coming thither, and therefore also a survival with him of a style
+limited, immature, literally provincial; for in the phase on which he
+had now entered he is under the influence of style in its most fully
+determined sense, of what might be called the thorough-bass of the
+pictorial art, of a fully realised intellectual system in regard to
+its processes, well tested by experiment, upon a survey [49] of all
+the conditions and various applications of it--of style as understood
+by Da Vinci, then at work in Florence.  Raphael's sojourn there
+extends from his twenty-first to his twenty-fifth year.  He came with
+flattering recommendations from the Court of Urbino; was admitted as
+an equal by the masters of his craft, being already in demand for
+work, then and ever since duly prized; was, in fact, already famous,
+though he alone is unaware--is in his own opinion still but a
+learner, and as a learner yields himself meekly, systematically to
+influence; would learn from Francia, whom he visits at Bologna; from
+the earlier naturalistic works of Masolino and Masaccio; from the
+solemn prophetic work of the venerable dominican, Bartolommeo,
+disciple of Savonarola.  And he has already habitually this strange
+effect, not only on the whole body of his juniors, but on those whose
+manner had been long since formed; they lose something of themselves
+by contact with him, as if they went to school again.
+
+Bartolommeo, Da Vinci, were masters certainly of what we call "the
+ideal" in art.  Yet for Raphael, so loyal hitherto to the traditions
+of Umbrian art, to its heavy weight of hieratic tradition, dealing
+still somewhat conventionally with a limited, non-natural matter--for
+Raphael to come from Siena, Perugia, Urbino, to sharp-witted,
+practical, masterful Florence was in immediate effect a transition
+from reverie to [50] realities--to a world of facts.  Those masters
+of the ideal were for him, in the first instance, masters also of
+realism, as we say.  Henceforth, to the end, he will be the analyst,
+the faithful reporter, in his work, of what he sees.  He will realise
+the function of style as exemplified in the practice of Da Vinci,
+face to face with the world of nature and man as they are; selecting
+from, asserting one's self in a transcript of its veritable data;
+like drawing to like there, in obedience to the master's preference
+for the embodiment of the creative form within him.  Portrait-art had
+been nowhere in the school of Perugino, but it was the triumph of the
+school of Florence.  And here a faithful analyst of what he sees, yet
+lifting it withal, unconsciously, inevitably, recomposing,
+glorifying, Raphael too becomes, of course, a painter of portraits.
+We may foresee them already in masterly series, from Maddalena Doni,
+a kind of younger, more virginal sister of La Gioconda, to cardinals
+and popes--to that most sensitive of all portraits, the "Violin-
+player," if it be really his.  But then, on the other hand, the
+influence of such portraiture will be felt also in his inventive
+work, in a certain reality there, a certain convincing loyalty to
+experience and observation.  In his most elevated religious work he
+will still keep, for security at least, close to nature, and the
+truth of nature.  His modelling of the visible surface is lovely
+because he understands, can see the hidden causes [51] of momentary
+action in the face, the hands--how men and animals are really made
+and kept alive.  Set side by side, then, with that portrait of
+Maddalena Doni, as forming together a measure of what he has learned
+at Florence, the "Madonna del Gran Duca," which still remains there.
+Call it on revision, and without hesitation, the loveliest of his
+Madonnas, perhaps of all Madonnas; and let it stand as representative
+of as many as fifty or sixty types of that subject, onwards to the
+Sixtine Madonna, in all the triumphancy of his later days at Rome.
+Observe the veritable atmosphere about it, the grand composition of
+the drapery, the magic relief, the sweetness and dignity of the human
+hands and faces, the noble tenderness of Mary's gesture, the unity of
+the thing with itself, the faultless exclusion of all that does not
+belong to its main purpose; it is like a single, simple axiomatic
+thought.  Note withal the novelty of its effect on the mind, and you
+will see that this master of style (that's a consummate example of
+what is meant by style) has been still a willing scholar in the hands
+of Da Vinci.  But then, with what ease also, and simplicity, and a
+sort of natural success not his!
+
+It was in his twenty-fifth year that Raphael came to the city of the
+popes, Michelangelo being already in high favour there.  For the
+remaining years of his life he paces the same streets with that grim
+artist, who was so great a [52] contrast with himself, and for the
+first time his attitude towards a gift different from his own is not
+that of a scholar, but that of a rival.  If he did not become the
+scholar of Michelangelo, it would be difficult, on the other hand, to
+trace anywhere in Michelangelo's work the counter influence usual
+with those who had influenced him.  It was as if he desired to add to
+the strength of Michelangelo that sweetness which at first sight
+seems to be wanting there.  Ex forti dulcedo: and in the study of
+Michelangelo certainly it is enjoyable to detect, if we may, sweet
+savours amid the wonderful strength, the strangeness and potency of
+what he pours forth for us: with Raphael, conversely, something of a
+relief to find in the suavity of that so softly moving, tuneful
+existence, an assertion of strength.  There was the promise of it, as
+you remember, in his very look as he saw himself at eighteen; and you
+know that the lesson, the prophecy of those holy women and children
+he has made his own, is that "the meek shall possess."  So, when we
+see him at Rome at last, in that atmosphere of greatness, of the
+strong, he too is found putting forth strength, adding that element
+in due proportion to the mere sweetness and charm of his genius; yet
+a sort of strength, after all, still congruous with the line of
+development that genius has hitherto taken, the special strength of
+the scholar and his proper reward, a purely cerebral strength [53]
+the strength, the power of an immense understanding.
+
+Now the life of Raphael at Rome seems as we read of it hasty and
+perplexed, full of undertakings, of vast works not always to be
+completed, of almost impossible demands on his industry, in a world
+of breathless competition, amid a great company of spectators, for
+great rewards.  You seem to lose him, feel he may have lost himself,
+in the multiplicity of his engagements; might fancy that, wealthy,
+variously decorated, a courtier, cardinal in petto, he was "serving
+tables."  But, you know, he was forcing into this brief space of
+years (he died at thirty-seven) more than the natural business of the
+larger part of a long life; and one way of getting some kind of
+clearness into it, is to distinguish the various divergent outlooks
+or applications, and group the results of that immense intelligence,
+that still untroubled, flawlessly operating, completely informed
+understanding, that purely cerebral power, acting through his
+executive, inventive or creative gifts, through the eye and the hand
+with its command of visible colour and form.  In that way you may
+follow him along many various roads till brain and eye and hand
+suddenly fail in the very midst of his work--along many various
+roads, but you can follow him along each of them distinctly.
+
+At the end of one of them is the Galatea, and in quite a different
+form of industry, the datum [54] for the beginnings of a great
+literary work of pure erudition.  Coming to the capital of
+Christendom, he comes also for the first time under the full
+influence of the antique world, pagan art, pagan life, and is
+henceforth an enthusiastic archaeologist.  On his first coming to
+Rome a papal bull had authorised him to inspect all ancient marbles,
+inscriptions, and the like, with a view to their adaptation in new
+buildings then proposed.  A consequent close acquaintance with
+antiquity, with the very touch of it, blossomed literally in his
+brain, and, under his facile hand, in artistic creations, of which
+the Galatea is indeed the consummation.  But the frescoes of the
+Farnese palace, with a hundred minor designs, find their place along
+that line of his artistic activity; they do not exhaust his knowledge
+of antiquity, his interest in and control of it.  The mere fragments
+of it that still cling to his memory would have composed, had he
+lived longer, a monumental illustrated survey of the monuments of
+ancient Rome.
+
+To revive something of the proportionable spirit at least of antique
+building in the architecture of the present, came naturally to
+Raphael as the son of his age; and at the end of another of those
+roads of diverse activity stands Saint Peter's, though unfinished.
+What a proof again of that immense intelligence, by which, as I said,
+the element of strength supplemented the element of mere sweetness
+and charm in his [55] work, that at the age of thirty, known hitherto
+only as a painter, at the dying request of the venerable Bramante
+himself, he should have been chosen to succeed him as the director of
+that vast enterprise!  And if little in the great church, as we see
+it, is directly due to him, yet we must not forget that his work in
+the Vatican also was partly that of an architect.  In the Loggie, or
+open galleries of the Vatican, the last and most delicate effects of
+Quattro-cento taste come from his hand, in that peculiar arabesque
+decoration which goes by his name.
+
+Saint Peter's, as you know, had an indirect connexion with the
+Teutonic reformation.  When Leo X. pushed so far the sale of
+indulgences to the overthrow of Luther's Catholicism, it was done
+after all for the not entirely selfish purpose of providing funds to
+build the metropolitan church of Christendom with the assistance of
+Raphael; and yet, upon another of those diverse outways of his so
+versatile intelligence, at the close of which we behold his
+unfinished picture of the Transfiguration, what has been called
+Raphael's Bible finds its place--that series of biblical scenes in
+the Loggie of the Vatican.  And here, while he has shown that he
+could do something of Michelangelo's work a little more soothingly
+than he, this graceful Roman Catholic rivals also what is perhaps
+best in the work of the rude German reformer--of Luther, who came to
+Rome about this very [56] time, to find nothing admirable there.
+Place along with them the Cartoons, and observe that in this phase of
+his artistic labour, as Luther printed his vernacular German version
+of the Scriptures, so Raphael is popularising them for an even larger
+world; he brings the simple, to their great delight, face to face
+with the Bible as it is, in all its variety of incident, after they
+had so long had to content themselves with but fragments of it, as
+presented in the symbolism and in the brief lections of the Liturgy:-
+-Biblia Pauperum, in a hundred forms of reproduction, though designed
+for popes and princes.
+
+But then, for the wise, at the end of yet another of those divergent
+ways, glows his painted philosophy in the Parnassus and the School of
+Athens, with their numerous accessories.  In the execution of those
+works, of course, his antiquarian knowledge stood him in good stead;
+and here, above all, is the pledge of his immense understanding, at
+work on its own natural ground on a purely intellectual deposit, the
+apprehension, the transmission to others of complex and difficult
+ideas.  We have here, in fact, the sort of intelligence to be found
+in Lessing, in Herder, in Hegel, in those who, by the instrumentality
+of an organised philosophic system, have comprehended in one view or
+vision what poetry has been, or what Greek philosophy, as great
+complex dynamic facts in the world.  But then, with the artist of the
+sixteenth century, [57] this synoptic intellectual power worked in
+perfect identity with the pictorial imagination and a magic hand.  By
+him large theoretic conceptions are addressed, so to speak, to the
+intelligence of the eye.  There had been efforts at such abstract or
+theoretic painting before, or say rather, leagues behind him.  Modern
+efforts, again, we know, and not in Germany alone, to do the like for
+that larger survey of such matters which belongs to the philosophy of
+our own century; but for one or many reasons they have seemed only to
+prove the incapacity of philosophy to be expressed in terms of art.
+They have seemed, in short, so far, not fit to be seen literally--
+those ideas of culture, religion, and the like.  Yet Plato, as you
+know, supposed a kind of visible loveliness about ideas.  Well! in
+Raphael, painted ideas, painted and visible philosophy, are for once
+as beautiful as Plato thought they must be, if one truly apprehended
+them.  For note, above all, that with all his wealth of antiquarian
+knowledge in detail, and with a perfect technique, it is after all
+the beauty, the grace of poetry, of pagan philosophy, of religious
+faith that he thus records.
+
+Of religious faith also.  The Disputa, in which, under the form of a
+council representative of all ages, he embodies the idea of theology,
+divinarum rerum notitia, as constantly resident in the Catholic
+Church, ranks with the "Parnassus" and the "School of Athens," if it
+does not rather [58] close another of his long lines of intellectual
+travail--a series of compositions, partly symbolic, partly
+historical, in which the "Deliverance of St. Peter from Prison," the
+"Expulsion of the Huns," and the "Coronation of Charlemagne," find
+their places; and by which, painting in the great official chambers
+of the Vatican, Raphael asserts, interprets the power and charm of
+the Catholic ideal as realised in history.  A scholar, a student of
+the visible world, of the natural man, yet even more ardently of the
+books, the art, the life of the old pagan world, the age of the
+Renaissance, through all its varied activity, had, in spite of the
+weakened hold of Catholicism on the critical intellect, been still
+under its influence, the glow of it, as a religious ideal, and in the
+presence of Raphael you cannot think it a mere after-glow.
+Independently, that is, of less or more evidence for it, the whole
+creed of the Middle Age, as a scheme of the world as it should be, as
+we should be glad to find it, was still welcome to the heart, the
+imagination.  Now, in Raphael, all the various conditions of that age
+discover themselves as characteristics of a vivid personal genius,
+which may be said therefore to be conterminous with the genius of the
+Renaissance itself.  For him, then, in the breadth of his immense
+cosmopolitan intelligence, for Raphael, who had done in part the work
+of Luther also, the Catholic Church--through all its phases, as
+reflected in its visible local centre, [59] the papacy--is alive
+still as of old, one and continuous, and still true to itself.  Ah!
+what is local and visible, as you know, counts for so much with the
+artistic temper!
+
+Old friends, or old foes with but new faces, events repeating
+themselves, as his large, clear, synoptic vision can detect, the
+invading King of France, Louis XII., appears as Attila: Leo X. as Leo
+I.: and he thinks of, he sees, at one and the same moment, the
+coronation of Charlemagne and the interview of Pope Leo with Francis
+I., as a dutiful son of the Church: of the deliverance of Leo X. from
+prison, and the deliverance of St. Peter.
+
+I have abstained from anything like description of Raphael's pictures
+in speaking of him and his work, have aimed rather at preparing you
+to look at his work for yourselves, by a sketch of his life, and
+therein especially, as most appropriate to this place, of Raphael as
+a scholar.  And now if, in closing, I commend one of his pictures in
+particular to your imagination or memory,, your purpose to see it, or
+see it again, it will not be the Transfiguration nor the Sixtine
+Madonna, nor even the "Madonna del Gran Duca," but the picture we
+have in London--the Ansidei, or Blenheim, Madonna.  I find there, at
+first sight, with something of the pleasure one has in a proposition
+of Euclid, a sense of the power of the understanding, in the economy
+with which he has reduced his material to the [60] simplest terms,
+has disentangled and detached its various elements.  He is painting
+in Florence, but for Perugia, and sends it a specimen of its own old
+art--Mary and the babe enthroned, with St. Nicolas and the Baptist in
+attendance on either side.  The kind of thing people there had
+already seen so many times, but done better, in a sense not to be
+measured by degrees, with a wholly original freedom and life and
+grace, though he perhaps is unaware, done better as a whole, because
+better in every minute particular, than ever before.  The scrupulous
+scholar, aged twenty-three, is now indeed a master; but still goes
+carefully.  Note, therefore, how much mere exclusion counts for in
+the positive effect of his work.  There is a saying that the true
+artist is known best by what he omits.  Yes, because the whole
+question of good taste is involved precisely in such jealous
+omission.  Note this, for instance, in the familiar Apennine
+background, with its blue hills and brown towns, faultless, for once-
+-for once only--and observe, in the Umbrian pictures around, how
+often such background is marred by grotesque, natural, or
+architectural detail, by incongruous or childish incident.  In this
+cool, pearl-grey, quiet place, where colour tells for double--the
+jewelled cope, the painted book in the hand of Mary, the chaplet of
+red coral--one is reminded that among all classical writers Raphael's
+preference was for the faultless Virgil.  How orderly, how divinely
+[61] clean and sweet the flesh, the vesture, the floor, the earth and
+sky!  Ah, say rather the hand, the method of the painter!  There is
+an unmistakeable pledge of strength, of movement and animation in the
+cast of the Baptist's countenance, but reserved, repressed.  Strange,
+Raphael has given him a staff of transparent crystal.  Keep then to
+that picture as the embodied formula of Raphael's genius.  Amid all
+he has here already achieved, full, we may think, of the quiet
+assurance of what is to come, his attitude is still that of the
+scholar; he seems still to be saying, before all things, from first
+to last, "I am utterly purposed that I will not offend."
+
+NOTES
+
+38. *A lecture delivered to the University Extension Students,
+Oxford, 2 August, 1892.  Published in the Fortnightly Review, Oct.
+1892, and now reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.
+
+
+
+PASCAL*
+
+[62] ABOUT the middle of the seventeenth century, two opposite views
+of a question, upon which neither Scripture, nor Council, nor Pope,
+had spoken with authority--the question as to the amount of freedom
+left to man by the overpowering work of divine grace upon him--had
+seemed likely for a moment to divide the Roman Church into two rival
+sects.  In the diocese of Paris, however, the controversy narrowed
+itself into a mere personal quarrel between the Jesuit Fathers and
+the religious community of Port-Royal, and might have been forgotten
+but for the intervention of a new writer in whom French literature
+made more than a new step.  It became at once, as if by a new
+creation, what it has remained--a pattern of absolutely unencumbered
+expressiveness.
+
+In 1656 Pascal, then thirty-three years old, under the form of
+"Letters to a Provincial by one of his Friends," put forth a series
+of [63] pamphlets in which all that was vulnerable in the Jesuit
+Fathers was laid bare to the profit of their opponents.  At the
+moment the quarrel turned on the proposed censure of Antoine Arnauld
+by the Sorbonne, by the University of Paris as a religious body.
+Pascal, intimate, like many another fine intellect of the day, with
+the Port-Royalists, was Arnauld's friend, and it belonged to the
+ardour of his genius, at least as he was then, to be a very active
+friend.  He took up the pen as other chivalrous gentlemen of the day
+took up the sword, and showed himself a master of the art of fence
+therewith.  His delicate exercise of himself with that weapon was
+nothing less than a revelation to all the world of the capabilities,
+the true genius of the French language in prose.
+
+Those who think of Pascal in his final sanctity, his detachment of
+soul from all but the greatest matters, may be surprised, when they
+turn to the "Letters," to find him treating questions, as serious for
+the friends he was defending as for their adversaries, ironically,
+with a but half-veiled disdain for them, or an affected humility at
+being unskilled in them and no theologian.  He does not allow us to
+forget that he is, after all, a layman; while he introduces us,
+almost avowedly, into a world of unmeaning terms, and unreal
+distinctions and suppositions that can never be verified.  The world
+in general, indeed, se paye des paroles.  That saying belongs to
+Pascal, and [64] he uses it with reference to the Jesuits and their
+favourite expression of "sufficient grace."  In the earliest
+"Letters" he creates in us a feeling that, however orthodox one's
+intention, it is scarcely possible to speak of the matters then so
+abundantly discussed by religious people without heresy at some
+unguarded point.  The suspected proposition of Arnauld, it is
+admitted by one of his foes, "would be Catholic in the mouth of any
+one but M. Arnauld."  "The truth," as it lay between Arnauld and his
+opponents, is a thing so delicate that "pour peu qu'on s'en retire,
+on tombe dans l'erreur; mais cette erreur est si déliée, que, pour
+peu qu'on s'en éloigne, on se trouve dans la vérité."
+
+Some, indeed, may find in the very delicacy, the curiosity, with
+which such distinctions are drawn, by Pascal's friends as well as by
+their foes, only the impertinence, the profanities, of the theologian
+by profession, all too intimate in laying down the law of the things
+he deals with--the things "which eye hath not seen" pressing into the
+secrets of God's sublime commerce with men, in which, it may be, He
+differs with every single human soul, by forms of thought adapted
+from the poorest sort of men's dealings with each other, from the
+trader, or the attorney.  Pascal notes too the "impious buffooneries"
+of his opponents.  The good Fathers, perhaps, only meant them to
+promote geniality of temper in the debate.  But of such failures--
+failures of taste, of respect towards one's [65] own point of view--
+the world is ever unamiably aware; and in the "Letters" there is much
+to move the self-complacent smile of the worldling, as Pascal
+describes his experiences, while he went from one authority to
+another to find out what was really meant by the distinction between
+grace "sufficient," grace "efficacious," grace "active," grace
+"victorious."  He heard, for instance, that all men have sufficient
+grace to do God's will; but it is not always prochain, not always at
+hand, at the moment of temptation to do otherwise.  So far, then,
+Pascal's charges are those which may seem to lie ready to hand
+against all who study theology, a looseness of thought and language,
+that would pass nowhere else, in making what are professedly very
+fine distinctions; the insincerity with which terms are carefully
+chosen to cover opposite meanings; the fatuity with which opposite
+meanings revolve into one another, in the strange vacuous atmosphere
+generated by professional divines.
+
+Up to this point, you see, Pascal is the countryman of Rabelais and
+Montaigne, smiling with the fine malice of the one, laughing outright
+with the gaiety of the other, all the world joining in the laugh--
+well, at the silliness of the clergy, who seem indeed not to know
+their own business.  It is we, the laity, he would urge, who are
+serious, and disinterested, because sincerely interested, in these
+great questionings.  Jalousie de métier, the reader may suspect, has
+something to do with [66] the Professional leaders on both sides of
+the controversy; but at the actual turn controversy took just then,
+it was against the Jesuit Fathers that Pascal's charges came home in
+full force.  And their sin is above all that sin, unpardonable with
+men of the world sans peur et sans reproche, of a lack of self-
+respect, sins against pride, if the paradox may be allowed, all the
+undignified faults, in a word, of essentially little people when they
+interfere in great matters--faults promoted in the direction of the
+consciences of women and children, weak concessions to weak people
+who want to be saved in some easy way quite other than Pascal's high,
+fine, chivalrous way of gaining salvation, an incapacity to say what
+one thinks with the glove thrown down.  He supposes a Jansenist to
+turn upon his opponent who uses the term "sufficient" grace, while
+really meaning, as he alleges, insufficient, with the words:--"Your
+explanation would be odious to men of the world.  They speak more
+sincerely than you on matters of far less importance than this."
+With the world, Pascal, in the "Provincial Letters," had immediate
+success.  "All the world," we read in his friend's supposed reply to
+the second "Letter," "sees them; all the world understands them.  Men
+of the world find them agreeable, and even women intelligible."  A
+century later Voltaire found them very agreeable.  The spirit in
+which Pascal deals with his opponents, his irony, may remind us of
+the "Apology" of [67] Socrates; the style which secured them
+immediate access to people who, as a rule, find the subjects there
+treated hopelessly dry, reminds us of the "Apologia" of Newman.
+
+The essence of all good style, whatever its accidents may be, is
+expressiveness.  It is mastered in proportion to the justice, the
+nicety with which words balance or match their meaning, and their
+writer succeeds in saying what he wills, grave or gay, severe or
+florid, simple or complex.  Pascal was a master of style because, as
+his sister tells us, recording his earliest years, he had a wonderful
+natural facility à dire ce qu'il voulait en la manière qu'il voulait.
+
+Facit indignatio versus.  The indignation which caused Pascal to
+write the "Letters" was of a supercilious kind, and what he willed to
+say in them led to the development of all those qualities that are
+summed up in the French term l'esprit.  Voltaire declared that the
+best comedies of Molière n'ont pas plus de sel que les premières
+lettres.  "Vos maximes," Pascal assures the Jesuit Fathers, "ont je
+ne sais quoi de divertissant, qui réjouit toujours le monde," and
+they lose nothing of that character in his handling of them, so much
+so that it was clear from the first that the world in general would
+never ask whether Pascal had been quite fair to his opponents:
+"N'êtes-vous donc pas ridicules, mes Pères?  Qu'on satisfait au
+précepte d'ouïr la messe en entendant quatre quarts de messe à la
+fois de différents prêtres!"  When [68] you have the like of that it
+is impossible not to laugh, parce que rien n'y porte davantage qu'une
+disproportion surprenante entre ce qu'on attend et ce qu'on voit.
+
+He has "salt" also, of another kind.  He drives straight at the
+Jesuits, for instance, rather than at those who do but copy them,
+because, as he tells us: Les choses valent toujours mieux dans leur
+source.  What equity of expression, how brief, how untranslateable!
+And the "Letters" abound in such things.
+
+But to his comparison of Pascal with Molière, Voltaire added that
+Bossuet n'a rien de plus sublime que les dernières.  And in truth the
+more serious note of the impassioned servant of religion whose lips
+have been touched with altar-fire, whose seriousness came to be like
+some incurable malady, a visitation of God, as people used to say, is
+presently struck when, in the natural course of his argument, his
+thoughts are carried, from a mere passage of arms between one man or
+one class of men and another, deep down to those awful encounters of
+the individual soul with itself which are formulated in the eternal
+problem of predestination.
+
+In their doctrine of "sufficient grace" the Jesuits had presented a
+view of the conflict of good and evil in the soul, which is
+honourable to God and encouraging to man, and which has catholicity
+on its face.  All to whom entrance into the Church, through its
+formal ministries, [69] lies open are truly called of God, while
+beyond it stretches the ocean of "His uncovenanted mercies."  That is
+a doctrine for the many, for those whose position in the religious
+life is mediocrity, who so far as themselves or others can discern
+have nothing about them of eternal or necessary or irresistible
+reprobation, or of the eternal condition opposite to that.
+
+The so-called Jansenist doctrine, on the other hand, of [   ]+ but
+irresistible grace was the appropriate view of the Port-Royalists,
+high-pitched, eager souls as they were, and of their friend Pascal
+himself, however much in his turn he might refine upon it.  Whether
+or not, as a matter of fact, upon which, as distinct from matters of
+faith, an infallible pope can be mistaken, the dreary old Dutch
+bishop Jansenius had really taught Jansenism, the Port-Royalists had
+found in his "Augustinus" an incentive to devotion, and were avowedly
+his adherents.  In that somewhat gloomy, that too deeply impressed,
+that fanatical age, they were the Calvinists of the Roman Catholic
+Church, maintaining, emphasising in it a view, a tradition, really
+constant in it from St. Augustin, from St. Paul himself.  It is a
+merit of Pascal, his literary merit, to have given a very fine-toned
+expression to that doctrine, though mainly in the way of a criticism
+of its opponents, to one side or aspect of an eternal controversy,
+eternally suspended, as representing two opposite aspects of
+experience [70] itself.  Calvin and Arminius, Jansen and Molina sum
+up, in fact, respectively, like the respective adherents of the
+freedom or of the necessity of the human will, in the more general
+question of moral philosophy, two opposed, two counter trains of
+phenomena actually observable by us in human action, too large and
+complex a matter, as it is, to be embodied or summed up in any one
+single proposition or idea.
+
+There are moments of one's own life, aspects of the life of others,
+of which the conclusion that the will is free seems to be the only--
+is the natural or reasonable--account.  Yet those very moments on
+reflexion, on second thoughts, present themselves again, as but links
+in a chain, in an all-embracing network of chains.  In all education
+we assume, in some inexplicable combination, at once the freedom and
+the necessity of the subject of it.  And who on a survey of life from
+outside would willingly lose the dramatic contrasts, the alternating
+interests, for which the opposed ideas of freedom and necessity are
+our respective points of view?  How significant become the details we
+might otherwise pass by almost unobserved, but to which we are put on
+the alert by the abstract query whether a man be indeed a freeman or
+a slave, as we watch from aside his devious course, his struggles,
+his final tragedy or triumph.  So much value at least there may be in
+problems insoluble in themselves, such as that great controversy of
+Pascal's day [71] between Jesuit and Jansenist.  And here again who
+would forego, in the spectacle of the religious history of the human
+soul, the aspects, the details which the doctrines of universal and
+particular grace respectively embody?  The Jesuit doctrine of
+sufficient grace is certainly, to use the familiar expression, a very
+pleasant doctrine conducive to the due feeding of the whole flock of
+Christ, as being, as assuming them to be, what they really are, at
+the worst, God's silly sheep.  It has something in it congruous with
+the rising of the physical sun on the evil and on the good, while the
+wheat and the tares grow naturally, peacefully together.  But how
+pleasant also the opposite doctrine, how true, how truly descriptive
+of certain distinguished, magnifical, or elect souls, vessels of
+election, épris des hauteurs, as we see them pass across the world's
+stage, as if led on by a kind of thirst for God!  Its necessary
+counterpart, of course, we may find, at least dramatically true of
+some; we can name them in history, perhaps from our own experience;
+souls of whom it seems but an obvious story to tell that they seemed
+to be in love with eternal death, to have borne on them from the
+first signs of reprobation.  Of certain quite visibly elect souls, at
+all events, the theory of irresistible grace might seem the almost
+necessary explanation.  Most reasonable, most natural, most truly is
+it descriptive of Pascal himself.
+
+[72] So far, indeed, up to the year 1656, Pascal's annus mirabilis,
+the year of the "Letters," the world had been allowed to see only one
+side of him.  Early in life he had achieved brilliant overtures in
+the abstract sciences, and, inheriting much of the quality of a fine
+gentleman, he figures, with his trenchant manner, never at a loss, as
+a quite secular person, stirred on occasion to take part in a
+religious debate.  But it is after the grand fashion of the mundane
+quarrels of that day, the age of the sentiment of personal honour, in
+which it was so natural for the good-natured Jesuits, stirring all
+Pascal's satiric power, to excuse as well as they could the act de
+tuer pour un simple médisance.  The Church was still an estate of the
+realm with all the obligations of the noblesse, and it was still
+something worse than bad taste, it was dangerous to express religious
+doubts.  About the Catholic religion, as he conceived it, Pascal
+displays the assured attitude of an ancient Crusader.  He has the
+full courage of his opinions, and by his elegant easy gallantry in
+speaking for it he gives to religion then and now a kind of dignity
+it had lost with other controversialists in the eyes of the world.
+There is abundant gaiety also in the "Letters."  He quotes from
+Tertullian to the effect that c'est proprement à la vérité qu'il
+appartient de rire parce qu'elle est gaie, et de se jouer de ses
+ennemis parce qu'elle est assurée de sa victoire.  For he could find
+quotations to his purpose from recondite writers, [73] though he was
+not a man of erudition; like a man of the world again, he read
+little, but that absorbingly, was the master of two authors,
+Epictetus and Montaigne, and, as appeared afterwards, of the
+Scriptures in the Vulgate.
+
+So far, his imposing carriage of himself intellectually might lead us
+to suspect that the forced humilities of his later years are
+indirectly a discovery of what seems one leading quality of the
+natural man in him, a pride that could be quite fierce on occasion.
+And, like another rich young man whom Jesus loved, he lacked nothing
+to make the world also love and confide in, as it already flattered,
+him.  He turned from it, decided to live a single life.  Was it the
+mere oddity of genius?  Or its last fine dainty touch of difference
+from ordinary people and their motives?  Or that sanctity of which,
+in some cases, the world itself instinctively feels the distinction,
+though it shrinks from the true explanation of it?  Certainly, all
+things considered, on the morrow of the "Letters," Blaise Pascal, at
+the age of thirty-three, had a brilliant worldly future before him,
+had he cared duly to wait upon, to serve it.  To develop the already
+considerable position of his family among the gentry of Auvergne
+would have been to follow the way of his time, in which so many noble
+names had been founded on professional talents.  Increasingly,
+however, from early youth, he had been the subject of a malady so
+hopeless [74] and inexplicable that in that superstitious age some
+fancied it the result of a malign spell in infancy.  Gradually, the
+world almost loses sight of him, hears at last, some time after it
+had looked for that event, that he had died, of course very piously,
+among those sombre people, his friends and relations of Port-Royal,
+with whom he had taken refuge, and seemed already to have been buried
+alive.  And in the year 1670, not till eight years after his death,
+the "Pensées" appeared--"Pensées de M. Pascal sur la Religion et sur
+quelques autres sujets"--or rather a selection from those "Thoughts"
+by the Port-Royalists, still in fear of consequences to the
+struggling Jansenist party, anxious to present Pascal's doctrine as
+far as possible in conformity with the Jesuit sense, as also to
+divert the vaguer parts of it more entirely into their own.  The
+incomparable words were altered, the order changed or lost, the
+thoughts themselves omitted or retrenched.  Written in short
+intervals of relief from suffering, they were contributions to a
+large and methodical work--"Pensées de M. Pascal sur la Religion et
+sur quelques autres sujets"--on a good many things besides, as the
+reader finds, on many of the great things of this world which seemed
+to him to come in contact or competition with religion.  In the true
+version of the "Thoughts," edited at last by Faugère, in 1844, from
+Pascal's own MSS., in the National Library, they group themselves
+into certain definite trains [75] of speculation and study.  But it
+is still, nevertheless, as isolated thoughts, as inspirations, so to
+call them, penetrating what seemed hopelessly dark, summarising what
+seemed hopelessly confused, sticking fast in men's memories, floating
+lightly, or going far, that they have left so deep a mark in
+literature.  For again the manner, also, their style precisely
+becomes them.  The merits of Pascal's style, indeed, as of the French
+language itself, still is to say beaucoup de choses en peu de mots;
+and the brevity, the discerning edge, the impassioned concentration
+of the language are here one with the ardent immediate apprehensions
+of his spirit.
+
+One of the literary merits of the "Provincial Letters" is that they
+are really like letters; they are essentially a conversation by
+writing with other persons.  What we have in the "Thoughts" is the
+conversation of the writer with himself, with himself and with God,
+or rather concerning Him, for He is, in Pascal's favourite phrase
+from the Vulgate, Deus absconditus, He who never directly shows
+Himself.  Choses de coeur the "Thoughts" are, indeed those of an
+individual, though they seem to have determined the very outlines of
+a great subject for all other persons.  In Pascal, at the summit of
+the Puy de Dôme in his native Auvergne, experimenting on the weight
+of the invisible air, proving it to be ever all around by its
+effects, we are presented with one of the more pleasing [76] aspects
+of his earlier, more wholesome, open-air life.  In the great work of
+which the "Thoughts" are the first head, Pascal conceived himself to
+be doing something of the same kind in the spiritual order by a
+demonstration of this other invisible world all around us, with its
+really ponderable forces, its movement, its attractions and
+repulsions, the world of grace, unseen, but, as he thinks, the one
+only hypothesis that can explain the experienced, admitted facts.
+Whether or not he was fixing permanently in the "Pensées" the
+outlines, the principles, of a great system of assent, of conviction,
+for acceptance by the intellect, he was certainly fixing these with
+all the imaginative depth and sufficiency of Shakespeare himself, the
+fancied opposites, the attitudes, the necessary forms of pathos,+ of a
+great tragedy in the heart, the soul, the essential human tragedy, as
+typical and central in its expression here, as Hamlet--what the  soul
+passes, and must pass, through, aux abois with nothingness, or with
+those offended mysterious powers that may really occupy it--or when
+confronted with the thought of what are called the "four last things"
+it yields this way or that.  What might have passed with all its
+fiery ways for an esprit de secte et de cabale is now revealed amid
+the disputes not of a single generation but of eternal ones, by the
+light of a phenomenal storm of blinding and blasting inspirations.
+
+[77] Observe, he is not a sceptic converted, a returned infidel, but
+is seen there as if at the very centre of a perpetually maintained
+tragic crisis holding the faith steadfastly, but amid the well-poised
+points of essential doubt all around him and it.  It is no mere calm
+supersession of a state of doubt by a state of faith; the doubts
+never die, they are only just kept down in a perpetual agonia.
+Everywhere in the "Letters" he had seemed so great a master--a master
+of himself--never at a loss, taking the conflict so lightly, with so
+light a heart: in the great Atlantean travail of the "Thoughts" his
+feet sometimes "are almost gone."  In his soul's agony, theological
+abstractions seem to become personal powers.  It was as if just below
+the surface of the green undulations, the stately woods, of his own
+strange country of Auvergne, the volcanic fires had suddenly
+discovered themselves anew.  In truth into his typical diagnosis, as
+it may seem, of the tragedy of the human soul, there have passed not
+merely the personal feelings, the temperament of an individual, but
+his malady also, a physical malady.  Great genius, we know, has the
+power of elevating, transmuting, serving itself by the accidental
+conditions about it, however unpromising--poverty, and the like.  It
+was certainly so with Pascal's long-continued physical sufferings.
+That aigreur, which is part of the native colour of Pascal's genius,
+is reinforced in the [78] "Pensées" by insupportable languor,
+alternating with supportable pain, as he died little by little
+through the eight years of their composition.  They are essentially
+the utterance of a soul malade--a soul of great genius, whose malady
+became a new quality of that genius, perfecting it thus, by its very
+defect, as a type on the intellectual stage, and thereby guiding,
+reassuring sympathetically, manning by a sense of good company that
+large class of persons who are malade in the same way.  "La maladie
+est l'état naturel des Chrétiens," says Pascal himself.  And we
+concede that every one of us more or less is ailing thus, as another
+has told us that life itself is a disease of the spirit.
+
+From Port-Royal also came, about the year 1670, a painful book, the
+"Life of Pascal," a portrait painted slowly from the life or living
+death, but with an almost exclusive preference for traits expressive
+of disease.  The post-mortem examination of Pascal's brain revealed,
+we are now told, the secret, not merely of that long prostration,
+those sudden passing torments, but of something analogous to them in
+Pascal's genius and work.  Well! the light cast indirectly on the
+literary work of Pascal by Mme. Périer's "Life" is of a similar kind.
+It is a veritable chapter in morbid pathology, though it may have
+truly a beauty for experts, the beauty which belongs to all refined
+cases even of cerebral disturbance.  That he should [79] have sought
+relief from his singular wretchedness, in that sombre company, is
+like the second stroke of tragedy upon him.  At moments Pascal
+becomes almost a sectarian, and seems to pass out of the genial broad
+heaven of the Catholic Church.  He had lent himself in those last
+years to a kind of pieties which do not make a winning picture, which
+always have about them, even when they show themselves in men
+physically strong, something of the small compass of the sick-
+chamber.  His medieval or oriental self-tortures, all the painful
+efforts at absolute detachment, a perverse asceticism taking all
+there still was to spare from the denuded and suffering body, might
+well, you may think, have died with him, but are here recorded,
+chiefly by way of showing the world, the Jesuits, that the
+Jansenists, too, had a saint quite after their mind.
+
+But though, at first sight, you may find a pettiness in those minute
+pieties, they have their signification as a testimony to the
+wholeness of Pascal's assent, the entirety of his submission, his
+immense sincerity, the heroic grandeur of his achieved faith.  The
+seventeenth century presents survivals of the gloomy mental habits of
+the Middle Age, but for the most part of a somewhat theatrical kind,
+imitations of Francis and Dominic or of their earlier imitators.  In
+Pascal they are original, and have all their seriousness.  Que je
+n'en sois [80] jamais séparé--pas séparé éternellement, he repeats,
+or makes that strange sort of MS. amulet, of which his sister tells
+us, repeat for him.  Cast me not away from Thy presence; and take not
+Thy Holy Spirit from me.  It is table rase he is trying to make of
+himself, that He might reign there absolutely alone, who, however, as
+he was bound to think, had made and blest all those things he
+declined to accept.  Deeper and deeper, then, he retreated into the
+renuncient life.  He could not, had he wished, deprive himself of
+that his greatest gift--literally a gift he might have thought it not
+to be buried but accounted for--the gift of le beau dire, of writing
+beautifully.  "Il avoit renoncé depuis longtemps aux sciences
+purement humains."  To him who had known them so well, and as if by
+intuition, those abstract and perdurable forms of service might well
+have seemed a part of "the Lord's doing, marvellous in our eyes," as
+his favourite Psalm cxix., the psalm des petites heures, the cxviii.
+of the Vulgate, says.*  These, too, he counts now as but a variety of
+le néant and vanity of things.  He no longer records, therefore, the
+mathematical aperçus that may visit him; and in his scruples, his
+suspicions of' visible beauty, he interests us as precisely an
+inversion of what is called the aesthetic life.
+
+[81] Yet his faith, as in the days of the Middle Age, had been
+supported, rewarded, by what he believed to be visible miracle among
+the strange lights and shades of that retired place.  Pascal's niece,
+the daughter of Madame Périer, a girl ten years of age, suffered from
+a disease of the eyes pronounced to be incurable.  The disease was a
+peculiarly distressing one, the sort of affliction which, falling on
+a young child, may lead one to question the presence of divine
+justice in the world, makes one long that miracles were possible.
+Well!  Pascal, for one, believed that on occasion that profound
+aspiration had been followed up by the power desired.  A thorn from
+the crown of Jesus, as was believed, had been lately brought to the
+Port-Royal du Faubourg S. Jacques in Paris, and was one day applied
+devoutly to the eye of the suffering child.  What followed was an
+immediate and complete cure, fully attested by experts.  Ah!  Thou
+hast given him his heart's desire: and hast not denied him the
+request of his lips.  Pascal, and the young girl herself, faithfully
+to the end of a long life, believed the circumstances to have been
+miraculous.  Otherwise, we do not see that Pascal was ever permitted
+to enjoy (so to speak) the religion for which he had exchanged so
+much; that the sense of acceptance, of assurance, had come to him;
+that for him the Spouse had ever penetrated the veil of the ordinary
+routine of the means of grace; [82] nothing that corresponded as a
+matter of clear personal intercourse of the very senses to the
+greatness of his surrender--who had emptied himself of all other
+things.  Besides, there was some not wholly-explained delay in his
+reception, in those his last days, of the Sacrament.  It was brought
+to him just in time--"Voici celui que vous avez tant désiré!"--the
+ministrant says to the dying man.  Pascal was then aged thirty-nine--
+an age you may remember fancifully noted as fatal to genius.
+
+Pascal's "Thoughts," then, we shall not rightly measure but as the
+outcome, the utterance, of a soul diseased, a soul permanently ill at
+ease.  We find in their constant tension something of insomnia, of
+that sleeplessness which can never be a quite healthful condition of
+mind in a human body.  Sometimes they are cries, cries of obscure
+pain rather than thoughts--those great fine sayings which seem to
+betray by their depth of sound the vast unseen hollow places of
+nature, of humanity, just beneath one's feet or at one's side.
+Reading them, so modern still are those thoughts, so rich and various
+in suggestion, that one seems to witness the mental seed-sowing of
+the next two centuries, and perhaps more, as to those matters with
+which he concerns himself.  Intuitions of a religious genius, they
+may well be taken also as the final considerations of the natural
+man, as a religious inquirer on doubt and faith, and their place in
+[83] things.  Listen now to some of these "Thoughts" taken at random:
+taken at first for their brevity.  Peu de chose nous console, parce
+que peu de chose nous afflige.  Par l'espace l'univers me comprend et
+m'engloutit comme un point: par la pensée je le comprends.  Things
+like these put us en route with Pascal.  Toutes les bonnes maximes
+sont dans le monde: on ne manque que de les appliquer.  The great
+ascetic was always hard on amusements, on mere pastimes: Le
+divertissement nous amuse, one and all of us, et nous fait arriver
+insensiblement à la mort.  Nous perdons encore la vie avec joie,
+pourvu qu'on en parle.  On ne peut faire une bonne physionomie (in a
+portrait) qu'en accordant toutes nos contrariétés.  L'homme n'est
+qu'un roseau, le plus foible de la nature, mais c'est un roseau
+pensant.  Il ne faut pas que l'univers entier s'arme pour l'écraser.
+Une vapeur, une goutte d'eau, suffit pour le tuer.  Mais quand
+l'univers l'écraseroit, l'homme seroit encore plus noble que se qui
+le tue, parce qu'il sait qu'il meurt, et l'avantage que l'univers a
+sur lui, l'univers n'en sait rien.  It is not thought by which that
+excels, but the convincing force of imagination which sublimates its
+very triteness.  Toute notre dignité consiste donc en la pensée.
+
+There, then, you have at random the sort of stuff of which the
+"Pensees" are made.  Let me now briefly indicate, also by quotation
+again, some of the main leading tendencies in them.  La chose la plus
+importante à toute la vie c'est la [84] choix du métier: le hasard en
+dispose.  There we recognise the manner of thought of Montaigne.  Now
+one of the leading interests in the study of Pascal is to trace the
+influence upon him of the typical sceptic of the preceding century.
+Pascal's "Thoughts" we shall never understand unless we realise the
+under-texture in them of Montaigne's very phrases, the fascination
+the "Essays" had for Pascal in his capacity of one of the children of
+light, as giving a veritable compte rendu of the Satanic course of
+this world since the Fall, set forth with all the persuasiveness, the
+power and charm, all the gifts of Satan, the veritable light on
+things he has at his disposal.
+
+Pascal re-echoes Montaigne then in asserting the paradoxical
+character of man and his experience.  The old headings under which
+the Port-Royalist editors grouped the "Thoughts" recall the titles of
+Montaigne's "Essays"--"Of the Disproportion of Man," and the like. As
+strongly as Montaigne he delights in asserting the relative, local,
+ephemeral and merely provisional character of our ideas of law, vice,
+virtue, happiness, and so forth.  Comme la mode fait l'agrément aussi
+fait-elle la justice.  La justice et la vérité sont deux pointes si
+subtiles, que nos instruments sont trop mousses pour y toucher
+exactement.  Bien suivant la seule raison n'est juste de soi: tout
+branle avec le temps.  Sometimes he strikes the express accent of
+Montaigne: Ceux qui sont dans un vaisseau croient que ceux qui sont
+[85] au bord fuient.  Le langage est pareil de tous côtés.  Il faut
+avoir un point fixe pour en juger.  Le port juge ceux qui sont dans
+un vaisseau, mais où prendrons-nous un port dans la morale?  At times
+he seems to forget that he himself and Montaigne are after all not of
+the same flock, as his mind grazes in those pleasant places.  Qu'il
+(man) se regarde comme égaré dans ce canton détourné de la nature, et
+de ce petit cachot où il se trouve logé, qu'il apprenne the earth, et
+soi-même à son juste prix.  Il ffre, mais elle est ployable à tous
+sens; et ainsi il n'y en a point.  Un même sens change selon les
+paroles qui l'expriment.  He has touches even of what he calls the
+malignity, the malign irony of Montaigne.  Rien que la médiocrité
+n'est bon, he says,--épris des hauteurs, as he so conspicuously was--
+C'est sortir de l'humanité que de sortir du milieu; la grandeur de
+l'âme humaine consiste à savoir s'y tenir.  Rien ne fortifie plus le
+pyrrhonisme--that is ever his word for scepticism--que ce qu'il y en
+a qui ne sont pas pyrrhoniens: si tous étaient ils auraient tort.
+You may even credit him, like Montaigne, with a somewhat Satanic
+intimacy with the ways, the cruel ways, the weakness, lâcheté, of the
+human heart, so that, as he says of Montaigne, himself too might be a
+pernicious study for those who have a native tendency to corruption.
+
+The paradoxical condition of the world, the natural inconsistency of
+man, his strange [86] blending of meanness with ancient greatness,
+the caprices of his status here, of his power and attainments, in the
+issue of his existence--that is what the study of Montaigne had
+enforced on Pascal as the sincere compte rendu of experience.  But
+then he passes at a tangent from the circle of the great sceptic's
+apprehension.  That prospect of man and the world, undulant,
+capricious, inconsistent, contemptible, lâche, full of contradiction,
+with a soul of evil in things good, irreducible to law, upon which,
+after all, Montaigne looks out with a complacency so entire, fills
+Pascal with terror.  It is the world on the morrow of a great
+catastrophe, the casual forces of which have by no means spent
+themselves.  Yes! this world we see, of which we are a part, with its
+thousand dislocations, is precisely what we might expect as resultant
+from the Fall of Man, with consequences in full working still.  It
+presents the appropriate aspect of a lost world, though with beams of
+redeeming grace about it, those, too, distributed somewhat
+capriciously to chosen people and elect souls, who, after all, can
+have but an ill time of it here.  Under the tragic éclairs of divine
+wrath essentially implacable, the gentle, pleasantly undulating,
+sunny, earthly prospect of poor loveable humanity which opens out for
+one in Montaigne's "Essays," becomes for Pascal a scene of harsh
+precipices, of threatening heights and depths--the depths of his own
+nothingness.  Vanity: nothingness: these [87] are his catchwords:
+Nous sommes incapables et du vrai et du bien; nous sommes tous
+condamnés.  Ce qui y paraît (i.e., what we see in the world) ne
+marque ni une exclusion totale ni une présence manifeste de divinité,
+mais la présence d'un Dieu qui se cache: (Deus absconditus, that is a
+recurrent favourite thought of his) tout porte ce caractère.  In this
+world of abysmal dilemmas, he is ready to push all things to their
+extremes.  All or nothing; for him real morality will be nothing
+short of sanctity.  En Jésus Christ toutes les contradictions sont
+accordées.  Yet what difficulties again in the religion of Christ!
+Nulle autre religion n'a proposé de se haïr.  La seule religion
+contraire à la nature, contraire au sens commun, est la seule qui ait
+toujours été.
+
+Multitudes in every generation have felt at least the aesthetic charm
+of the rites of the Catholic Church.  For Pascal, on the other hand,
+a certain weariness, a certain puerility, a certain unprofitableness
+in them is but an extra trial of faith.  He seems to have little
+sense of the beauty of holiness.  And for his sombre, trenchant,
+precipitous philosophy there could be no middle terms; irresistible
+election, irresistible reprobation; only sometimes extremes meet, and
+again it may be the trial of faith that the justified seem as
+loveless and unlovely as the reprobate.  Abêtissez-vous!  A nature,
+you may think, that would magnify things to the utmost, nurse, expand
+them beyond their natural bounds by his [88] reflex action upon them.
+Thus revelation is to be received on evidence, indeed, but an
+evidence conclusive only on a presupposition or series of
+presuppositions, evidence that is supplemented by an act of
+imagination, or by the grace of faith, shall we say?  At any rate,
+the fact is, that the genius of the great reasoner, of this great
+master of the abstract and deductive sciences, turned theologian,
+carrying the methods of thought there formed into the things of
+faith, was after all of the imaginative order.  Now hear what he says
+of imagination: Cette faculté trompeuse, qui semble nous être donnée
+exprès pour nous induire à une erreur nécessaire.  That has a sort of
+necessity in it.  What he says has again the air of Montaigne, and he
+says much of the same kind: Cette superbe puissance ennemie de la
+raison, combien toutes les richesses de la terre sont insuffisantes
+sans son consentement.  The imagination has the disposition of all
+things: Elle fait la beauté, la justice, et le bonheur, qui est le
+tout du monde.  L'imagination dispose de tout.  And what we have here
+to note is its extraordinary power in himself.  Strong in him as the
+reasoning faculty, so to speak, it administered the reasoning faculty
+in him à son grbut he was unaware of it, that power d'autant plus
+fourbe qu'elle ne l'est pas toujours.  Hidden under the apparent
+rigidity of his favourite studies, imagination, even in them, played
+a large part.  Physics, mathematics were with him largely matters of
+intuition, anticipation, [89] precocious discovery, short cuts,
+superb guessing.  It was the inventive element in his work and his
+way of putting things that surprised those best able to judge.  He
+might have discovered the mathematical sciences for himself, it is
+alleged, had his father, as he once had a mind to do, withheld him
+from instruction in them.
+
+About the time when he was bidding adieu to the world, Pascal had an
+accident.  As he drove round a corner on the Seine side to cross the
+bridge at Neuilly, the horses were precipitated down the bank into
+the water.  Pascal escaped, but with a nervous shock, a certain
+hallucination, from which he never recovered.  As he walked or sat he
+was apt to perceive a yawning depth beside him; would set stick or
+chair there to reassure himself.  We are now told, indeed, that that
+circumstance has been greatly exaggerated.  But how true to Pascal's
+temper, as revealed in his work, that alarmed precipitous character
+in it!  Intellectually the abyss was evermore at his side.  Nous
+avons, he observes, un autre principe d'erreur, les maladies.  Now in
+him the imagination itself was like a physical malady, troubling,
+disturbing, or in active collusion with it.  .  .  .
+
+NOTES
+
+62. *Published in the Contemporary Review, Feb. 1895, and now
+reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.
+
+76. +Transliteration: pathos.
+
+80. *The words here cited are, however, from Psalm cxviii., the
+cxvii. of the Vulgate, and not from Pascal's favourite Psalm.
+(C.L.S.)  +C.L.S. stands for Charles Shadwell, editor of the original
+volume.
+
+
+
+ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY*
+
+[90] TITIAN, as we see him in what some have thought his noblest
+work, the large altar-piece, dated 1522, his forty-fifth year, of SS.
+Nazaro e Celso, at Brescia, is certainly a religious--a great,
+religious painter.  The famous Gabriel of the Annunciation, aflight,
+in all the effortless energy of an angel indeed, and Sebastian,
+adapted, it was said, from an ancient statue, yet as novel in design
+as if Titian had been the first to handle that so familiar figure in
+old religious art--may represent for us a vast and varied amount of
+work--in which he expands to their utmost artistic compass the
+earlier religious dreams of Mantegna and the Bellini, affording
+sufficient proof how sacred themes could rouse his imagination, and
+all his manual skill, to heroic efforts.  But he is also the painter
+of the Venus of the Tribune and the Triumph of Bacchus; and such
+frank acceptance of the voluptuous paganism of the Renaissance, the
+motive of a large proportion of his work, [91] might make us think
+that religion, grandly dramatic as was his conception of it, can have
+been for him only one of many pictorial attitudes.  There are however
+painters of that date who, while their work is great enough to be
+connected (perhaps groundlessly) with Titian's personal influence, or
+directly attributed to his hand, possess at least this psychological
+interest, that about their religiousness there can be no question.
+Their work is to be looked for mainly in and about the two sub-alpine
+towns of Brescia and Bergamo; in the former of which it becomes
+definable as a school--the school of Moretto, in whom the perfected
+art of the later Renaissance is to be seen in union with a
+catholicism as convinced, towards the middle of the sixteenth
+century, as that of Giotto or Angelico.
+
+Moretto of Brescia, for instance, is one of the few painters who have
+fully understood the artistic opportunities of the subject of Saint
+Paul, for whom, for the most part, art has found only the
+conventional trappings of a Roman soldier (a soldier, as being in
+charge of those prisoners to Damascus), or a somewhat commonplace old
+age.  Moretto also makes him a nobly accoutred soldier--the rim of
+the helmet, thrown backward in his fall to the earth, rings the head
+already with a faint circle of glory--but a soldier still in
+possession of all those resources of unspoiled youth which he is
+ready to offer in a [92] moment to the truth that has just dawned
+visibly upon him.  The terrified horse, very grandly designed, leaps
+high against the suddenly darkened sky above the distant horizon of
+Damascus, with all Moretto's peculiar understanding of the power of
+black and white.  But what signs the picture inalienably as Moretto's
+own is the thought of the saint himself, at the moment of his
+recovery from the stroke of Heaven.  The pure, pale, beardless face,
+in noble profile, might have had for its immediate model some
+military monk of a later age, yet it breathes all the joy and
+confidence of the Apostle who knows in a single flash of time that he
+has found the veritable captain of his soul.  It is indeed the Paul
+whose genius of conviction has so greatly moved the minds of men--the
+soldier who, bringing his prisoners "bound to Damascus," is become
+the soldier of Jesus Christ.
+
+Moretto's picture has found its place (in a dark recess, alas!) in
+the Church of Santa Maria presso San Celso, in the suburbs of Milan,
+hard by the site of the old Roman cemetery, where Ambrose, at a
+moment when in one of his many conflicts a "sign" was needed, found
+the bodies of Nazarus and Celsus, youthful patrician martyrs in the
+reign of Nero, overflowing now with miraculous powers, their blood
+still fresh upon them--conspersa recenti sanguine.  The body of Saint
+Nazarus he removed into the city: that of Saint Celsus remained
+within the little sanctuary [93] which still bears his name, and
+beside which, in the fifteenth century, arose the glorious Church of
+the Madonna, with spacious atrium after the Ambrosian manner, a
+façade richly sculptured in the style of the Renaissance, and
+sumptuously adorned within.  Behind the massive silver tabernacle of
+the altar of the miraculous picture which gave its origin to this
+splendid building, the rare visitor, peeping as into some sacred
+bird-nest, detects one of the loveliest works of Luini, a small, but
+exquisitely finished "Holy Family."  Among the fine pictures around
+are works by two other very notable religious painters of the cinque-
+cento.  Both alike, Ferrari and Borgognone, may seem to have
+introduced into fiery Italian latitudes a certain northern
+temperature, and somewhat twilight, French, or Flemish, or German,
+thoughts.  Ferrari, coming from the neighbourhood of Varallo, after
+work at Vercelli and Novara, returns thither to labour, as both
+sculptor and painter, in the "stations" of the Sacro Monte, at a form
+of religious art which would seem to have some natural kinship with
+the temper of a mountain people.  It is as if the living actors in
+the "Passion Play" of Oberammergau had been transformed into almost
+illusive groups in painted terra-cotta.  The scenes of the Last
+Supper, of the Martyrdom of the Innocents, of the Raising of Jairus'
+daughter, for instance, are certainly touching in the naïve piety of
+their life-sized realism.  But Gaudenzio Ferrari had many [94]
+helpmates at the Sacro Monte; and his lovelier work is in the
+Franciscan Church at the foot of the hill, and in those two, truly
+Italian, far-off towns of the Lombard plain.  Even in his great,
+many-storied fresco in the Franciscan Church at Varallo there are
+traces of a somewhat barbaric hankering after solid form; the armour
+of the Roman soldiers, for example, is raised and gilt.  It is as if
+this serious soul, going back to his mountain home, had lapsed again
+into mountain "grotesque," with touches also, in truth, of a
+peculiarly northern poetry--a mystic poetry, which now and again, in
+his treatment, for instance, of angel forms and faces, reminds one of
+Blake.  There is something of it certainly in the little white
+spectral soul of the penitent thief making its escape from the
+dishonoured body along the beam of his cross.
+
+The contrast is a vigorous one when, in the space of a few hours, the
+traveller finds himself at Vercelli, half-stifled in its thick
+pressing crop of pumpkins and mulberry trees.  The expression of the
+prophet occurs to him: "A lodge in a garden of cucumbers."  Garden of
+cucumbers and half-tropical flowers, it has invaded the quiet open
+spaces of the town.  Search through them, through the almost
+cloistral streets, for the Church of the Umiliati; and there, amid
+the soft garden-shadows of the choir, you may find the sentiment of
+the neighbourhood expressed with great refinement in what is perhaps
+[95] the masterpiece of Ferrari, "Our Lady of the Fruit-garden," as
+we might say--attended by twelve life-sized saints and the monkish
+donors of the picture.  The remarkable proportions of the tall panel,
+up which the green-stuff is climbing thickly above the mitres and
+sacred garniture of those sacred personages, lend themselves
+harmoniously to the gigantic stature of Saint Christopher in the
+foreground as the patron saint of the church.  With the savour of
+this picture in his memory, the visitor will look eagerly in some
+half-dozen neighbouring churches and deserted conventual places for
+certain other works from Ferrari's hand; and so, leaving the place
+under the influence of his delicate religious ideal, may seem to have
+been listening to much exquisite church-music there, violins and the
+like, on that perfectly silent afternoon--such music as he may still
+really hear on Sundays at the neighbouring town of Novara, famed for
+it from of old.  Here, again, the art of Gaudenzio Ferrari reigns.
+Gaudenzio!  It is the name of the saintly prelate on whom his pencil
+was many times employed, First Bishop of Novara, and patron of the
+magnificent basilica hard by which still covers his body, whose
+earthly presence in cope and mitre Ferrari has commemorated in the
+altar-piece of the "Marriage of St. Catherine," with its refined
+richness of colour, like a bank of real flowers blooming there, and
+like nothing else around it in the [96] vast duomo of old Roman
+architecture, now heavily masked in modern stucco.  The solemn
+mountains, under the closer shadow of which his genius put on a
+northern hue, are far away, telling at Novara only as the grandly
+theatrical background to an entirely lowland life.  And here, as at
+Vercelli so at Novara, Ferrari is not less graciously Italian than
+Luini himself.
+
+If the name of Luini's master, Borgognone, is no proof of northern
+extraction, a northern temper is nevertheless a marked element of his
+genius--something of the patience, especially, of the masters of
+Dijon or Bruges, nowhere more clearly than in the two groups of male
+and female heads in the National Gallery, family groups, painted in
+the attitude of worship, with a lowly religious sincerity which may
+remind us of the contemporary work of M. Legros.  Like those northern
+masters, he accepts piously, but can refine, what "has no
+comeliness."  And yet perhaps no painter has so adequately presented
+that purely personal beauty (for which, indeed, even profane painters
+for the most part have seemed to care very little) as Borgognone in
+the two deacons, Stephen and Laurence, who, in one of the altar-
+pieces of the Certosa, assist at the throne of Syrus, ancient,
+sainted, First Bishop of Pavia--stately youths in quite imperial
+dalmatics of black and gold.  An indefatigable worker at many forms
+of religious art, here and elsewhere, assisting at last in the [97]
+carving and inlaying of the rich marble façade of the Certosa, the
+rich carved and inlaid wood-work of Santa Maria at Bergamo, he is
+seen perhaps at his best, certainly in his most significantly
+religious mood, in the Church of the Incoronata at Lodi, especially
+in one picture there, the "Presentation of Christ in the Temple."
+The experienced visitor knows what to expect in the sacristies of the
+great Italian churches; the smaller, choicer works of Luini, say, of
+Della Robbia or Mino of Fiesole, the superb ambries and drawers and
+presses of old oak or cedar, the still untouched morsel of fresco--
+like sacred priestly thoughts visibly lingering there in the half-
+light.  Well! the little octagonal Church of the Incoronata is like
+one of these sacristies.  The work of Bramante--you see it, as it is
+so rarely one's luck to do, with its furniture and internal
+decoration complete and unchanged, the coloured pavement, the
+colouring which covers the walls, the elegant little organ of
+Domenico da Lucca (1507), the altar-screens with their dainty rows of
+brass cherubs.  In Borgognone's picture of the "Presentation," there
+the place is, essentially as we see it to-day.  The ceremony,
+invested with all the sentiment of a Christian sacrament, takes place
+in this very church, this "Temple" of the Incoronata where you are
+standing, reflected on the dimly glorious wall, as in a mirror.
+Borgognone in his picture has [98] but added in long legend, letter
+by letter, on the fascia below the cupola, the Song of Simeon.
+
+The Incoronata however is, after all, the monument less of Ambrogio
+Borgognone than of the gifted Piazza family:--Callisto, himself born
+at Lodi, his father, his uncle, his brothers, his son Fulvio, working
+there in three generations, under marked religious influence, and
+with so much power and grace that, quite gratuitously, portions of
+their work have been attributed to the master-hand of Titian, in some
+imaginary visit here to these painters, who were in truth the
+disciples of another--Romanino of Brescia.  At Lodi, the lustre of
+Scipione Piazza is lost in that of Callisto, his elder brother; but
+he might worthily be included in a list of painters memorable for a
+single picture, such pictures as the solemn Madonna of Pierino del
+Vaga, in the Duomo of Pisa, or the Holy Family of Pellegrino Piola,
+in the Goldsmiths' Street at Genoa.  A single picture, a single
+figure in a picture, signed and dated, over the altar of Saint
+Clement, in the Church of San Spirito, at Bergamo, might preserve the
+fame of Scipione Piazza, who did not live to be old.  The figure is
+that of the youthful Clement of Rome himself, "who had seen the
+blessed Apostles," writing at the dictation of Saint Paul.  For a
+moment he looks away from the letters of the book with all the
+wistful intelligence of a boy softly touched already by the radiancy
+of the [99] celestial Wisdom.  "Her ways are ways of pleasantness!"
+That is the lesson this winsome, docile, spotless creature--ingenui
+vultus puer ingenuique pudoris--younger brother or cousin of
+Borgognone's noble deacons at the Certosa--seems put there to teach
+us.  And in this church, indeed, as it happens, Scipione's work is
+side by side with work of his.
+
+It is here, in fact, at Bergamo and at Brescia, that the late
+survival of a really convinced religious spirit becomes a striking
+fact in the history of Italian art.  Vercelli and Novara, though
+famous for their mountain neighbourhood, enjoy but a distant and
+occasional view of Monte Rosa and its companions; and even then those
+awful stairways to tracts of airy sunlight may seem hardly real.  But
+the beauty of the twin sub-alpine towns further eastward is shaped by
+the circumstance that mountain and plain meet almost in their
+streets, very effectively for all purposes of the picturesque.
+Brescia, immediately below the "Falcon of Lombardy" (so they called
+its masterful fortress on the last ledge of the Piè di Monte), to
+which you may now ascend by gentle turfed paths, to watch the purple
+mystery of evening mount gradually from the great plain up the
+mountain-walls close at hand, is as level as a church pavement, home-
+like, with a kind of easy walking from point to point about it, rare
+in Italian towns--a town full of walled gardens, giving even to [100]
+its smaller habitations the retirement of their more sumptuous
+neighbours, and a certain English air.  You may peep into them,
+pacing its broad streets, from the blaze of which you are glad to
+escape into the dim and sometimes gloomy churches, the twilight
+sacristies, rich with carved and coloured woodwork.  The art of
+Romanino still lights up one of the darkest of those churches with
+the altar-piece which is perhaps his most expressive and noblest
+work.  The veritable blue sky itself seems to be breaking into the
+dark-cornered, low-vaulted, Gothic sanctuary of the Barefoot
+Brethren, around the Virgin and Child, the bowed, adoring figures of
+Bonaventura, Saint Francis, Saint Antony, the youthful majesty of
+Saint Louis, to keep for ever in memory--not the King of France
+however, in spite of the fleurs-de-lys on his cope of azure, but
+Louis, Bishop of Toulouse.  A Rubens in Italy! you may think, if you
+care to rove from the delightful fact before you after vague
+supposititious alliances--something between Titian and Rubens!
+Certainly, Romanino's bold, contrasted colouring anticipates
+something of the northern freshness of Rubens.  But while the
+peculiarity of the work of Rubens is a sense of momentary transition,
+as if the colours were even now melting in it, Romanino's canvas
+bears rather the steady glory of broad Italian noonday; while he is
+distinguished also for a remarkable clearness of [101] design, which
+has perhaps something to do, is certainly congruous with, a markedly
+religious sentiment, like that of Angelico or Perugino, lingering
+still in the soul of this Brescian painter towards the middle of the
+sixteenth century.
+
+Romanino and Moretto, the two great masters of Brescia in successive
+generations, both alike inspired above all else by the majesty, the
+majestic beauty, of religion--its persons, its events, every
+circumstance that belongs to it--are to be seen in friendly rivalry,
+though with ten years' difference of age between them, in the Church
+of San Giovanni Evangelista; Romanino approaching there, as near as
+he might, in a certain candle-lighted scene, to that harmony in
+black, white, and grey preferred by the younger painter.  Before this
+or that example of Moretto's work, in that admirably composed picture
+of Saint Paul's Conversion, for instance, you might think of him as
+but a very noble designer in grisaille.  A more detailed study would
+convince you that, whatever its component elements, there is a very
+complex tone which almost exclusively belongs to him; the "Saint
+Ursula" finally, that he is a great, though very peculiar colourist--
+a lord of colour who, while he knows the colour resources that may
+lie even in black and white, has really included every delicate hue
+whatever in that faded "silver grey," which yet lingers in one's
+memory as their final effect.  For some admirers indeed he is
+definable [102] as a kind of really sanctified Titian.  It must be
+admitted, however, that whereas Titian sometimes lost a little of
+himself in the greatness of his designs, or committed their
+execution, in part, to others, Moretto, in his work, is always all
+there--thorough, steady, even, in his workmanship.  That, again, was
+a result of his late-surviving religious conscience.  And here, as in
+other instances, the supposed influence of the greater master is only
+a supposition.  As a matter of fact, at least in his earlier life,
+Moretto made no visit to Venice; developed his genius at home, under
+such conditions for development as were afforded by the example of
+the earlier masters of Brescia itself; left his work there
+abundantly, and almost there alone, as the thoroughly representative
+product of a charming place.  In the little Church of San Clemente he
+is still "at home" to his lovers; an intimately religious artist,
+full of cheerfulness, of joy.  Upon the airy galleries of his great
+altar-piece, the angels dance against the sky above the Mother and
+the Child; Saint Clement, patron of the church, being attendant in
+pontifical white, with Dominic, Catherine, the Magdalen, and good,
+big-faced Saint Florian in complete armour, benign and strong.  He
+knows many a saint not in the Roman breviary.  Was there a single
+sweet-sounding name without its martyr patron?  Lucia, Agnes, Agatha,
+Barbara, Cecilia--holy women, dignified, high-bred, intelligent--
+[103] have an altar of their own; and here, as in that festal high
+altar-piece, the spectator may note yet another artistic alliance,
+something of the pale effulgence of Correggio--an approach, at least,
+to that peculiar treatment of light and shade, and a pre-occupation
+with certain tricks therein of nature itself, by which Correggio
+touches Rembrandt on the one hand, Da Vinci on the other.  Here, in
+Moretto's work, you may think that manner more delightful, perhaps
+because more refined, than in Correggio himself.  Those pensive,
+tarnished, silver side-lights, like mere reflexions of natural
+sunshine, may be noticed indeed in many another painter of that day,
+in Lanini, for instance, at the National Gallery.  In his "Nativity"
+at the Brera, Procaccini of Verona almost anticipates Correggio's
+Heilige Nacht.  It is, in truth, the first step in the decomposition
+of light, a touch of decadence, of sunset, along the whole horizon of
+North-Italian art.  It is, however, as the painter of the white-
+stoled Ursula and her companions that the great master of Brescia is
+most likely to remain in the memory of the visitor; with this fact,
+above all, clearly impressed on it, that Moretto had attained full
+intelligence of all the pictorial powers of white.  In the clearness,
+the cleanliness, the hieratic distinction, of this earnest and
+deeply-felt composition, there is something "pre-Raphaelite"; as also
+in a certain liturgical formality in the grouping of the virgins--the
+[104] looks, "all one way," of the closely-ranged faces; while in the
+long folds of the drapery we may see something of the severe grace of
+early Tuscan sculpture--something of severity in the long, thin,
+emphatic shadows.  For the light is high, as with the level lights of
+early morning, the air of which ruffles the banners borne by Ursula
+in her two hands, her virgin companions laying their hands also upon
+the tall staves, as if taking share, with a good will, in her self-
+dedication, with all the hazard of battle.  They bring us,
+appropriately, close to the grave of this manly yet so virginal
+painter, born in the year 1500, dead at forty-seven.
+
+Of Moretto and Romanino, whose works thus light up, or refine, the
+dark churches of Brescia and its neighbourhood, Romanino is scarcely
+to be seen beyond it.  The National Gallery, however, is rich in
+Moretto's work, with two of his rare poetic portraits; and if the
+large altar-picture would hardly tell his secret to one who had not
+studied him at Brescia, in those who already know him it will awake
+many a reminiscence of his art at its best.  The three white mitres,
+for instance, grandly painted towards the centre of the picture, at
+the feet of Saint Bernardino of Siena--the three bishoprics refused
+by that lowly saint--may remind one of the great white mitre which,
+in the genial picture of Saint Nicholas, in the Miracoli at Brescia,
+one of the children, who as delightfully+ [105] unconventional
+acolytes accompany their beloved patron into the presence of the
+Madonna, carries along so willingly, laughing almost, with pleasure
+and pride, at his part in so great a function.  In the altar-piece at
+the National Gallery those white mitres form the key-note from which
+the pale, cloistral splendours of the whole picture radiate.  You see
+what a wealth of enjoyable colour Moretto, for one, can bring out of
+monkish habits in themselves sad enough, and receive a new lesson in
+the artistic value of reserve.
+
+Rarer still (the single work of Romanino, it is said, to be seen out
+of Italy) is the elaborate composition in five parts on the opposite
+side of the doorway.  Painted for the high-altar of one of the many
+churches of Brescia, it seems to have passed into secular hands about
+a century ago.  Alessandro, patron of the church, one of the many
+youthful patrician converts Italy reveres from the ranks of the Roman
+army, stands there on one side, with ample crimson banner superbly
+furled about his lustrous black armour, and on the other--Saint
+Jerome, Romanino's own namesake--neither more nor less than the
+familiar, self-tormenting anchorite; for few painters (Bellini, to
+some degree, in his picture of the saint's study) have perceived the
+rare pictorial opportunities of Jerome; Jerome with the true cradle
+of the Lord, first of Christian antiquaries, author of the fragrant
+Vulgate version of the [106] Scriptures.  Alessandro and Jerome
+support the Mother and the Child in the central place.  But the
+loveliest subjects of this fine group of compositions are in the
+corners above, half-length, life-sized figures--Gaudioso, Bishop of
+Brescia, above Saint Jerome; above Alessandro, Saint Filippo Benizzi,
+meek founder of the Order of Servites to which that church at Brescia
+belonged, with his lily, and in the right hand a book; and what a
+book!  It was another very different painter, Giuseppe Caletti, of
+Cremona, who, for the truth and beauty of his drawing of them, gained
+the title of the "Painter of Books."  But if you wish to see what can
+be made of the leaves, the vellum cover, of a book, observe that in
+Saint Philip's hand.--The writer? the contents? you ask: What may
+they be? and whence did it come?--out of embalmed sacristy, or
+antique coffin of some early Brescian martyr, or, through that bright
+space of blue Italian sky, from the hands of an angel, like his
+Annunciation lily, or the book received in the Apocalypse by John the
+Divine?  It is one of those old saints, Gaudioso (at home in every
+church in Brescia), who looks out with full face from the opposite
+corner of the altar-piece, from a background which, though it might
+be the new heaven over a new earth, is in truth only the proper,
+breathable air of Italy.  As we see him here, Saint Gaudioso is one
+of the more exquisite treasures of our National Gallery.  It was thus
+that at the magic [107] touch of Romanino's art the dim, early,
+hunted-down Brescian church of the primitive centuries, crushed into
+the dust, it might seem, was "brought to her king," out of those old
+dark crypts, "in raiment of needle-work"--the delicate, richly
+folded, pontifical white vestments, the mitre and staff and gloves,
+and rich jewelled cope, blue or green.  The face, of remarkable
+beauty after a type which all feel though it is actually rare in art,
+is probably a portrait of some distinguished churchman of Romanino's
+own day; a second Gaudioso, perhaps, setting that later Brescian
+church to rights after the terrible French occupation in the
+painter's own time, as his saintly predecessor, the Gaudioso of the
+earlier century here commemorated, had done after the invasion of the
+Goths.  The eloquent eyes are open upon some glorious vision.  "He
+hath made us kings and priests!" they seem to say for him, as the
+clean, sensitive lips might do so eloquently.  Beauty and Holiness
+had "kissed each other," as in Borgognone's imperial deacons at the
+Certosa.  At the Renaissance the world might seem to have parted them
+again.  But here certainly, once more, Catholicism and the
+Renaissance, religion and culture, holiness and beauty, might seem
+reconciled, by one who had conceived neither after any feeble way, in
+a gifted person.  Here at least, by the skill of Romanino's hand, the
+obscure martyr of the crypts shines as a [108] saint of the later
+Renaissance, with a sanctity of which the elegant world itself would
+hardly escape the fascination, and which reminds one how the great
+Apostle Saint Paul has made courtesy part of the content of the
+Divine charity itself.  A Rubens in Italy!--so Romanino has been
+called.  In this gracious presence we might think that, like Rubens
+also, he had been a courtier.
+
+NOTES
+
+90. *Published in the New Review, Nov. 1890, and now reprinted by the
+kind permission of the proprietors.
+
+
+
+NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS*
+
+[109] THE greatest and purest of Gothic churches, Notre-Dame
+d'Amiens, illustrates, by its fine qualities, a characteristic
+secular movement of the beginning of the thirteenth century.
+Philosophic writers of French history have explained how, in that and
+in the two preceding centuries, a great number of the more important
+towns in eastern and northern France rose against the feudal
+establishment, and developed severally the local and municipal life
+of the commune.  To guarantee their independence therein they
+obtained charters from their formal superiors.  The Charter of Amiens
+served as the model for many other communes.  Notre-Dame d'Amiens is
+the church of a commune.  In that century of Saint Francis, of Saint
+Louis, they were still religious.  But over against monastic
+interests, as identified with a central authority--king, emperor, or
+pope--they pushed forward the local, and, so to call it, secular
+authority of their [110] bishops, the flower of the "secular clergy"
+in all its mundane astuteness, ready enough to make their way as the
+natural Protectors of such townships.  The people of Amiens, for
+instance, under a powerful episcopal patron, invested their civic
+pride in a vast cathedral, outrivalling neighbours, as being in
+effect their parochial church, and promoted there the new,
+revolutionary, Gothic manner, at the expense of the derivative and
+traditional, Roman or Romanesque, style, the imperial style, of the
+great monastic churches.  Nay, those grand and beautiful people's
+churches of the thirteenth century, churches pre-eminently of "Our
+Lady," concurred also with certain novel humanistic movements of
+religion itself at that period, above all with the expansion of what
+is reassuring and popular in the worship of Mary, as a tender and
+accessible, though almost irresistible, intercessor with her severe
+and awful Son.
+
+Hence the splendour, the space, the novelty, of the great French
+cathedrals in the first Pointed style, monuments for the most part of
+the artistic genius of laymen, significant pre-eminently of that
+Queen of Gothic churches at Amiens.  In most cases those early
+Pointed churches are entangled, here or there, by the constructions
+of the old round-arched style, the heavy, Norman or other, Romanesque
+chapel or aisle, side by side, though in strong contrast with, the
+soaring new Gothic of nave or transept.  But of that older [111]
+manner of the round arch, the plein-cintre, Amiens has nowhere, or
+almost nowhere, a trace.  The Pointed style, fully pronounced, but in
+all the purity of its first period, found here its completest
+expression.  And while those venerable, Romanesque, profoundly
+characteristic, monastic churches, the gregarious product of long
+centuries, are for the most part anonymous, as if to illustrate from
+the first a certain personal tendency which came in with the Gothic
+manner, we know the name of the architect under whom, in the year
+A.D. 1220, the building of the church of Amiens began--a layman,
+Robert de Luzarches.
+
+Light and space--floods of light, space for a vast congregation, for
+all the people of Amiens, for their movements, with something like
+the height and width of heaven itself enclosed above them to breathe
+in;--you see at a glance that this is what the ingenuity of the
+Pointed method of building has here secured.  For breadth, for the
+easy flow of a processional torrent, there is nothing like the
+"ambulatory," the aisle of the choir and transepts.  And the entire
+area is on one level.  There are here no flights of steps upward, as
+at Canterbury, no descending to dark crypts, as in so many Italian
+churches--a few low, broad steps to gain the choir, two or three to
+the high altar.  To a large extent the old pavement remains, though
+almost worn-out by the footsteps of centuries.  Priceless, though not
+composed of precious material, it gains its effect [112] by ingenuity
+and variety in the patterning, zig-zags, chequers, mazes, prevailing
+respectively, in white and grey, in great square, alternate spaces--
+the original floor of a medieval church for once untouched.  The
+massive square bases of the pillars of a Romanesque church, harshly
+angular, obstruct, sometimes cruelly, the standing, the movements, of
+a multitude of persons.  To carry such a multitude conveniently round
+them is the matter-of-fact motive of the gradual chiselling away, the
+softening of the angles, the graceful compassing, of the Gothic base,
+till in our own Perpendicular period it all but disappears.  You may
+study that tendency appropriately in the one church of Amiens; for
+such in effect Notre-Dame has always been.  That circumstance is
+illustrated by the great font, the oldest thing here, an oblong
+trough, perhaps an ancient saintly coffin, with four quaint prophetic
+figures at the angles, carved from a single block of stone.  To it,
+as to the baptistery of an Italian town, not so long since all the
+babes of Amiens used to come for christening.
+
+Strange as it may seem, in this "queen" of Gothic churches, l'église
+ogivale par excellence, there is nothing of mystery in the vision,
+which yet surprises, over and over again, the eye of the visitor who
+enters at the western doorway.  From the flagstone at one's foot to
+the distant keystone of the chevet, noblest of its species-- [113]
+reminding you of how many largely graceful things, sails of a ship in
+the wind, and the like!--at one view the whole is visible,
+intelligible;--the integrity of the first design; how later additions
+affixed themselves thereto; how the rich ornament gathered upon it;
+the increasing richness of the choir; its glazed triforium; the
+realms of light which expand in the chapels beyond; the astonishing
+boldness of the vault, the astonishing lightness of what keeps it
+above one; the unity, yet the variety of perspective.  There is no
+mystery here, and indeed no repose.  Like the age which projected it,
+like the impulsive communal movement which was here its motive, the
+Pointed style at Amiens is full of excitement.  Go, for repose, to
+classic work, with the simple vertical law of pressure downwards, or
+to its Lombard, Rhenish, or Norman derivatives.  Here, rather, you
+are conscious restlessly of that sustained equilibrium of oblique
+pressure on all sides, which is the essence of the hazardous Gothic
+construction, a construction of which the "flying buttress" is the
+most significant feature.  Across the clear glass of the great
+windows of the triforium you see it, feel it, at its Atlas-work
+audaciously.  "A pleasant thing it is to behold the sun" those first
+Gothic builders would seem to have said to themselves; and at Amiens,
+for instance, the walls have disappeared; the entire building is
+composed of its windows.  Those who built it [114] might have had for
+their one and only purpose to enclose as large a space as possible
+with the given material.
+
+No; the peculiar Gothic buttress, with its double, triple, fourfold
+flights, while it makes such marvels possible, securing light and
+space and graceful effect, relieving the pillars within of their
+massiveness, is not a restful architectural feature.  Consolidation
+of matter naturally on the move, security for settlement in a very
+complex system of construction--that is avowedly a part of the Gothic
+situation, the Gothic problem.  With the genius which contended,
+though not always quite successfully, with this difficult problem,
+came also novel aesthetic effect, a whole volume of delightful
+aesthetic effects.  For the mere melody of Greek architecture, for
+the sense as it were of music in the opposition of successive sounds,
+you got harmony, the richer music generated by opposition of sounds
+in one and the same moment; and were gainers.  And then, in contrast
+with the classic manner, and the Romanesque survivals from it, the
+vast complexity of the Gothic style seemed, as if consciously, to
+correspond to the richness, the expressiveness, the thousandfold
+influence of the Catholic religion, in the thirteenth century still
+in natural movement in every direction.  The later Gothic of the
+fifteenth and sixteenth centuries tended to conceal, as it now took
+for granted, the structural use of the buttress, for [115] example;
+seemed to turn it into a mere occasion for ornament, not always
+pleasantly:--while the ornament was out of place, the structure
+failed.  Such falsity is far enough away from what at Amiens is
+really of the thirteenth century.  In this pre-eminently "secular"
+church, the execution, in all the defiance of its method, is direct,
+frank, clearly apparent, with the result not only of reassuring the
+intelligence, but of keeping one's curiosity also continually on the
+alert, as we linger in these restless aisles.
+
+The integrity of the edifice, together with its volume of light, has
+indeed been diminished by the addition of a range of chapels, beyond
+the proper limits of the aisles, north and south.  Not a part of the
+original design, these chapels were formed for private uses in the
+fourteenth century, by the device of walling in and vaulting the open
+spaces between the great buttresses of the nave.  Under the broad but
+subdued sunshine which falls through range upon range of windows,
+reflected from white wall and roof and gallery, soothing to the eye,
+while it allows you to see the delicate carved work in all its
+refinement of touch, it is only as an after-thought, an artificial
+after-thought, that you regret the lost stained glass, or the
+vanished mural colour, if such to any large extent there ever were.
+The best stained glass is often that stained by weather, by centuries
+of weather, [116] and we may well be grateful for the amazing
+cheerfulness of the interior of Amiens, as we actually find it.
+Windows of the richest remain, indeed, in the apsidal chapels; and
+the rose-windows of the transepts are known, from the prevailing
+tones of their stained glass, as Fire and Water, the western rose
+symbolising in like manner Earth and Air, as respectively green and
+blue.  But there is no reason to suppose that the interior was ever
+so darkened as to prevent one's seeing, really and clearly, the
+dainty ornament, which from the first abounded here; the floriated
+architectural detail; the broad band of flowers and foliage, thick
+and deep and purely sculptured, above the arches of nave and choir
+and transepts, and wreathing itself continuously round the embedded
+piers which support the roof; with the woodwork, the illuminated
+metal, the magnificent tombs, the jewellers' work in the chapels.
+One precious, early thirteenth-century window of grisaille remains,
+exquisite in itself, interesting as evidence of the sort of
+decoration which originally filled the larger number of the windows.
+Grisaille, with its lace-work of transparent grey, set here and there
+with a ruby, a sapphire, a gemmed medallion, interrupts the clear
+light on things hardly more than the plain glass, of which indeed
+such windows are mainly composed.  The finely designed frames of iron
+for the support of the glass, in the windows from which even [117]
+this decoration is gone, still remain, to the delight of those who
+are knowing in the matter.
+
+Very ancient light, this seems, at any rate, as if it had been lying
+imprisoned thus for long centuries; were in fact the light over which
+the great vault originally closed, now become almost substance of
+thought, one might fancy,--a mental object or medium.  We are
+reminded that after all we must of necessity look on the great
+churches of the Middle Age with other eyes than those who built or
+first worshipped in them; that there is something verily worth
+having, and a just equivalent for something else lost, in the mere
+effect of time, and that the salt of all aesthetic study is in the
+question,--What, precisely what, is this to me?  You and I, perhaps,
+should not care much for the mural colouring of a medieval church,
+could we see it as it was; might think it crude, and in the way.
+What little remains of it at Amiens has parted, indeed, in the course
+of ages, with its shrillness and its coarse grain.  And in this
+matter certainly, in view of Gothic polychrome, our difference from
+the people of the thirteenth century is radical.  We have, as it was
+very unlikely they should have, a curiosity, a very pleasurable
+curiosity, in the mere working of the stone they built with, and in
+the minute facts of their construction, which their colouring, and
+the layer of plaster it involved, disguised or hid.  We may think
+that in architecture stone is the most beautiful [118] of all things.
+Modern hands have replaced the colour on some of the tombs here--the
+effigies, the tabernacles above--skilfully as may be, and have but
+deprived them of their dignity.  Medieval colouring, in fact, must
+have improved steadily, as it decayed, almost till there came to be
+no question of colour at all.  In architecture, close as it is to
+men's lives and their history, the visible result of time is a large
+factor in the realised aesthetic value, and what a true architect
+will in due measure always trust to.  A false restoration only
+frustrates the proper ripening of his work.
+
+If we may credit our modern eyes, then, those old, very secular
+builders aimed at, they achieved, an immense cheerfulness in their
+great church, with a purpose which still pursued them into their
+minuter decoration.  The conventional vegetation of the Romanesque,
+its blendings of human or animal with vegetable form, in cornice or
+capital, have given way here, in the first Pointed style, to a
+pleasanter, because more natural, mode of fancy; to veritable forms
+of vegetable life, flower or leaf, from meadow and woodside, though
+still indeed with a certain survival of the grotesque in a confusion
+of the leaf with the flower, which the subsequent Decorated period
+will wholly purge away in its perfect garden-borders.  It was not
+with monastic artists and artisans that the sheds and workshops
+around Amiens Cathedral were filled, [119] as it rose from its
+foundations through fifty years; and those lay schools of art, with
+their communistic sentiment, to which in the thirteenth century the
+great episcopal builders must needs resort, would in the natural
+course of things tend towards naturalism.  The subordinate arts also
+were no longer at the monastic stage, borrowing inspiration
+exclusively from the experiences of the cloister, but belonged to
+guilds of laymen--smiths, painters, sculptors.  The great
+confederation of the "city," the commune, subdivided itself into
+confederations of citizens.  In the natural objects of the first
+Pointed style there is the freshness as of nature itself, seen and
+felt for the first time; as if, in contrast, those older cloistral
+workmen had but fed their imagination in an embarrassed, imprisoned,
+and really decadent manner, or mere reminiscence of, or prescriptions
+about, things visible.
+
+Congruous again with the popularity of the builders of Amiens, of
+their motives, is the wealth, the freedom and abundance, of popular,
+almost secular, teaching, here afforded, in the carving especially,
+within and without; an open Bible, in place of later legend, as at
+monastic Vézelay,--the Bible treated as a book about men and women,
+and other persons equally real, but blent with lessons, with the
+liveliest observations, on the lives of men as they were then and
+now, what they do, and how they do it, or did it then, and on the
+doings of nature [120] which so greatly influence what man does;
+together with certain impressive metaphysical and moral ideas, a sort
+of popular scholastic philosophy, or as if it were the virtues and
+vices Aristotle defines, or the characters of Theophrastus,
+translated into stone.  Above all, it is to be observed that as a
+result of this spirit, this "free" spirit, in it, art has at last
+become personal.  The artist, as such, appears at Amiens, as
+elsewhere, in the thirteenth century; and, by making his personal way
+of conception and execution prevail there, renders his own work vivid
+and organic, and apt to catch the interest of other people.  He is no
+longer a Byzantine, but a Greek--an unconscious Greek.  Proof of this
+is in the famous Beau-Dieu of Amiens, as they call that benign,
+almost classically proportioned figure, on the central pillar of the
+great west doorway; though in fact neither that, nor anything else on
+the west front of Amiens, is quite the best work here.  For that we
+must look rather to the sculpture of the portal of the south
+transept, called, from a certain image there, Portail de la Vierge
+dorée, gilded at the expense of some unknown devout person at the
+beginning of the last century.  A presentation of the mystic, the
+delicately miraculous, story of Saint Honoré, eighth Bishop of
+Amiens, and his companions, with its voices, its intuitions, and
+celestial intimations, it has evoked a correspondent method of work
+at once [121] naïve and nicely expressive.  The rose, or roue, above
+it, carries on the outer rim seventeen personages, ascending and
+descending--another piece of popular philosophy--the wheel of
+fortune, or of human life.
+
+And they were great brass-founders, surely, who at that early day
+modelled and cast the tombs of the Bishops Evrard and Geoffrey, vast
+plates of massive black bronze in half-relief, like abstract thoughts
+of those grand old prelatic persons.  The tomb of Evrard, who laid
+the foundations (qui fundamenta hujus basilicae locavit), is not
+quite as it was.  Formerly it was sunk in the pavement, while the
+tomb of Bishop Geoffrey opposite (it was he closed in the mighty
+vault of the nave: hanc basilicam culmen usque perduxit), itself
+vaulted-over the space of the grave beneath.  The supreme excellence
+of those original workmen, the journeymen of Robert de Luzarches and
+his successor, would seem indeed to have inspired others, who have
+been at their best here, down to the days of Louis the Fourteenth.
+It prompted, we may think, a high level of execution, through many
+revolutions of taste in such matters; in the marvellous furniture of
+the choir, for instance, like a whole wood, say a thicket of old
+hawthorn, with its curved topmost branches spared, slowly transformed
+by the labour of a whole family of artists, during fourteen years,
+into the stalls, in number one hundred and ten, with nearly four
+[122] thousand figures.  Yet they are but on a level with the
+Flamboyant carved and coloured enclosures of the choir, with the
+histories of John the Baptist, whose face-bones are here preserved,
+and of Saint Firmin--popular saint, who protects the houses of Amiens
+from fire.  Even the screens of forged iron around the sanctuary,
+work of the seventeenth century, appear actually to soar, in their
+way, in concert with the airy Gothic structure; to let the daylight
+pass as it will; to have come, they too, from smiths, odd as it may
+seem at just that time, with some touch of inspiration in them.  In
+the beginning of the fifteenth century they had reared against a
+certain bald space of wall, between the great portal and the western
+"rose," an organ, a lofty, many-chambered, veritable house of church-
+music, rich in azure and gold, finished above at a later day, not
+incongruously, in the quaint, pretty manner of Henri-Deux.  And those
+who are interested in the curiosities of ritual, of the old
+provincial Gallican "uses," will be surprised to find one where they
+might least have expected it.  The reserved Eucharist still hangs
+suspended in a pyx, formed like a dove, in the midst of that
+lamentable "glory" of the eighteenth century in the central bay of
+the sanctuary, all the poor, gaudy, gilt rays converging towards it.
+There are days in the year in which the great church is still
+literally filled with reverent worshippers, and if you come late to
+service you push the [123] doors in vain against the closely serried
+shoulders of the good people of Amiens, one and all in black for
+church-holiday attire.  Then, one and all, they intone the Tantum
+ergo (did it ever sound so in the Middle Ages?) as the Eucharist,
+after a long procession, rises once more into its resting-place.
+
+If the Greeks, as at least one of them says, really believed there
+could be no true beauty without bigness, that thought certainly is
+most specious in regard to architecture; and the thirteenth-century
+church of Amiens is one of the three or four largest buildings in the
+world, out of all proportion to any Greek building, both in that and
+in the multitude of its external sculpture.  The chapels of the nave
+are embellished without by a double range of single figures, or
+groups, commemorative of the persons, the mysteries, to which they
+are respectively dedicated--the gigantic form of Christopher, the
+Mystery of the Annunciation.
+
+The builders of the church seem to have projected no very noticeable
+towers; though it is conventional to regret their absence, especially
+with visitors from England, where indeed cathedral and other towers
+are apt to be good, and really make their mark.  Robert de Luzarches
+and his successors aimed rather at the domical outline, with its
+central point at the centre of the church, in the spire or flèche.
+The existing spire is a wonderful mass of carpentry [124] of the
+beginning of the sixteenth century, at which time the lead that
+carefully wraps every part of it was heavily gilt.  The great western
+towers are lost in the west front, the grandest, perhaps the
+earliest, example of its species--three profound, sculptured portals;
+a double gallery above, the upper gallery carrying colossal images of
+twenty-two kings of the House of Judah, ancestors of Our Lady; then
+the great rose; above it the ringers' gallery, half masking the gable
+of the nave, and uniting at their top-most storeys the twin, but not
+exactly equal or similar, towers, oddly oblong in plan, as if never
+intended to carry pyramids or spires.  They overlook an immense
+distance in those flat, peat-digging, black and green regions, with
+rather cheerless rivers, and are the centre of an architectural
+region wider still--of a group to which Soissons, far beyond the
+woods of Compiègne, belongs, with St. Quentin, and, towards the west,
+a too ambitious rival, Beauvais, which has stood however--what we now
+see of it--for six centuries.
+
+It is a spare, rather sad world at most times that Notre-Dame
+d'Amiens thus broods over; a country with little else to be proud of;
+the sort of world, in fact, which makes the range of conceptions
+embodied in these cliffs of quarried and carved stone all the more
+welcome as a hopeful complement to the meagreness of most people's
+present existence, and its apparent ending in a [125] sparely built
+coffin under the flinty soil, and grey, driving sea-winds.  In Notre-
+Dame, therefore, and her sisters, there is not only a common method
+of construction, a single definable type, different from that of
+other French latitudes, but a correspondent common sentiment also;
+something which speaks, amid an immense achievement just here of what
+is beautiful and great, of the necessity of an immense effort in the
+natural course of things, of what you may see quaintly designed in
+one of those hieroglyphic carvings--radix de terra sitienti: "a root
+out of a dry ground."
+
+NOTES
+
+109. *Published in the Nineteenth Century, March 1894, and now
+reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.
+
+
+
+VÉZELAY*
+
+[126] As you discern the long unbroken line of its roof, low-pitched
+for France, above the cottages and willow-shaded streams of the
+place, you might think the abbey church of Pontigny, the largest
+Cistercian church now remaining, only a great farm-building.  On a
+nearer view there is something unpretending, something pleasantly
+English, in the plain grey walls, pierced with long "lancet" windows,
+as if they overlooked the lowlands of Essex, or the meadows of Kent
+or Berkshire, the sort of country from which came those saintly
+exiles of our race who made the cloisters of Pontigny famous, and one
+of whom, Saint Edmund of Abingdon, Saint-Edme, still lies enshrined
+here.  The country which the sons of Saint Bernard choose for their
+abode is in fact but a patch of scanty pasture-land in the midst of a
+heady wine-district.  Like its majestic Cluniac rivals, the church
+has its western portico, elegant in structure but of comparatively
+humble [127] proportions, under a plain roof of tiles, pent-wise.
+Within, a heavy coat of white-wash seems befitting to the simple
+forms of the "Transition," or quite earliest "Pointed," style, to its
+remarkable continence of spirit, its uniformity, and cleanness of
+build.  The long prospect of nave and choir ends, however, with a
+sort of graceful smallness, in a chevet of seven closely packed,
+narrow bays.  It is like a nun's church, or like a nun's coif.
+
+The church of Pontigny, representative generally of the churches of
+the Cistercian order, including some of the loveliest early English
+ones, was in truth significant of a reaction, a reaction against
+monasticism itself, as it had come to be in the order of Cluny, the
+genius of which found its proper expression in the imperious, but
+half-barbaric, splendours of the richest form of the Romanesque, the
+monastic style pre-eminently, as we may still see it at La Charité-
+sur-Loire, at Saint-Benoît, above all, on the hill of Vézelay.  Saint
+Bernard, who had lent his immense influence to the order of Cîteaux
+by way of a monastic reform, though he had a genius for hymns and was
+in other ways an eminent religious poet, and though he gave new life
+to the expiring romance of the crusades, was, as regards the visible
+world, much of a Puritan.  Was it he who, wrapt in thought upon the
+world unseen, walked along the shores of Lake Leman without observing
+it?--the eternal snows he might have taken for the walls of the New
+Jerusalem; the blue waves he [128] might have fancied its pavement of
+sapphire.  In the churches, the worship, of his new order he required
+simplicity, and even severity, being fortunate in finding so winsome
+an exponent of that principle as the early Gothic of Pontigny, or of
+the first Cistercian church, now destroyed, at Cîteaux itself.
+Strangely enough, while Bernard's own temper of mind was a survival
+from the past (we see this in his contest with Abelard), hierarchic,
+reactionary, suspicious of novelty, the architectural style of his
+preference was largely of secular origin.  It had a large share in
+that inventive and innovating genius, that expansion of the natural
+human soul, to which the art, the literature, the religious movements
+of the thirteenth century in France, as in Italy, where it ends with
+Dante, bear witness.
+
+In particular, Bernard had protested against the sculpture, rich and
+fantastic, but gloomy, it might be indecent, developed more
+abundantly than anywhere else in the churches of Burgundy, and
+especially in those of the Cluniac order.  "What is the use," he
+asks, "of those grotesque monsters in painting and sculpture?" and
+almost certainly he had in mind the marvellous carved work at
+Vézelay, whither doubtless he came often--for example on Good Friday,
+1146, to preach, as we know, the second crusade in the presence of
+Louis the Seventh.  He too might have wept at the sight of the doomed
+multitude (one in ten, it is said, returned from the Holy [129]
+Land), as its enthusiasm, under the charm of his fiery eloquence,
+rose to the height of his purpose.  Even the aisles of Vézelay were
+not sufficient for the multitude of his hearers, and he preached to
+them in the open air, from a rock still pointed out on the hillside.
+Armies indeed have been encamped many times on the slopes and meadows
+of the valley of the Cure, now to all seeming so impregnably
+tranquil.  The Cluniac order even then had already declined from its
+first intention; and that decline became especially visible in the
+Abbey of Vézelay itself not long after Bernard's day.  Its majestic
+immoveable church was complete by the middle of the twelfth century.
+And there it still stands in spite of many a threat, while the
+conventual buildings around it have disappeared; and the institution
+it represented--secularised at its own request at the Reformation--
+had dwindled almost to nothing at all, till in the last century the
+last Abbot built himself, in place of the old Gothic lodging below
+those solemn walls, a sort of Château Gaillard, a dainty abode in the
+manner of Louis Quinze--swept away that too at the Revolution--where
+the great oaks now flourish, with the rooks and squirrels.
+
+Yet the order of Cluny, in its time, in that dark period of the
+eleventh and twelfth centuries, had deserved well of those to whom
+religion, and art, and social order are precious.  The Cluniacs had
+in fact represented monasticism in the most [130] legitimate form of
+its activity; and, if the church of Vézelay was not quite the
+grandest of their churches, it is certainly the grandest of them
+which remains.  It is also typical in character.  As Notre-Dame
+d'Amiens is pre-eminently the church of the city, of a commune, so
+the Madeleine of Vézelay is typically the church of a monastery.
+
+The monastic style proper, then, in its peculiar power and influence,
+was Romanesque, and with the Cluniac order; and here perhaps better
+than anywhere else we may understand what it really came to, what was
+its effect on the spirits, the imagination.
+
+As at Pontigny, the Cistercians, for the most part, built their
+churches in lowly valleys, according to the intention of their
+founder.  The representative church of the Cluniacs, on the other
+hand, lies amid the closely piled houses of the little town, which it
+protected and could punish, on a steep hill-top, like a long massive
+chest there, heavy above you, as you climb slowly the winding road,
+the old unchanged pathway of Saint Bernard.  In days gone by it
+threatened the surrounding neighbourhood with four boldly built
+towers; had then also a spire at the crossing; and must have been at
+that time like a more magnificent version of the buildings which
+still crown the hill of Laon.  Externally, the proportions, the
+squareness, of the nave (west and east, the vast narthex or porch,
+and the [131] Gothic choir, rise above its roof-line), remind one of
+another great Romanesque church at home--of the nave of Winchester,
+out of which Wykeham carved his richly panelled Perpendicular
+interior.
+
+At Vézelay however, the Romanesque, the Romanesque of Burgundy, alike
+in the first conception of the whole structure, and in the actual
+locking together of its big stones, its masses of almost unbroken
+masonry, its inertia, figures as of more imperial character, and
+nearer to the Romans of old, than its feebler kindred in England or
+Normandy.  We seem to have before us here a Romanesque architecture,
+studied, not from Roman basilicas or Roman temples, but from the
+arenas, the colossal gateways, the triumphal arches, of the people of
+empire, such as remain even now, not in the South of France only.
+The simple "flying," or rather leaning and almost couchant,
+buttresses, quadrants of a circle, might be parts of a Roman
+aqueduct.  In contrast to the lightsome Gothic manner of the last
+quarter of the twelfth century (as we shall presently find it here
+too, like an escape for the eye, for the temper, out of some grim
+underworld into genial daylight), the Cluniac church might seem a
+still active instrument of the iron tyranny of Rome, of its tyranny
+over the animal spirits.  As the ghost of ancient Rome still lingers
+"over the grave thereof," in the papacy, the hierarchy, so is it with
+the material structures [132] also, the Cluniac and other Romanesque
+churches, which most emphatically express the hierarchical, the papal
+system.  There is something about this church of Vézelay, in the
+long-sustained patience of which it tells, that brings to mind the
+labour of slaves, whose occasional Fescennine licence and fresh
+memories of a barbaric life also find expression, now and again, in
+the strange sculpture of the place.  Yet here for once, around a
+great French church, there is the kindly repose of English
+"precincts," and the country which this monastic acropolis overlooks
+southwards is a very pleasant one, as we emerge from the shadows of--
+yes! of that peculiarly sad place--a country all the pleasanter by
+reason of the toil upon it, performed, or exacted from others, by the
+monks, through long centuries; Le Morvan, with its distant blue hills
+and broken foreground, the vineyards, the patches of woodland, the
+roads winding into their cool shadows; though in truth the fortress-
+like outline of the monastic church and the sombre hue of its
+material lend themselves most readily to the effects of a stormy sky.
+
+By a door, which in the great days opened from a magnificent
+cloister, you enter what might seem itself but the ambulatory of a
+cloister, superbly vaulted and long and regular, and built of huge
+stones of a metallic colour.  It is the southern aisle of the nave, a
+nave of ten bays, the grandest Romanesque interior in France, [133]
+perhaps in the world.  In its mortified light the very soul of
+monasticism, Roman and half-military, as the completest outcome of a
+religion of threats, seems to descend upon one.  Monasticism is
+indeed the product of many various tendencies of the religious soul,
+one or another of which may very properly connect itself with the
+Pointed style, as we saw in those lightsome aisles of Pontigny, so
+expressive of the purity, the lowly sweetness, of the soul of
+Bernard.  But it is here at Vézelay, in this iron place, that
+monasticism in its central, its historically most significant
+purpose, presents itself as most completely at home.  There is no
+triforium.  The monotonous cloistral length of wall above the long-
+drawn series of stately round arches, is unbroken save by a plain
+small window in each bay, placed as high as possible just below the
+cornice, as a mere after-thought, you might fancy.  Those windows
+were probably unglazed, and closed only with wooden shutters as
+occasion required.  Furnished with the stained glass of the period,
+they would have left the place almost in darkness, giving doubtless
+full effect to the monkish candle-light in any case needful here.  An
+almost perfect cradle-roof, tunnel-like from end to end of the long
+central aisle, adds by its simplicity of form to the magnificent
+unity of effect.  The bearing-arches, which span it from bay to bay,
+being parti-coloured, with voussures of alternate white and a kind of
+grey or green, [134] being also somewhat flat at the keystone, and
+literally eccentric, have, at least for English eyes, something of a
+Saracenic or other Oriental character.  Again, it is as if the
+architects--the engineers--who worked here, had seen things undreamt
+of by other Romanesque builders, the builders in England and
+Normandy.
+
+Here then, scarcely relieving the almost savage character of the
+work, abundant on tympanum and doorway without, above all on the
+immense capitals of the nave within, is the sculpture which offended
+Bernard.  A sumptuous band of it, a carved guipure of singular
+boldness, passes continuously round the arches, and along the
+cornices from bay to bay, and with the large bossy tendency of the
+ornament throughout may be regarded as typical of Burgundian
+richness.  Of sculptured capitals, to like, or to dislike with Saint
+Bernard, there are nearly a hundred, unwearied in variety, unique in
+the energy of their conception, full of wild promise in their coarse
+execution, cruel, you might say, in the realisation of human form and
+features.  Irresistibly they rivet attention.
+
+The subjects are for the most part Scriptural, chosen apparently as
+being apt for strongly satiric treatment, the suicide of Judas, the
+fall of Goliath.  The legend of Saint Benedict, naturally at home in
+a Benedictine church, presented the sculptor with a series of
+forcible grotesques ready-made.  Some monkish story, [135] half
+moral, half facetious, perhaps a little coarse, like that of Sainte
+Eugénie, from time to time makes variety; or an example of the
+punishment of the wicked by men or by devils, who play a large, and
+to themselves thoroughly enjoyable and merry, part here.  The
+sculptor would seem to have witnessed the punishment of the
+blasphemer; how adroitly the executioner planted knee on the
+culprit's bosom, as he lay on the ground, and out came the sinful
+tongue, to meet the iron pincers.  The minds of those who worked thus
+seem to have been almost insanely preoccupied just then with the
+human countenance, but by no means exclusively in its pleasantness or
+dignity.  Bold, crude, original, their work indicates delight in the
+power of reproducing fact, curiosity in it, but little or no sense of
+beauty.  The humanity therefore here presented, as in the Cluniac
+sculpture generally, is wholly unconventional.  M. Viollet-le-Duc
+thinks he can trace in it individual types still actually existing in
+the peasantry of Le Morvan.  Man and morality, however, disappearing
+at intervals, the acanthine capitals have a kind of later Venetian
+beauty about them, as the Venetian birds also, the conventional
+peacocks, or birds wholly of fantasy, amid the long fantastic
+foliage.  There are still however no true flowers of the field here.
+There is pity, it must be confessed, on the other hand, and the
+delicacy, the beauty, which that always brings [136] with it, where
+Jephtha peeps at the dead daughter's face, lifting timidly the great
+leaves that cover it; in the hanging body of Absalom; in the child
+carried away by the eagle, his long frock twisted in the wind as he
+goes.  The parents run out in dismay, and the devil grins, not
+because it is the punishment of the child or of them; but because he
+is the author of all mischief everywhere, as the monkish carver
+conceived--so far wholesomely.
+
+We must remember that any sculpture less emphatic would have been
+ineffective, because practically invisible, in this sombre place.
+But at the west end there is an escape for the eye, for the soul,
+towards the unhindered, natural, afternoon sun; not however into the
+outer and open air, but through an arcade of three bold round arches,
+high above the great closed western doors, into a somewhat broader
+and loftier place than this, a reservoir of light, a veritable camera
+lucida.  The light is that which lies below the vault and within the
+tribunes of the famous narthex (as they say), the vast fore-church or
+vestibule, into which the nave is prolonged.  A remarkable feature of
+many Cluniac churches, the great western porch, on a scale which is
+approached in England only at Peterborough, is found also in some of
+the churches of the Cistercians.  It is characteristic, in fact,
+rather of Burgundy than of either of those religious orders
+especially.
+
+[137] At Pontigny itself, for instance, there is a good one; and a
+very early one at Paray-le-Monial.  Saint-Père-sous-Vézelay, daughter
+of the great church, in the vale below, has a late Gothic example;
+Semur also, with fantastic lodges above it.  The cathedral of Autun,
+a secular church in rivalry of the "religious," presents, by way of
+such western porch or vestibule, two entire bays of the nave,
+unglazed, with the vast western arch open to the air; the west front,
+with its rich portals, being thrown back into the depths of the great
+fore-church thus produced.
+
+The narthex of Vézelay, the largest of these singular structures, is
+glazed, and closed towards the west by what is now the façade.  It is
+itself in fact a great church, a nave of three magnificent bays, and
+of three aisles, with a spacious triforium.  With their fantastic
+sculpture, sheltered thus from accident and weather, in all its
+original freshness, the great portals of the primitive façade serve
+now for doorways, as a second, solemn, door of entrance, to the
+church proper within.  The very structure of the place, and its
+relation to the main edifice, indicate that it was for use on
+occasion, when, at certain great feasts, that of the Magdalen
+especially, to whom the church of Vézelay is dedicated, the monastery
+was swollen with pilgrims, too poor, too numerous, to be lodged in
+the town, come hither to worship before the [138] relics of the
+friend of Jesus, enshrined in a low-vaulted crypt, the floor of which
+is the natural rocky surface of the hill-top.  It may be that the
+pilgrims were permitted to lie for the night, not only on the
+pavement, but (if so favoured) in the high and dry chamber formed by
+the spacious triforium over the north aisle, awaiting an early Mass.
+The primitive west front, then, had become but a wall of partition;
+and above its central portal, where the round arched west windows had
+been, ran now a kind of broad, arcaded tribune, in full view of the
+entire length of the church.  In the midst of it stood an altar; and
+here perhaps, the priest who officiated being visible to the whole
+assembled multitude east and west, the early Mass was said.
+
+The great vestibule was finished about forty years after the
+completion of the nave, towards the middle of the twelfth century.
+And here, in the great pier-arches, and in the eastern bay of the
+vault, still with the large masonry, the large, flat, unmoulded
+surfaces, and amid the fantastic carvings of the Romanesque building
+about it, the Pointed style, determined yet discreet, makes itself
+felt--makes itself felt by appearing, if not for the first time, yet
+for the first time in the organic or systematic development of French
+architecture.  Not in the unambitious façade of Saint-Denis, nor in
+the austere aisles of Sens, but at Vézelay, in this grandiose fabric,
+so worthy of the event, Viollet-le-Duc would [139] fain see the
+birthplace of the Pointed style.  Here at last, with no sense of
+contrast, but by way of veritable "transition," and as if by its own
+matured strength, the round arch breaks into the double curve, les
+arcs brisés, with a wonderful access of grace.  And the imaginative
+effect is forthwith enlarged.  Beyond, far beyond, what is actually
+presented to the eye in that peculiar curvature, its mysterious
+grace, and by the stateliness, the elevation of the ogival method of
+vaulting, the imagination is stirred to present one with what belongs
+properly to it alone.  The masonry, though large, is nicely fitted; a
+large light is admitted through the now fully pronounced Gothic
+windows towards the west.  At Amiens we found the Gothic spirit,
+reigning there exclusively, to be a restless one.  At Vézelay, where
+it breathes for the first time amid the heavy masses of the old
+imperial style, it breathes the very genius of monastic repose.  And
+then, whereas at Amiens, and still more at Beauvais, at Saint-
+Quentin, you wonder how these monuments of the past can have endured
+so long, in strictly monastic Vézelay you have a sense of freshness,
+such as, in spite of their ruin, we perceive in the buildings of
+Greece.  We enjoy here not so much, as at Amiens, the sentiment of
+antiquity, but that of eternal duration.
+
+But let me place you once more where we stood for a while, on
+entering by the doorway [140] in the midst of the long southern
+aisle.  Cross the aisle, and gather now in one view the perspective
+of the whole.  Away on the left hand the eye is drawn upward to the
+tranquil light of the vaults of the fore-church, seeming doubtless
+the more spacious because partly concealed from us by the wall of
+partition below.  But on the right hand, towards the east, as if with
+the set purpose of a striking architectural contrast, an instruction
+as to the place of this or that manner in the architectural series,
+the long, tunnel-like, military work of the Romanesque nave opens
+wide into the exhilarating daylight of choir and transepts, in the
+sort of Gothic Bernard would have welcomed, with a vault rising now
+high above the roof-line of the body of the church, sicut lilium
+excelsum.  The simple flowers, the flora, of the early Pointed style,
+which could never have looked at home as an element in the half-
+savage decoration of the nave, seem to be growing here upon the
+sheaves of slender, reedy pillars, as if naturally in the carved
+stone.  Even here indeed, Roman, or Romanesque, taste still lingers
+proudly in the monolith columns of the chevet.  Externally, we may
+note with what dexterity the Gothic choir has been inserted into its
+place, below and within the great buttresses of the earlier
+Romanesque one.
+
+Visitors to the great church of Assisi have sometimes found a kind of
+parable in the threefold [141] ascent from the dark crypt where the
+body of Saint Francis lies, through the gloomy "lower" church, into
+the height and breadth, the physical and symbolic "illumination," of
+the church above.  At Vézelay that kind of contrast suggests itself
+in one view; the hopeful, but transitory, glory upon which one
+enters; the long, darksome, central avenue; the "open vision" into
+which it conducts us.  As a symbol of resurrection, its choir is a
+fitting diadem to the church of the Magdalen, whose remains the monks
+meant it to cover.
+
+And yet, after all, notwithstanding this assertion of the superiority
+(are we so to call it?) of the new Gothic way, perhaps by the very
+force of contrast, the Madeleine of Vézelay is still pre-eminently a
+Romanesque, and thereby the typically monastic, church.  In spite of
+restoration even, as we linger here, the impression of the monastic
+Middle Age, of a very exclusive monasticism, that has verily turned
+its back upon common life, jealously closed inward upon itself, is a
+singularly weighty one; the more so because, as the peasant said when
+asked the way to an old sanctuary that had fallen to the occupation
+of farm-labourers, and was now deserted even by them: Maintenant il
+n'y a personne là.
+
+NOTES
+
+126. *Published in the Nineteenth Century, June 1894, and now
+reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.
+
+
+
+APOLLO IN PICARDY*
+
+[142] "CONSECUTIVE upon Apollo in all his solar fervour and
+effulgence," says a writer of Teutonic proclivities, "we may discern
+even among the Greeks themselves, elusively, as would be natural with
+such a being, almost like a mock sun amid the mists, the northern or
+ultra-northern sun-god.  In hints and fragments the lexicographers
+and others have told us something of this Hyperborean Apollo, fancies
+about him which evidence some knowledge of the Land of the Midnight
+Sun, of the sun's ways among the Laplanders, of a hoary summer
+breathing very softly on the violet beds, or say, the London-pride
+and crab-apples, provided for those meagre people, somewhere amid the
+remoteness of their icy seas.  In such wise Apollo had already
+anticipated his sad fortunes in the Middle Age as a god definitely in
+exile, driven north of the Alps, and even here ever in flight before
+the summer.  Summer indeed he leaves now to the management of [143]
+others, finding his way from France and Germany to still paler
+countries, yet making or taking with him always a certain seductive
+summer-in-winter, though also with a divine or titanic regret, a
+titanic revolt in his heart, and consequent inversion at times of his
+old beneficent and properly solar doings.  For his favours, his
+fallacious good-humour, which has in truth a touch of malign magic
+about it, he makes men pay sometimes a terrible price, and is in fact
+a devil!"
+
+Devilry, devil's work:--traces of such you might fancy were to be
+found in a certain manuscript volume taken from an old monastic
+library in France at the Revolution.  It presented a strange example
+of a cold and very reasonable spirit disturbed suddenly, thrown off
+its balance, as by a violent beam, a blaze of new light, revealing,
+as it glanced here and there, a hundred truths unguessed at before,
+yet a curse, as it turned out, to its receiver, in dividing
+hopelessly against itself the well-ordered kingdom of his thought.
+Twelfth volume of a dry enough treatise on mathematics, applied,
+still with no relaxation of strict method, to astronomy and music, it
+should have concluded that work, and therewith the second period of
+the life of its author, by drawing tight together the threads of a
+long and intricate argument.  In effect however, it began, or, in
+perturbed manner, and as [144] with throes of childbirth, seemed the
+preparation for, an argument of an entirely new and disparate
+species, such as would demand a new period of life also, if it might
+be, for its due expansion.
+
+But with what confusion, what baffling inequalities!  How afflicting
+to the mind's eye!  It was a veritable "solar storm"--this
+illumination, which had burst at the last moment upon the strenuous,
+self-possessed, much-honoured monastic student, as he sat down
+peacefully to write the last formal chapters of his work ere he
+betook himself to its well-earned practical reward as superior, with
+lordship and mitre and ring, of the abbey whose music and calendar
+his mathematical knowledge had qualified him to reform.  The very
+shape of Volume Twelve, pieced together of quite irregularly formed
+pages, was a solecism.  It could never be bound.  In truth, the man
+himself, and what passed with him in one particular space of time,
+had invaded a matter, which is nothing if not entirely abstract and
+impersonal.  Indirectly the volume was the record of an episode, an
+interlude, an interpolated page of life.  And whereas in the earlier
+volumes you found by way of illustration no more than the simplest
+indispensable diagrams, the scribe's hand had strayed here into mazy
+borders, long spaces of hieroglyph, and as it were veritable pictures
+of the theoretic elements of his subject.  Soft wintry auroras seemed
+to play behind whole pages of crabbed textual writing, line and
+figure [145] bending, breathing, flaming, in, to lovely
+"arrangements" that were like music made visible; till writing and
+writer changed suddenly, "to one thing constant never," after the
+known manner of madmen in such work.  Finally, the whole matter broke
+off with an unfinished word, as a later hand testified, adding the
+date of the author's death, "deliquio animi."
+
+He had been brought to the monastery as a little child; was bred
+there; had never yet left it, busy and satisfied through youth and
+early manhood; was grown almost as necessary a part of the community
+as the stones of its material abode, as a pillar of the great tower
+he ascended to watch the movement of the stars.  The structure of a
+fortified medieval town barred in those who belonged to it very
+effectively.  High monastic walls intrenched the monk still further.
+From the summit of the tower you looked straight down into the deep
+narrow streets, upon the houses (in one of which Prior Saint-Jean was
+born) climbing as high as they dared for breathing space within that
+narrow compass.  But you saw also the green breadth of Normandy and
+Picardy, this way and that; felt on your face the free air of a still
+wider realm beyond what was seen.  The reviving scent of it, the mere
+sight of the flowers brought thence, of the country produce at the
+convent gate, stirred the ordinary monkish soul with desires,
+sometimes with efforts, to be sent on duty there.  Prior [146] Saint-
+Jean, on the other hand, shuddered at the view, at the thoughts it
+suggested to him; thoughts of unhallowed wild places, where the old
+heathen had worshipped "stocks and stones," and where their
+wickedness might still survive them in something worse than
+mischievous tricks of nature, such as you might read of in Ovid,
+whose verses, however, he for his part had never so much as touched
+with a finger.  He gave thanks rather, that his vocation to the
+abstract sciences had kept him far apart from the whole crew of
+miscreant poets--Abode of demons.
+
+Thither nevertheless he was now to depart, sent to the Grange or
+Obedience of Notre-Dame De-Pratis by the aged Abbot (about to resign
+in his favour) for the benefit of his body's health, a little
+impaired at last by long intellectual effort, yet so invaluable to
+the community.  But let him beware! whispered his dearest friend, who
+shared those strange misgivings, let him "take heed to his ways" when
+he was come to that place.  "The mere contact of one's feet with its
+soil might change one."  And that same night, disturbed perhaps by
+thoughts of the coming journey with which his brain was full, Prior
+Saint-Jean himself dreamed vividly, as he had been little used to do.
+He saw the very place in which he lay (he knew it! his little inner
+cell, the brown doors, the white breadth of wall, the black crucifix
+upon it) alight, alight [147] softly; and looking, as he fancied,
+from the window, saw also a low circlet of soundless flame, waving,
+licking daintily up the black sky, but harmless, beautiful, closing
+in upon that round dark space in the midst, which was the earth.  He
+seemed to feel upon his shoulder just then the touch of his friend
+beside him.  "It is hell-fire!" he said.
+
+The Prior took with him a very youthful though devoted companion--
+Hyacinthus, the pet of the community.  They laughed admiringly at the
+rebellious masses of his black hair, with blue in the depths of it,
+like the wings of the swallow, which refused to conform to the
+monkish pattern.  It only grew twofold, crown upon crown, after the
+half-yearly shaving.  And he was as neat and serviceable as he was
+delightful to be with.  Prior Saint-Jean, then, and the boy started
+before daybreak for the long journey; onwards, till darkness, a soft
+twilight rather, was around them again.  How unlike a winter night it
+seemed, the further they went through the endless, lonely, turf-grown
+tracts, and along the edge of a valley, at length--vallis monachorum,
+monksvale--taken aback by its sudden steepness and depth, as of an
+immense oval cup sunken in the grassy upland, over which a golden
+moon now shone broadly.  Ah! there it was at last, the white Grange,
+the white gable of the chapel apart amid a few scattered white
+gravestones, the white flocks crouched about on the hoar-frost, [148]
+like the white clouds, packed somewhat heavily on the horizon, and
+nacrés as the clouds of June, with their own light and heat in them,
+in their hollows, you might fancy.
+
+From the very first, the atmosphere, the light, the influence of
+things, seemed different from what they knew; and how distant already
+the dark buildings of their home!  Was there the breath of surviving
+summer blossom on the air?  Now and then came a gentle, comfortable
+bleating from the folds, and themselves slept soundly at last in the
+great open upper chamber of the Grange; were awakened by the sound of
+thunder.  Strange, in the late November night!  It had parted,
+however, with its torrid fierceness; modulated by distance, seemed to
+break away into musical notes.  And the lightning lingered along with
+it, but glancing softly; was in truth an aurora, such as persisted
+month after month on the northern sky as they sojourned here.  Like
+Prospero's enchanted island, the whole place was "full of noises."
+The wind it might have been, passing over metallic strings, but that
+they were audible even when the night was breathless.
+
+So like veritable music, however, were they on that first night that,
+upon reflexion, the Prior climbed softly the winding stair down which
+they appeared to flow, to the great solar among the beams of the
+roof, where the farm produce lay stored.  A flood of moonlight now
+fell through the unshuttered dormer-windows; and, [149] under the
+glow of a lamp hanging from the low rafters, Prior Saint-Jean seemed
+to be looking for the first time on the human form, on the old Adam
+fresh from his Maker's hand.  A servant of the house, or farm-
+labourer, perhaps!--fallen asleep there by chance on the fleeces
+heaped like golden stuff high in all the corners of the place.  A
+serf!  But what unserflike ease, how lordly, or godlike rather, in
+the posture!  Could one fancy a single curve bettered in the rich,
+warm, white limbs; in the haughty features of the face, with the
+golden hair, tied in a mystic knot, fallen down across the inspired
+brow?  And yet what gentle sweetness also in the natural movement of
+the bosom, the throat, the lips, of the sleeper!  Could that be
+diabolical, and really spotted with unseen evil, which was so
+spotless to the eye?  The rude sandals of the monastic serf lay
+beside him apart, and all around was of the roughest, excepting only
+two strange objects lying within reach (even in their own renowned
+treasury Prior Saint-Jean had not seen the like of them), a harp, or
+some such instrument, of silver-gilt once, but the gold had mostly
+passed from it, and a bow, fashioned somehow of the same precious
+substance.  The very form of these things filled his mind with
+inexplicable misgivings.  He repeated a befitting collect, and trod
+softly away.
+
+It was in truth but a rude place to which they were come.  But, after
+life in the [150] monastery, the severe discipline of which the Prior
+himself had done much to restore, there was luxury in the free, self-
+chosen hours, the irregular fare, in doing pretty much as one
+pleased, in the sweet novelties of the country; to the boy Hyacinth
+especially, who forgot himself, or rather found his true self for the
+first time.  Girding up his heavy frock, which he laid aside erelong
+altogether to go in his coarse linen smock only, he seemed a monastic
+novice no longer; yet, in his natural gladness, was found more
+companionable than ever by his senior, surprised, delighted, for his
+part, at the fresh springing of his brain, the spring of his
+footsteps over the close greensward, as if smoothed by the art of
+man.  Cause of his renewed health, or concurrent with its effects,
+the air here might have been that of a veritable paradise, still
+unspoiled.  "Could there be unnatural magic," he asked himself again,
+"any secret evil, lurking in these tranquil vale-sides, in their
+sweet low pastures, in the belt of scattered woodland above them, in
+the rills of pure water which lisped from the open down beyond?"
+Making what was really a boy's experience, he had a wholly boyish
+delight in his holiday, and certainly did not reflect how much we
+beget for ourselves in what we see and feel, nor how far a certain
+diffused music in the very breath of the place was the creation of
+his own ear or brain.
+
+[151] That strange enigmatic owner of the harp and the bow, whom he
+had found sleeping so divinely, actually waited on them the next
+morning with all obsequiousness, stirred the great fire of peat,
+adjusted duly their monkish attire, laid their meal.  It seemed an
+odd thing to be served thus, like St. Jerome by the lion, as if by
+some imperiously beautiful wild animal tamed.  You hesitated to
+permit, were a little afraid of, his services.  Their silent tonsured
+porter himself, contrast grim enough to any creature of that kind,
+had been so far seduced as to permit him to sleep there in the
+Grange, as he loved to do, instead of in ruder, rougher quarters;
+and, coaxed into odd garrulity on this one matter, told the new-
+comers the little he knew, with much also that he only suspected,
+about him; among other things, as to the origin of those precious
+objects, which might have belonged to some sanctuary or noble house,
+found thus in the possession of a mere labourer, who is no Frenchman,
+but a pagan, or gipsy, white as he looks, from far south or east, and
+who works or plays furtively, by night for the most part, returning
+to sleep awhile before daybreak.  The other herdsmen of the valley
+are bond-servants, but he a hireling at will, though coming regularly
+at a certain season.  He has come thus for any number of years past,
+though seemingly never grown older (as the speaker reflects), singing
+his way meagrely from farm to farm, to the sound of [152] his harp.
+His name?--It was scarcely a name at all, in the diffident syllables
+he uttered in answer to that question, on first coming there; but of
+names known to them it came nearest to a malignant one in Scripture,
+Apollyon.  Apollyon had a just discernible tonsure, but probably no
+right to it.
+
+Well skilled in architecture, Prior Saint-Jean was set, by way of a
+holiday task, to superintend the completion of the great monastic
+barn then in building.  The visitor admires it still; perhaps
+supposes it, with its noble aisle, though set north and south, to be
+a desecrated church.  If he be an expert in such matters, he will
+remark a sort of classical harmony in its broad, very simple
+proportions, with a certain suppression of Gothic emphasis, more
+especially in that peculiarly Gothic feature, the buttresses,
+scarcely marking the unbroken, windowless walls, which rise very
+straight, taking the sun placidly.  The silver-grey stone, cut, if it
+came from this neighbourhood at all, from some now forgotten quarry,
+has the fine, close-grained texture of antique marble.  The great
+northern gable is almost a classic pediment.  The horizontal lines of
+plinth and ridge and cornice are kept unbroken, the roof of sea-grey
+slates being pitched less angularly than is usual in this rainy
+clime.  A welcome contrast, the Prior thought it, to the sort of
+architectural nightmare he came from.  He found the structure already
+more than half- [153] way up, the low squat pillars ready for their
+capitals.
+
+Yes! it must have so happened often in the Middle Age, as you feel
+convinced, in looking sometimes at medieval building.  Style must
+have changed under the very hands of men who were no wilful
+innovators.  Thus it was here, in the later work of Prior Saint-Jean,
+all unconsciously.  The mysterious harper sat there always, at the
+topmost point achieved; played, idly enough it might seem, on his
+precious instrument, but kept in fact the hard taxed workmen
+literally in tune, working for once with a ready will, and, so to
+speak, with really inventive hands--working expeditiously, in this
+favourable weather, till far into the night, as they joined unbidden
+in a chorus, which hushed, or rather turned to music, the noise of
+their chipping.  It was hardly noise at all, even in the night-time.
+Now and again Brother Apollyon descended nimbly to surprise them, at
+an opportune moment, by the display of an immense strength.  A great
+cheer exploded suddenly, as single-handed he heaved a massive stone
+into its place.  He seemed to have no sense of weight: "Put there by
+the devil!" the modern villager assures you.
+
+With a change then, not so much of style as of temper, of management,
+in the application of acknowledged rules, Prior Saint-Jean shaping
+only, adapting, simplifying, partly with a view [154] to economy, not
+the heavy stones only, but the heavy manner of using them, turned
+light.  With no pronounced ornamentation, it is as if in the upper
+story ponderous root and stem blossomed gracefully, blossomed in
+cornice and capital and pliant arch-line, as vigorous as they were
+graceful, and rose on high quickly.  Almost suddenly tie-beam and
+rafter knit themselves together into the stone, and the dark, dry,
+roomy place was closed in securely to this day.  Mere audible music,
+certainly, had counted for something in the operations of an art,
+held at its best (as we know) to be a sort of music made visible.
+That idle singer, one might fancy, by an art beyond art, had
+attracted beams and stones into their fit places.  And there, sure
+enough, he still sits, as a final decorative touch, by way of apex on
+the gable which looks northward, though much weather-worn, and with
+an ugly gap between the shoulder and the fingers on the harp,* as if,
+literally, he had cut off his right hand and put it from him:--King
+David, or an angel? guesses the careless tourist.  The space below
+has been lettered.  After a little puzzling you recognise there the
+relics of a familiar verse from a Latin psalm Nisi Dominus
+aedificaverit domum,+ and the rest: inscribed as well as may be in
+Greek characters.  Prior Saint-Jean caused it to be so inscribed,
+absurdly, during his last days there.
+
+[155] And is not the human body, too, a building, with architectural
+laws, a structure, tending by the very forces which primarily held it
+together to drop asunder in time?  Not in vain, it seemed, had Prior
+Saint-Jean come to this mystic place for the improvement of his
+body's health.  Thenceforth that fleshly tabernacle had housed him,
+had housed his cunning, overwrought and excitable soul, ever the
+better day by day, and he began to feel his bodily health to be a
+positive quality or force, the presence near him of that singular
+being having surely something to do with this result.  He and his
+fascinations, his music, himself, might at least be taken for an
+embodiment of all those genial influences of earth and sky, and the
+easy ways of living here, which made him turn, with less of an effort
+than he had known for many years past, to his daily tasks, and sink
+so regularly, so immediately, to wholesome rest on returning from
+them.  It was as if Brother Apollyon himself abhorred the spectacle
+of distress, and mainly for his own satisfaction charmed away other
+people's maladies.  The mere touch of that ice-cold hand, laid on the
+feverish brow, when the Prior lapsed from time to time into his
+former troubles, certainly calmed the respiration of a troubled
+sleeper.  Was there magic in it, not wholly natural?  The hand might
+have been a dead one.  But then, was it surprising, after all, that
+the [156] methods of curing men's maladies, as being in very deed the
+fruit of sin, should have something strange and unlooked-for about
+them, like some of those Old Testament healings and purifications
+which the Prior's biblical lore suggested to him?  Yet Brother
+Apollyon, if their surly Janitor, in his less kindly moments, spoke
+truly, himself greatly needed purification, being not only a thief,
+but a homicide in hiding from the law.  Nay, once, on his annual
+return from southern or eastern lands, he had been observed on his
+way along the streets of the great town literally scattering the
+seeds of disease till his serpent-skin bag was empty.  And within
+seven days the "black death" was there, reaping its thousands.  As a
+wise man declared, he who can best cure disease can also most
+cunningly engender it.
+
+In short, these creatures of rule, these "regulars," the Prior and
+his companion, were come in contact for the first time in their lives
+with the power of untutored natural impulse, of natural inspiration.
+The boy experienced it immediately in the games which suited his
+years, but which he had never so much as seen before; as his superior
+was to undergo its influence by-and-by in serious study.  By night
+chiefly, in its long, continuous twilights, Hyacinth became really a
+boy at last, with immense gaiety; eyes, hands and feet awake,
+expanding, as he raced his comrade over the [157] turf, with the
+conical Druidic stone for a goal, or wrestled lithely enough with
+him, though as with a rock; or, taking the silver bow in hand for a
+moment, transfixed a mark, next a bird, on the bough, on the wing,
+shedding blood for the first time, with a boy's delight, a boy's
+remorse.  Friend Apollyon seemed able to draw the wild animals too,
+to share their sport, yet not altogether kindly.  Tired, surfeited,
+he destroys them when his game with them is at an end; breaks the
+toy; deftly snaps asunder the fragile back.  Though all alike would
+come at his call, or the sound of his harp, he had his preferences;
+and warred in the night-time, as if on principle, against the
+creatures of the day.  The small furry thing he pierced with his
+arrow fled to him nevertheless caressingly, with broken limb, to die
+palpitating in his hand.  In this wonderful season, the migratory
+birds, from Norway, from Britain beyond the seas, came there as usual
+on the north wind, with sudden tumult of wings; but went that year no
+further, and by Christmas-time had built their nests, filling that
+belt of woodland around the vale with the chatter of their business
+and love quarrels.  In turn they drew after them strangers no one
+here had ever known before; the like of which Hyacinth, who knew his
+bestiary, had never seen even in a picture.  The wild-cat, the wild-
+swan--the boy peeped on these wonders as they floated over the vale,
+or [158] glided with unwonted confidence over its turf, under the
+moonlight, or that frequent continuous aurora which was not the dawn.
+Even the modest rivulets of the hill-side felt that influence, and
+"lisped" no longer, but babbled as they leapt, like mountain streams,
+exposing their rocky bed.  Were they angry, as they ran red sometimes
+with blood-drops from the stricken bird caught there by rock or
+bough, as it fell with rent breast among the waves?
+
+But say, think, what you might against him, the pagan outlaw was
+worth his hire as a herdsman; seemingly loved his sheep; was an
+"affectionate shepherd"; cured their diseases; brought them easily to
+the birth, and if they strayed afar would bring them back tenderly
+upon his shoulders.  Monastic persons would have seen that image many
+times before.  Yet if Apollyon looked like the great carved figure
+over the low doorway of their place of penitence at home, that could
+be but an accident, or perhaps a deceit; so closely akin to those
+soulless creatures did he still seem to the wondering Prior,--
+immersed in, or actually a part of, that irredeemable natural world
+he had dreaded so greatly ere he came hither.  And was he after all
+making terms with it now, in the seductive person of this mysterious
+being--man or demon--suspected of murder; who has an air of
+unfathomable evil about him as from a distant but ineffaceable past,
+and a sort of heathen [159] understanding with the dark realm of
+matter; who is bringing the simple people, the women and lovesick
+lads, back to those caves and cromlechs and blasted trees, resorts of
+old godless secret-telling?  And still he has all his own way with
+beasts and man, with the Prior himself, much as all alike distrust
+him.
+
+Most conspicuous in the little group of buildings, a feudal tower of
+goodly white stone, cylindrical and smoothly polished without to
+hinder the ascent of creeping things, and snugly plastered within to
+resist the damp, was the pigeon-house--a veritable feudal tower, a
+veritable feudal plaisance of birds, which the common people dared
+not so much as ruffle.  About a thousand of them were housed there,
+each in its little chamber, encouraged to grow plump, and to breed,
+in perfect self-content.  From perch to perch of the great axle-tree
+in the centre, monastic feet might climb, gentle monastic hands pass
+round to every tiny compartment in turn.  The arms of the monastery
+were carved on the keystone of the doorway, and the tower finished in
+a conical roof, with becoming aerial gaillardise, with pretty dormer-
+windows for the inmates to pass in and out, little balconies for
+brooding in the sun, little awnings to protect them from rough
+breezes, and a great weather-vane, on which the birds crowded for the
+chance of a ride.  If the peasants of that day, whose small fields
+they plundered, noting all this, perhaps [160] envied the birds
+dumbly, for the brethren, on the other hand, it was a constant
+delight to watch the feathered brotherhood, which supplied likewise
+their daintiest fare.  Who then, what hawk, or wild-cat, or other
+savage beast, had ravaged it so wantonly, so very cruelly destroyed
+the bright creatures in a single night--broken backs, rent away
+limbs, pierced the wings?  And what was that object there below?  The
+silver harp surely, lying broken likewise on the sanded floor,
+soaking in the pale milky blood and torn plumage.
+
+Apollyon sobbed and wept audibly as he went about his ordinary doings
+next day, for once fully, though very sadly, awake in it; and towards
+evening, when the villagers came to the Prior to confess themselves,
+the Feast of the Nativity being now at hand, he too came along with
+them in his place meekly, like any other penitent, touched the
+lustral water devoutly, knew all the ways, seemed to desire
+absolution from some guilt of blood heavier than the slaughter of
+beast or bird.  The Prior and his attendant, on their side, are
+reminded that by this time they have wellnigh forgotten the monastic
+duties still incumbent upon them, especially in that matter of the
+"Offices."  On the vigil of the feast, however, Brother Apollyon
+himself summoned the devout to Midnight Mass with the great bell,
+which had hung silent for a generation, wedged in immoveably by a
+beam of [161] the cradle fallen out of its place.  With an immense
+effort of strength he relieved it, hitched the bell back upon its
+wheel; the thick rust cracked on the hinges, and the strokes tolled
+forth betimes, with a hundred querulous, quaint creatures, bats and
+owls, circling stupidly in the waves of sound, but allowed to settle
+back again undisturbedly into their beds.
+
+People and priest, the Prior, vested as well as might be, with
+Hyacinth as "server," come in due course, all alike amazed to find
+that frozen neglected place, with its low-browed vault and narrow
+windows, alight, and as if warmed with flowers from a summer more
+radiant far than that of France, with ilex and laurel--gilt laurel--
+by way of holly and box.  Prior Saint-Jean felt that he had never
+really seen flowers before.  Somewhat later they and the like of them
+seemed to have grown into and over his brain; to have degraded the
+scientific and abstract outlines of things into a tangle of useless
+ornament.  Whence were they procured?  From what height, or hellish
+depth perhaps?  Apollyon, who entered the chapel just then, as if
+quite naturally, though with a bleating lamb in his bosom ("dropped"
+thus early in that wonderful season) by way of an offering, took his
+place at the altar's very foot, and drawing forth his harp, now
+restrung, at the right moment, turned to real silvery music the
+hoarse Gloria in Excelsis of those rude worshippers, still [162]
+shrinking from him, while they listened in a little circle, as he
+stood there in his outlandish attire of skins strangely spotted and
+striped.  With that however the Mass broke off unconsummated.  The
+Prior felt obliged to desist from the sacred office, and had left the
+altar hurriedly.
+
+But Brother Apollyon put his strange attire aside next day, and in a
+much-worn monk's frock, drawn forth from a dark corner, came with
+them, still like a Penitent, when they turned once more to their
+neglected studies somewhat sadly.  See them then, after a collect for
+"Light" repeated by Hyacinth, skull-cap in hand, seated at their
+desks in the little scriptorium, panelled off from their living-room
+on the first floor, while the Prior makes an effort to recover the
+last thought of his long-suspended work, in the execution of which
+the boy is to assist with his skilful pen.  The great glazed windows
+remain open; admit, as if already on the soft air of spring, what
+seems like a stream of flowery odours, the entire moonlit scene, with
+the thorn bushes on the vale-side prematurely bursting into blossom,
+and the sound of birds and flocks emphasising the deep silence of the
+night.
+
+Apollyon then, as if by habit, as he had shared all their occupations
+of late, had taken his seat beside them, meekly enough, at first with
+the manner of a mere suppliant for the [163] crumbs of their high
+studies.  But, straightway again, he surprises by more than racing
+forward incredibly on the road to facts, and from facts to luminous
+doctrine; Prior Saint-Jean himself, in comparison, seeming to lag
+incompetently behind.  He can but wonder at this strange scholar's
+knowledge of a distant past, evidenced in his familiarity (it was as
+if he might once have spoken them) with the dead languages in which
+their text-books are written.  There was more surely than the utmost
+merely natural acuteness in his guesses as to the words intended by
+those crabbed contractions, of their meaning, in his sense of
+allusions and the like.  An ineffaceable memory it might rather seem
+of the entire world of which those languages had been the living
+speech, once more vividly awake under the Prior's cross- questioning,
+and now more than supplementing his own laborious search.
+
+And at last something of the same kind happens with himself.  Had he,
+on his way hither from the convent, passed unwittingly through some
+river or rivulet of Lethe, that had carried away from him all his so
+carefully accumulated intellectual baggage of fact and theory?  The
+hard and abstract laws, or theory of the laws, of music, of the
+stars, of mechanical structure, in hard and abstract formulae, adding
+to the abstract austerity of the man, seemed to have deserted him; to
+be revived in him again [164] however, at the contact of this
+extraordinary pupil or fellow-inquirer, though in a very different
+guise or attitude towards himself, as matters no longer to be
+reasoned upon and understood, but to be seen rather, to be looked at
+and heard.  Did not he see the angle of the earth's axis with the
+ecliptic, the deflexions of the stars from their proper orbits with
+fatal results here below, and the earth--wicked, unscriptural truth!-
+-moving round the sun, and those flashes of the eternal and unorbed
+light such as bring water, flowers, living things, out of the rocks,
+the dust?  The singing of the planets: he could hear it, and might in
+time effect its notation.  Having seen and heard, he might erelong
+speak also, truly and with authority, on such matters.  Could one but
+arrest it for one's self, for final transference to others, on the
+written or printed page--this beam of insight, or of inspiration!
+
+Alas! one result of its coming was that it encouraged delay.  If he
+set hand to the page, the firm halo, here a moment since, was gone,
+had flitted capriciously to the wall; passed next through the window,
+to the wall of the garden; was dancing back in another moment upon
+the innermost walls of one's own miserable brain, to swell there--
+that astounding white light!--rising steadily in the cup, the mental
+receptacle, till it overflowed, and he lay faint and drowning in it.
+Or he rose above it, as above a great liquid surface, and hung
+giddily over it--light, [165] simple, and absolute--ere he fell.  Or
+there was a battle between light and darkness around him, with no way
+of escape from the baffling strokes, the lightning flashes; flashes
+of blindness one might rather call them.  In truth, the intuitions of
+the night (for they worked still, or tried to work, by night) became
+the sickly nightmares of the day, in which Prior Saint-Jean slept, or
+tried to sleep, or lay sometimes in a trance without food for many
+hours, from which he would spring up suddenly to crowd, against time,
+as much as he could into his book with pen or brush; winged flowers,
+or stars with human limbs and faces, still intruding themselves, or
+mere notes of light and darkness from the actual horizon.  There it
+all is still in the faded gold and colours of the ancient volume--
+"Prior Saint-Jean's folly":--till on a sudden the hand collapses, as
+he becomes aware of that real, prosaic, broad daylight lying harsh
+upon the page, making his delicately toned auroras seem but a patch
+of grey, and himself for a moment, with a sigh of disgust, of self-
+reproach, to be his old unimpassioned monastic self once more.
+
+The boy, for his part, was grown at last full of misgiving.  He
+ponders how he may get the Prior away, or escape by himself, find his
+way back to the convent and report his master's condition, his
+strange loss of memory for names and the like, his illusions about
+himself and [166] others.  And he is more than ever distrustful now
+of his late beloved playmate, who quietly obstructs any movement of
+the kind, and has undertaken, at the Prior's entreaty, to draw down
+the moon from the sky, for some shameful price, known to the
+magicians of that day.
+
+Yet Apollyon, at all events, would still play as gaily as ever on
+occasion.  Hitherto they had played as young animals do; without
+playthings namely, applying hand or foot only to their games.  But it
+happened about this time that a grave was dug, a grave of unusual
+depth, to be ready, in that fiery plaguesome weather, the first heat
+of veritable summer come suddenly, for the body of an ancient
+villager then at the point of death.  In the drowsy afternoon
+Hyacinth awakes Apollyon, to see the strange thing he has found at
+the grave-side, among the gravel and yellow bones cast up there.  He
+had wrested it with difficulty from the hands of the half-crippled
+gravedigger, at eighty still excitable by the mere touch of metal.
+
+The like of it had indeed been found before, within living memory, in
+this place of immemorial use as a graveyard--"Devil's penny-pieces"
+people called them.  Five such lay hidden already in a dark corner of
+the chapel, to keep them from superstitious employment.  To-day they
+came out of hiding at last.  Apollyon knew the use of the thing at a
+glance; had put an expert hand to it forthwith; poises the [167]
+discus; sets it wheeling.  How easily it spins round under one's arm,
+in the groove of the bent fingers, slips thence smoothly like a knife
+flung from its sheath, as if for a course of perpetual motion!
+Splendescit eundo: it seems to burn as it goes.  It is heavier many
+times than it looks, and sharp-edged.  By night they have scoured and
+polished the corroded surfaces.  Apollyon promises Hyacinth and
+himself rare sport in the cool of the evening--an evening however, as
+it turned out, not less breathless than the day.
+
+In the great heat Apollyon had flung aside, as if for ever, the last
+sorry remnant of his workman's attire, and challenged the boy to do
+the same.  On the moonlit turf there, crouching, right foot foremost,
+and with face turned backwards to the disk in his right hand, his
+whole body, in that moment of rest, full of the circular motion he is
+about to commit to it, he seemed--beautiful pale spectre--to shine
+from within with a light of his own, like that of the glow-worm in
+the thicket, or the dead and rotten roots of the old trees.  And as
+if they had a proper motion of their own in them, the disks, the
+quoits, ran, amid the delighted shouts and laughter of the boy, as he
+follows, scarcely less swift, to score the points of their contact
+with the grass.  Again and again they recommence, forgetful of the
+hours; while the death-bell cries out harshly for the grave's
+occupant, and [168] the corpse itself is borne along stealthily not
+far from them, and, unnoticed by either, the entire aspect of things
+has changed.  Under the overcast sky it is in darkness they are
+playing, by guess and touch chiefly; and suddenly an icy blast of
+wind has lifted the roof from the old chapel, the trees are moaning
+in wild circular motion, and their devil's penny-piece, when Apollyon
+throws it for the last time, is itself but a twirling leaf in the
+wind, till it sinks edgewise, sawing through the boy's face, uplifted
+in the dark to trace it, crushing in the tender skull upon the brain.
+
+His shout of laughter is turned in an instant to a cry of pain, of
+reproach; and in that which echoed it--an immense cry, as from the
+very heart of ancient tragedy, over the Picard wolds--it was as if
+that half-extinguished deity, its proper immensity, its old greatness
+and power, were restored for a moment.  The villagers in their beds
+wondered.  It was like the sound of some natural catastrophe.
+
+The storm which followed was still in possession, still moving
+tearfully among the poplar groves, though it had spent its heat and
+thunder.  The last drops of the blood of Hyacinth still trickled
+through the thick masses of dark hair, where the tonsure had been.
+An abundant rain, mingling with the copious purple stream, had
+coloured the grass all around where the corpse lay, stealing afar in
+tiny channels.
+
+[169] So it was, when Apollyon, reduced in the morning light to his
+smaller self, came with the other people of the Grange to gaze, to
+enquire, and found the Prior already there, speechless.  Clearly this
+was no lightning stroke; and Apollyon straightway conceives certain
+very human fears that, coming upon those antecedent suspicions of
+himself, the boy's death may be thought the result of intention on
+his part.  He proposes to bury the body at once, with no delay for
+religious rites, in that still uncovered grave, the bearers having
+fled from it in the tempest.
+
+And next day, fulfilling his annual custom, he went his way
+northward, without a word of farewell to Prior Saint-Jean, whom he
+leaves in fact under suspicion of murder.  From the profound slumber
+which had followed the excitements of yesterday, the Prior awoke amid
+the sound of voices, the voices of the peasants singing no Christian
+song, certainly, but a song which Apollyon himself had taught them,
+to dismiss him on his journey.  For, strange or not as it might be,
+they loved him, perhaps in spite of themselves; would certainly
+protect him at any risk.  Prior Saint-Jean arose, and looked forth--
+with wonder.  A brief spell of sunshine amid the rain had clothed the
+vale with a marvel of blue flowers, if it were not rather with
+remnants of the blue sky itself, fallen among the woods there.  But
+there too, in the little courtyard, [170] the officers of justice
+are already in waiting to take him, on the charge of having caused
+the death of his young server by violence, in a fit of mania, induced
+by dissolute living in that solitary place.  One hitherto so
+prosperous in life would, of course, have his enemies.
+
+The monastic authorities, however, claim him from the secular power,
+to correct his offence in their own way, and with friendly
+interpretation of the facts.  Madness, however wicked, being still
+madness, Prior, now simple Brother, Saint-Jean, is detained in a
+sufficiently cheerful apartment, in a region of the atmosphere likely
+to restore lost wits, whence indeed he can still see the country--
+vallis monachorum.  The one desire which from time to time fitfully
+rouses him again to animation for a few moments is to return thither.
+Here then he remains in peace, ostensibly for the completion of his
+great work.  He never again set pen to it, consistent and clear now
+on nothing save that longing to be once more at the Grange, that he
+may get well, or die and be well so.  He is like the damned spirit,
+think some of the brethren, saying "I will return to the house whence
+I came out."  Gazing thither daily for many hours, he would mistake
+mere blue distance, when that was visible, for blue flowers, for
+hyacinths, and wept at the sight; though blue, as he observed, was
+the colour of Holy Mary's gown on the illuminated page, the colour of
+hope, of merciful [171] omnipresent deity.  The necessary permission
+came with difficulty, just too late.  Brother Saint-Jean died,
+standing upright with an effort to gaze forth once more, amid the
+preparations for his departure.
+
+NOTES
+
+142. *Published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Nov. 1893, and now
+reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.
+
+154. *Or sundial, as some maintain, though turned from the south.
+
+154. +Latin Vulgate (ed. Saint Jerome) Psalm 126, verse 1:
+"canticum graduum Salomonis nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum in vanum
+laboraverunt qui aedificant eam nisi Dominus custodierit civitatem
+frustra vigilavit qui custodit."  King James Bible's translation:
+"When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them
+that dream."
+
+
+
+THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE*
+
+[172] As Florian Deleal walked, one hot afternoon, he overtook by the
+wayside a poor aged man, and, as he seemed weary with the road,
+helped him on with the burden which he carried, a certain distance.
+And as the man told his story, it chanced that he named the place, a
+little place in the neighbourhood of a great city, where Florian had
+passed his earliest years, but which he had never since seen, and,
+the story told, went forward on his journey comforted.  And that
+night, like a reward for his pity, a dream of that place came to
+Florian, a dream which did for him the office of the finer sort of
+memory, bringing its object to mind with a great clearness, yet, as
+sometimes happens in dreams, raised a little above itself, and above
+ordinary retrospect.  The true aspect of the place, especially of the
+house there in which he had lived as a child, the fashion of its
+doors, its hearths, its windows, the very scent upon the air of it,
+was with him in sleep for a season; only, with tints more musically
+blent on wall [173] and floor, and some finer light and shadow
+running in and out along its curves and angles, and with all its
+little carvings daintier.  He awoke with a sigh at the thought of
+almost thirty years which lay between him and that place, yet with a
+flutter of pleasure still within him at the fair light, as if it
+were a smile, upon it.  And it happened that this accident of his
+dream was just the thing needed for the beginning of a certain design
+he then had in view, the noting, namely, of some things in the story
+of his spirit--in that process of brain-building by which we are,
+each one of us, what we are.  With the image of the place so clear
+and favourable upon him, he fell to thinking of himself therein, and
+how his thoughts had grown up to him.  In that half-spiritualised
+house he could watch the better, over again, the gradual expansion of
+the soul which had come to be there--of which indeed, through the law
+which makes the material objects about them so large an element in
+children's lives, it had actually become a part; inward and outward
+being woven through and through each other into one inextricable
+texture--half, tint and trace and accident of homely colour and form,
+from the wood and the bricks; half, mere soul-stuff, floated thither
+from who knows how far.  In the house and garden of his dream he saw
+a child moving, and could divide the main streams at least of
+the winds that had played on [174] him, and study so the first stage
+in that mental journey.
+
+The old house, as when Florian talked of it afterwards he always
+called it, (as all children do, who can recollect a change of home,
+soon enough but not too soon to mark a period in their lives) really
+was an old house; and an element of French descent in its inmates--
+descent from Watteau, the old court-painter, one of whose gallant
+pieces still hung in one of the rooms--might explain, together with
+some other things, a noticeable trimness and comely whiteness about
+everything there--the curtains, the couches, the paint on the walls
+with which the light and shadow played so delicately; might explain
+also the tolerance of the great poplar in the garden, a tree most
+often despised by English people, but which French people love,
+having observed a certain fresh way its leaves have of dealing with
+the wind, making it sound, in never so slight a stirring of the air,
+like running water.
+
+The old-fashioned, low wainscoting went round the rooms, and up the
+staircase with carved balusters and shadowy angles, landing half-way
+up at a broad window, with a swallow's nest below the sill, and the
+blossom of an old pear-tree showing across it in late April, against
+the blue, below which the perfumed juice of the find of fallen fruit
+in autumn was so fresh.  At the next turning came the closet which
+held on its deep shelves the best china.  Little angel [175] faces
+and reedy flutings stood out round the fireplace of the children's
+room.  And on the top of the house, above the large attic, where the
+white mice ran in the twilight--an infinite, unexplored wonderland of
+childish treasures, glass beads, empty scent-bottles still sweet,
+thrum of coloured silks, among its lumber--a flat space of roof,
+railed round, gave a view of the neighbouring steeples; for the
+house, as I said, stood near a great city, which sent up heavenwards,
+over the twisting weather-vanes, not seldom, its beds of rolling
+cloud and smoke, touched with storm or sunshine.  But the child of
+whom I am writing did not hate the fog because of the crimson lights
+which fell from it sometimes upon the chimneys, and the whites which
+gleamed through its openings, on summer mornings, on turret or
+pavement.  For it is false to suppose that a child's sense of beauty
+is dependent on any choiceness or special fineness, in the objects
+which present themselves to it, though this indeed comes to be the
+rule with most of us in later life; earlier, in some degree, we see
+inwardly; and the child finds for itself, and with unstinted delight,
+a difference for the sense, in those whites and reds through the
+smoke on very homely buildings, and in the gold of the dandelions at
+the road-side, just beyond the houses, where not a handful of earth
+is virgin and untouched, in the lack of better ministries to its
+desire of beauty.
+
+[176] This house then stood not far beyond the gloom and rumours of
+the town, among high garden-wall, bright all summer-time with Golden-
+rod, and brown-and-golden Wall-flower--Flos Parietis, as the
+children's Latin-reading father taught them to call it, while he was
+with them.  Tracing back the threads of his complex spiritual habit,
+as he was used in after years to do, Florian found that he owed to
+the place many tones of sentiment afterwards customary with him,
+certain inward lights under which things most naturally presented
+themselves to him.  The coming and going of travellers to the town
+along the way, the shadow of the streets, the sudden breath of the
+neighbouring gardens, the singular brightness of bright weather
+there, its singular darknesses which linked themselves in his mind to
+certain engraved illustrations in the old big Bible at home, the
+coolness of the dark, cavernous shops round the great church, with
+its giddy winding stair up to the pigeons and the bells--a citadel of
+peace in the heart of the trouble--all this acted on his childish
+fancy, so that ever afterwards the like aspects and incidents never
+failed to throw him into a well-recognised imaginative mood, seeming
+actually to have become a part of the texture of his mind.  Also,
+Florian could trace home to this point a pervading preference in
+himself for a kind of comeliness and dignity, an urbanity literally,
+in modes of life, which he connected with the pale [177] people of
+towns, and which made him susceptible to a kind of exquisite
+satisfaction in the trimness and well-considered grace of certain
+things and persons he afterwards met with, here and there, in his way
+through the world.
+
+So the child of whom I am writing lived on there quietly; things
+without thus ministering to him, as he sat daily at the window with
+the birdcage hanging below it, and his mother taught him to read,
+wondering at the ease with which he learned, and at the quickness of
+his memory.  The perfume of the little flowers of the lime-tree fell
+through the air upon them like rain; while time seemed to move ever
+more slowly to the murmur of the bees in it, till it almost stood
+still on June afternoons.  How insignificant, at the moment, seem the
+influences of the sensible things which are tossed and fall and lie
+about us, so, or so, in the environment of early childhood.  How
+indelibly, as we afterwards discover, they affect us; with what
+capricious attractions and associations they figure themselves on the
+white paper, the smooth wax, of our ingenuous souls, as "with lead in
+the rock for ever," giving form and feature, and as it were assigned
+house-room in our memory, to early experiences of feeling and
+thought, which abide with us ever afterwards, thus, and not
+otherwise.  The realities and passions, the rumours of the greater
+world without, steal in upon us, each by its own special little
+passage-way, through the wall of custom [178] about us; and never
+afterwards quite detach themselves from this or that accident, or
+trick, in the mode of their first entrance to us.  Our
+susceptibilities, the discovery of our powers, manifold experiences--
+our various experiences of the coming and going of bodily pain, for
+instance--belong to this or the other well-remembered place in the
+material habitation--that little white room with the window across
+which the heavy blossoms could beat so peevishly in the wind, with
+just that particular catch or throb, such a sense of teasing in it,
+on gusty mornings; and the early habitation thus gradually becomes a
+sort of material shrine or sanctuary of sentiment; a system of
+visible symbolism interweaves itself through all our thoughts and
+passions; and irresistibly, little shapes, voices, accidents--the
+angle at which the sun in the morning fell on the pillow--become
+parts of the great chain wherewith we are bound.
+
+Thus far, for Florian, what all this had determined was a peculiarly
+strong sense of home--so forcible a motive with all of us--prompting
+to us our customary love of the earth, and the larger part of our
+fear of death, that revulsion we have from it, as from something
+strange, untried, unfriendly; though life-long imprisonment, they
+tell you, and final banishment from home is a thing bitterer still;
+the looking forward to but a short space, a mere childish goûter and
+dessert of it, before the end, being so great a resource of [179]
+effort to pilgrims and wayfarers, and the soldier in distant
+quarters, and lending, in lack of that, some power of solace to the
+thought of sleep in the home churchyard, at least--dead cheek by dead
+cheek, and with the rain soaking in upon one from above.
+
+So powerful is this instinct, and yet accidents like those I have
+been speaking of so mechanically determine it; its essence being
+indeed the early familiar, as constituting our ideal, or typical
+conception, of rest and security.  Out of so many possible
+conditions, just this for you and that for me, brings ever the
+unmistakeable realisation of the delightful chez soi; this for the
+Englishman, for me and you, with the closely-drawn white curtain and
+the shaded lamp; that, quite other, for the wandering Arab, who folds
+his tent every morning, and makes his sleeping-place among haunted
+ruins, or in old tombs.
+
+With Florian then the sense of home became singularly intense, his
+good fortune being that the special character of his home was in
+itself so essentially home-like.  As after many wanderings I have
+come to fancy that some parts of Surrey and Kent are, for Englishmen,
+the true landscape, true home-counties, by right, partly, of a
+certain earthy warmth in the yellow of the sand below their gorse-
+bushes, and of a certain grey-blue mist after rain, in the hollows of
+the hills there, welcome to fatigued eyes, and never seen farther
+south; so I think that the sort of [180] house I have described, with
+precisely those proportions of red-brick and green, and with a just
+perceptible monotony in the subdued order of it, for its
+distinguishing note, is for Englishmen at least typically home-life.
+And so for Florian that general human instinct was reinforced by this
+special home-likeness in the place his wandering soul had happened to
+light on, as, in the second degree, its body and earthly tabernacle;
+the sense of harmony between his soul and its physical environment
+became, for a time at least, like perfectly played music, and the
+life led there singularly tranquil and filled with a curious sense of
+self-possession.  The love of security, of an habitually undisputed
+standing-ground or sleeping-place, came to count for much in the
+generation and correcting of his thoughts, and afterwards as a
+salutary principle of restraint in all his wanderings of spirit.  The
+wistful yearning towards home, in absence from it, as the shadows of
+evening deepened, and he followed in thought what was doing there
+from hour to hour, interpreted to him much of a yearning and regret
+he experienced afterwards, towards he knew not what, out of strange
+ways of feeling and thought in which, from time to time, his spirit
+found itself alone; and in the tears shed in such absences there
+seemed always to be some soul-subduing foretaste of what his last
+tears might be.
+
+And the sense of security could hardly have [181] been deeper, the
+quiet of the child's soul being one with the quiet of its home, a
+place "inclosed" and "sealed."  But upon this assured place, upon the
+child's assured soul which resembled it, there came floating in from
+the larger world without, as at windows left ajar unknowingly, or
+over the high garden walls, two streams of impressions, the
+sentiments of beauty and pain--recognitions of the visible, tangible,
+audible loveliness of things, as a very real and somewhat tyrannous
+element in them--and of the sorrow of the world, of grown people and
+children and animals, as a thing not to be put by in them.  From this
+point he could trace two predominant processes of mental change in
+him--the growth of an almost diseased sensibility to the spectacle of
+suffering, and, parallel with this, the rapid growth of a certain
+capacity of fascination by bright colour and choice form--the sweet
+curvings, for instance, of the lips of those who seemed to him comely
+persons, modulated in such delicate unison to the things they said or
+sang,--marking early the activity in him of a more than customary
+sensuousness, "the lust of the eye," as the Preacher says, which
+might lead him, one day, how far!  Could he have foreseen the
+weariness of the way!  In music sometimes the two sorts of
+impressions came together, and he would weep, to the surprise of
+older people.  Tears of joy too the child knew, also to older
+people's surprise; real tears, once, of relief from long-strung,
+[182] childish expectation, when he found returned at evening, with
+new roses in her cheeks, the little sister who had been to a place
+where there was a wood, and brought back for him a treasure of fallen
+acorns, and black crow's feathers, and his peace at finding her again
+near him mingled all night with some intimate sense of the distant
+forest, the rumour of its breezes, with the glossy blackbirds aslant
+and the branches lifted in them, and of the perfect nicety of the
+little cups that fell.  So those two elementary apprehensions of the
+tenderness and of the colour in things grew apace in him, and were
+seen by him afterwards to send their roots back into the beginnings
+of life.
+
+Let me note first some of the occasions of his recognition of the
+element of pain in things--incidents, now and again, which seemed
+suddenly to awake in him the whole force of that sentiment which
+Goethe has called the Weltschmerz, and in which the concentrated
+sorrow of the world seemed suddenly to lie heavy upon him.  A book
+lay in an old book-case, of which he cared to remember one picture--a
+woman sitting, with hands bound behind her, the dress, the cap, the
+hair, folded with a simplicity which touched him strangely, as if not
+by her own hands, but with some ambiguous care at the hands of
+others--Queen Marie Antoinette, on her way to execution--we all
+remember David's drawing, meant merely to make her ridiculous.  The
+face [183] that had been so high had learned to be mute and
+resistless; but out of its very resistlessness, seemed now to call on
+men to have pity, and forbear; and he took note of that, as he closed
+the book, as a thing to look at again, if he should at any time
+find himself tempted to be cruel.  Again, he would never quite forget
+the appeal in the small sister's face, in the garden under the
+lilacs, terrified at a spider lighted on her sleeve.  He could trace
+back to the look then noted a certain mercy he conceived always for
+people in fear, even of little things, which seemed to make him,
+though but for a moment, capable of almost any sacrifice of himself.
+Impressible, susceptible persons, indeed, who had had their sorrows,
+lived about him; and this sensibility was due in part to the tacit
+influence of their presence, enforcing upon him habitually the fact
+that there are those who pass their days, as a matter of course, in a
+sort of "going quietly."  Most poignantly of all he could recall, in
+unfading minutest circumstance, the cry on the stair, sounding
+bitterly through the house, and struck into his soul for ever, of an
+aged woman, his father's sister, come now to announce his death in
+distant India; how it seemed to make the aged woman like a child
+again; and, he knew not why, but this fancy was full of pity to him.
+There were the little sorrows of the dumb animals too--of the white
+angora, with a dark tail like an ermine's, and a face like a [184]
+flower, who fell into a lingering sickness, and became quite
+delicately human in its valetudinarianism, and came to have a hundred
+different expressions of voice--how it grew worse and worse, till it
+began to feel the light too much for it, and at last, after one wild
+morning of pain, the little soul flickered away from the body, quite
+worn to death already, and now but feebly retaining it.
+
+So he wanted another pet; and as there were starlings about the
+place, which could be taught to speak, one of them was caught, and he
+meant to treat it kindly; but in the night its young ones could be
+heard crying after it, and the responsive cry of the mother-bird
+towards them; and at last, with the first light, though not till
+after some debate with himself, he went down and opened the cage, and
+saw a sharp bound of the prisoner up to her nestlings; and therewith
+came the sense of remorse,--that he too was become an accomplice in
+moving, to the limit of his small power, the springs and handles of
+that great machine in things, constructed so ingeniously to play
+pain-fugues on the delicate nerve-work of living creatures.
+
+I have remarked how, in the process of our brain-building, as the
+house of thought in which we live gets itself together, like some
+airy bird's-nest of floating thistle-down and chance straws, compact
+at last, little accidents have their consequence; and thus it
+happened that, as he [185] walked one evening, a garden gate, usually
+closed, stood open; and lo! within, a great red hawthorn in full
+flower, embossing heavily the bleached and twisted trunk and
+branches, so aged that there were but few green leaves thereon--a
+plumage of tender, crimson fire out of the heart of the dry wood.
+The perfume of the tree had now and again reached him, in the
+currents of the wind, over the wall, and he had wondered what might
+be behind it, and was now allowed to fill his arms with the flowers--
+flowers enough for all the old blue-china pots along the chimney-
+piece, making fête in the children's room.  Was it some periodic
+moment in the expansion of soul within him, or mere trick of heat in
+the heavily-laden summer air?
+
+But the beauty of the thing struck home to him feverishly; and in
+dreams all night he loitered along a magic roadway of crimson
+flowers, which seemed to open ruddily in thick, fresh masses about
+his feet, and fill softly all the little hollows in the banks on
+either side.  Always afterwards, summer by summer, as the flowers
+came on, the blossom of the red hawthorn still seemed to him
+absolutely the reddest of all things; and the goodly crimson, still
+alive in the works of old Venetian masters or old Flemish tapestries,
+called out always from afar the recollection of the flame in those
+perishing little petals, as it pulsed gradually out of them, kept
+long in the drawers of an old cabinet.
+
+[186] Also then, for the first time, he seemed to experience a
+passionateness in his relation to fair outward objects, an
+inexplicable excitement in their presence, which disturbed him, and
+from which he half longed to be free.  A touch of regret or desire
+mingled all night with the remembered presence of the red flowers,
+and their perfume in the darkness about him; and the longing for some
+undivined, entire possession of them was the beginning of a
+revelation to him, growing ever clearer, with the coming of the
+gracious summer guise of fields and trees and persons in each
+succeeding year, of a certain, at times seemingly exclusive,
+predominance in his interests, of beautiful physical things, a kind
+of tyranny of the senses over him.
+
+In later years he came upon philosophies which occupied him much in
+the estimate of the proportion of the sensuous and the ideal elements
+in human knowledge, the relative parts they bear in it; and, in his
+intellectual scheme, was led to assign very little to the abstract
+thought, and much to its sensible vehicle or occasion.  Such
+metaphysical speculation did but reinforce what was instinctive in
+his way of receiving the world, and for him, everywhere, that
+sensible vehicle or occasion became, perhaps only too surely, the
+necessary concomitant of any perception of things, real enough to be
+of any weight or reckoning, in his house of thought.  There were
+times when he could think of the [187] necessity he was under of
+associating all thoughts to touch and sight, as a sympathetic link
+between himself and actual, feeling, living objects; a protest in
+favour of real men and women against mere grey, unreal abstractions;
+and he remembered gratefully how the Christian religion, hardly less
+than the religion of the ancient Greeks, translating so much of its
+spiritual verity into things that may be seen, condescends in part to
+sanction this infirmity, if so it be, of our human existence, wherein
+the world of sense is so much with us, and welcomed this thought as a
+kind of keeper and sentinel over his soul therein.  But certainly, he
+came more and more to be unable to care for, or think of soul but as
+in an actual body, or of any world but that wherein are water and
+trees, and where men and women look, so or so, and press actual
+hands.  It was the trick even his pity learned, fastening those who
+suffered in anywise to his affections by a kind of sensible
+attachments.  He would think of Julian, fallen into incurable
+sickness, as spoiled in the sweet blossom of his skin like pale
+amber, and his honey-like hair; of Cecil, early dead, as cut off from
+the lilies, from golden summer days, from women's voices; and then
+what comforted him a little was the thought of the turning of the
+child's flesh to violets in the turf above him.  And thinking of the
+very poor, it was not the things which most men care most for that he
+yearned to give them; [188] but fairer roses, perhaps, and power to
+taste quite as they will, at their ease and not task-burdened, a
+certain desirable, clear light in the new morning, through which
+sometimes he had noticed them, quite unconscious of it, on their way
+to their early toil.
+
+So he yielded himself to these things, to be played upon by them like
+a musical instrument, and began to note with deepening watchfulness,
+but always with some puzzled, unutterable longing in his enjoyment,
+the phases of the seasons and of the growing or waning day, down even
+to the shadowy changes wrought on bare wall or ceiling--the light
+cast up from the snow, bringing out their darkest angles; the brown
+light in the cloud, which meant rain; that almost too austere
+clearness, in the protracted light of the lengthening day, before
+warm weather began, as if it lingered but to make a severer workday,
+with the school-books opened earlier and later; that beam of June
+sunshine, at last, as he lay awake before the time, a way of gold-
+dust across the darkness; all the humming, the freshness, the perfume
+of the garden seemed to lie upon it--and coming in one afternoon in
+September, along the red gravel walk, to look for a basket of yellow
+crab-apples left in the cool, old parlour, he remembered it the more,
+and how the colours struck upon him, because a wasp on one bitten
+apple stung him, and he felt the passion of [189] sudden, severe
+pain.  For this too brought its curious reflexions; and, in relief
+from it, he would wonder over it--how it had then been with him--
+puzzled at the depth of the charm or spell over him, which lay, for a
+little while at least, in the mere absence of pain; once, especially,
+when an older boy taught him to make flowers of sealing-wax, and he
+had burnt his hand badly at the lighted taper, and been unable to
+sleep.  He remembered that also afterwards, as a sort of typical
+thing--a white vision of heat about him, clinging closely, through
+the languid scent of the ointments put upon the place to make it
+well.
+
+Also, as he felt this pressure upon him of the sensible world, then,
+as often afterwards, there would come another sort of curious
+questioning how the last impressions of eye and ear might happen to
+him, how they would find him--the scent of the last flower, the soft
+yellowness of the last morning, the last recognition of some object
+of affection, hand or voice; it could not be but that the latest look
+of the eyes, before their final closing, would be strangely vivid;
+one would go with the hot tears, the cry, the touch of the wistful
+bystander, impressed how deeply on one! or would it be, perhaps, a
+mere frail retiring of all things, great or little, away from one,
+into a level distance?
+
+For with this desire of physical beauty mingled itself early the fear
+of death--the fear of death [190] intensified by the desire of
+beauty.  Hitherto he had never gazed upon dead faces, as sometimes,
+afterwards, at the Morgue in Paris, or in that fair cemetery at
+Munich, where all the dead must go and lie in state before burial,
+behind glass windows, among the flowers and incense and holy candles-
+-the aged clergy with their sacred ornaments, the young men in their
+dancing-shoes and spotless white linen--after which visits, those
+waxen, resistless faces would always live with him for many days,
+making the broadest sunshine sickly.  The child had heard indeed of
+the death of his father, and how, in the Indian station, a fever had
+taken him, so that though not in action he had yet died as a soldier;
+and hearing of the "resurrection of the just," he could think of him
+as still abroad in the world, somehow, for his protection--a grand,
+though perhaps rather terrible figure, in beautiful soldier's things,
+like the figure in the picture of Joshua's Vision in the Bible--and
+of that, round which the mourners moved so softly, and afterwards
+with such solemn singing, as but a worn-out garment left at a
+deserted lodging.  So it was, until on a summer day he walked with
+his mother through a fair churchyard.  In a bright dress he rambled
+among the graves, in the gay weather, and so came, in one corner,
+upon an open grave for a child--a dark space on the brilliant grass--
+the black mould lying heaped up round it, weighing down the little
+jewelled [191] branches of the dwarf rose-bushes in flower.  And
+therewith came, full-grown, never wholly to leave him, with the
+certainty that even children do sometimes die, the physical horror of
+death, with its wholly selfish recoil from the association of lower
+forms of life, and the suffocating weight above.  No benign, grave
+figure in beautiful soldier's things any longer abroad in the world
+for his protection! only a few poor, piteous bones; and above them,
+possibly, a certain sort of figure he hoped not to see.  For sitting
+one day in the garden below an open window, he heard people talking,
+and could not but listen, how, in a sleepless hour, a sick woman had
+seen one of the dead sitting beside her, come to call her hence; and
+from the broken talk evolved with much clearness the notion that not
+all those dead people had really departed to the churchyard, nor were
+quite so motionless as they looked, but led a secret, half-fugitive
+life in their old homes, quite free by night, though sometimes
+visible in the day, dodging from room to room, with no great goodwill
+towards those who shared the place with them.  All night the figure
+sat beside him in the reveries of his broken sleep, and was not quite
+gone in the morning--an odd, irreconcileable new member of the
+household, making the sweet familiar chambers unfriendly and suspect
+by its uncertain presence.  He could have hated the dead he had
+pitied so, for being [192] thus.  Afterwards he came to think of
+those poor, home-returning ghosts, which all men have fancied to
+themselves--the revenants--pathetically, as crying, or beating with
+vain hands at the doors, as the wind came, their cries
+distinguishable in it as a wilder inner note.  But, always making
+death more unfamiliar still, that old experience would ever, from
+time to time, return to him; even in the living he sometimes caught
+its likeness; at any time or place, in a moment, the faint atmosphere
+of the chamber of death would be breathed around him, and the image
+with the bound chin, the quaint smile, the straight, stiff feet, shed
+itself across the air upon the bright carpet, amid the gayest
+company, or happiest communing with himself.
+
+To most children the sombre questionings to which impressions like
+these attach themselves, if they come at all, are actually suggested
+by religious books, which therefore they often regard with much
+secret distaste, and dismiss, as far as possible, from their habitual
+thoughts as a too depressing element in life.  To Florian such
+impressions, these misgivings as to the ultimate tendency of the
+years, of the relationship between life and death, had been suggested
+spontaneously in the natural course of his mental growth by a strong
+innate sense for the soberer tones in things, further strengthened by
+actual circumstances; and religious sentiment, that [193] system of
+biblical ideas in which he had been brought up, presented itself to
+him as a thing that might soften and dignify, and light up as with a
+"lively hope," a melancholy already deeply settled in him.  So he
+yielded himself easily to religious impressions, and with a kind of
+mystical appetite for sacred things; the more as they came to him
+through a saintly person who loved him tenderly, and believed that
+this early pre-occupation with them already marked the child out for
+a saint.  He began to love, for their own sakes, church lights, holy
+days, all that belonged to the comely order of the sanctuary, the
+secrets of its white linen, and holy vessels, and fonts of pure
+water; and its hieratic purity and simplicity became the type of
+something he desired always to have about him in actual life.  He
+pored over the pictures in religious books, and knew by heart the
+exact mode in which the wrestling angel grasped Jacob, how Jacob
+looked in his mysterious sleep, how the bells and pomegranates were
+attached to the hem of Aaron's vestment, sounding sweetly as he
+glided over the turf of the holy place.  His way of conceiving
+religion came then to be in effect what it ever afterwards remained--
+a sacred history indeed, but still more a sacred ideal, a
+transcendent version or representation, under intenser and more
+expressive light and shade, of human life and its familiar or
+exceptional incidents, birth, death, marriage, [194] youth, age,
+tears, joy, rest, sleep, waking--a mirror, towards which men might
+turn away their eyes from vanity and dullness, and see themselves
+therein as angels, with their daily meat and drink, even, become a
+kind of sacred transaction--a complementary strain or burden, applied
+to our every-day existence, whereby the stray snatches of music in it
+re-set themselves, and fall into the scheme of some higher and more
+consistent harmony.  A place adumbrated itself in his thoughts,
+wherein those sacred personalities, which are at once the reflex and
+the pattern of our nobler phases of life, housed themselves; and this
+region in his intellectual scheme all subsequent experience did but
+tend still further to realise and define.  Some ideal, hieratic
+persons he would always need to occupy it and keep a warmth there.
+And he could hardly understand those who felt no such need at all,
+finding themselves quite happy without such heavenly companionship,
+and sacred double of their life, beside them.
+
+Thus a constant substitution of the typical for the actual took place
+in his thoughts.  Angels might be met by the way, under English elm
+or beech-tree; mere messengers seemed like angels, bound on celestial
+errands; a deep mysticity brooded over real meetings and partings;
+marriages were made in heaven; and deaths also, with hands of angels
+thereupon, to bear soul and body quietly asunder, each to its [195]
+appointed rest.  All the acts and accidents of daily life borrowed a
+sacred colour and significance; the very colours of things became
+themselves weighty with meanings like the sacred stuffs of Moses'
+tabernacle, full of penitence or peace.  Sentiment, congruous in the
+first instance only with those divine transactions, the deep,
+effusive unction of the House of Bethany, was assumed as the due
+attitude for the reception of our every-day existence; and for a time
+he walked through the world in a sustained, not unpleasurable awe,
+generated by the habitual recognition, beside every circumstance and
+event of life, of its celestial correspondent.
+
+Sensibility--the desire of physical beauty--a strange biblical awe,
+which made any reference to the unseen act on him like solemn music--
+these qualities the child took away with him, when, at about the age
+of twelve years, he left the old house, and was taken to live in
+another place.  He had never left home before, and, anticipating much
+from this change, had long dreamed over it, jealously counting the
+days till the time fixed for departure should come; had been a little
+careless about others even, in his strong desire for it--when Lewis
+fell sick, for instance, and they must wait still two days longer.
+At last the morning came, very fine; and all things--the very
+pavement with its dust, at the roadside--seemed to have a white,
+pearl-like lustre in them.  They were to travel by a [196] favourite
+road on which he had often walked a certain distance, and on one of
+those two prisoner days, when Lewis was sick, had walked farther than
+ever before, in his great desire to reach the new place.  They had
+started and gone a little way when a pet bird was found to have been
+left behind, and must even now--so it presented itself to him--have
+already all the appealing fierceness and wild self-pity at heart of
+one left by others to perish of hunger in a closed house; and he
+returned to fetch it, himself in hardly less stormy distress.  But as
+he passed in search of it from room to room, lying so pale, with a
+look of meekness in their denudation, and at last through that
+little, stripped white room, the aspect of the place touched him like
+the face of one dead; and a clinging back towards it came over him,
+so intense that he knew it would last long, and spoiling all his
+pleasure in the realisation of a thing so eagerly anticipated.  And
+so, with the bird found, but himself in an agony of home-sickness,
+thus capriciously sprung up within him, he was driven quickly away,
+far into the rural distance, so fondly speculated on, of that
+favourite country-road.
+
+NOTES
+
+172. *Published in Macmillan's Magazine, Aug. 1878.
+
+
+
+EMERALD UTHWART*
+
+[197] WE smile at epitaphs--at those recent enough to be read easily;
+smile, for the most part, at what for the most part is an unreal and
+often vulgar branch of literature; yet a wide one, with its flowers
+here or there, such as make us regret now and again not to have
+gathered more carefully in our wanderings a fair average of the like.
+Their very simplicity, of course, may set one's thoughts in motion to
+fill up the scanty tale, and those of the young at least are almost
+always worth while.  At Siena, for instance, in the great Dominican
+church, even with the impassioned work of Sodoma at hand, you may
+linger in a certain dimly lit chapel to spell out the black-letter
+memorials of the German students who died here--aetatis flore!--at
+the University, famous early in the last century; young nobles
+chiefly, far from the Rhine, from Nuremberg, or Leipsic.  Note one in
+particular!  Loving parents and elder brother meant to record [198]
+carefully the very days of the lad's poor life--annos, menses, dies;
+sent the order, doubtless, from the distant old castle in the
+Fatherland, but not quite explicitly; the spaces for the numbers
+remain still unfilled; and they never came to see.  After two
+centuries the omission is not to be rectified; and the young man's
+memorial has perhaps its propriety as it stands, with those
+unnumbered, or numberless, days.  "Full of affections," observed,
+once upon a time, a great lover of boys and young men, speaking to a
+large company of them:--"full of affections, full of powers, full of
+occupation, how naturally might the younger part of us especially
+(more naturally than the older) receive the tidings that there are
+things to be loved and things to be done which shall never pass away.
+We feel strong, we feel active, we feel full of life; and these
+feelings do not altogether deceive us, for we shall live for ever.
+We see a long prospect before us, for which it is worth while to
+work, even with much labour; for we are as yet young, and the past
+portion of our lives is but small in comparison of that which
+probably remains to us.  It is most true!  The past years of our life
+are absolutely beyond proportion small in comparison with those which
+certainly remain to us."
+
+In a very different neighbourhood, here at home, in a remote Sussex
+churchyard, you may read that Emerald Uthwart was born on such a
+[199] day, "at Chase Lodge, in this parish; and died there," on a day
+in the year 18--, aged twenty-six.  Think, thereupon, of the years of
+a very English existence passed without a lost week in that bloomy
+English place, amid its English lawns and flower-beds, its oldish
+brick and raftered plaster; you may see it still, not far off, on a
+clearing of the wooded hill-side sloping gradually to the sea.  But
+you think wrong.  Emerald Uthwart, in almost unbroken absence from
+his home, longed greatly for it, but left it early and came back
+there only to die, in disgrace, as he conceived; of which it was he
+died there, finding the sense of the place all around him at last,
+like blessed oil in one's wounds.
+
+How they shook their musk from them!--those gardens, among which the
+youngest son, but not the youngest child, grew up, little considered
+till he returned there in those last years.  The rippling note of the
+birds he distinguished so acutely seemed a part of this tree-less
+place, open freely to sun and air, such as rose and carnation loved,
+in the midst of the old disafforested chase.  Brothers and sisters,
+all alike were gardeners, methodically intimate with their flowers.
+You need words compact rather of perfume than of colour to describe
+them, in nice annual order; terms for perfume, as immediate and
+definite as red, purple, and yellow.  Flowers there were which seemed
+to yield their sweetest in the faint sea-salt, when the loosening
+wind [200] was strong from the south-west; some which found their way
+slowly towards the neighbourhood of the old oaks and beech-trees.
+Others consorted most freely with the wall-fruit, or seemed made for
+pot-pourri to sweeten the old black mahogany furniture.  The sweet-
+pea stacks loved the broad path through the kitchen garden; the old-
+fashioned garden azalea was the making of a nosegay, with its honey
+which clung to one's finger.  There were flowers all the sweeter for
+a battle with the rain; a flower like aromatic medicine; another like
+summer lingering into winter; it ripened as fruit does; and another
+was like August, his own birthday time, dropped into March.
+
+The very mould here, rich old black gardener's earth, was flower-
+seed; and beyond, the fields, one after another, through the white
+gates breaking the well-grown hedge-rows, were hardly less garden-
+like; little velvety fields, little with the true sweet English
+littleness of our little island, our land of vignettes.  Here all was
+little; the very church where they went to pray, to sit, the ancient
+Uthwarts sleeping all around outside under the windows, deposited
+there as quietly as fallen trees on their native soil, and almost
+unrecorded, as there had been almost nothing to record; where
+however, Sunday after Sunday, Emerald Uthwart reads, wondering, the
+solitary memorial of one soldierly member of his race, who had,--
+well! who had not died here [201] at home, in his bed.  How wretched!
+how fine! how inconceivably great and difficult!--not for him!  And
+yet, amid all its littleness, how large his sense of liberty in the
+place he, the cadet doomed to leave it--his birth-place, where he is
+also so early to die--had loved better than any one of them!
+Enjoying hitherto all the freedom of the almost grown-up brothers,
+the unrepressed noise, the unchecked hours, the old rooms, all their
+own way, he is literally without the consciousness of rule.  Only,
+when the long irresponsible day is over, amid the dew, the odours, of
+summer twilight, they roll their cricket-field against to-morrow's
+game.  So it had always been with the Uthwarts; they never went to
+school.  In the great attic he has chosen for himself Emerald
+awakes;--it was a rule, sanitary, almost medical, never to rouse the
+children--rises to play betimes; or, if he choose, with window flung
+open to the roses, the sea, turns to sleep again, deliberately,
+deliciously, under the fine old blankets.
+
+A rather sensuous boy! you may suppose, amid the wholesome, natural
+self-indulgence of a very English home.  His days began there: it
+closed again, after an interval of the larger number of them,
+indulgently, mercifully, round his end.  For awhile he became its
+centre, old habits changing, the old furniture rearranged about him,
+for the first time in many generations, though he left it now with
+something like [202] resentment in his heart, as if thrust harshly
+away, sent ablactatus a matre; made an effort thereon to snap the
+last thread which bound him to it.  Yet it would come back upon him
+sometimes, amid so different a scene, as through a suddenly opened
+door, or a rent in the wall, with softer thoughts of his people,--
+there, or not there,--and a sudden, dutiful effort on his part to
+rekindle wasting affection.
+
+The youngest of four sons, but not the youngest of the family!--you
+conceive the sort of negligence that creeps over even the kindest
+maternities, in such case; unless, perhaps, sickness, or the sort of
+misfortune, making the last first for the affectionate, that brought
+Emerald back at length to die contentedly, interferes with the way of
+nature.  Little by little he comes to understand that, while the
+brothers are indulged with lessons at home, are some of them free
+even of these and placed already in the world, where, however, there
+remains no place for him, he is to go to school, chiefly for the
+convenience of others--they are going to be much away from home!--
+that now for the first time, as he says to himself, an old-English
+Uthwart is to pass under the yoke.  The tutor in the house, meantime,
+aware of some fascination in the lad, teaches him, at his own
+irregularly chosen hours, more carefully than the others; exerts all
+his gifts for the purpose, winning him on almost insensibly to
+youthful proficiency in those difficult rudiments.
+
+[203] See him as he stands, seemingly rooted in the spot where he has
+come to flower!  He departs, however, a few days before the departure
+of the rest--some to foreign parts, the brothers, who shut up the old
+place, to town.  For a moment, he makes an effort to figure to
+himself those coming absences as but exceptional intervals in his
+life here; he will count the days, going more quickly so; find his
+pleasure in watching the sands fall, as even the sands of time at
+school must.  In fact, he was scarcely ever to lie at ease here
+again, till he came to take his final leave of it, lying at his
+length so.  In brief holidays he rejoins his people, anywhere,
+anyhow, in a sort of hurry and makeshift:--Flos Parietis! thus
+carelessly plucked forth.  Emerald Uthwart was born on such a day "at
+Chase Lodge, in this parish, and died there."
+
+See him then as he stands! counting now the hours that remain, on the
+eve of that first emigration, and look away next at the other place,
+which through centuries has been forming to receive him; from those
+garden-beds, now at their richest, but where all is so winsomely
+little, to that place of "great matters," great stones, great
+memories out of reach.  Why! the Uthwarts had scarcely had more
+memories than their woods, noiselessly deciduous; or their
+prehistoric, entirely unprogressive, unrecording forefathers, in or
+before the days of the Druids.  Centuries of almost "still" life--of
+birth, death, [204] and the rest, as merely natural processes--had
+made them and their home what we find them.  Centuries of conscious
+endeavour, on the other hand, had builded, shaped, and coloured the
+place, a small cell, which Emerald Uthwart was now to occupy; a place
+such as our most characteristic English education has rightly tended
+to "find itself a house" in--a place full, for those who came within
+its influence, of a will of its own.  Here everything, one's very
+games, have gone by rule onwards from the dim old monastic days, and
+the Benedictine school for novices with the wholesome severities
+which have descended to our own time.  Like its customs,--there's a
+book in the cathedral archives with the names, for centuries Past, of
+the "scholars" who have missed church at the proper times for going
+there--like its customs, well-worn yet well-preserved, time-stained,
+time-engrained, time-mellowed, the venerable Norman or English stones
+of this austere, beautifully proportioned place look like marble, to
+which Emerald's softly nurtured being, his careless wild-growth must
+now adapt itself, though somewhat painfully recoiling from contact
+with what seems so hard also, and bright, and cold.  From his native
+world of soft garden touches, carnation and rose (they had been
+everywhere in those last weeks), where every one did just what he
+liked, he was passed now to this world of grey stone; and here it was
+always the decisive word [205] of command.  That old warrior
+Uthwart's record in the church at home, so fine, yet so wretched, so
+unspeakably great and difficult! seemed written here everywhere
+around him, as he stood feeling himself fit only to be taught, to be
+drilled into, his small compartment; in every movement of his
+companions, with their quaint confining little cloth gowns; in the
+keen, clear, well-authorised dominancy of some, the instant
+submission of others.  In fact, by one of our wise English
+compromises, we still teach our so modern boys the Classics; a lesson
+in attention and patience, at the least.  Nay! by a double
+compromise, with delightful physiognomic results sometimes, we teach
+them their pagan Latin and Greek under the shadow of medieval church-
+towers, amid the haunts, the traditions, and with something of the
+discipline, of monasticism; for which, as is noticeable, the English
+have never wholly lost an early inclination.  The French and others
+have swept their scholastic houses empty of it, with pedantic
+fidelity to their theories.  English pedants may succeed in doing the
+like.  But the result of our older method has had its value so far,
+at least, say! for the careful aesthetic observer.  It is of such
+diagonal influences, through complication of influence, that
+expression comes, in life, in our culture, in the very faces of men
+and boys--of these boys.  Nothing could better harmonise present with
+past than the sight of them just here, as they [206] shout at their
+games, or recite their lessons, over-arched by the work of medieval
+priors, or pass to church meekly, into the seats occupied by the
+young monks before them.
+
+If summer comes reluctantly to our English shores, it is also apt to
+linger with us;--its flora of red and gold leaves on the branches
+wellnigh to Christmas; the hot days that surprise you, and persist,
+though heralded by white mornings, hinting that it is but the year's
+indulgence so to deal with us.  To the fanciful, such days may seem
+most at home in the places where England has thus preferred to locate
+the somewhat pensive education of its more favoured youth.  As
+Uthwart passes through the old ecclesiastical city, upon which any
+more modern touch, modern door or window, seems a thing out of place
+through negligence, the diluted sunlight itself seems driven along
+with a sparing trace of gilded vane or red tile in it, under the
+wholesome active wind from the East coast.  The long, finely
+weathered, leaden roof, and the great square tower, gravely
+magnificent, emphatic from the first view of it over the grey down
+above the hop-gardens, the gently-watered meadows, dwarf now
+everything beside; have the bigness of nature's work, seated up there
+so steadily amid the winds, as rain and fog and heat pass by.  More
+and more persistently, as he proceeds, in the "Green Court" at last,
+they occupy the outlook.  He is shown the narrow [207] cubicle in
+which he is to sleep; and there it still is, with nothing else, in
+the window-pane, as he lies;--"our tower," the "Angel Steeple,"
+noblest of its kind.  Here, from morning to night, everything seems
+challenged to follow the upward lead of its long, bold,
+"perpendicular" lines.  The very place one is in, its stone-work, its
+empty spaces, invade you; invade all who belong to them, as Uthwart
+belongs, yielding wholly from the first; seem to question you
+masterfully as to your purpose in being here at all, amid the great
+memories of the past, of this school;--challenge you, so to speak, to
+make moral philosophy one of your acquirements, if you can, and to
+systematise your vagrant self; which however will in any case be here
+systematised for you.  In Uthwart, then, is the plain tablet, for the
+influences of place to inscribe.  Say if you will, that he is under
+the power of an "embodied ideal," somewhat repellent, but which he
+cannot despise.  He sits in the schoolroom--ancient, transformed
+chapel of the pilgrims; sits in the sober white and brown place, at
+the heavy old desks, carved this way and that, crowded as an old
+churchyard with forgotten names, side by side with sympathetic or
+antipathetic competitors, as it may chance.  In a delightful, exactly
+measured, quarter of an hour's rest, they come about him, seem to
+wish to be friends at once, good and bad alike, dull and clever;
+wonder a little at the name, and [208] the owner.  A family name--he
+explains, good-humouredly; tries to tell some story no one could ever
+remember precisely of the ancestor from whom it came, the one story
+of the Uthwarts; is spared; nay! petulantly forbidden to proceed.
+But the name sticks the faster.  Nicknames mark, for the most part,
+popularity.  Emerald! so every one called Uthwart, but shortened to
+Aldy.  They disperse; flock out into the court; acquaint him hastily
+with the curiosities of the Precincts, the "dark entry," the rich
+heraldries of the blackened and mouldering cloister, the ruined
+overgrown spaces where the old monastery stood, the stones of which
+furnished material for the rambling prebends houses, now
+"antediluvian" in their turn; are ready also to climb the scaffold-
+poles always to be found somewhere about the great church, or dive
+along the odd, secret passages of the old builders, with quite
+learned explanations (being proud of, and therefore painstaking
+about, the place) of architectural periods, of Gothic "late" and
+"early," layer upon layer, down to round-arched "Norman," like the
+famous staircase of their school.
+
+The reader comprehends that Uthwart was come where the genius loci
+was a strong one, with a claim to mould all who enter it to a
+perfect, uninquiring, willing or unwilling, conformity to itself.  On
+Saturday half-holidays the scholars are taken to church in their
+surplices, across the [209] court, under the lime-trees; emerge at
+last up the dark winding passages into the melodious, mellow-lighted
+space, always three days behind the temperature outside, so thick are
+the walls;--how warm and nice! how cool and nice!  The choir, to
+which they glide in order to their places below the clergy, seems
+conspicuously cold and sad.  But the empty chapels lying beyond it
+all about into the distance are a trap on sunny mornings for the
+clouds of yellow effulgence.  The Angel Steeple is a lantern within,
+and sheds down a flood of the like just beyond the gates.  You can
+peep up into it where you sit, if you dare to gaze about you.  If at
+home there had been nothing great, here, to boyish sense, one seems
+diminished to nothing at all, amid the grand waves, wave upon wave,
+of patiently-wrought stone; the daring height, the daring severity,
+of the innumerable, long, upward, ruled lines, rigidly bent just at
+last, in due place, into the reserved grace of the perfect Gothic
+arch; the peculiar daylight which seemed to come from further than
+the light outside.  Next morning they are here again.  In contrast to
+those irregularly broken hours at home, the passive length of things
+impresses Uthwart now.  It develops patience--that tale of hours, the
+long chanted English service; our English manner of education is a
+development of patience, of decorous and mannerly patience.  "It is
+good for a man that he bear the yoke in [210] his youth: he putteth
+his mouth in the dust, he keepeth silence, because he hath borne it
+upon him."--They have this for an anthem; sung however to wonderfully
+cheerful and sprightly music, as if one liked the thought.
+
+The aim of a veritable community, says Plato, is not that this or
+that member of it should be disproportionately at ease, but that the
+whole should flourish; though indeed such general welfare might come
+round again to the loyal unit therein, and rest with him, as a
+privilege of his individual being after all.  The social type he
+preferred, as we know, was conservative Sparta and its youth; whose
+unsparing discipline had doubtless something to do with the fact that
+it was the handsomest and best-formed in all Greece.  A school is not
+made for one.  It would misrepresent Uthwart's wholly unconscious
+humility to say that he felt the beauty of the askêsis+ (we need that
+Greek word) to which he not merely finds himself subject, but as
+under a fascination submissively yields himself, although another
+might have been aware of the charm of it, half ethic, half physical,
+as visibly effective in him.  Its peculiarity would have lain in the
+expression of a stress upon him and his customary daily existence,
+beyond what any definitely proposed issue of it, at least for the
+moment, explained.  Something of that is involved in the very idea of
+a classical education, at least for such as he; in its seeming
+indirectness [211] or lack of purpose, amid so much difficulty, as
+contrasted with forms of education more obviously useful or
+practical.  He found himself in a system of fixed rules, amid which,
+it might be, some of his own tendencies and inclinations would die
+out of him through disuse.  The confident word of command, the
+instantaneous obedience expected, the enforced silence, the very
+games that go by rule, a sort of hardness natural to wholesome
+English youths when they come together, but here de rigueur as a
+point of good manners;--he accepts all these without hesitation; the
+early hours also, naturally distasteful to him, which gave to actual
+morning, to all that had passed in it, when in more self-conscious
+mood he looked back on the morning of life, a preponderance, a
+disproportionate place there, adding greatly to the effect of its
+dreamy distance from him at this later time;--an ideal quality, he
+might have said, had he ever used such words as that.
+
+Uthwart duly passes his examination; and, in their own chapel in the
+transept of the choir, lighted up late for evening prayer after the
+long day of trial, is received to the full privileges of a Scholar
+with the accustomed Latin words:--Introitum tuum et exitum tuum
+custodiat Dominus!  He takes them, not to heart, but rather to mind,
+as few, if they so much as heard them, were wont to do; ponders them
+for a while.  They seem scarcely meant for him--words like those!
+[212] increase however his sense of responsibility to the place, of
+which he is now more exclusively than before a part--that he belongs
+to it, its great memories, great dim purposes; deepen the
+consciousness he had on first coming hither of a demand in the world
+about him, whereof the very stones are emphatic, to which no average
+human creature could be sufficient; of reproof, reproaches, of this
+or that in himself.
+
+It was reported, there was a funny belief, at school, that Aldy
+Uthwart had no feeling and was incapable of tears.  They never came
+to him certainly, when, at nights for the most part, the very touch
+of home, so soft, yet so indifferent to him, reached him, with a
+sudden opulent rush of garden perfumes; came at the rattling of the
+window-pane in the wind, with anything that expressed distance from
+the bare white walls around him here.  He thrust it from him
+brusquely, being of a practical turn, and, though somewhat sensuous,
+wholly without sentimentality.  There is something however in the
+lad's soldier-like, impassible self-command, in his sustained
+expression of a certain indifference to things, which awakes suddenly
+all the sentiment, the poetry, latent hitherto in another--James
+Stokes, the prefect, his immediate superior; awakes for the first
+time into ample flower something of genius in a seemingly plodding
+scholar, and therewith also something of the waywardness popularly
+thought to belong to [213] genius.  Preceptores, condiscipuli, alike,
+marvel at a sort of delicacy coming into the habits, the person, of
+that tall, bashful, broad-shouldered, very Kentish, lad; so
+unaffectedly nevertheless, that it is understood after all to be but
+the smartness properly significant of change to early manhood, like
+the down on his lip.  Wistful anticipations of manhood are in fact
+aroused in him, thoughts of the future; his ambition takes effective
+outline.  The well-worn, perhaps conventional, beauties of their
+"dead" Greek and Latin books, associated directly now with the living
+companion beside him, really shine for him at last with their
+pristine freshness; seem more than to fulfil their claim upon the
+patience, the attention, of modern youth.  He notices as never before
+minute points of meaning in Homer, in Virgil; points out thus, for
+instance, to his junior, one day in the sunshine, how the Greeks had
+a special word for the Fate which accompanied one who would come to a
+violent end.  The common Destinies of men, Moirai,+ Moerae--they
+accompanied all men indifferently.  But Kêr,+ the extraordinary
+Destiny, one's Doom, had a scent for distant blood-shedding; and, to
+be in at a sanguinary death, one of their number came forth to the
+very cradle, followed persistently all the way, over the waves,
+through powder and shot, through the rose-gardens;--where not?
+Looking back, one might trace the red footsteps all along, side by
+[214] side.  (Emerald Uthwart, you remember, was to "die there," of
+lingering sickness, in disgrace, as he fancied, while the word glory
+came to be softly whispered of them and of their end.) Classic
+felicities, the choice expressions, with which James Stokes has so
+patiently stored his memory, furnish now a dainty embroidery upon
+every act, every change in time or place, of their daily life in
+common.  He finds the Greek or the Latin model of their antique
+friendship or tries to find it, in the books they read together.
+None fits exactly.  It is of military glory they are really thinking,
+amid those ecclesiastical surroundings, where however surplices and
+uniforms are often mingled together; how they will lie, in costly
+glory, costly to them, side by side, (as they work and walk and play
+now, side by side) in the cathedral aisle, with a tattered flag
+perhaps above them, and under a single epitaph, like that of those
+two older scholars, Ensigns, Signiferi, in their respective
+regiments, in hac ecclesiâ pueri instituti,+ with the sapphic stanza
+in imitation of the Horace they had learned here, written by their
+old master.
+
+Horace!--he was, had been always, the idol of their school; to know
+him by heart, to translate him into effective English idiom, have an
+apt phrase of his instinctively on one's lips for every occasion.
+That boys should be made to spout him under penalties, would have
+seemed doubtless to that sensitive, vain, winsome poet, [215] even
+more than to grim Juvenal, quite the sorriest of fates; might have
+seemed not so bad however, could he, from the "ashes" so persistently
+in his thoughts, have peeped on these English boys, row upon row,
+with black or golden heads, repeating him in the fresh morning, and
+observed how well for once the thing was done; how well he was
+understood by English James Stokes, feeling the old "fire" really
+"quick" still, under the influence which now in truth quickened,
+enlivened, everything around him.  The old heathen's way of looking
+at things, his melodious expression of it, blends, or contrasts
+itself oddly with the everyday detail, with the very stones, the
+Gothic stones, of a world he could hardly have conceived, its
+medieval surroundings, their half-clerical life here.  Yet not so
+inconsistently after all!  The builders of these aisles and cloisters
+had known and valued as much of him as they could come by in their
+own un-instructed time; had built up their intellectual edifice more
+than they were aware of from fragments of pagan thought, as, quite
+consciously, they constructed their churches of old Roman bricks and
+pillars, or frank imitations of them.  One's day, then, began with
+him, for all alike, Sundays of course excepted,--with an Ode, learned
+over-night by the prudent, who, observing how readily the words which
+send us to sleep cling to the brain and seem an inherent part of it
+next morning, kept him under [216] their pillows.  Prefects, without
+a book, heard the repetition of the Juniors, must be able to correct
+their blunders.  Odes and Epodes, thus acquired, were a score of days
+and weeks; alcaic and sapphic verses like a bead-roll for counting
+off the time that intervened before the holidays.  Time--that tardy
+servant of youthful appetite--brought them soon enough to the point
+where they desired in vain "to see one of" those days, erased now so
+willingly; and sentimental James Stokes has already a sense that this
+"pause 'twixt cup and lip" of life is really worth pausing over,
+worth deliberation:--all this poetry, yes! poetry, surely, of their
+alternate work and play; light and shade, call it!  Had it been,
+after all, a life in itself less commonplace than theirs--that life,
+the trivial details of which their Horace had touched so daintily,
+gilded with real gold words?
+
+Regular, submissive, dutiful to play also, Aldy meantime enjoys his
+triumphs in the Green Court; loves best however to run a paper-chase
+afar over the marshes, till you come in sight, or within scent, of
+the sea, in the autumn twilight; and his dutifulness to games at
+least had its full reward.  A wonderful hit of his at cricket was
+long remembered; right over the lime-trees on to the cathedral roof,
+was it? or over the roof, and onward into space, circling there
+independently, minutely, as Sidus Cantiorum?  A comic poem on it in
+Latin, and a pretty one in English, [217] were penned by James
+Stokes, still not so serious but that he forgets time altogether one
+day, in a manner the converse of exemplary in a prefect, whereupon
+Uthwart, his companion as usual, manages to take all the blame, and
+the due penalty next morning.  Stokes accepted the sacrifice the more
+readily, believing--he too--that Aldy was "incapable of pain."  What
+surprised those who were in the secret was that, when it was over, he
+rose, and facing the head-master--could it be insolence? or was it
+the sense of untruthfulness in his friendly action, or sense of the
+universal peccancy of all boys and men?--said submissively: "And now,
+sir, that I have taken my punishment, I hope you will forgive my
+fault."
+
+Submissiveness!--It had the force of genius with Emerald Uthwart.  In
+that very matter he had but yielded to a senior against his own
+inclination.  What he felt in Horace was the sense, original, active,
+personal, of "things too high for me!", the sense, not really
+unpleasing to him, of an unattainable height here too, in this royal
+felicity of utterance, this literary art, the minute cares of which
+had been really designed for the minute carefulness of a disciple
+such as this--all attention.  Well! the sense of authority, of a
+large intellectual authority over us, impressed anew day after day,
+of some impenetrable glory round "the masters of those who know," is,
+of course, one of the effects we [218] look for from a classical
+education:--that, and a full estimate of the preponderating value of
+the manner of the doing of it in the thing done; which again, for
+ingenuous youth, is an encouragement of good manners on its part:--"I
+behave myself orderly."  Just at those points, scholarship attains
+something of a religious colour.  And in that place, religion,
+religious system, its claim to overpower one, presented itself in a
+way of which even the least serious by nature could not be unaware.
+Their great church, its customs and traditions, formed an element in
+that esprit de corps into which the boyish mind throws itself so
+readily.  Afterwards, in very different scenes, the sentiment of that
+place would come back upon him, as if resentfully, by contrast with
+the conscious or unconscious profanities of others, crushed out about
+him straightway, by the shadow of awe, the minatory flash, felt
+around his unopened lips, in the glance, the changed manner.  Not to
+be "occupied with great matters" recommends in heavenly places, as we
+know, the souls of some.  Yet there were a few to whom it seemed
+unfortunate that religion whose flag Uthwart would have borne in
+hands so pure, touched him from first to last, and till his eyes were
+finally closed on this world, only, again, as a thing immeasurable,
+surely not meant for the like of him; its high claims, to which no
+one could be equal; its reproaches.  He would scarcely have proposed
+to "enter into" [219] such matters; was constitutionally shy of them.
+His submissiveness, you see, was a kind of genius; made him
+therefore, of course, unlike those around him; was a secret; a thing,
+you might say, "which no one knoweth, saving he that receiveth it."
+
+Thus repressible, self-restrained, always concurring with the
+influence, the claim upon him, the rebuke, of others, in the bustle
+of school life he did not count even with those who knew him best,
+with those who taught him, for the intellectual capacity he really
+had.  In every generation of schoolboys there are a few who find out,
+almost for themselves, the beauty and power of good literature, even
+in the literature they must read perforce; and this, in turn, is but
+the handsel of a beauty and power still active in the actual world,
+should they have the good fortune, or rather, acquire the skill, to
+deal with it properly.  It has something of the stir and unction--
+this intellectual awaking with a leap--of the coming of love.  So it
+was with Uthwart about his seventeenth year.  He felt it, felt the
+intellectual passion, like the pressure outward of wings within him--
+hê pterou dynamis,+ says Plato, in the Phaedrus; but again, as some do
+with everyday love, withheld, restrained himself; the status of a
+freeman in the world of intellect can hardly be for him.  The sense
+of intellectual ambition, ambitious thoughts such as sweeten the toil
+of some of those about him, [220] coming to him once in a way, he is
+frankly recommended to put them aside, and acquiesces; puts them from
+him once for all, as he could do with besetting thoughts and
+feelings, his preferences, (as he had put aside soft thoughts of home
+as a disobedience to rule) and with a countenance more good-humoured
+than ever, an absolute placidity.  It is fit he should be treated
+sparingly in this matter of intellectual enjoyment.  He is made to
+understand that there is at least a score of others as good scholars
+as he.  He will have of course all the pains, but must not expect the
+prizes, of his work; of his loyal, incessant, cheerful industry.
+
+But only see him as he goes.  It is as if he left music, delightfully
+throbbing music, or flowers, behind him, as he passes, careless of
+them, unconsciously, through the world, the school, the precincts,
+the old city.  Strangers' eyes, resting on him by chance, are
+deterred for a while, even among the rich sights of the venerable
+place, as he walks out and in, in his prim gown and purple-tasselled
+cap; goes in, with the stream of sunlight, through the black shadows
+of the mouldering Gothic gateway, like youth's very self, eternal,
+immemorial, eternally renewed, about those immemorially ancient
+stones.  "Young Apollo!" people say--people who have pigeon-holes for
+their impressions, watching the slim, trim figure with the exercise
+books.  His very dress seems touched [221] with Hellenic fitness to
+the healthy youthful form.  "Golden-haired, scholar Apollo!" they
+repeat, foolishly, ignorantly.  He was better; was more like a real
+portrait of a real young Greek, like Tryphon, Son of Eutychos, for
+instance, (as friends remembered him with regret, as you may see him
+still on his tombstone in the British Museum) alive among the paler
+physical and intellectual lights of modern England, under the old
+monastic stonework of the Middle Age.  That theatrical old Greek god
+never took the expressiveness, the lines of delicate meaning, such as
+were come into the face of the English lad, the physiognomy of his
+race; ennobled now, as if by the writing, the signature, there, of a
+grave intelligence, by grave information and a subdued will, though
+without a touch of melancholy in this "best of playfellows."  A
+musical composer's notes, we know, are not themselves till the fit
+executant comes, who can put all they may be into them.  The somewhat
+unmeaningly handsome facial type of the Uthwarts, moulded to a mere
+animal or physical perfection through wholesome centuries, is
+breathed on now, informed, by the touches, traces, complex influences
+from past and present a thousandfold, crossing each other in this
+late century, and yet at unity in the simple law of the system to
+which he is now subject.  Coming thus upon an otherwise vigorous and
+healthy nature, an untainted [222] physique, and limited by it, those
+combining mental influences leave the firm unconscious simplicity of
+the boyish nature still unperplexed.  The sisters, their friends,
+when he comes rarely upon them in foreign places, are proud of the
+schoolboy's company--to walk at his side; the brothers, when he sees
+them for a day, more considerate than of old.  Everywhere he leaves
+behind him an odd regret for his presence, as he in turn wonders
+sometimes at the deference paid to one so unimportant as himself by
+those he meets by accident perhaps; at the ease, for example, with
+which he attains to the social privileges denied to others.
+
+They tell him, he knows it already, he would "do for the army."
+"Yes! that would suit you," people observe at once, when he tells
+them what "he is to be"--undoubtedly suit him, that dainty, military,
+very English kind of pride, in seeming precisely what one is, neither
+more nor less.  And the first mention of Uthwart's purpose defines
+also the vague outlooks of James Stokes, who will be a soldier too.
+Uniforms, their scarlet and white and blue, spruce leather and steel,
+and gold lace, enlivening the old oak stalls at service time--
+uniforms and surplices were always close together here, where a
+military garrison had been established in the suburbs for centuries
+past, and there were always sons of its officers in the school.  If
+you stole out of an evening, it was like a stage scene-- [223] nay!
+like the Middle Age, itself, with this multitude of soldiers mingling
+in the crowd which filled the unchanged, gabled streets.  A military
+tradition had been continuous, from the days of crusading knights who
+lay humbly on their backs in the "Warriors' Chapel" to the time of
+the civil wars, when a certain heroic youth of eighteen was brought
+to rest there, onward to Dutch and American wars, and to Harry, and
+Geoffrey, and another James also, in hac ecclesiâ pueri instituti.
+It was not so long since one of them sat on those very benches in the
+sixth form; had come back and entered the school, in full uniform, to
+say good-bye!  Then the "colours" of his regiment had been brought,
+to be deposited by Dean and Canons in the cathedral; and a few weeks
+later they had passed, scholars and the rest in long procession, to
+deposit Ensign--himself there under his flag, or what remained of it,
+a sorry, tattered fringe, along the staff he had borne out of the
+battle at the cost of his life, as a little tablet explained.  There
+were others in similar terms.  Alas! for that extraordinary,
+peculiarly-named, Destiny, or Doom, appointed to walk side by side
+with one or another, aware from the first, but never warning him,
+till the random or well-considered shot comes.
+
+Meantime however, the University, with work in preparation thereto,
+fills up the thoughts, the hours, of these would-be soldiers, of
+James [224] Stokes, and therefore of Emerald Uthwart, through the
+long summer-time, till the Green Court is fragrant with lime-blossom,
+and speech-day comes, on which, after their flower-service and sermon
+from an old comrade, Emerald surprises masters and companions by the
+fine quality of a recitation; still more when "Scholar Stokes" and he
+are found bracketed together as "Victors" of the school, who will
+proceed together to Oxford.  His speech in the Chapter-house was from
+that place in Homer, where the soul of the lad Elpenor, killed by
+accident, entreats Ulysses for due burial rites.  "Fix my oar over my
+grave," he says, "the oar I rowed with when I lived, when I went with
+my companions."  And in effect what surprised, charmed the hearers
+was the scruple with which those naturally graceful lips dealt with
+every word, every syllable, put upon them.  He seemed to be thinking
+only of his author, except for just so much of self-consciousness as
+was involved in the fact that he seemed also to be speaking a little
+against his will; like a monk, it might be said, who sings in choir
+with a really fine voice, but at the bidding of his superior, and
+counting the notes all the while till his task be done, because his
+whole nature revolts from so much as the bare opportunity for
+personal display.  It was his duty to speak on the occasion.  They
+had always been great in speech-making, in theatricals, from before
+[225] the days when the Puritans destroyed the Dean's "Great Hall"
+because "the King's Scholars had profaned it by acting plays there";
+and that peculiar note or accent, as being conspicuously free from
+the egotism which vulgarises most of us, seemed to befit the person
+of Emerald, impressing weary listeners pleasantly as a novelty in
+that kind.  Singular!--The words, because seemingly forced from him,
+had been worth hearing.  The cheers, the "Kentish Fire," of their
+companions might have broken down the crumbling black arches of the
+old cloister, or roused the dead under foot, as the "Victors" came
+out of the Chapter-house side by side; side by side also out of that
+delightful period of their life at school, to proceed in due course
+to the University.
+
+They left it precipitately, after brief residence there, taking
+advantage of a sudden outbreak of war to join the army at once,
+regretted--James Stokes for his high academic promise, Uthwart for a
+quality, or group of qualities, not strictly to be defined.  He
+seemed, in short, to harmonise by their combination in himself all
+the various qualities proper to a large and varied community of
+youths of nineteen or twenty, to which, when actually present there,
+he was felt from hour to hour to be indispensable.  In fact school
+habits and standards had survived in a world not so different from
+that of school for those who are faithful to its type.  When he
+looked back upon [226] it a little later, college seemed to him,
+seemed indeed at the time, had he ventured to admit it, a strange
+prolongation of boyhood, in its provisional character, the narrow
+limitation of its duties and responsibility, the very divisions of
+one's day, the routine of play and work, its formal, perhaps pedantic
+rules.  The veritable plunge from youth into manhood came when one
+passed finally through those old Gothic gates, from a somewhat dreamy
+or problematic preparation for it, into the world of peremptory
+facts.  A college, like a school, is not made for one; and as Uthwart
+sat there, still but a scholar, still reading with care the books
+prescribed for him by others--Greek and Latin books--the contrast
+between his own position and that of the majority of his coevals
+already at the business of life impressed itself sometimes with an
+odd sense of unreality in the place around him.  Yet the schoolboy's
+sensitive awe for the great things of the intellectual world had but
+matured itself, and was at its height here amid this larger
+competition, which left him more than ever to find in doing his best
+submissively the sole reward of so doing.  He needs now in fact less
+repression than encouragement not to be a "passman," as he may if he
+likes, acquiescing in a lowly measure of culture which certainly will
+not manufacture Miltons, nor turn serge into silk, broom-blossom into
+verbenas, but only, perhaps not so faultily, leave Emerald Uthwart
+and the like of him [227] essentially what they are.  "He holds his
+book in a peculiar way," notes in manuscript one of his tutors;
+"holds on to it with both hands; clings as if from below, just as his
+tough little mind clings to the sense of the Greek words he can
+English so closely, precisely."  Again, as at school, he had put his
+neck under the yoke; though he has now also much reading quite at his
+own choice; by preference, when he can come by such, about the place
+where he finds himself, about the earlier youthful occupants, if it
+might be, of his own quaint rooms on the second floor just below the
+roof; of what he can see from his windows in the old black front
+eastwards, with its inestimable patina of ancient smoke and weather
+and natural decay (when you look close the very stone is a composite
+of minute dead bodies) relieving heads like his so effectively on
+summer mornings.  On summer nights the scent of the hay, the wild-
+flowers, comes across the narrow fringe of town to right and left;
+seems to come from beyond the Oxford meadows, with sensitive, half-
+repellent thoughts from the gardens at home.  He looks down upon the
+green square with the slim, quaint, black, young figures that cross
+it on the way to chapel on yellow Sunday mornings, or upwards to the
+dome, the spire; can watch them closely in freakish moonlight, or
+flickering softly by an occasional bonfire in the quadrangle behind
+him.  Yet how hard, how forbidding sometimes, under [228] a late
+stormy sky, the scheme of black, white, and grey, to which the group
+of ancient buildings could attune itself.  And what he reads most
+readily is of the military life that intruded itself so oddly, during
+the Civil War, into these half-monastic places, till the timid old
+academic world scarcely knew itself.  He treasures then every
+incident which connects a soldier's coat with any still recognisable
+object, wall, or tree, or garden-walk; that walk, for instance, under
+Merton garden where young Colonel Windebank was shot for a traitor.
+His body lies in Saint Mary Magdalen's churchyard.  Unassociated to
+such incident, the mere beauties of the place counted at the moment
+for less than in retrospect.  It was almost retrospect even now, with
+an anticipation of regret, in rare moments of solitude perhaps, when
+the oars splashed far up the narrow streamlets through the fields on
+May evenings among the fritillaries--does the reader know them? that
+strange remnant just here of a richer extinct flora--dry flowers,
+though with a drop of dubious honey in each.  Snakes' heads, the rude
+call them, for their shape, scale-marked too, and in colour like
+rusted blood, as if they grew from some forgotten battle-field, the
+bodies, the rotten armour--yet delicate, beautiful, waving proudly.
+In truth the memory of Oxford made almost everything he saw after it
+seem vulgar.  But he feels also nevertheless, characteristically,
+that such local pride (fastus he terms it) is proper [229] only for
+those whose occupations are wholly congruous with it; for the gifted,
+the freemen who can enter into the genius, who possess the liberty,
+of the place; that it has a reproach in it for the outsider, which
+comes home to him.
+
+Here again then as he passes through the world, so delightfully to
+others, they tell him, as if weighing him, his very self, against his
+merely scholastic capacity and effects, that he would "do for the
+army"; which he is now wholly glad to hear, for from first to last,
+through all his successes there, the army had still been scholar
+Stokes' choice, and he had no difficulty, as the reader sees, in
+keeping Uthwart also faithful to first intentions.  Their names were
+already entered for commissions; but the war breaking out afresh,
+information reaches them suddenly one morning that they may join
+their regiment forthwith.  Bidding good-bye therefore, gladly,
+hastily, they set out with as little delay as possible for Flanders;
+and passing the old school by their nearest road thither, stay for an
+hour, find an excuse for coming into the hall in uniform, with which
+it must be confessed they seem thoroughly satisfied--Uthwart quite
+perversely at ease in the stiff make of his scarlet jacket with black
+facings--and so pass onward on their way to Dover, Dunkirk, they
+scarcely know whither finally, among the featureless villages, the
+long monotonous lines of the windmills, the poplars, blurred with
+cold fogs, but marking the [230] roads through the snow which covers
+the endless plain, till they come in sight at last of the army in
+motion, like machines moving--how little it looked on that endless
+plain!--pass on their rapid way to fame, to unpurchased promotion, as
+a matter of course to responsibility also, till, their fortune
+turning upon them, they miscarry in the latter fatally.  They joined
+in fact a distinguished regiment in a gallant army, immediately after
+a victory in those Flemish regions; shared its encouragement as fully
+as if they had had a share in its perils; the high character of the
+young officers consolidating itself easily, pleasantly for them, till
+the hour of an act of thoughtless bravery, almost the sole irregular
+or undisciplined act of Uthwart's life, he still following his
+senior--criminal however to the military conscience, under the actual
+circumstances, and in an enemy's country.  The faulty thing was done,
+certainly, with a scrupulous, a characteristic completeness on their
+part; and with their prize actually in hand, an old weather-beaten
+flag such as hung in the cathedral aisle at school, they bethought
+them for the first time of its price, with misgivings now in rapid
+growth, as they return to their posts as nearly as may be, for the
+division has been ordered forward in their brief absence, to find
+themselves under arrest, with that damning proof of heroism, of
+guilt, in their possession, relinquished however along with the
+swords they will never handle [231] again--toys, idolised toys of our
+later youth, we weep at the thought of them as never to be handled
+again!--as they enter the prison to await summary trial next day on
+the charge of wantonly deserting their posts while in position of
+high trust in time of war.
+
+The full details of what had happened could have been told only by
+one or other of themselves; by Uthwart best, in the somewhat matter-
+of-fact and prosaic journal he had managed to keep from the first,
+noting there the incidents of each successive day, as if in
+anticipation of its possible service by way of pièce justificative,
+should such become necessary, attesting hour by hour their single-
+hearted devotion to soldierly duty.  Had a draughtsman equally
+truthful or equally "realistic," as we say, accompanied them and made
+a like use of his pencil, he might have been mistaken at home for an
+artist aiming at "effect," by skilful "arrangements" to tickle
+people's interest in the spectacle of war--the sudden ruin of a
+village street, the heap of bleeding horses in the half-ploughed
+field, the gaping bridges, hand or face of the dead peeping from a
+hastily made grave at the roadside, smoke-stained rents in cottage-
+walls, ignoble ruin everywhere--ignoble but for its frank expression.
+
+But you find in Uthwart's journal, side by side with those ugly
+patches, very precise and unadorned records of their common
+gallantry, the more effective indeed for their simplicity; [232] and
+not of gallantry only, but of the long-sustained patience also, the
+essential monotony of military life, even on a campaign.  Peril,
+good-luck, promotion, the grotesque hardships which leave them smart
+as ever, (as if, so others observe, dust and mire wouldn't hold on
+them, so "spick and span" they were, more especially on days of any
+exceptional risk or effort) the great confidence reposed in them at
+last; all is noted, till, with a little quiet pride, he records a
+gun-shot wound which keeps him a month alone in hospital wearily; and
+at last, its hasty but seemingly complete healing.
+
+Following, leading, resting sometimes perforce, amid gun-shots,
+putrefying wounds, green corpses, they never lacked good spirits, any
+more than the birds warbling perennially afresh, as they will, over
+such gangrened places, or the grass which so soon covers them.  And
+at length fortune, their misfortune, perversely determined that
+heroism should take the form of patience under the walls of an
+unimportant frontier town, with old Vauban fortifications seemingly
+made only for appearance' sake, like the work in the trenches--
+gardener's work! round about the walls they are called upon to
+superintend day after day.  It was like a calm at sea, delaying one's
+passage, one's purpose in being on board at all, a dead calm, yet
+with an awful feeling of tension, intolerable at last for those who
+were still all athirst for action.  How dumb and [233] stupid the
+place seemed, in its useless defiance of conquerors, anxious, for
+reasons not indeed apparent, but which they were undoubtedly within
+their rights in holding to, not to blow it at once into the air--the
+steeple, the perky weathercock--to James Stokes in particular, always
+eloquent in action, longing for heroic effort, and ready to pay its
+price, maddened now by the palpable imposture in front of him morning
+after morning, as he demonstrates conclusively to Uthwart, seduced at
+last from the clearer sense of duty and discipline, not by the
+demonstrated ease, but rather by the apparent difficulty of what
+Stokes proposes to do.  They might have been deterred by recent
+example.  Colonel --, who, as every one knew, had actually gained a
+victory by disobeying orders, had not been suffered to remain in the
+army of which he was an ornament.  It was easy in fact for both,
+though it seemed the heroic thing, to dash through the calm with
+delightful sense of active powers renewed; to pass into the
+beleaguered town with a handful of men, and no loss, after a manner
+the feasibility of which Stokes had explained acutely but in vain at
+headquarters.  He proved it to Uthwart at all events, and a few
+others.  Delightful heroism! delightful self-indulgence!  It was
+delayed for a moment by orders to move forward at last, with hopes
+checked almost immediately after by a countermand, bringing them
+right round their [234] stupid dumb enemy to the same wearisome
+position once again, to the trenches and the rest, but with their
+thirst for action only stimulated the more.  How great the
+disappointment! encouraging a certain laxity of discipline that had
+prevailed about them of late.  They take advantage however of a vague
+phrase in their instructions; determine in haste to proceed on their
+plan as carefully, as sparingly of the lives of others as may be;
+detach a small company, hazarding thereby an algebraically certain
+scheme at headquarters of victory or secure retreat, which embraced
+the entire country in its calculations; detach themselves; finally
+pass into the place, and out again with their prize, themselves
+secure.  Themselves only could have told the details--the intensely
+pleasant, the glorious sense of movement renewed once more; of
+defiance, just for once, of a seemingly stupid control; their dismay
+at finding their company led forward by others, their own posts
+deserted, their handful of men--nowhere!
+
+In an ordinary trial at law, the motives, every detail of so
+irregular an act might have been weighed, changing the colour of it.
+Their general character would have told in their favour, but actually
+told against them now; they had but won an exceptional trust to
+betray it.  Martial courts exist not for consideration, but for vivid
+exemplary effect and prompt punishment.  "There is a kind of tribunal
+incidental [235] to service in the field," writes another diarist,
+who may tell in his own words what remains to be told.  "This court,"
+he says, "may consist of three staff-officers only, but has the power
+of sentencing to death.  On the --st two young officers of the --th
+regiment, in whom it appears unusual confidence had been placed, were
+brought before this court, on the charge of desertion and wantonly
+exposing their company to danger.  They were found guilty, and the
+proper penalty death, to be inflicted next morning before the
+regiment marches.  The delinquents were understood to have appealed
+to a general court-martial; desperately at last, to 'the judgment of
+their country'; but were held to have no locus standi whatever for an
+appeal under the actual circumstances.  As a civilian I cannot but
+doubt the justice, whatever may be thought of the expediency, of such
+a summary process in regard to the capital penalty.  The regiment to
+which the culprits belonged, with some others, was quartered for the
+night in the faubourg of Saint --, recently under blockade by a
+portion of our forces.  I was awoke at daybreak by the sound of
+marching.  The morning was a particularly clear one, though, as the
+sun was not yet risen, it looked grey and sad along the empty street,
+up which a party of grey soldiers were passing with steady pace.  I
+knew for what purpose.
+
+"The whole of the force in garrison here [236] had already marched to
+the place of execution, the immense courtyard of a monastery,
+surrounded irregularly by ancient buildings like those of some
+cathedral precincts I have seen in England.  Here the soldiers then
+formed three sides of a great square, a grave having been dug on the
+fourth side.  Shortly afterwards the funeral procession came up.
+First came the band of the --th, playing the Dead March; next the
+firing party, consisting of twelve non-commissioned officers; then
+the coffins, followed immediately by the unfortunate prisoners,
+accompanied by a chaplain.  Slowly and sadly did the mournful
+procession approach, when it passed through three sides of the
+square, the troops having been previously faced inwards, and then
+halted opposite to the grave.  The proceedings of the court-martial
+were then read; and the elder prisoner having been blindfolded was
+ordered to kneel down on his coffin, which had been placed close to
+the grave, the firing party taking up a position exactly opposite at
+a few yards' distance.  The poor fellow's face was deadly pale, but
+he had marched his last march as steadily as ever I saw a man step,
+and bore himself throughout most bravely, though an oddly mixed
+expression passed over his countenance when he was directed to remove
+himself from the side of his companion, shaking his hand first.  At
+this moment there was hardly a dry eye, and several young soldiers
+fainted, numberless as must be [237] the scenes of horror which even
+they have witnessed during these last months.  At length the
+chaplain, who had remained praying with the prisoner, quietly
+withdrew, and at a given signal, but without word of command, the
+muskets were levelled, a volley was fired, and the body of the
+unfortunate man sprang up, falling again on his back.  One shot had
+purposely been reserved; and as the presiding officer thought he was
+not quite dead a musket was placed close to his head and fired.  All
+was now over; but the troops having been formed into columns were
+marched close by the body as it lay on the ground, after which it was
+placed in one of the coffins and buried.
+
+"I had almost forgotten his companion, the younger and more fortunate
+prisoner, though I could scarcely tell, as I looked at him, whether
+his fate was really preferable in leaving his own rough coffin
+unoccupied behind him there.  Lieutenant (I think Edward) Uthwart, as
+being the younger of the two offenders, 'by the mercy of the court'
+had his sentence commuted to dismissal from the army with disgrace.
+A colour-sergeant then advanced with the former officer's sword, a
+remarkably fine one, which he thereupon snapped in sunder over the
+prisoner's head as he knelt.  After this the prisoner's regimental
+coat was handed forward and put upon him, the epaulettes and buttons
+being then torn off and flung to a distance.  This part of [238] such
+sentences is almost invariably spared; but, I suppose through
+unavoidable haste, was on the present occasion somewhat rudely
+carried out.  I shall never forget the expression of this man's
+countenance, though I have seen many sad things in the course of my
+profession.  He had the sort of good looks which always rivet
+attention, and in most minds friendly interest; and now, amid all his
+pain and bewilderment, bore a look of humility and submission as he
+underwent those extraordinary details of his punishment, which
+touched me very oddly with a sort of desire (I cannot otherwise
+express it) to share his lot, to be actually in his place for a
+moment.  Yet, alas! --no! say rather Thank Heaven! the nearest
+approach to that look I have seen has been on the face of those whom
+I have known from circumstances to be almost incapable at the time of
+any feeling whatever.  I would have offered him pecuniary aid,
+supposing he needed it, but it was impossible.  I went on with the
+regiment, leaving the poor wretch to shift for himself, Heaven knows
+how, the state of the country being what it is.  He might join the
+enemy!"
+
+What money Uthwart had about him had in fact passed that morning into
+the hands of his guards.  To tell what followed would be to accompany
+him on a roundabout and really aimless journey, the details of which
+he could never afterwards recall.  See him lingering for morsels
+[239] of food at some shattered farmstead, or assisted by others
+almost as wretched as himself, sometimes without his asking.  In his
+worn military dress he seems a part of the ruin under which he creeps
+for a night's rest as darkness comes on.  He actually came round
+again to the scene of his disgrace, of the execution; looked in vain
+for the precise spot where he had knelt; then, almost envying him who
+lay there, for the unmarked grave; passed over it perhaps
+unrecognised for some change in that terrible place, or rather in
+himself; wept then as never before in his life; dragged himself on
+once more, till suddenly the whole country seems to move under the
+rumour, the very thunder, of "the crowning victory," as he is made to
+understand.  Falling in with the tide of its heroes returning to
+English shores, his vagrant footsteps are at last directed homewards.
+He finds himself one afternoon at the gate, turning out of the quiet
+Sussex road, through the fields for whose safety he had fought with
+so much of undeniable gallantry and approval.
+
+On that July afternoon the gardens, the woods, mounted in flawless
+sweetness all round him as he stood, to meet the circle of a flawless
+sky.  Not a cloud; not a motion on the grass!  At the first he had
+intended to return home no more; and it had been a proof of his great
+dejection that he sent at last, as best he could, for money.  They
+knew his fate already [240] by report, and were touched naturally
+when that had followed on the record of his honours.  Had it been
+possible they would have set forth at any risk to meet, to seek him;
+were waiting now for the weary one to come to the gate, ready with
+their oil and wine, to speak metaphorically, and from this time forth
+underwent his charm to the utmost--the charm of an exquisite
+character, felt in some way to be inseparable from his person, his
+characteristic movements, touched also now with seemingly irreparable
+sorrow.  For his part, drinking in here the last sweets of the
+sensible world, it was as if he, the lover of roses, had never before
+been aware of them at all.  The original softness of his temperament,
+against which the sense of greater things thrust upon him had
+successfully reacted, asserted itself again now as he lay at ease,
+the ease well merited by his deeds, his sorrows.  That he was going
+to die moved those about him to humour this mood, to soften all
+things to his touch; and looking back he might have pronounced those
+four last years of doom the happiest of his life.  The memory of the
+grave into which he had gazed so steadily on the execution morning,
+into which, as he feels, one half of himself had then descended, does
+not lessen his shrinking from the fate before him, yet fortifies him
+to face it manfully, gives a sort of fraternal familiarity to death;
+in a few weeks' time this battle too is fought out; it is as if the
+thing were ended. [241] The delightful summer heat, the freshness it
+enhances--he contrasts such things no longer with the sort of place
+to which he is hastening.  The possible duration of life for him was
+indeed uncertain, the future to some degree indefinite; but as
+regarded any fairly distant date, anything like a term of years, from
+the first there had been no doubt at all; he would be no longer here.
+Meantime it was like a delightful few days' additional holiday from
+school, with which perforce one must be content at last; or as though
+he had not been pardoned on that terrible morning, but only reprieved
+for two or three years.  Yet how large a proportion they would have
+seemed in the whole sum of his years.  He would have liked to lie
+finally in the garden among departed pets, dear dead dogs and horses;
+faintly proposes it one day; but after a while comprehends the
+churchyard, with its white spots in the distant flowery view, as
+filling harmoniously its own proper place there.  The weary soul
+seemed to be settling deeper into the body and the earth it came of,
+into the condition of the flowers, the grass, proper creatures of the
+earth to which he is returning.  The saintly vicar visits him
+considerately; is repelled with politeness; goes on his way pondering
+inwardly what kind of place there might be, in any possible scheme of
+another world, for so absolutely unspiritual a subject.  In fact, as
+the breath of the infinite world came about him, he clung all [242]
+the faster to the beloved finite things still in contact with him; he
+had successfully hidden from his eyes all beside.
+
+His reprieve however lasted long enough, after all, for a certain
+change of opinion of immense weight to him--a revision or reversal of
+judgment.  It came about in this way.  When peace was arranged, with
+question of rewards, pensions, and the like, certain battles or
+incidents therein were fought over again, sometimes in the highest
+places of debate.  On such an occasion a certain speaker cites the
+case of Lieutenant James Stokes and another, as being "pessimi
+exempli": whereupon a second speaker gets up, prepared with full
+detail, insists, brings that incidental matter to the front for an
+hour, tells his unfortunate friend's story so effectively,
+pathetically, that, as happens with our countrymen, they repent.  The
+matter gets into the newspapers, and, coming thus into sympathetic
+public view, something like glory wins from Emerald Uthwart his last
+touch of animation.  Just not too late he received the offer of a
+commission; kept the letter there open within sight.  Aldy, who
+"never shed tears and was incapable of pain," in his great physical
+weakness, wept--shall we say for the second time in his life?  A less
+excitement would have been more favorable to any chance there might
+be of the patient's surviving.  In fact the old gun-shot wound,
+wrongly thought to be cured, which had caused [243] the one illness
+of his life, is now drawing out what remains of it, as he feels with
+a kind of odd satisfaction and pride--his old glorious wound!  And
+then, as of old, an absolute submissiveness comes over him, as he
+gazes round at the place, the relics of his uniform, the letter lying
+there.  It was as if there was nothing more that could be said.
+Accounts thus settled, he stretched himself in the bed he had
+occupied as a boy, more completely at his ease than since the day
+when he had left home for the first time.  Respited from death once,
+he was twice believed to be dead before the date actually registered
+on his tomb.  "What will it matter a hundred years hence?" they used
+to ask by way of simple comfort in boyish troubles at school,
+overwhelming at the moment.  Was that in truth part of a certain
+revelation of the inmost truth of things to "babes," such as we have
+heard of?  What did it matter--the gifts, the good-fortune, its
+terrible withdrawal, the long agony?  Emerald Uthwart would have been
+all but a centenarian to-day.
+
+Postscript, from the Diary of a Surgeon,
+August --th, 18--.
+
+I was summoned by letter into the country to perform an operation on
+the dead body of a young man, formerly an officer in the army.  The
+cause of death is held to have been some [244] kind of distress of
+mind, concurrent with the effects of an old gun-shot wound, the ball
+still remaining somewhere in the body.  My instructions were to
+remove this, at the express desire, as I understood, of the deceased,
+rather than to ascertain the precise cause of death.  This however
+became apparent in the course of my search for the ball, which had
+enveloped itself in the muscular substance in the region of the
+heart, and was removed with difficulty.  I have known cases of this
+kind, where anxiety has caused incurable cardiac derangement (the
+deceased seems to have been actually sentenced to death for some
+military offence when on service in Flanders), and such mental strain
+would of course have been aggravated by the presence of a foreign
+object in that place.  On arriving at my destination, a small village
+in a remote part of Sussex, I proceeded through the little orderly
+churchyard, where however the monthly roses were blooming all their
+own way among the formal white marble monuments of the wealthier
+people of the neighbourhood.  At one of these the masons were at
+work, picking and chipping in the otherwise absolute stillness of the
+summer afternoon.  They were in fact opening the family burial-place
+of the people who summoned me hither; and the workmen pointed out
+their abode, conspicuous on the slope beyond, towards which I bent my
+steps accordingly.  I was conducted to a large upper [245] room or
+attic, set freely open to sun and air, and found the body lying in a
+coffin, almost hidden under very rich-scented cut flowers, after a
+manner I have never seen in this country, except in the case of one
+or two Catholics laid out for burial.  The mother of the deceased was
+present, and actually assisted my operations, amid such tokens of
+distress, though perfectly self-controlled, as I fervently hope I may
+never witness again.
+
+Deceased was in his twenty-seventh year, but looked many years
+younger; had indeed scarcely yet reached the full condition of
+manhood.  The extreme purity of the outlines, both of the face and
+limbs, was such as is usually found only in quite early youth; the
+brow especially, under an abundance of fair hair, finely formed, not
+high, but arched and full, as is said to be the way with those
+who have the imaginative temper in excess.  Sad to think that had he
+lived reason must have deserted that so worthy abode of it!  I was
+struck by the great beauty of the organic developments, in the
+strictly anatomic sense; those of the throat and diaphragm in
+particular might have been modelled for a teacher of normal
+physiology, or a professor of design.  The flesh was still almost as
+firm as that of a living person; as happens when, as in this case,
+death comes to all intents and purposes as gradually as in old age.
+
+This expression of health and life, under my seemingly merciless
+doings, together with the mother's distress, touched me to a degree
+very [246] unusual, I conceive, in persons of my years and
+profession.  Though I believed myself to be acting by his express
+wish, I felt like a criminal.  The ball, a small one, much corroded
+with blood, was at length removed; and I was then directed to wrap it
+in a partly-printed letter, or other document, and place it in the
+breast-pocket of a faded and much-worn scarlet soldier's coat, put
+over the shirt which enveloped the body.  The flowers were then
+hastily replaced, the hands and the peak of the handsome nose
+remaining visible among them; the wind ruffled the fair hair a
+little; the lips were still red.  I shall not forget it.  The lid was
+then placed on the coffin and screwed down in my presence.  There was
+no plate or other inscription upon it.
+
+NOTES
+
+197. *Published in the New Review, June and July 1892, and now
+reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.
+
+210. +Transliteration: askêsis.  Liddel and Scott definition:
+"exercise, training."
+
+213. +Transliteration: Moirai.  Liddel and Scott definition:
+"[singular =] one's portion in life, lot, destiny."
+
+213. +Transliteration: Kêr.  Brief Liddel and Scott definition:
+"doom, death, destruction."
+
+214. +Translation: "in this church established for boys."
+
+219. +Transliteration: hê pterou dynamis.
+
+
+
+DIAPHANEITÉ
+
+[247] THERE are some unworldly types of character which the world is
+able to estimate.  It recognises certain moral types, or categories,
+and regards whatever falls within them as having a right to exist.
+The saint, the artist, even the speculative thinker, out of the
+world's order as they are, yet work, so far as they work at all, in
+and by means of the main current of the world's energy.  Often it
+gives them late, or scanty, or mistaken acknowledgment; still it has
+room for them in its scheme of life, a place made ready for them in
+its affections.  It is also patient of doctrinaires of every degree
+of littleness.  As if dimly conscious of some great sickness and
+weariness of heart in itself, it turns readily to those who theorise
+about its unsoundness.  To constitute one of these categories, or
+types, a breadth and generality of character is required.  There is
+another type of character, which is not broad and general, rare,
+precious above all to the artist, a character which seems to have
+been the supreme moral charm in the Beatrice of the [248] Commedia.
+It does not take the eye by breadth of colour; rather it is that fine
+edge of light, where the elements of our moral nature refine
+themselves to the burning point.  It crosses rather than follows the
+main current of the world's life.  The world has no sense fine enough
+for those evanescent shades, which fill up the blanks between
+contrasted types of character--delicate provision in the organisation
+of the moral world for the transmission to every part of it of the
+life quickened at single points!  For this nature there is no place
+ready in its affections.  This colourless, unclassified purity of
+life it can neither use for its service, nor contemplate as an ideal.
+
+"Sibi unitus et simplificatus esse," that is the long struggle of the
+Imitatio Christi.  The spirit which it forms is the very opposite of
+that which regards life as a game of skill, and values things and
+persons as marks or counters of something to be gained, or achieved,
+beyond them.  It seeks to value everything at its eternal worth, not
+adding to it, or taking from it, the amount of influence it may have
+for or against its own special scheme of life.  It is the spirit that
+sees external circumstances as they are, its own power and tendencies
+as they are, and realises the given conditions of its life, not
+disquieted by the desire for change, or the preference of one part in
+life rather than another, or passion, or opinion.  The character we
+mean to indicate achieves this [249] perfect life by a happy gift of
+nature, without any struggle at all.  Not the saint only, the artist
+also, and the speculative thinker, confused, jarred, disintegrated in
+the world, as sometimes they inevitably are, aspire for this
+simplicity to the last.  The struggle of this aspiration with a lower
+practical aim in the mind of Savonarola has been subtly traced by the
+author of Romola.  As language, expression, is the function of
+intellect, as art, the supreme expression, is the highest product of
+intellect, so this desire for simplicity is a kind of indirect self-
+assertion of the intellectual part of such natures.  Simplicity in
+purpose and act is a kind of determinate expression in dexterous
+outline of one's personality.  It is a kind of moral expressiveness;
+there is an intellectual triumph implied in it.  Such a simplicity is
+characteristic of the repose of perfect intellectual culture.  The
+artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of art desires only
+to be shown to the world as he really is; as he comes nearer and
+nearer to perfection, the veil of an outer life not simply expressive
+of the inward becomes thinner and thinner.  This intellectual throne
+is rarely won.  Like the religious life, it is a paradox in the
+world, denying the first conditions of man's ordinary existence,
+cutting obliquely the spontaneous order of things.  But the character
+we have before us is a kind of prophecy of this repose and
+simplicity, coming as it were in the order of grace, not of nature,
+by [250] some happy gift, or accident of birth or constitution,
+showing that it is indeed within the limits of man's destiny.  Like
+all the higher forms of inward life this character is a subtle
+blending and interpenetration of intellectual, moral and spiritual
+elements.  But it is as a phase of intellect, of culture, that it is
+most striking and forcible.  It is a mind of taste lighted up by some
+spiritual ray within.  What is meant by taste is an imperfect
+intellectual state; it is but a sterile kind of culture.  It is the
+mental attitude, the intellectual manner of perfect culture, assumed
+by a happy instinct.  Its beautiful way of handling everything that
+appeals to the senses and the intellect is really directed by the
+laws of the higher intellectual life, but while culture is able to
+trace those laws, mere taste is unaware of them.  In the character
+before us, taste, without ceasing to be instructive, is far more than
+a mental attitude or manner.  A magnificent intellectual force is
+latent within it.  It is like the reminiscence of a forgotten culture
+that once adorned the mind; as if the mind of one philosophêsas pote
+met' erôtos,+ fallen into a new cycle, were beginning its spiritual
+progress over again, but with a certain power of anticipating its
+stages.  It has the freshness without the shallowness of taste, the
+range and seriousness of culture without its strain and over-
+consciousness.  Such a habit may be described as wistfulness of mind,
+the feeling that there is "so much to [251] know," rather as a
+longing after what is unattainable, than as a hope to apprehend.  Its
+ethical result is an intellectual guilelessness, or integrity, that
+instinctively prefers what is direct and clear, lest one's own
+confusion and intransparency should hinder the transmission from
+without of light that is not yet inward.  He who is ever looking for
+the breaking of a light he knows not whence about him, notes with a
+strange heedfulness the faintest paleness in the sky.  That
+truthfulness of temper, that receptivity, which professors often
+strive in vain to form, is engendered here less by wisdom than by
+innocence.  Such a character is like a relic from the classical age,
+laid open by accident to our alien modern atmosphere.  It has
+something of the clear ring, the eternal outline of the antique.
+Perhaps it is nearly always found with a corresponding outward
+semblance.  The veil or mask of such a nature would be the very
+opposite of the "dim blackguardism" of Danton, the type Carlyle has
+made too popular for the true interest of art.  It is just this sort
+of entire transparency of nature that lets through unconsciously all
+that is really lifegiving in the established order of things; it
+detects without difficulty all sorts of affinities between its own
+elements, and the nobler elements in that order.  But then its
+wistfulness and a confidence in perfection it has makes it love the
+lords of change.  What makes revolutionists is either self-pity, or
+indignation [252] for the sake of others, or a sympathetic perception
+of the dominant undercurrent of progress in things.  The nature
+before us is revolutionist from the direct sense of personal worth,
+that chlidê,+ that pride of life, which to the Greek was a heavenly
+grace.  How can he value what comes of accident, or usage, or
+convention, whose individual life nature itself has isolated and
+perfected?  Revolution is often impious.  They who prosecute
+revolution have to violate again and again the instinct of reverence.
+That is inevitable, since after all progress is a kind of violence.
+But in this nature revolutionism is softened, harmonised, subdued as
+by distance.  It is the revolutionism of one who has slept a hundred
+years.  Most of us are neutralised by the play of circumstances.  To
+most of us only one chance is given in the life of the spirit and the
+intellect, and circumstances prevent our dexterously seizing that one
+chance.  The one happy spot in our nature has no room to burst into
+life.  Our collective life, pressing equally on every part of every
+one of us, reduces nearly all of us to the level of a colourless
+uninteresting existence.  Others are neutralised, not by suppression
+of gifts, but by just equipoise among them.  In these no single gift,
+or virtue, or idea, has an unmusical predominance.  The world easily
+confounds these two conditions.  It sees in the character before us
+only indifferentism.  Doubtless the chief vein of the life of
+humanity [253] could hardly pass through it.  Not by it could the
+progress of the world be achieved.  It is not the guise of Luther or
+Spinoza; rather it is that of Raphael, who in the midst of the
+Reformation and the Renaissance, himself lighted up by them, yielded
+himself to neither, but stood still to live upon himself, even in
+outward form a youth, almost an infant, yet surprising all the world.
+The beauty of the Greek statues was a sexless beauty; the statues of
+the gods had the least traces of sex.  Here there is a moral
+sexlessness, a kind of impotence, an ineffectual wholeness of nature,
+yet with a divine beauty and significance of its own.
+
+Over and over again the world has been surprised by the heroism, the
+insight, the passion, of this clear crystal nature.  Poetry and
+poetical history have dreamed of a crisis, where it must needs be
+that some human victim be sent down into the grave.  These are they
+whom in its profound emotion humanity might choose to send.  "What,"
+says Carlyle, of Charlotte Corday, "What if she had emerged from her
+secluded stillness, suddenly like a star; cruel-lovely, with half-
+angelic, half-daemonic splendour; to gleam for a moment, and in a
+moment be extinguished; to be held in memory, so bright complete was
+she, through long centuries!"
+
+Often the presence of this nature is felt like a sweet aroma in early
+manhood.  Afterwards, as the adulterated atmosphere of the world
+assimilates [254] us to itself, the savour of it faints away.
+Perhaps there are flushes of it in all of us; recurring moments of it
+in every period of life.  Certainly this is so with every man of
+genius.  It is a thread of pure white light that one might disentwine
+from the tumultuary richness of Goethe's nature.  It is a natural
+prophecy of what the next generation will appear, renerved, modified
+by the ideas of this.  There is a violence, an impossibility about
+men who have ideas, which makes one suspect that they could never be
+the type of any widespread life.  Society could not be conformed to
+their image but by an unlovely straining from its true order.  Well,
+in this nature the idea appears softened, harmonised as by distance,
+with an engaging naturalness, without the noise of axe or hammer.
+
+People have often tried to find a type of life that might serve as a
+basement type.  The philosopher, the saint, the artist, neither of
+them can be this type; the order of nature itself makes them
+exceptional.  It cannot be the pedant, or the conservative, or
+anything rash and irreverent.  Also the type must be one discontented
+with society as it is.  The nature here indicated alone is worthy to
+be this type.  A majority of such would be the regeneration of the
+world.
+
+July, 1864.
+
+NOTES
+
+250. +Transliteration: philosophêsas pote met' erôtos.
+
+252. +Transliteration: chlidê.
+
+THE END
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Miscellaneous Studies by Walter Pater
+