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EUPHORION. 
 
[AU rights reserved ?i 
 
EUPHORION : 
 
 STUDIES OF THE ANTIQUE AND THE MEDIiEVAL 
 IN THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 UY 
 
 VERNON LEE 
 
 Second and Revised Edition 
 
 Scnbdtt 
 
 T FISHER UNWIN 
 
 26 Paternoster Square 
 
 i88j 
 
UNWTN BROTHERS, THE GRESHAM PRESS, CHILWORTH AND LONDON, 
 
WALTER PATER, 
 
 IN APPRECIATION OF THAT WHICH, IN EXPOUNDING THE 
 
 BEAUTIFUL THINGS OF THE PAST, HE HAS ADDED TO 
 
 THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS OF THE PRESENT. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION ....... I 
 
 THE SACRIFICE 25 
 
 THE ITALY OF THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 55 
 
 THE OUTDOOR POETRY .... IO9 
 
 SYMMETRIA PRISCA . , , . . . 167 
 
 THE PORTRAIT ART 215 
 
 THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO . . . . 261 
 
 MEDI^^VAL LOVE . , . . . . 335 
 
 EPILOGUE ........ 433 
 
 APPENDIX .... ■ • 449 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Faitsius is therefore a parable of the impotent yearnings of the Middle Ages — its 
 passionate aspiration, its conscience-strickejt desire, its fettered curiosity amid the 
 cramping limits of im.perfect knowledge and irrational dogmatism. The inde^ 
 strtLCtible beauty of Greek art, Tsihereof Helen -was an emblem, became, through tli^ 
 discovery of classic poetry and sculptJtre, the possession of the modem world. 
 MedicEvalism took this Helen to wife, and tlieir offspring, the Euphorion of 
 Goethe's drama, is the spirit of the jnoderJi world. — J. A. Symonds, " Renaissance 
 in Italy," vol. ii. p. 54. 
 
 Euphorion is the name given by Goethe to the 
 marvellous child born of the mystic marriage of Faust 
 and Helena. Who Faust is, and who Helena, we all 
 know. Faust, of whom no man can remember the 
 youth or childhood, seems to have come into the 
 world by some evil spell, already old and with the 
 faintness of body and of mind which are the heritage 
 of age ; and every additional year of mysterious study 
 and abortive effort has made him more vacillating of 
 step and uncertain of sight, but only more hungry of 
 soul. Postponed and repressed by reclusion from the 
 world, and desperate tension over insoluble problems ; 
 diverted into the channels of mere thought and vision ; 
 there boils within him the energy, the passion, of 
 
4 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 retarded youth : its appetites and curiosities, which, 
 cramped by the intolerant will, and foiled by many a 
 sudden palsy of limb and mind, torment him with 
 mad visions of unreal worlds, mock him with dreams 
 of superhuman powers, from which he awakes in 
 impotent and apathetic anguish. But these often- 
 withstood and often-baffled cravings are not those 
 merely of scholar or wizard, they are those of soldier 
 and poet and monk, of the mere man : lawless desires 
 which he seeks to divert, but fails, from the things of 
 the flesh and of the world to the things of the reason ; 
 supersensuous desires for the beautiful and intangible, 
 which he strives to crush, but in vain, with the cynical 
 scepticism of science, which derides the things it cannot 
 grasp. In this strange Faustus, made up of so many 
 and conflicting instincts ; in this old man with ever- 
 budding and ever-nipped feelings of youthfulness, 
 muddling the hard-won secrets of nature in search 
 after impossibilities ; in him so all-sided, and yet so 
 wilfully narrowed, so restlessly active, yet so often pal- 
 sied and apathetic ; in this Faustus, who has laboured 
 so much and succeeded in so little, feeling himself at 
 the end, when he has summed up all his studies, as 
 foolish as before — which of us has not learned to 
 recognize the impersonated Middle Ages? And 
 Helena, we know her also, she is the spirit of Anti- 
 quity. Personified, but we dare scarcely say, em- 
 bodied ; for she is a ghost raised by the spells of 
 Faustus, a simulacrum of a thing long dead ; yet with 
 
INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 such continuing semblance of life, nay, with all life's 
 real powers, that she seems the real, vital, living one, 
 and Faustus yonder, thing as he is of the present, 
 little better than a spectre. Yet Helena has been 
 ages before Faust ever was ; nay, by an awful mys- 
 tery like those which involve the birth of Pagan gods, 
 she whom he has evoked to be the mother of his only 
 son has given, centuries before, somewhat of her life 
 to make this self-same Faust. A strange mystery of 
 Fate's necromancy this, and with strange anomalies. 
 For opposite this living, decrepit Faust, Helena, the 
 long dead, is young ; and she is all that which Faust 
 is not. Knowing much less than he, who has plunged 
 his thoughts like his scalpel into all the mysteries of 
 life and death, she yet knows much more, can tell 
 him of the objects and aims of men and things ; nay, 
 with little more than the unconscious faithfulness to 
 instinct of the clean-limbed, placid brute, she can 
 give peace to his tormented conscience ; and, while 
 he has suffered and struggled and lashed himself for 
 every seeming baseness of desire, and loathed himself 
 for every imagined microscopic soiling, she has 
 walked through good and evil, letting the vileness of 
 sin trickle off her unhidden soul, so quietly and 
 majestically that all thought of evil vanishes ; and 
 the self-tormenting wretch, with macerated flesh hid- 
 den beneath the heavy garments of mysticism and 
 philosophy, suddenly feels, in the presence of her un- 
 abashed nakedness, that he, like herself, is chaste. 
 
6 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 Such are the parents, Faustus and Helena ; we know 
 them ; but who is this son Euphorion ? To me it 
 seems as if there could be but one answer — the Re- 
 naissance. Goethe indeed has told us (though, with his 
 rejuvenation of Faustus, unknown to the old German 
 legend and to our Marlowe, in how bungling a manner!) 
 the tale of that mystic marriage ; but Goethe could 
 not tell us rightly, even had he attempted, the real 
 name of its offspring. For even so short a time ago, 
 the Middle Ages were only beginning to be more 
 than a mere historical expression. Antiquity was being 
 only then critically discovered ; and the Renaissance, 
 but vaguely seen and quite unformulated by the 
 first men. Gibbon and Roscoe, who perceived it at 
 all, was still virtually unknown. To Goethe, there- 
 fore, it might easily have seemed as if the antique 
 Helena had only just been evoked, and as if of her 
 union with the worn-out century of his birth, a real 
 Euphorion, the age in which ourselves are living, 
 might have been born. But, at the distance of addi- 
 tional time, and from the undreamed-of height upon 
 which recent historical science has enabled us to stand, 
 we can easily see that in this he would have been 
 mistaken. Not only is our modern culture no child of 
 Faustus and Helena, but it is the complex descendant, 
 strangely featured by atavism from various sides, of 
 many and various civilizations ; and the eighteenth 
 century, so far from being a Faustus evoking as his 
 bride the long dead Helen of Antiquity, was in itself a 
 
INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 curiously varied grandchild or great-grandchild of such 
 a marriage, its every moral feature, its every intellectual 
 movement proclaiming how much of its being was in- 
 herited from Antiquity. No allegory, I well know, 
 and least of all no historical allegory, can ever be 
 strained to fit quite tight — the lives of individuals and 
 those of centuries, their modesof intermixture, genesis, 
 and inheritance are far different ; but if an allegory is 
 to possess any meaning at all, we must surely apply it 
 wherever it will fit most easily and completely ; and 
 the beautiful allegory prepared by the tradition of the 
 sixteenth century for the elaborating genius of Goethe, 
 can have a real meaning only if we explain Faust as re- 
 presenting the Middle Ages, Helena as Antiquity, and 
 Euphorion as that child of the Middle Ages, taking 
 life and reality from them, but born of and curiously 
 nurtured by the spirit of Antiquity, to which significant 
 accident has given the name of Renaissance. 
 
 After Euphorion I have therefore christened this 
 book ; and this not from any irrational conceit of 
 knowing more (when I am fully aware that I know 
 infinitely less) than other writers about the life and 
 characterof this wonderful child of Helenaand Faustus, 
 but merely because it is more particularly as the off- 
 spring of this miraculous marriage, and with reference 
 to the harmonies and anomalies which therefrom 
 resulted, that Euphorion has exercised my thoughts. 
 
 The Renaissance has interested and interests me, not 
 merely for what it is, but even more for what it sprang 
 
8 E UP MORION. 
 
 from, and for the manner in which the many things 
 inherited from both Middle Ages and Renaissance, the 
 tendencies and necessities inherent in every special 
 civilization, acted and reacted upon each other, united 
 in concord or antagonism ; forming, like the gases of 
 the chemist, new things, sometimes like and sometimes 
 unlike themselves and each other; producing now 
 some unknown substance of excellence and utility, at 
 other times some baneful element, known but too well 
 elsewhere, but unexpected here. But not the watch- 
 ing of the often tragic meeting of these great fatalities 
 of inherited spirit and habit only : for equally fas- 
 cinating almost has been the watching of the elabo- 
 ration by this double-natured period of things of little 
 weight, mere trifles of artistic material bequeathed to 
 it by one or by the other of its spiritual parents. The 
 charm for me — a charm sometimes pleasurable, but 
 sometimes also painful, like the imperious necessity 
 which we sometimes feel to see again and examine, 
 seemingly uselessly, some horrible evil — the charm, I 
 mean the involuntary compulsion of attention, has 
 often been as great in following the vicissitudes of a 
 mere artistic item, like the Carolingiaij stories or the 
 bucolic element, as it has been in looking on at the 
 dissolution of moral and social elements. And in 
 this, that I have tried to understand only where my 
 curiosity was awakened, tried to reconstruct only 
 where my fancy was taken ; in short, studied of this 
 Renaissance civilization only as much or as little as I 
 
INTRODUCTION. 9 
 
 cared, depends all the incompleteness and irrelevancy 
 and unsatisfactoriness of this book, and depends also 
 whatever addition to knowledge or pleasure it may 
 afford. Were I desirous of giving a complete, clear 
 notion of the very complex civilization of the Renais- 
 sance, a kind of encyclopaedic atlas of that period, 
 where (by a double power which history alone pos- 
 sesses) you could see at once the whole extent and 
 shape of this historical territory, and at the same time, 
 with all its bosses of mountain and furrows of valley, 
 the exact composition of all its various earths and 
 waters, the exact actual colour and shape of all its 
 different vegetations, not to speak of its big towns 
 and dotting villages ;— were I desirous of doing this, I 
 should not merely be attempting a work completely 
 beyond my faculties, but a work moreover already 
 carried out with all the perfection due to specially 
 adapted gifts, to infinite patience and ingenuity, oc- 
 casionally amounting almost to genius. Such is not 
 at all within my wishes, as it assuredly would be 
 totally without my powers. 
 
 But besides such marvels of historic mapping 
 as I have described, where every one can find at 
 a glance whatever he may be looking for, and get 
 the whole topography, geological and botanical, 
 of an historic tract at his fingers' ends, there are 
 yet other kinds of work which may be done. For a 
 period in history is like a more Or less extended real 
 landscape : it has, if you will, actual, chemically de- 
 
lo EUPHORION. 
 
 fined colours in this and that, if you consider this and 
 that separate and unaffected by any kind of visual 
 medium ; and measurable distances also between this 
 point and the other, if you look down upon it as from 
 a balloon. But, like a real landscape, it may also be 
 seen from different points of view, and under different 
 lights ; then, according as you stand, the features of 
 the scene will group themselves — this ridge will disap- 
 pear behind that, this valley will open out before you, 
 that other will be closed. Similarly, according to the 
 light wherein the landscape is seen, the relative scale 
 of colours and tints of objects, due to pervading light 
 and to distances — what painters call the values — will 
 alter : the scene will possess one or two predomi- 
 nant effects, it will produce also one or, at most, two 
 or three (in which case co-ordinated) impressions. 
 The art which deals with impressions, which tries to 
 seize the real relative values of colours and tints at a 
 given moment, is what you call new-fangled : its doc- 
 trines and works are still subject to the reproach of 
 charlatanry. Yet it is the only truly realistic art, and 
 it only, by giving you a thing as it appears at a given 
 moment, gives it you as it really ever is ; all the rest 
 is the result of cunning abstraction, and representing 
 the scene as it is always, represents it (by striking an 
 average) as it never is at all. I do not pretend that 
 in questions of history we can proceed upon the 
 principles of modern landscape painting : we do not 
 know what were the elevations which made per- 
 
INTRODUCTION. ii 
 
 spective, what were the effects of light which created 
 scales of tints, in that far distant country of the past ; 
 and it is safer certainly, and doubtless much more 
 useful, to strike an average, and represent the past as 
 seen neither from here nor from there, neither in this 
 light nor that, and let each man imagine his historical 
 perspective and colour value to the best of his powers. 
 Yet it is nevertheless certain that the past, to the people 
 who were in it, was not a miraculous map or other 
 marvellous diagram constructed on the principle of 
 getting at the actual qualities of things by analysis; 
 that it must have been, to its inhabitants, but a series 
 of constantly varied perspectives and constantly varied 
 schemes of colour, according to the position of each 
 individual, and the light in which that individual 
 viewed it. To attempt to reconstruct those various 
 perspective-making heights, to rearrange those various 
 value-determining lights, would be to the last degree 
 disastrous ; we should have valleys where there existed 
 mountains, and brilliant warm schemes of colour where 
 there may have been all harmonies of pale and neutral 
 tints. Still the perspective and colour valuation of 
 individual minds there must have been ; and since it 
 is not given to us to reproduce those of the near 
 spectator in a region which we can never enter, we 
 may yet sometimes console ourselves for the too 
 melancholy abstractness and averageness of scientific 
 representations, by painting that distant historic 
 country as distant indeed, but as its far-off hill ranges 
 
12 EUPHORION. 
 
 and shimmering plains really appear in their combina- 
 tion of form and colour, from the height of an indi- 
 vidual interest of our own, and beneath the light of 
 our individual character. We see only very little at 
 a time, and that little is not what it appeared to the 
 men of the past ; but we see at least, if not the same 
 things, yet in the same manner in which they saw, as 
 we see from the standpoints of personal interest and 
 in the light of personal temper. Scientifically we 
 doubtless lose; but is the past to be treated only 
 scientifically ? and can it not give us, and do we not 
 owe it, something more than a mere understanding of 
 why and how ? Is it a thing so utterly dead as to be 
 fit only for the scalpel and the microscope ? 
 
 Surely not so. The past can give us, and should 
 give us, not merely ideas, but emotions : healthy 
 pleasure which may make us more light of spirit, 
 and pain which may make us more earnest of mind ; 
 the one, it seems to me, as necessary for our indi- 
 vidual worthiness as is the other. For to each of us, 
 as we watch the past, as we lie passive and let it slowly 
 circulate around us, there must come sights which, in 
 their reality or in their train of associations, and to 
 the mind of each differently, must gladden as with a 
 sense of beauty, or put us all into a sullen moral ache. 
 I should hate to be misunderstood in this more, per- 
 haps, than in anything else in the world. I speak not 
 of any dramatic emotion, of such egotistic, half-artis- 
 tic pleasure as some may get from the alternation of 
 
INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 cheerfulness and terror, from the excitement caused 
 by evil from which we are as safely separated as are 
 those who look on from the enfuriate bulls in an arena. 
 To such, history, and the history especially of the 
 Renaissance, has been made to pander but too much. 
 The pain I speak of is the pain which must come to 
 every morally sentient creature with the contempla- 
 tion of some one of the horrible tangles of evil, of the 
 still fouler intermeshing of evil with good, which 
 history brings up ever and anon. Evil which is past, 
 it is true, but of which the worst evil almost of all, the 
 fact of its having been, can never be past, must ever 
 remain present ; and our trouble and indignation at 
 which is holy, our pain is healthy : holy and healthy, 
 because every vibration of such pain as that makes our 
 moral fibre more sensitive ; because every immunity 
 from such sensation deadens our higher nature : holy 
 and healthyalso because,just asno image of pleasurable 
 things can pass before us without gathering about it 
 other images of some beauty which have long lain by 
 in each individual mind, so also no thought of great 
 injustice of man or of accident, of signal whitewashing 
 of evil or befouling of good, but must, in striking into 
 our soul, put in motion there the salutary thought 
 of some injustice or lying legitimation or insidious 
 pollution, smaller indeed perhaps, but perhaps also 
 nearer to ourselves. 
 
 Be not therefore too hard upon me if in what I 
 have written of the Renaissance, there is too little 
 
14 EUPHORION. 
 
 attempt to make matters scientifically complete, and 
 too much giving way to personal and perhaps some- 
 times irrelevant impressions of pleasure and of pain ; 
 if I have followed up those pleasurable and painful 
 impressions rather more than sought to discover the 
 exact geography of the historical tract which gave 
 them. Consider, moreover, that this very cause of de- 
 ficiency may have been also the cause of my having 
 succeeded in achieving anything at all. Personal im- 
 pression has led me, perhaps, sometimes away from 
 the direct road ; but had it not beckoned me to follow, 
 I should most likely have simply not stirred. Pleasant 
 impression and painful, as I have said ; and sometimes 
 the painful has been more efficacious than the other. 
 I do not know whether the interest which I have 
 always taken in the old squabble of real and ideal 
 has enabled me to make at all clearer the different 
 characteristics of painting and sculpture in Renaissance 
 portraiture, the relation of the art of Raphael to the 
 art of Velasquez and the art of Whistler. I can 
 scarcely judge whether the pleasure which I owe to 
 the crowding together, the moving about in my fancy, 
 of the heroes and wizards and hippogriffs of the old 
 tales of Oberon and Ogier ; the association with the 
 knights and ladies of Boiardo and Ariosto, of this or 
 that figure out of a fresco of Pinturicchio, or a picture 
 by Dosso, has made it easier or more difficult for 
 me to sum up the history of medieval romance in 
 Renaissance Italy ; nor whether the recollection of 
 
INTRODUCTION. 15 
 
 certain Tuscan farms, the well-known scent of the 
 sun-dried fennel and mint under the vine-trellis, the 
 droning song of the contadino ploughing or pruning 
 unseen in the valley, the snatches of peasants' rhymes, 
 the outlines of peasants' faces — things all these of this 
 our own time, of yesterday or to-day ; whether all 
 this, running in my mind like so many scribbly illus- 
 trations and annotations along the margin of Lorenzo 
 dei Medici's poems, has made my studies of rustic 
 poetry more clear or more confused. But this much I 
 know as a certainty, that never should I have tried 
 to unravel the causes of the Renaissance's horrible 
 anomaly of improvement and degradation, had not that 
 anomaly returned and returned to make me wretched 
 with its loathsome mixture of good and evil ; its de- 
 testable alternative of endurance of vile solidarities in 
 the souls of our intellectual forefathers, or of unjust 
 turning away from the men and the times whose moral 
 degradation paid the price of our moral dignity. I 
 also have the further certainty of its having been this 
 long-endured moral sickening at the sight of this 
 moral anomaly, which enabled me to realize the 
 feelings of such of our nobler Elizabethan playwrights 
 as sought to epitomize in single tales of horror the 
 strange impressions left by the accomplished and 
 infamous Italy of their day ; and which made it possible 
 for me to express perhaps some of the trouble which 
 filled the mind of Webster and of Tourneur merely by 
 expressing the trouble which filled my own. 
 
1 6 EUPHORION. 
 
 The following studies are not samples, fragments at 
 which one tries one's hand, of some large and metho- 
 dical scheme of work. They are mere impressions 
 developed by means of study : not merely currents of 
 thought and feeling which I have singled out from 
 the multifold life of the Renaissance ; but currents of 
 thought and feeling in myself, which have found and 
 swept along with them certain items of Renaissance 
 lore. For the Renaissance has been to me, in the 
 small measure in which it has been anything, not so 
 much a series of studies as a series of impressions. I 
 have not mastered the history and literature of the 
 Renaissance (first-hand or second-hand, perfectly or 
 imperfectly), abstract and exact, and then sought out 
 the places and things which could make that abstrac- 
 tion somewhat more concrete in my mind ; I have 
 seen the concrete things, and what I might call the 
 concrete realities of thought and feeling left behind by 
 the Renaissance, and then tried to obtain from books 
 some notion of the original shape and manner of wear- 
 ing these relics, rags and tatters of a past civilization. 
 
 For Italy, beggared and maimed (by her own un- 
 thrift, by the rapacity of others, by the order of Fate) 
 at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was never 
 able to weave for herself a new, a modern civilization, as 
 did the nations who had shattered her looms on which 
 such woofs are made, and carried off her earnings with 
 v/hich such things may be bought ; and she had, 
 accordingly, to go through life in the old garments, 
 
INTRODUCTION. 17 
 
 still half mediaeval in shape, which had been fashioned 
 for her during the Renaissance : apparel of the best 
 that could then be made, beautiful and strong in many 
 ways, so beautiful and strong indeed as to impose on 
 people for a good long time, and make French, and 
 Germans, and Spaniards, and English believe (com- 
 paring these brilliant tissues with the homespun they 
 were providing for themselves) that it must be all 
 brand new, and of the very latest fashion. But the 
 garments left to Italy by those latest Middle Ages 
 which we call Renaissance, were not eternal : wear and 
 tear, new occupations, and the rough usage of other 
 nations, rent them most sorely ; their utter neglect 
 by the long seventeenth century, their hasty patchings 
 up (with bits of odd stuff and all manner of coloured 
 thread and string, so that a harlequin's jacket could 
 not look queerer) by the happy-go-lucky practicalness 
 of the eighteenth century and the Revolution, reduced 
 them thoroughly to rags ; and with these rags of Re- 
 naissance civilization, Italy may still be seen to drape 
 herself. Not perhaps in the great centres, where the 
 garments of modern civilization, economical, unpic- 
 turesque, intended to be worn but a short time, have 
 been imported from other countries ; but yet in many 
 places. Yes, you may still see those rags of the 
 Renaissance as plainly as you see the tattered linen 
 fluttering from the twisted iron hooks (made for the 
 display of precious brocades and carpets on pageant 
 days) which still remain in the stained whitewash, the 
 
 3 
 
1 8 EUPHORION. 
 
 seams of battered bricks of the solid old escutcheoned 
 palaces ; see them sometimes displayed like the worm- 
 eaten squares of discoloured embroidery which the 
 curiosity dealers take out of their musty oak presses ; 
 and sometimes dragging about mere useless and be- 
 fouled odds and ends, like the torn shreds which lie 
 among the decaying kitchen refuse, the broken tiles 
 and plaster, the nameless filth and ooze which attracts 
 the flies under every black archway, in every steep 
 bricked lane descending precipitously between the 
 high old houses. Old palaces, almost strongholds, 
 and which are still inhabited by those too poor to pull 
 them down and build some plastered bandbox in- 
 stead ; poems and prose tales written or told five 
 hundred years ago, edited and re-edited by printers 
 to whom there come no modern poems or prose tales 
 worth editing instead ; half-pagan, mediaeval priest 
 lore, believed in by men and women who have not 
 been given anything to believe instead ; easy-going, 
 all-permitting fifteenth century scepticism, not yet 
 replaced by the scientific and socialistic disbelief which 
 is puritanic and iconoclastic ; sly and savage habits of 
 vengeance still doing service among the lower classes 
 instead of the orderly chicanery of modern justice ; 
 — these are the things, and a hundred others besides, 
 concrete and spiritual, things too magnificent, too 
 sordid, too irregular, too nauseous, too beautiful, and, 
 above all, too utterly unpractical and old-fashioned for 
 our times, which I call the rags of the Renaissance, 
 
INTRODUCTION. 19 
 
 and with which Italy still ekes out her scanty apparel 
 of modern thoughts and things. 
 
 It is living among such things, turn by turn delighted 
 by their beauty and offended by their foulness, that 
 one acquires the habit of spending a part only of 
 one's intellectual and moral life in the present, and 
 the rest in the past. Impressions are not derived from 
 description, and thoughts are not suggested by books. 
 The juxtaposition of concrete objects invites the 
 making of a theory as the jutting out of two branches 
 invites the spinning of a spider's web. You find 
 everywhere your facts without opening a book. The 
 explanation which I have tried to give of the exact 
 manner in which mediaeval art was influenced by the 
 remains of antiquity, came like a flash during a rainy 
 morning in the Pisan Campo Santo ; the working out 
 and testing of that explanation in its details was a 
 matter of going from one church or gallery to the 
 other, a reference or two to Vasari for some date or 
 fact being the only necessary reading ; and should 
 any one at this moment ask me for substantiation of 
 that theory, instead of opening books I would take 
 that person to this Sienese Cathedral, and there bid 
 him compare the griffins and arabesques, the delicate 
 figure and foliage ornaments carved in wood and 
 marble by the latter Middle Ages, with the griffins 
 and arabesques, the boldly bossed horsemen, the ex- 
 quisite fruit garlands of a certain antique altar stone 
 which the builders of the church used as a base to a 
 
-o EUPHORION. 
 
 pillar, and which must have been a never-ceasing- 
 object of study to every draughtsman and stone- 
 worker in Siena. 
 
 Nor are such everywhere-scattered facts ready for 
 working into theoretic shape, the most which Italy 
 still affords to make the study of the Renaissance an 
 ahnost involuntary habit. In certain places where 
 only decay has altered things from what they were 
 four centuries ago, Perugia, Orvieto, S. Gimignano, in 
 the older quarters of Florence, Venice, and Verona, 
 but nowhere I think so much as in this city of Siena 
 (as purely mediaeval as the suits of rusted armour 
 which its townsfolk patch up and bury themselves in 
 during their August pageants), we are subjected to 
 receive impressions of the past so startlingly life-like 
 as to get quite interwoven with our impressions of the 
 present ; and from that moment the past must share, 
 in a measure, some of the everyday thoughts which 
 we give to the present. In such a city as this, the 
 sudden withdrawal, by sacristan or beggar-crone, of 
 the curtain from before an altar-piece is many a time 
 much more than the mere displaying of a picture : it 
 is the sudden bringing us face to face with the real 
 life of the Renaissance. We have ourselves, perhaps 
 not an hour before, sauntered through squares and 
 dawdled beneath porticos like those which we see 
 filled with the red-robed and plumed citizens and 
 patricians, the Jews and ruffians whom Pinturicchio's 
 parti-coloured men-at-arms are dispersing to make 
 
INTRODUCTION. 21 
 
 room for the followers of ^neas Sylvius ; or clambered 
 up rough lanes, hedged in between oak woods and 
 oliveyards, which we might almost swear were the 
 very ones through which are winding Sodoma's caval- 
 cades of gallantly dressed gentlemen, with their hawks 
 and hounds, and negro jesters and apes and beautiful 
 pages, cantering along on shortnecked little horses 
 with silver bits and scarlet trappings, on the pretence 
 of being the Kings from the East, carrying gold and 
 myrrh to the infant Christ. It seems as if all were 
 astoundingly real, as if, by some magic, we were 
 actually going to mix in the life of the past. But it 
 is in reality but a mere delusion, a deceit like those 
 dioramas which we have all been into as children, anc. 
 where, by paying your shilling, you were suddenly 
 introduced into an oasis of the desert, or into a recent 
 battle-field : things which surprised us, real palm 
 trunks and Arabian water jars, or real fascines and 
 cannon balls, lying about for us to touch ; roads open- 
 ing on all sides into this simulated desert, through this 
 simulated battle-field. So also with these seeming 
 realities of Renaissance life. We can touch the things 
 scattered on the foreground, can handle the weapons, 
 the furniture, the books and musical instruments ; we 
 can see, or think we see, most plainly the streets and 
 paths, the faces and movements of that Renaissance 
 world ; but when we try to penetrate into it, we 
 shall find that there is but a slip of solid ground 
 beneath us, that all around us is but canvas and 
 
22 EUPHORIOISf. 
 
 painted wall, perspectived and lit up by our fancy ; 
 and that when we try to approach to touch one of those 
 seemingly so real men and women, our eyes find only 
 daubs of paint, our hands meet only flat and chilly 
 stucco. Turn we to our books, and seek therein the 
 spell whereby to make this simulacrum real ; and I 
 think the plaster will still remain plaster, the stones 
 still remain stone. Out of the Renaissance, out of the 
 Middle Ages, we must never hope to evoke any spectres 
 which can talk with us and we with them ; nothing 
 of the kind of those dim but familiar ghosts, often 
 grotesque rather than heroic, who come to us from 
 out of the books, the daubed portraits of times nearer 
 our own, and sit opposite us, making us laugh, and 
 also cry, with humdrum stories and humdrum woes so 
 very like our own. No ; such ghosts the Renaissance 
 has not left behind it. From out of it there come to 
 us no familiars. They are all faces — those which meet 
 us in the pages of chronicles and in the frames of 
 pictures : they are painted records of the past — we may 
 understand them by scanning well their features, but 
 they cannot understand, they cannot perceive us. 
 Such, when all is said, are my impressions of the 
 Renaissance. The moral atmosphere of those days is 
 as impossible for us to breathe as would be the physical 
 atmosphere of the moon : could we, for a moment, 
 penetrate into it, we should die of asphyxia. Say what 
 we may against both Protestant reformation and 
 Catholic reaction, these two began to make an atmo- 
 
INTRODUCTION. 23 
 
 sphere (pure or foul) different from that of the Middle 
 Ages and the Renaissance, an atmosphere in which 
 lived creatures like ourselves, into which ourselves 
 might penetrate. 
 
 A crotchet this, perhaps, of my own ; but it is my 
 feeling, nevertheless. The Renaissance is, I say again, 
 no period out of which we must try and evoke ghostly 
 companions. Let us not waste our strength in seeking 
 to do so ; but be satisfied if it teaches us strange 
 truths, scientific and practical ; if its brilliant and 
 solemn personalities, its bright and majestic art can 
 give us pleasure ; if its evils and wrongs, its inevitable 
 degradation, can move us to pity and to indignation. 
 
 Siena, 
 September, 1882. 
 
THE SACRIFICE. 
 
THE SACRIFICE. 
 
 Ihrfilhri ins Lebcn uns hinein; 
 Ihr lasst den armeti schtcldi^ werden ; 
 Dann ubergiebt Ihr ihn der Pein^ 
 Denn alle Schnld rdcht sich auf Erden, 
 
 At the end of the fifteenth century, Italy was the 
 centre of European civilization : while the other 
 nations were still plunged in a feudal barbarism which 
 seems almost as far removed from all our sympathies 
 as is the condition of some American or Polynesian 
 savages, the Italians appear to us as possessing habits 
 of thought, a mode of life, political, social, and lite- 
 rary institutions, not unlike those of to-day ; as men 
 whom we can thoroughly understand, whose ideas 
 and aims, whose general views, resemble our own in 
 that main, indefinable characteristic of being modern. 
 They had shaken off the morbid monastic ways of 
 feeling, they had thrown aside the crooked scholastic 
 modes of thinking, they had trampled under foot the 
 feudal institutions of the Middle Ages ; no symbolical 
 mists made them see things vague, strange, and dis- 
 torted ; their intellectual atmosphere was as clear as 
 
28 EUPHORION. 
 
 our own, and, if they saw less than we do, what they 
 did see appeared to them in its true shape and pro- 
 portions. Almost for the first time since the ruin of 
 antique civilization, they could show well-organized, 
 well-defined States ; artistically disciplined armies ; 
 rationally devised laws ; scientifically conducted agri- 
 culture ; and widely extended, intelligently undertaken 
 commerce. For the first time, also, they showed 
 regularly built, healthy, and commodious towns ; well- 
 drained fields ; and, more important than all, hundreds 
 of miles of country owned not by feudal lords, but by 
 citizens ; cultivated not by serfs, but by free peasants. 
 While in the rest of Europe men were floundering 
 among the stagnant ideas and crumbling institutions 
 of the effete Middle Ages, with but a vague half- 
 consciousness of their own nature, the Italians 
 walked calmly through a life as well arranged as their 
 great towns, bold, inquisitive, and sceptical : modern 
 administrators, modern soldiers, modern politicians, 
 modern financiers, scholars, and thinkers. Towards 
 the end of the fifteenth century, Italy seemed to have 
 obtained the philosophic, literary, and artistic inherit- 
 ance of Greece ; the administrative, legal, and military 
 inheritance of Rome, increased threefold by her own 
 strong, original, essentially modern activities. 
 
 Yet, at that very time, and almost in proportion as 
 all these advantages developed, the moral vitality of 
 the Italians was rapidly decreasing, and a horrible 
 moral gangrene beginning to spread : liberty was 
 
THE SACRIFICE. 29 
 
 extinguished ; public good faith seemed to be dying 
 out ; even private morality flickered ominously ; every 
 free State became subject to a despot, always unscru- 
 pulous and often infamous ; warfare became a mere 
 pretext for the rapine and extortions of mercenaries ; 
 diplomacy grew to be a mere swindle ; the humanists 
 inoculated literature with the filthiest refuse cast up 
 by antiquity ; nay, even civic and family ties were 
 loosened ; assassinations and fratricides began to 
 abound, and all law, human and divine, to be set at 
 defiance. 
 
 The nations who came into contact with the 
 Italians opened their eyes with astonishment, with 
 mingled admiration and terror ; and we, people of the 
 nineteenth century, are filled with the same feeling, 
 only much stronger and more defined, as we watch 
 the strange ebullition of the Renaissance, seething 
 with good and evil, as we contemplate the enigmatic 
 picture drawn by the puzzled historian, the picture of 
 a people moving on towards civilization and towards 
 chaos. Our first feeling is perplexity ; our second 
 feeling, anger ; we do not at first know whether we 
 ought to believe in such an anomaly ; when once we 
 do believe in it, we are indignant at its existence. 
 We accuse these Italians of the Renaissance of having 
 wilfully and shamefully perverted their own powers, 
 of having wantonly corrupted their own civilization, 
 of having cynically destroyed their own national exist- 
 ence, of having boldly called down the vengeance of 
 
30 EUPHORION. 
 
 Heaven ; we lament and we accuse, naturally enough, 
 but perhaps not justly. 
 
 Let us ask ourselves what the Renaissance really 
 was, and what was its use ; how it was produced, and 
 how it necessarily ended. Let us try to understand 
 its inherent nature, and the nature of what surrounded 
 it, which, taken together, constitute its inevitable fate ; 
 let us seek the explanation of that strange, anomalous 
 civilization, of that life in death, and death in life. 
 
 The Renaissance, inasmuch as it is something 
 which we can define, and not a mere vague name for 
 a certain epoch, is not a period, but a condition ; and 
 if we apply the word to any period in particular, it is 
 because in it that condition was peculiarly marked. 
 The Renaissance may be defined as being that phase 
 in mediaeval history in which the double influence, 
 feudal and ecclesiastic, which had gradually crushed 
 the spontaneous life of the early mediaeval revival, and 
 reduced all to a dead, sterile mass, was neutralized by 
 the existence of democratic and secular communities ; 
 that phase in which, while there existed not yet any 
 large nations, or any definite national feeling, there 
 existed free towns and civic democracies. In this 
 sense the Renaissance began to exist with the earliest 
 medieval revival, but its peculiar mission could be 
 carried out only when that general revival had come 
 to an end. In this sense, also, the Renaissance did not 
 exist all over Italy, and it existed outside Italy ; but 
 in Italy it was far more universal than slsewhere : 
 
THE SACRIFICE. 31 
 
 there it was the rule, elsewhere the exception. There 
 was no Renaissance in Savoy, nor in Naples, nor even 
 in Rome ; but north of the Alps there was Renais- 
 sance only in individual towns like Nurnberg, Augs- 
 burg, Bruges, Ghent, &c. In the North the Renais- 
 sance is dotted about amidst the stagnant Middle 
 Ages ; in Italy the Middle Ages intersect and inter- 
 rupt the Renaissance here and there : the consequence 
 was that in the North the Renaissance was crushed 
 by the Middle Ages, whereas in Italy the Middle 
 Ages were crushed by the Renaissance. Wherever 
 there was a free town, without direct dependence on 
 feudal or ecclesiastical institutions, governed by its 
 own citizens, subsisting by its own industry and com- 
 merce ; wherever the burghers built walls, slung 
 chains across their streets, and raised their own cathe- 
 dral ; wherever, be it in Germany, in Flanders, or in 
 England, there was a suspension of the deadly in- 
 fluences of the later Middle Ages ; there, to greater 
 or less extent, was the Renaissance. 
 
 But in the North this rudimentary Renaissance was 
 never suffered to spread beyond the walls of single 
 towns ; it was hemmed in on all sides by feudal and 
 ecclesiastical institutions, which restrained it within 
 definite limits. The free towns of Germany were 
 mostly dependent upon their bishops or archbishops ; 
 the more politically important cities of Flanders were 
 under the suzerainty of a feudal family ; they were 
 subject to constant vexations from their suzerains, 
 
32 EUPHORIC N. 
 
 and their very existence was endangered by an 
 attempt at independence ; Li^ge was well-nigh de- 
 stroyed by the supporters of her bishop, and Ghent 
 was ruined by the revenge of the Duke of Burgundy. 
 In these northern cities, therefore, the commonwealth 
 was restricted to a sort of mercantile corporation, 
 powerful within the town, but powerless without it ; 
 while outside the town reigned feudalism, with its 
 robber nobles, free companies, and bands of outlawed 
 peasants, from whom the merchant princes of Bruges 
 and Niirnberg could scarcely protect their wares. To 
 this political feebleness and narrowness corresponded 
 an intellectual weakness and pettiness : the burghers 
 were mere self-ruling tradesfolk ; their interests did 
 not extend far beyond their shops and their houses ; 
 literature was cramped in guilds, and reflection and 
 imagination were confined within the narrow limits of 
 town life. Everything was on a small scale ; the 
 Renaissance was moderate and inefficient, running 
 no great dangers and achieving no great conquests. 
 There was not enough action to produce reaction ; 
 and, while the Italian free States were ground down 
 by foreign tyrannies, the German and Flemish cities 
 insensibly merged into the vast empire of the House 
 of Austria. While also the Italians of the sixteenth 
 century rushed into moral and religious confusion, 
 which only Jesuitism could discipline, the Germans of 
 the same time quietly and comfortably adopted the 
 Reformation. 
 
THE SACRIFICE. 33 
 
 The main cause of this difference, the main explan- 
 ation of the fact that while in the North the Renais- 
 sance was cramped and enfeebled, in Italy it carried 
 everything before it, lies in the circumstance that 
 feudalism never took deep root in Italy. The con- 
 quered Latin race was enfeebled, it is true, but it was 
 far more civilized than the conquering Teutonic peoples ; 
 the Barbarians came down, not on to a previous layer 
 of Barbarians, but on to a deep layer of civilized men ; 
 the nomads of the North found in Italy a people 
 weakened and corrupt, but with a long and inextin- 
 guishable habit of independence, of order, of industry. 
 The country had been cultivated for centuries, the 
 Barbarians could not turn it into a desert ; the inhabi- 
 tants had been organized as citizens for a thousand 
 years, the Barbarians could not reorganize them feudally. 
 The Barbarians who settled in Italy, especially the 
 latest of them, the Lombards, were not only in a 
 minority, but at an immense disadvantage. They 
 founded kingdoms and dukedoms, where German was 
 spoken and German laws were enacted ; but whenever 
 they tried to communicate with their Italian subjects, 
 they found themselves forced to adopt the Latin lan- 
 guage, manners, and laws ; their domination became 
 real only in proportion as it ceased to be Teutonic, 
 and the Barbarian element was swallowed up by what 
 remained of Roman civilization. Little by little these 
 Lombard monarchies, without roots in the soil, and 
 surrounded by hostile influences, died out, and there 
 
 4 
 
34 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 remained of the invaders only a certain number of 
 nobles, those whose descendants were to bear the 
 originally German names of Gherardesca, Rolandinghi, 
 Soffredinghi, Lambertazzi, Guidi, and whose suzerains 
 were the Bavarian and Swabian dukes and marquises 
 of Tuscany. Meanwhile the Latin element revived ; 
 towns were rebuilt ; a new Latin language was formed ; 
 and the burghers of these young communities gradually 
 wrested franchises and privileges from the weak Teu- 
 tonic rulers, who required Italian agriculture, industry, 
 and commerce, without which they and their feudal 
 retainers would have starved. Feudalism became 
 speedily limited to the hilly country ; the plain 
 became the property of the cities which it surrounded; 
 the nobles turned into mere robber chieftains, then into 
 mercenary soldiers, and finally, as the towns gained 
 importance, they gradually descended into the cities 
 and begged admission into the guilds of artizans and 
 tradesfolk. Thus they grew into citizens and Italians ; 
 but for a long time they kept hankering after feudalism, 
 and looking towards the German emperors who 
 claimed the inheritance of the Lombard kings. The 
 struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, between 
 the German feudal element and the Latin civic one, 
 ended in the complete annihilation of the former in 
 all the north and centre of Italy. The nobles sank 
 definitely into merchants, and those who persisted in 
 keeping their castles were speedily ousted by the 
 commissaries of the free towns. Such is the history 
 
THE SACRIFICE. 35 
 
 of feudalism in Italy — the history of Barbarian minority 
 engulphed in Latin civilization ; of Teutonic counts 
 and dukes turned into robber nobles, hunted into the 
 hills by the townsfolk, and finally seeking admission 
 into the guilds of wool-spinners or money-changers ; 
 and in it is the main explanation of the fact that the 
 Italian republics, instead of remaining restricted within 
 their city walls like those of the North, spread over 
 whole provinces, and became real politically organized 
 States. And in such States having a free political, 
 military,and commercial life, uncramped by ecclesiastic 
 or feudal influence, in them alone could the great 
 revival of human intelligence and character thoroughly 
 succeed. The commune was the only species of free 
 government possible during the Middle Ages, the only 
 form which could resist that utterly prostrating action 
 of later mediaevalism. Feudalism stamped out civili- 
 zation ; monasticism warped it ; in the open country 
 it was burnt, trampled on, and uprooted ; in the cloister 
 it withered and shrank and perished ; only within the 
 walls of a city, protected from the storm without, and 
 yet in the fresh atmosphere of life, could it develope, 
 flourish, and bear fruit. 
 
 But this system of the free town contained in itself, 
 as does every other institution, the seed of death — 
 contained it in that expandingelement which developes, 
 ripens, rots, and finally dissolves all living organisms. 
 A little town is formed in the midst of some feudal 
 state, as Pisa, Florence, Lucca, and Bologna were 
 
36 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 formed in the dominions of the lords of Tuscany ; 
 the elders govern it ; it is protected from without ; it 
 obtains privileges from its suzerain, always glad to 
 oppose anything to his vassals, and who, unlike them, 
 is too far removed in the feudal scale to injure the 
 commune, which is under his supreme jurisdiction but 
 not in his land. The town can thus develope regu- 
 larly, governing itself, taxing itself, defending itself 
 against encroaching neighbours ; it gradually extends 
 beyond its own walls, liberates its peasantry, extends 
 its commerce, extinguishes feudalism, beats back its 
 suzerain or buys privileges from him ; in short, lives 
 the vigorous young life of the early Italian common- 
 wealths. But now the danger begins. The original 
 system of government, where every head of a family 
 is a power in the State, where every man helps to 
 govern, without representation or substitution, could 
 exist only as long as the commune remained small 
 enough for the individual to be in proportion with it ; 
 as long as the State remained small enough for all its 
 citizens to assemble in the market-place and vote, 
 for every man to know every detail of the admin- 
 istration, every inch of the land. When the limits 
 were extended, the burgher had to deal with towns 
 and villages and men and things which he did not 
 know, and which he probably hated, as every small 
 community hated its neighbour ; witness the horrible 
 war, lasting centuries, between the two little towns of 
 Dinant and Bouvines on the Meuse. Still more was 
 
THE SACRIFICE. 37 
 
 this the case with an important city : the subjugated 
 town was hated all the more for being a rival centre ; 
 the burghers of Florence, inspired only by their narrow 
 town interest, treated Pisa according to its dictates, 
 that is, tried to stamp it out. Thence the victorious 
 communes came to be surrounded by conquered com- 
 munes, which they dared not trust with any degree of 
 power ; and which, instead of being so many allies in 
 case of invasion, were merely focuses of revolt, or at 
 best inert impediments. Similarly, when the com- 
 munes enlarged, and found it indispensable to delegate 
 special men, who could attend to political matters more 
 thoroughly than the other citizens, they were constantly 
 falling under the tyranny of their captams of the people, 
 of their gonfalo7tieri, and of all other heads of the State ; 
 or else, as in Florence, they were frightened by this 
 continual danger into a system of perpetual interfer- 
 ence with the executive, which was thus rendered well- 
 nigh helpless. To this rule Venice forms the only 
 exception, on account of her exceptional position and 
 history : the earliest burghers turning into an intensely 
 conservative and civic aristocracy, while everywhere 
 else the feudal nobles turned into petty burghers, en- 
 tirely subversive of communal interests. Venice had 
 the yet greater safeguard of being protected both from 
 her victorious enemies and her own victorious generals; 
 who, however powerful on the mainland, could not 
 seriously endanger the city itself, which thus remained 
 a centre of reorganization in time of disaster. In this 
 
38 EUPHORION. 
 
 Venice was entirely unique, as she was unique in the 
 duration of her institutions and independence. In the 
 other towns of Italy, where there existed no naturally 
 governing family or class, where every citizen had an 
 equal share in government, and there existed no dis- 
 tinction save that of wealth and influence, there was a 
 constant tendency to the illegitimate preponderance 
 of every man or every family that rose above the aver- 
 age ; and in a democratic, mercantile State, not a day 
 passed without some such elevation. In a systematic, 
 consolidated State, where the power is in the hands of 
 a hereditary sovereign or aristocracy, a rich merchant 
 remains a rich merchant, a victorious general remains 
 a victorious general, an eloquent orator remains an 
 eloquent orator ; but in a shapeless, flunctuating 
 democracy like those of Italy, the man who has in- 
 fluence over his fellow-citizens, whether by his money, 
 his soldiers, or his eloquence, necessarily becomes the 
 head of the State ; everything is free and unoccupied, 
 only a little superior strength is required to push into 
 it. Cosimo de' Medici has many clients, many cor- 
 respondents, many debtors ; he can bind people by 
 pecuniary obligations: he becomes prince. Sforza 
 has a victorious army, whom he can either hound on 
 to the city or restrain into a protection of its interests : 
 he becomes prince. Savonarola has eloquence that 
 makes the virtuous start up and the wicked tremble : 
 he becomes prince. The history of the Italian com- 
 monwealths shows us but one thing : the people, the 
 
THE SACRIFICE. 39 
 
 only legal possessors of political power, giving it over 
 to their bankers (Medici, Pepoli) ; to their generals 
 (Delia Torre, Visconti, Scaligeri) ; to their monkish 
 reformers (Fra Bussolaro, Fra Giovanni da Vincenza, 
 Savonarola). Here then we have the occasional but 
 inevitable usurpers, who either momentarily or finally 
 disorganize the State. But this is not all. In such 
 a State every family hate, every mercantile hostility, 
 means a corresponding political division. The guilds 
 are sure to be rivals, the larger wishing to exclude the 
 smaller from government : the lower working classes 
 (the cioinpi of Florence) wish to upset the guilds com- 
 pletely ; the once feudal nobles wish to get back mili- 
 tary power ; the burghers wish entirely to extirpate 
 the feudal nobles ; the older families wish to limit the 
 Government, the newer prefer democracy and Caesarism. 
 Add to this the complications of private interests, the 
 personal jealousies and aversions, the private warfare, 
 inevitable in a town where legal justice is not always 
 to be had, while forcible retaliation is always within 
 reach ; and the result is constant party spirit, insults, 
 scuffles, conspiracies : the feudal nobles build towers 
 in the streets, the burghers pull them down ; the lower 
 artizans set fire to the warehouses of the guilds, the 
 magistrates take part in the contest ; blood is spilt, 
 magistrates are beheaded or thrown out of windows, 
 a foreign State is entreated to interfere, and a number 
 of citizens are banished by the victorious party. This 
 latter result creates a new and terrible danger for the 
 
40 EUPHORION. 
 
 State, in the persons of so many exiles, ready to do 
 anything, to join with any one, in order to return to the 
 city and drive out their enemies in their turn. The end 
 of such constant upheavings is that the whole popula- 
 tion is disarmed, no party suffering its rival to have any 
 means of offence or defence. Moreover, as industry and 
 commerce develope, the citizens become unwilling to 
 fight, while on the other hand the invention of firearms, 
 subverting the whole system of warfare, renders special 
 military training more and more necessary. In the 
 days of the Lombard League, of Campaldino and 
 Montaperti, the citizens could fight, hand to hand, 
 round their carroccio or banner, without much disci- 
 pline being required ; but when it came to fortifying 
 towns against cannon, to drilling bodies of heavily 
 armed cavalry, acting by the mere dexterity of their 
 movements ; when war became a science and an art, 
 then the citizen had necessarily to be left out, and 
 adventurers and poor nobles had to form armies of 
 mercenaries, making warfare their sole profession. 
 This system of mercenary troops, so bitterly inveighed 
 against by Machiavelli (who, of course, entirely over- 
 looked its inevitable origin and viewed it as a volun- 
 tarily incurred pest), added yet another and, perhaps, 
 the very worst danger to civil liberty. It gave enor- 
 mous, irresistible power to adventurers unscrupulous 
 by nature and lawless by education, the sole object of 
 whose career it became to obtain possession of States ; 
 by no means a difficult enterprise, considering that 
 
THE SACRIFICE. 41 
 
 they and their fellows were the sole possessors of 
 military force in the country. At the same time, this 
 system of mercenaries perfected the condition of utter 
 defencelessness in which the gradual subjection of 
 rival cities, the violent party spirit, and the general 
 disarming of the burghers, had placed the great Italian 
 cities. For these troops, being wholly indifferent as 
 to the cause for which they were fighting, turned war 
 into the merest game of dodges — half-a-dozen men 
 being killed at a great battle like that of Anghiari 
 — and they at the same time protracted campaigns 
 beyond every limit, without any decisive action taking 
 place. The result of all these inevitable causes of ruin, 
 was that most of the commonwealths fell into the 
 hands of despots ; while those that did not were para- 
 lyzed by interior factions, by a number of rebellious 
 subject towns, and by generals who, even if they did 
 not absolutely betray their employers, never efficiently 
 served them. 
 
 Such a condition of civic disorder lasted through- 
 out the Middle Ages, until the end of the fifteenth 
 century, without any further evils arising from it. 
 The Italians made endless wars with each other, 
 conquered each other, changed their government 
 without end, fell into the power of tyrants ; but 
 throughout these changes their civilization developed 
 unimpeded ; because, although one of the centres of 
 national life might be momentarily crushed, the others 
 remained in activity, and infused vitality even into 
 
42 EUPHORION. 
 
 the feeble one, which would otherwise have perished. 
 All these ups and downs seemed but to stir the life 
 in the country : and no vital danger appeared to 
 threaten it ; nor did any, so long as the surrounding 
 countries — France, Germany, and Spain — remained 
 mere vast feudal nebulae, formless, weightless, im- 
 movable. The Italians feared nothing from them ; 
 they would call down the King of France or the 
 Emperor of Germany without a moment's hesitation, 
 because they knew that the king could not bring 
 France, nor the emperor bring Germany, but only a 
 few miserable, hungry retainers with him ; but Florence 
 would watch the growth of the petty State of the 
 Scaligers, and Venice look with terror at the Duke of 
 Milan, because they knew that there there was con- 
 centrated life, and an organization which could be 
 wielded as perfectly as a sword by the head of the 
 State. In the last decade of the fifteenth century 
 the Italians called in the French to put down their 
 private enemies : Lodovico of Milan called down 
 Charles VIII. to rid him of his nephew and of the 
 Venetians ; the Venetians to rid them of Lodovico : 
 the Medici to establish them firmly in Florence ; the 
 party of freedom to drive out the Medici. Each State 
 intended to use the French to serve their purpose, and 
 then to send back Charles VIII. with a little money 
 and a great deal of derision, as they had done with 
 kings and emperors of earlier days. But Italian poli- 
 ticians suddenly discovered that they had made a 
 
THE SACRIFICE. 43 
 
 fatal mistake ; that they had reckoned in ignorance, 
 and that instead of an army they had called down a 
 nation : for during the interval since their last appeal 
 to foreign interference, that great movement had 
 taken place which had consolidated the heteroge- 
 neous feudal nebulae into homogeneous and compact 
 kingdoms. 
 
 Single small States, relying upon mercenary troops, 
 could not for a moment resist the shock of such 
 an agglomeration of soldiery as that of the French, 
 and of their successors the Spaniards and Germans. 
 Sismondi asks indignantly, Why did the Italians not 
 form a federation as soon as the strangers appeared .'' 
 He might as well ask. Why did the commonwealths 
 not turn into a modern monarchy .' The habit of 
 security from abroad and of jealousy within ; the 
 essential nature of a number of rival trading centres, 
 made such a thing not only impossible of execution, 
 but for a while impossible of conception ; confedera- 
 cies had become possible only when Burlamacchi was 
 decapitated by the imperialists ; popular resistance 
 had become a reality only when Feruccio was mas- 
 sacred by the Spaniards ; a change of national insti- 
 tutions was feasible only when all national institutions 
 had been destroyed ; when the Italians, having recog- 
 nized the irresistible force of their adversaries, had 
 ceased to form independent States and larger and 
 smaller guilds ; when all the characteristics of Italian 
 civilization had been destroyed ; when, in short, it was 
 
44 EUPHORION. 
 
 too late to do anything save theorize with Machlavelli 
 and Guicciardini as to what ought to have been done. 
 We must not hastily accuse the volition of the Italians 
 of the Renaissance ; they may have been egotistic and 
 timid, but had they been (as some most certainly 
 were) heroic and self-sacrificing to the utmost degree, 
 they could not have averted the catastrophe. The 
 nature of their civilization prevented not only their 
 averting the peril, but even their conceiving its exist- 
 ence ; the very nature of their political forms necessi- 
 tated such a dissolution of them. The commune 
 grows from within ; it is a little speck which gradually 
 extends its circumference, and the further this may be 
 from the original centre, the less do its parts coalesce. 
 The modern monarchy grows from external pressure, 
 and towards the centre ; it is a huge mass consoli- 
 dating into a hard, distinct shape. Thence it follows 
 that the more the commonwealth developes, the 
 weaker it grows, because its tendency is to spread 
 and fall to pieces ; whereas the more the monarchy 
 developes, the stronger it becomes, because it fills up 
 towards the centre, and becomes more vigorously 
 knit together. The city ceases to be a city when 
 extended over hundreds of miles ; the nation becomes 
 all the more a nation for being compressed towards a 
 central point. 
 
 The entire political collapse of Italy in the sixteenth 
 century was not only inevitable, from the essential 
 nature of the civilization of the Renaissance, but it 
 
THE SACRIFICE. 45 
 
 was also indispensable in order that this civilization 
 might fulfil its mission. Civilization cannot spread 
 so long as it is contained within a national mould, 
 and only a vanquished nation can civilize its victors. 
 The Greece of Pericles could not Hellenize Rome, 
 but the Greece of the weak successors of Alexander 
 could ; the Rome of Cassar did not Romanize the 
 Teutonic races as did the Rome of Theodosius ; no 
 amount of colonizing among the vanquished can ever 
 produce the effect of a victorious army, of a whole 
 nation, suddenly finding itself in the midst of the 
 superior civilization of a conquered people. Michelet 
 may well call the campaign of Charles VIII. the dis- 
 covery of Italy. His imaginative mind seized at once 
 the vast importance of this descent of the French into 
 Italy, which other historians have been too prone 
 to view in the same light as any other invasion. It 
 is from this moment that dates the modernization, 
 if we may so express ourselves, of the North. The 
 barbarous soldiers of Gaston de Foix, of Frundsberg, 
 and of Gonsalvo, were the unconscious bearers of the 
 seeds of the ages of Elizabeth, of Louis XIV., and of 
 Goethe. These stupid and rapacious ruffians, while 
 they wantonly destroyed the works of Italian civili- 
 zation, rendered possible the existence of a Montaigne, 
 a Shakespeare, and a Cervantes. 
 
 Italy was as a vast storehouse, sheltered from all the 
 dangers of mediaeval destruction ; in which, while all 
 other nations were blindly and fiercely working out 
 
46 EUPHORION. 
 
 their national existence, the inheritance of Antiquity 
 and the produce of the earliest modern civilization 
 had been peaceably garnered up. When the store- 
 house was full, its gates had to be torn open and its 
 riches plundered and disseminated by the intellectual 
 starvelings of the North ; thus only could the rest of 
 mankind feed on these riches, regain and develope 
 their mental life. 
 
 What were those intellectual riches of the Renais- 
 sance .'' What was that strong intellectual food which 
 revived the energies and enriched the blood of the 
 Barbarians of the sixteenth century.? The Renais- 
 sance possessed the germs of every modern thing, and 
 much that was far more than a mere germ: it possessed 
 the habit of equality before the law, of civic organiza- 
 tion, of industry and commerce developed to immense 
 and superb proportions. It possessed science, literature, 
 and art ; above all, that which at once produced 
 and was produced by all these — thorough perception 
 of what exists, thorough consciousness of our own 
 freedom and powers : self-cognizance. In Italy there 
 was intellectual light, enabling men to see and 
 judge all around them, enabling them to act wit- 
 tingly and deliberately. In this lies the immense 
 greatness of the Renaissance ; to this are due all its 
 achievements in literature and science, and, above all, 
 in art : that, for the first time since the dissolution of 
 antique civilization, men were free agents, both in 
 thought and in deed ; that there was an end of that 
 
THE SACRIFICE. 47 
 
 palsying slavery of the Middle Ages, slavery of body 
 and of mind, slavery to stultified ideas and effete 
 forms, which made men endure every degree of evil 
 and believe every degree of absurdity. For the first 
 time since Antiquity, man walks free of all political 
 and intellectual trammels, erect, conscious of his own 
 thoughts, master of his own actions ; ready to seek 
 for truth across the ocean like Columbus, or across the 
 heavens like Copernicus ; to seek it in criticism and 
 analysis like Machiavelli or Guicciardini, boldly to 
 reproduce it in its highest, widest sense like Michael 
 Angelo and Raphael. 
 
 The men of the Renaissance had to pay a heavy 
 price for this intellectual freedom and self-cognizance 
 which they not only enjoyed themselves, but trans- 
 mitted to the rest of the world ; the price was the loss 
 of all moral standard, of all fixed public feeling. They 
 had thrown aside all accepted rules and criteria, they 
 had cast away all faith in traditional institutions, they 
 had destroyed, and could not yet rebuild. In their 
 instinctive and universal disbelief in all that had been 
 taught them, they lost all respect for opinion, for rule, 
 for what had been called right and wrong. Could it 
 be otherwise } Had they not discovered that what 
 had been called right had often been unnatural, and 
 what had been called wrong often natural } Moral 
 teachings, remonstrances, and judgments belonged to 
 that dogmatism from which they had broken loose ; 
 to those schools and churches where the foolish and 
 
48 EUPHORION. 
 
 the unnatural had been taught and worshipped ; to 
 those priests and monks who themselves most shame- 
 fully violated their teachings. To profess morality 
 was to be a hypocrite ; to reprobate others was to be 
 narrow-minded. There was so much error mixed up 
 with truth that truth had to share the discredit of error ; 
 so many innocent things had been denounced as sins 
 that sinful ones at length ceased to be reprobated ; 
 people had so often found themselves sympathizing 
 with supposed criminals, that they soon lost their 
 horror of real ones. Damnation came to be disasso- 
 ciated from moral indignation : it was the retribution, 
 not of the unnatural and immoral, but of the unlawful ; 
 and unlawful with respect to a law made without 
 reference to reason and instinct. As reason and 
 instinct were thus set at defiance, but could not be 
 silenced, the law was soon acquiesced in without being 
 morally supported ; thus, little by little, moral feeling 
 became warped. This was already the case in Dante's 
 day. Farinata is condemned to the most horrible 
 punishment, which to Dante seems just, because in 
 accordance with an accepted code ; yet Dante cannot 
 but admire him and cannot really hate him, for there 
 is nothing in him to hate ; he is a criminal and yet 
 respected — fatal combination ! Dante punishes Fran- 
 cesca, Pier delle Vigne, and Brunetto Latini, but he 
 shows no personal horror of them ; in the one case 
 his moral instinct refrains from censuring the com- 
 paratively innocent, in the other it has ceased to 
 
THE SACRIFICE. 49 
 
 revolt from the really infamous. Where Dante does 
 feel real indignation, is most often in cases unpro- 
 vided for by the religious codes, as with those low, 
 grovelling, timid natures (the very same with whom 
 Machiavelli, the admirer of great villains, fairly loses 
 patience), those creatures whom Dante personally 
 despises, whom he punishes with filthy devices of his 
 own, whom he passes by with words such as he never 
 addresses to Semiramis, Brutus, or Capaneus. This 
 toleration of vice, while acquiescing in its legal pun- 
 ishment, increased in proportion to the development 
 of individual judgment, and did not cease till all the 
 theories of the lawful and unlawful had been so com- 
 pletely demolished as to permit of their being rebuilt 
 on solid bases. 
 
 This work of demolition had not yet ceased in the 
 beginning of the sixteenth century ; and the moral 
 confusion due to it was increased by various causes 
 dependent on political and other circumstances. The 
 despots in whose hands it was the inevitable fate of 
 the various commonwealths to fall, were by their very 
 position immoral in all their dealings : violent, fraudu- 
 lent, suspicious, and, from their life of constant un- 
 natural tension of the feelings, prone to every species 
 of depravity ; while, on the other hand, in the feudal 
 parts of Italy — which had merely received a superficial 
 Renaissance varnish imported from other places with 
 painters and humanists — in Naples, Rome, and the 
 greater part of Umbria and the Marches, the upper 
 
 5 
 
50 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 classes had got into that monstrous condition which 
 seems to have been the inevitable final product of 
 feudalism, and which, while it gave France her 
 Armagnacs, her Foix, and her Retz, gave Italy their 
 counterparts in her hideously depraved princelets, the 
 Malatestas, Varanos, Vitelli, and Baglioni. Both these 
 classes of men, despots and feudal nobles, had a wide 
 field for their ambition among the necessarily dissolved 
 civic institutions ; and their easy success contributed 
 to confirm the general tendency of the day to say with 
 Commines, " Qui a le succes a I'honneur,'' and to 
 confound these two words and ideas. Nor was this 
 yet all : the men of the Renaissance discovered the 
 antique world, and in their wild, blind enthusiasm, in 
 their ardent, insatiable thirst for its literature, swal- 
 lowed it eagerly, dregs and all, till they were drunk 
 and poisoned. 
 
 These are the main causes of the immorality of the 
 Renaissance : first, the general disbelief in all accepted 
 doctrines, due to the falseness and unnaturalness of 
 those hitherto prevalent ; secondly, the success of un- 
 scrupulous talent in a condition of political disorder ; 
 thirdly, the wholesale and unjudging enthusiasm for 
 all that remained of Antiquity, good or bad. These 
 three great causes, united in a general intellectual 
 ebullition, are the explanation of the worst feature of 
 the Renaissance : not the wickedness of numberless 
 single individuals, but the universal toleration of it by 
 the people at large. Men like Sigismondo Malatesta, 
 
THE SACRIFICE. 51 
 
 Sixtus IV., Alexander VI., and Cffisar Borgia might 
 be passed over as exceptions, as monstrous aberra- 
 tions which cannot affect our judgment of their time 
 and nation ; but the general indifference towards 
 their vices shown by their contemporaries and 
 countrymen is a conclusive and terrible proof of the 
 moral chaos of the Renaissance. It is just the 
 presence of so much instinctive simplicity and virtue, 
 of childlike devotion to great objects, of patriarchal 
 simplicity of manners, of all that is loveable in the 
 books of men like Vespasiano da Bisticci and Leon 
 Battista Alberti ; of so much that seems like the 
 realization of the idyllic home and merchant life of 
 Schiller's " Song of the Bell," by the side of all the 
 hideous lawlessness and vice of the despots and 
 humanists ; that makes the Renaissance so drearily 
 painful a spectacle. The presence of the good does 
 not console us for that of the evil, because it neither 
 mitigates nor even shrinks from it ; we merely lose 
 our pleasure in the good nature and simplicity of 
 .^neas Sylvius when we see his cool admiration for 
 a man of fraud and violence like Sforza ; we begin 
 to mistrust the purity and integrity of the upright 
 Guarino da Verona when we hear his lenient judg- 
 ment of the infamous Beccadelli ; we require of the 
 virtuous that they should not only be incapable of 
 vice, but abhorrent of it ; and this is what even the 
 best men of the Renaissance rarely were. 
 
 Such a state of moral chaos there has constantly 
 
52 EUPHORION. 
 
 been when an old effete mode of thought required 
 to be destroyed. Such work is always attended, in 
 greater or less degree, by this subversion of all recog- 
 nized authority, this indifference to evil, this bold 
 tasting of the forbidden. In the eighteenth century 
 France plays the same part that was played in the 
 fifteenth by Italy : again we meet the rebellion against 
 all that has been consecrated by time and belief, the 
 toleration of evil, the praise of the abominable, in the 
 midst of the search for the good. These two have 
 been the great fever epochs of modern history ; fever 
 necessary for a subsequent steady growth. Both gave 
 back truth to man, and man to nature, at the expense 
 of temporary moral uncertainty and ruthless de- 
 struction. The Renaissance reinstated the individual 
 in his human dignity, as a thinking, feeling, and 
 acting being ; the Eighteenth Century reconstructed 
 society as a homogeneous free existence ; both at the 
 expense of individual degradation and social disorder. 
 Both were moments of ebullition in which horrible 
 things rose to the surface, but after which what re- 
 mained was purer than it had ever been before. 
 
 This is no plea for the immorality of the Renais- 
 sance : evil is none the less evil for being inevitable 
 and necessary ; but it is nevertheless well that we 
 should understand its necessity. It certainly is a 
 terrible admission, but one which must be made, that 
 evil is part of the mechanism for producing good ; and 
 had the arrangement of the universe been entrusted 
 
THE SACRIFICE. 53 
 
 to us, benevolent and equitable people of an enlight- 
 ened age, there would doubtless have been invented 
 some system of evolution and progression differing 
 from the one which includes such machinery as hurri- 
 canes and pestilences, carnage and misery, super- 
 stition and license, Renaissance and Eighteenth 
 Century. But unfortunately Nature was organized in 
 a less charitable and intelligent fashion ; and, among 
 other evils required for the final attainment of good, 
 we find that of whole generations of men being con- 
 demned to moral uncertainty and error in order that 
 other generations may enjoy knowledge peacefully 
 and guiltlessly. Let us remember this, and let us be 
 more generous towards the men who were wicked 
 that we might be enlightened. Above all, let us bear 
 in mind, in judging the Renaissance, that the sacrifice 
 which it represents could be useful only in so far as it 
 was complete and irretrievable. Let us remember that 
 the communal system of government, on whose de- 
 velopment the Renaissance mainly depended, inevi- 
 tably perished in proportion as it developed ; that the 
 absolute subjugation of Italy by Barbarous nations 
 was requisite to the dissemination of the civilization 
 thus obtained ; that the Italians were politically an- 
 nihilated before they had time to recover a normal 
 condition, and were given up crushed and broken- 
 spirited, to be taught righteousness by Spaniards and 
 Jesuits. That, in short, while the morality of the 
 Italians was sacrificed to obtain the knowledge on 
 
54 EUPHORION. 
 
 which modern society depends, the political existence 
 of Italy was sacrificed to the diffusion of that know- 
 ledge, and that the nation was not only doomed to 
 immorality, but doomed also to the inability to reform. 
 Perhaps, if we think of all this, and weigh the tre- 
 mendous sacrifice to which we owe our present intel- 
 lectual advantages, we may still feel sad, but sad 
 rather with remorse than with indignation, in contem- 
 plating the condition of Italy in the first years of the 
 sixteenth century ; in looking down from our calm, 
 safe, scientific position, on the murder of the Italian 
 Renaissance : great and noble at heart, cut off pitilessly 
 at its prime ; denied even an hour to repent and 
 amend ; hurried off before the tribunal of posterity, 
 suddenly, unexpectedly, and still bearing its weight 
 of unexpiated, unrecognized guilt. 
 
THE ITALY OF THE ELIZABETHAN 
 DRAMATISTS. 
 
THE ITALY OF THE 
 ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 
 
 The chroniclers of the last years of the fifteenth 
 century have recorded how the soldiery of Charles 
 VIII. of France amused the tedious leisure of their 
 sullen and suspicious occupation of Rome, by erecting 
 in the camp a stage of planks, and performing there- 
 on a rude mystery-play. The play thus improvised 
 by a handful of troopers before this motley invading 
 army : before the feudal cavalry of Burgundy, strange 
 steel monsters, half bird, half reptile, with steel beaked 
 and winged helmets and claw-like steel shoes, and 
 jointed steel corselet and rustling steel mail coat ; 
 before the infantry of Gascony, rapid and rapacious 
 with tattered doublets and rag-bound feet ; before the 
 over-fed, immensely plumed, and slashed and furbe- 
 lowed giants of Switzerland, and the starved, half- 
 naked savages of Brittany and the Marches ; before 
 
58 EUPHORION. 
 
 this multifaced, many-speeched army, gathered from 
 the rich cities of the North and the devastated fields 
 of the South, and the wilds and rocks of the West 
 and the East, alike in nothing save in its wonder 
 and dread and delight and horror at this strange 
 invaded Italy — the play performed for the entertain- 
 ment of this encamped army was no ordinary play. 
 No clerkly allegorical morality ; no mouthing and 
 capering market-place farce ; no history of Joseph 
 and his Brethren, of the Birth of the Saviour, or of 
 the Temptation of St. Anthony. It was the half- 
 allegorical, half-dramatic representation of the reigning 
 Pope Borgia and his children ; it was the rude and 
 hesitating moulding into dramatic shape of those 
 terrible rumours of simony and poison, of lust and of 
 violence, of mysterious death and abominable love, 
 which had met the invaders as they had first set their 
 feet in Italy ; which had become louder and clearer 
 with every onward step through the peninsula, and 
 now circulated around them, with frightful distinct- 
 ness, in the very capital of Christ's Vicar on Earth. 
 This blundering mystery-play of the French troopers 
 is the earliest imaginative fruit of that first terrified 
 and fascinated glimpse of the men of the barbarous 
 North at the strange Italy of the Renaissance ; it is 
 the first manifestation of that strong tragic impulse 
 due to the sudden sight, by rude and imaginative 
 young nations, of the splendid and triumphant wicked- 
 ness of Italy. 
 
THE ITAL Y OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA T/STS. 59 
 
 The French saw, wondered, shuddered, and played 
 upon their camp stage the tragedy of the Borgias. 
 But the French remained in Italy, became familiar 
 with its ways, and soon merely shrugged their 
 shoulders and smiled where they had once stared 
 in horror. They served under the flags of Sforzas, 
 Borgias, Baglionis, and Vitellis, by the side of the 
 bravos of Naples and Umbria ; they saw their princes 
 wed the daughters of evil-famed Italian sovereigns, 
 and their princes' children, their own Valois and 
 Guises, develope into puny, ambiguous, and ominous 
 Medicis and Gonzagas, surrounded by Italian min- 
 ions and poison distillers, and buffoons and money- 
 lenders. The French of the sixteenth century, during 
 their long Neapolitan and Lombard wars and nego- 
 tiations, had time to learn all that Italy could teach ; 
 to become refined, subtle, indifferent, and cynical : 
 bastard Italians, with the bastard Italian art of 
 Goujon and Philibert Delorme, and the bastard 
 Italian poetry of Du Bellay and Ronsard. The 
 French of the sixteenth century therefore translated 
 Machiavel and Ariosto and Bandello ; but they never 
 again attempted such another play as that which they 
 had improvised while listening to the tales of Alex- 
 ander VI. and Caesar and Lucrezia, in their camp in 
 the meadows behind Sant' Angelo. The Spaniards 
 then came to Italy, and the Germans : strong mediaeval 
 nations, like the French, with the creative power of 
 the Middle Ages still in them, refreshed by the long 
 
6o EUPHORION. 
 
 rest of the dull fifteenth century. But Spaniards and 
 Germans came as mere greedy and besotten and 
 savage mercenaries : the scum of their countries, care- 
 less of Italian sights and deeds, thinking only of 
 torturing for hidden treasure, or swilling southern 
 wines ; and they returned to Spain and to Germany, 
 to persecutions of Moriscos and plundering of abbeys, 
 as savage and well-nigh as dull as they had arrived. 
 A smattering of Italian literature, art, and manners 
 was carried back to Spain and Germany by Spanish 
 and German princes and governors, to be transmitted 
 to a few courtiers and humanists ; but the imagination 
 of the lower classes of Spain and of Germany, absorbed 
 in the quixotic Catholicism of Loyola and the biblical 
 contemplation of Luther, never came into fertilizing 
 contact with the decaying Italy of the Renaissance. 
 
 The mystery-play of the soldiers of Charles VIII. 
 seemed destined to remain an isolated and abortive 
 attempt. But it was not so. The invasions had 
 exhausted themselves ; the political organization of 
 Italy was definitively broken up ; its material wealth 
 was exhausted ; the French, Germans, and Spaniards 
 had come and gone, and returned and gone again ; 
 they had left nothing to annex or to pillage ; when, 
 about the middle of the sixteenth century, the country 
 began to be overrun by a new horde of barbarians : 
 the English. The English came neither as invaders 
 nor as marauders ; they were peaceable students and 
 rich noblemen, who, so far from trying to extort 
 
THE ITAL Y OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA TISTS. 6i 
 
 money or annex territory, rather profited the ruined 
 Italians by the work which they did and the money 
 which they squandered. Yet these quiet and profit- 
 able travellers, before whom the Italians might safely 
 display their remaining wealth, were in reality as 
 covetous of the possessions of Italy and as resolute to 
 return home enriched as any tattered Gascon men- 
 at-arms or gluttonous Swiss or grinding Spaniards. 
 They were, one and all, consciously and unconsciously, 
 dragged to Italy by the irresistible instinct that Italy 
 possessed that which they required : by the greed of 
 intellectual gain. That which they thus instinctively 
 knew that Italy possessed, that which they were re- 
 solved to obtain, was a mode of thought, a habit of 
 form ; philosophy, art, civilization : all the materials 
 for intellectual manipulation. For, in the sixteenth 
 century, on awakening from its long evil sleep, haunted 
 by civil war nightmares of the fifteenth century, the 
 English mind had started up in the vigour of well- 
 nigh mature youth, nourished and rested by the long 
 inactivity in which it had slept through its period of 
 assimilation and growth. It had awakened at the 
 first touch of foreign influence, and had grown with 
 every fresh contact with the outer world : with the 
 first glance at Plato and Xenophon suddenly opened 
 by Erasmus and Colet, at the Bible suddenly opened 
 by Cranmer ; it had grown with its sob of indignation 
 at the sight of the burning faggots surrounding the 
 martyrs, with its joyous heart-throbs at the sight of 
 
62 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 the seas and islands of the New World ; it had grown 
 with the sudden passionate strain of every nerve and 
 every muscle when the galleys of Philip had been 
 sighted in the Channel. And when it had paused, 
 taken breath, and looked calmly around it, after the 
 tumult of all these sights and sounds and actions, the 
 English mind, in the time of Elizabeth, had found itself 
 of a sudden full-grown and blossomed out into superb 
 manhood, with burning activities and indefatigable 
 powers. But it had found itself without materials for 
 work. Of the scholastic philosophy and the chivalric 
 poetry of the Middle Ages there remained but little 
 that could be utilized : the few bungled formulae, the 
 few half-obsolete rhymes still remaining, were as unin- 
 telligible, in their spirit of feudalism and monasticism 
 and mysticism, as were the Angevin English and the 
 monkish Latin in which they were written to these 
 men of the sixteenth century. All the intellectual 
 wealth of England remained to be created ; but it 
 could not be created out of nothing. Spenser, Shake- 
 speare, and Bacon could not be produced out of the 
 half- effete and scattered fragments of Chaucer, of 
 Scotus, and of Wycliffe. The materials on which 
 English genius was to work must be sought abroad, 
 and abroad they could be found only in Italy. For 
 in the demolished Italy of the sixteenth century lay 
 the whole intellectual wealth of the world : the great 
 legacy of Antiquity, the great work of the Middle 
 Ages had been stored up, and had been increased 
 
THE ITAL V OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA TISTS. 63 
 
 threefold, and sorted and classified by the Renais- 
 sance ; and now that the national edifice had been 
 dismantled and dilapidated, and the national activity- 
 was languishing, it all lay in confusion, awaiting only 
 the hand of those who would carry it away and use 
 it once more. To Italy therefore Englishmen of 
 thought and fancy were dragged by an impulse of 
 adventure and greed as irresistible as that which 
 dragged to Antwerp and the Hanse ports, to India 
 and America, the seekers for gold and for soil. To 
 Italy they flocked and through Italy they rambled, 
 prying greedily into each cranny and mound of the 
 half-broken civilization, upturning with avid curiosity 
 all the rubbish and filth ; seeking with aching eyes 
 and itching fingers for the precious fragments of 
 intellectual splendour ; lingering with fascinated 
 glance over the broken remnants and deep, myste- 
 rious gulfs of a crumbling and devastated civilization. 
 And then, impatient of their intoxicating and tanta- 
 lizing search, suddenly grown desperate, they clutched 
 and stored away everything, and returned home 
 tattered, soiled, bedecked with gold and with tinsel, 
 laden with an immense uncouth burden of jewels, 
 and broken wealth, and refuse and ordure, with 
 pseudo-antique philosophy, with half-mediaeval Pe- 
 trarchesque poetry, with Renaissance science, with 
 humanistic pedantry and obscenity, with euphuistic 
 conceits and casuistic quibble, with art, politics, 
 metaphysics — civilization embedded in all manner 
 
64 EUPHORION. 
 
 of rubbish and abomination, soiled with all manner 
 of ominous stains. All this did they carry home 
 and throw helter-skelter into the new-kindled fire 
 of English intellectual life, mingling with it many 
 a humble-seeming Northern alloy ; cleaning and com- 
 pounding, casting into shapes, mediaeval and English, 
 this strange Corinthian brass made of all these hetero- 
 geneous remnants, classical, Italian, Saxon, and Chris- 
 tian. A strange Corinthian brass indeed ; and as 
 various in tint, in weight, and in tone, in manifold 
 varieties of mixture, as were the moulds into which it 
 was cast : the white and delicate silver settling down 
 in the gracious poetic moulds of Sidney and Spenser ; 
 the glittering gold, which can buy and increase, in 
 the splendid, heavy mould of Bacon's prose ; and the 
 copper, the iron, the silver and gold in wondrous 
 mixture, with wondrous iridescences of colour and 
 wondrous scale of tone, all poured into the manifold 
 moulds, fantastic and beautiful and grand, of Shake- 
 speare. And as long as all this dross and ore and 
 filth brought from the ruins of Italy was thus min- 
 gling in the heat of English genius, while it was yet 
 but imperfectly fused, while already its purest and 
 best compounded portion was being expended to 
 make Shakespeare, and when already there remained 
 only a seething residue, some of it all, of the pure 
 metal bubbling up, of the scum frothing round, nay, 
 of the very used-up dregs, was ever and anon being 
 
THE ITAL y OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA TISTS. 65 
 
 ladled out— gold, dross, filth, all indiscriminately — 
 and cast into shapes severe, graceful, or uncouth. 
 And this somewhat, thus pilfered from what was to 
 make, or was making, or had made, the works of 
 Shakespeare ; this base and noble, still unfused or 
 already exhausted alloy, became the strange hetero- 
 geneous works of the Elizabethan dramatists ; of 
 Webster, of Ford, of Tourneur, of Ben Jonson, of 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, and of their lesser brethren ; 
 from the splendid ore of Marlowe, only half molten 
 and half freed from dross, down to the shining metal 
 of Massinger, smooth and silvery as only tinsel can be- 
 In all the works of our Elizabethans, we see not 
 only the assimilated intellectual wealth of Italy, but 
 we see the deep impression, the indelible picture in 
 the memory, of Italy itself ; the positive, unallegorical, 
 essentially secular mode of thought ; the unascetic, 
 aesthetic, eminently human mode of feeling ; the artistic 
 desire for clear and harmonious form ; the innumerable 
 tendencies and habits which sever the Elizabethans 
 so completely from the Middle Ages, and bring them 
 so near at once to ourselves and to the ancients, 
 making them at once antique and modern, in opposi- 
 tion to mediseval ; these essential characters and the 
 vast bulk of absolute scientific fact and formula, of 
 philosophic opinion, of artistic shape, of humanistic 
 learning, are only one-half of the debt of our sixteenth 
 century to the Italy of the Renaissance. The delicate 
 form of the Italian sonnet, as copied by Sidney from 
 
 6 
 
66 EUPHORION. 
 
 Bembo and Molza and Costanzo, contained within it 
 the exotic and exquisite ideal passion of the " Vita 
 Nuova " and Petrarch. With their bright, undulating 
 stanza Spenser received from Ariosto and Tasso 
 the richly coloured spirit of the Italian descriptive 
 epic. With the splendid involutions of Machiavelli's 
 and Guicciardini's prose Bacon learned their cool and 
 disimpassioned philosophy. From the reading of 
 Politian and Lorenzo dei Medici, from the sight of 
 the Psyche of Raphael, the Europa of Veronese, the 
 Ariadne of Tintoret, men like Greene and Dorset 
 learned that revival of a more luscious and pictorial 
 antique vifhich was brought to perfection in Shake- 
 speare's "Venus and Adonis" and Marlowe's "Sestiad." 
 From the Platonists and Epicureans of Renaissance 
 Italy our greatest dramatists learned that cheerful 
 and serious love of life, that solemn and manly facing 
 of death, that sense of the finiteness of man, the 
 inexhaustibleness of nature, which shines out in such 
 grand paganism, with such Olympian serenity, as of 
 the bent brows and smiling lips of an antique Zeus, 
 in Shakespeare, in Marlowe, in Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, even in the sad and savage Webster. But 
 with the abstract, with the imbibed modes of thought 
 and feeling, with the imitated forms, the Elizabethans 
 brought back from Italy the concrete, the individual, 
 the personal. They filled their works with Italian 
 things : from the whole plot of a play borrowed from 
 an Italian novel, to the mere passing allusion to an 
 
THE ITAL V OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA TISTS. 67 
 
 Italian habit, or the mere quotation of an Italian 
 word ; from the full-length picture of the actions of 
 Italian men and women, down to the mere sketch, 
 in two or three words, of a bit of Italian garden or 
 a group of Italian figures ; nay, to the innumerable 
 scraps of tiny detail, grotesque, graceful, or richly 
 coloured, which they stuffed into all their works : allu- 
 sions to the buffoons of the mask comedy, to the high- 
 voiced singers, to the dress of the Venetian merchants, 
 to the step of a dance ; to the pomegranate in the 
 garden or the cypress on the hillside ; often mere 
 names of Italian things : the lavolta and corranto 
 dances, the Traghetto ferry, the Rialto bridge ; count- 
 less little touches, trifling to us, but which brought 
 home to the audience at the Globe or at Blackfriars 
 that wonderful Italy which every man of the day had 
 travelled through at least in spirit, and had loved at 
 least in imagination. And of this wonderful Italy the 
 Englishmen of the days of Elizabeth and of James 
 knew yet another side ; they were familiar, whether 
 travelled or untravelled, with yet other things besides 
 the buffoons and singers and dancers, the scholars and 
 learned ladies, the pomegranates, and cypresses and 
 roses and nightingales ; and fascinated by something 
 besides the green lagoons, the clear summer nights, 
 the soft spring evenings whose fascination we feel 
 in the words of Jessica and Portia and Juliet. The 
 Englisb knew and were haunted by the crimes of 
 Italy: the terrible and brilliant, the mysterious and 
 
68 EUPHORION. 
 
 shadowy crimes of lust and of blood which, in their 
 most gigantic union and monstrous enthronement on 
 the throne of the vicar of Christ, had in the first 
 terrified glimpse, awakened the tragic impulse in the 
 soldiers of Charles VIII. 
 
 We can picture to ourselves the innumerable English 
 travellers who went to Italy greedy for life and know- 
 ledge or merely obeying a fashion of the day — travellers 
 forced into far closer contact with the natives than the 
 men of the time of Walpole and of Beckford, who 
 were met by French-speaking hosts and lacqueys and 
 officials — travellers also thirsting to imbibe the very 
 spirit of the country as the travellers of the seventeenth 
 and eighteenth centuries never thirsted ; and their 
 morbid passion for the stories of abominable and un- 
 punished crime — crime of the learned, the refined, the 
 splendid parts of society — which permeated the Italy 
 of the deeply corrupted sixteenth century. We can 
 imagine how the prosaic merchants' clerks from Lon- 
 don ; the perfumed dandies, trying on Italian clothes, 
 rehearsing Italian steps and collecting Italian oaths, 
 the Faulconbridges of Shakespeare and Mr. Gingleboys 
 of Beaumont and Fletcher, sent to Italy in order grace- 
 fully to 
 
 Kiss the hand and cry, " sweet lady ! " 
 Say they had been at Rome and seen the relics, 
 Drunk your Verdea wine, and rid at Naples — 
 
 how all these privileged creatures ferreted about for 
 monstrous crimes with which to horrify their stay-at- 
 
THE ITALY OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 69 
 
 home countrymen ; how the rich young lords, returning 
 home with mincing steps and high-pitched lisp, sur- 
 rounded by a train of parti-coloured, dialect-jabbering 
 Venetian clowns, deft and sinister Neapolitan fencing 
 masters, silver- voiced singing boys decoyed from some 
 church, and cynical humanists escaped from the faggot 
 or the gallows, were expected to bring home (together 
 with the newest pastoral dramas, lewd novels, Platonic 
 philosophy and madrigals set in complicated counter- 
 point) stories of hideous wickedness, of the murders 
 and rapes and poisonings committed by the dukes 
 and duchesses, the nobles and senators, in whose 
 palaces they had so lately supped and danced. The 
 crimes of Italy fascinated Englishmen of genius with 
 a fascination even more potent than that exerted over 
 the vulgar imagination of mere foppish and swash- 
 buckler lovers of the scandalous and the sensational. 
 They fascinated with the attraction of tragic grandeur, 
 of psychological strangeness, of moral monstrosity, a 
 generation in whom the passionate imagination of the 
 playwright was curiously blent with the metaphysical 
 analysis of the philosopher and the ethical judgment 
 of the Puritan. To these men — ardent and serious 
 even in their profligacy, imaginative and passionate 
 even in their Puritanism — all sucking avidly at this 
 newly found Italian civilization, the wickedness of 
 Italy was more than morbidly attractive or morbidly 
 appalling ; it was imaginatively and psychologically 
 fascinating. Whether they were riotous and infidel 
 
70 EUPHORION. 
 
 youths like the dramatist Greene, recklessly absorbing, 
 in their avidity for new life, the corruption of Italy, 
 glorying in the saying that "an Englishman Italianized 
 is a demon incarnate ; " or grave and austere scholars 
 like Ascham, thanking Heaven that had let them come 
 undefiled from the abominable country where men 
 were as free to sin as to wear shoe or pantocle ; what- 
 ever the nature of the individual traveller, they served 
 only to increase their countrymen's love for the tales 
 of Italian wickedness. 
 
 And the dramatic grandeur, the psychological 
 interest, the mysterious fascination of Italian crime 
 impressed most of all the men whose work was with 
 the dramatic and the psychological — the Elizabethan 
 playwrights. The crimes of Italy furnished the sub- 
 jects for nearly half of the tragedies written in the 
 reigns of Elizabeth and of James I. ; the play dealing 
 with national history or with antique subjects had 
 not, to the patriots and humanists of the end of the 
 sixteenth century, the potent attraction of the play 
 dealing with Italian tales of lust and of blood. Italian 
 novels were ransacked for subjects ; Italian histories 
 greedily consulted for details ; travellers from Italy 
 beset for new anecdotes gleaned during their wander- 
 ings. It seemed impossible to satisfy the general greed 
 for Italian horrors. The openly narrated, written, 
 and printed misdeeds of the previous generation of 
 villains, of the Borgias, Sforzas, and Aragonese of 
 the beginning of the sixteenth century, were fused 
 
THE ITALY OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 71 
 
 with the whispered tales of the crimes of reigning 
 Medicis, Farnesi, and Estensi, and spiced with the 
 details of domestic scandal and bloodshed of the 
 living Italian nobles of the day — the day, be it remem- 
 bered, of Cencis and Accorambonis and Santa Croces, 
 when incest and parricide could be bought off for 
 money, and the nobles even of well-regulated re- 
 publics like Venice and Lucca kept their retinue of 
 highly paid ruffians. Various tales were fused together 
 by the English playwrights, like those of Vittoria 
 Accoramboni, of Bianca Cappello, and of Isabella 
 Orsini, avowedly in Webster's " White Devil : " like 
 those of Luisa Strozzi poisoned for resisting Duke 
 Alexander's lust, and the Duke murdered by his 
 pretended pander Lorenzino, in more altered and dis- 
 guised fashion, in Tourneur's "Revenger's Tragedy;" 
 numberless ghastly incidents picked up, perhaps, from 
 old chronicles and travellers' tales, like the dance of 
 madmen, the waxen images of murdered husband and 
 children, the were-wolf madness of the fratricide Fer- 
 dinand, added by Webster to Bandello's story of the 
 Duchess of Amalfi ; like the corpse painted up with 
 poison that the guilty lover might suck death in kiss- 
 ing its revived beauties, tacked on by Massinger to 
 his play of the jealousy of some mythical Duke of 
 Milan, himself a compromise between Maximilian 
 Sforza despoiled by Charles V. and Filippo Maria 
 Visconti murdering his guiltless wife Beatrice di 
 Tenda. Details of crime were heaped together, either 
 
72 EUPHORION. 
 
 as part of the action or as allusions, as in Webster's 
 two great plays, in which there occurs poisoning by- 
 means of the leaves of a book, poisoning by the poi- 
 soned lips of a picture, poisoning by a helmet, poison- 
 ing by the pommel of a saddle. Crimes were multi- 
 plied by means of subordinate plots and unnecessary 
 incidents, like the double vengeance of Richardetto 
 and Hippolita in Ford's " Giovanni and Annabella," 
 where both characters are absolutely unnecessary to 
 the main story of the horrible love of the hero and 
 heroine ; like the murders of Levidulcia and Sebastian 
 in Tourneur's " Atheist's Tragedy," and the com- 
 pletely unnecessary though extremely pathetic death 
 of young Marcello in Webster's " White Devil ; " until 
 the plays were brought to a close by the gradual ex- 
 termination of all the principal performers, and only 
 a few confidants and dummies remained to bury the 
 corpses which strewed the stage. Imaginary monsters 
 were fashioned out of half-a-dozen Neapolitan and 
 Milanese princes, by Ford, by Beaumont and Fletcher, 
 by Middleton, by Marston, even by the light and 
 graceful Philip Massinger : mythical villains, Ferdi- 
 nands, Lodowicks, and Fernezes, who yet fell short of 
 the frightful realities of men like Sigismondo Mala- 
 testa, Alexander VI., and Pier Luigi Farnese ; nay, 
 mere typical monsters, with no name save their vices, 
 Lussuriosos, Gelosos, Ambitiosos, and Vindicis, like 
 those drawn by the strong and savage hand of Cyril 
 Tourneur, 
 
THE ITAL Y OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA TISTS. 73 
 
 Nothing which the English stage could display 
 seemed to the minds of English playwrights and the 
 public to give an adequate picture of the abominations 
 of Italy ; much as they heaped up horrors and com- 
 bined them with artistic skill, much as they forced into 
 sight, there yet remained an abyss of evil which the 
 English tongue refused to mention, but which weighed 
 upon the English mind ; and which, unspoken, nay 
 (and it is the glory of the Elizabethan dramatists 
 excepting Ford), unhinted, yet remained as an incubus 
 in the consciousness of the playwrights and the public, 
 was in their thoughts when they wrote and heard such 
 savage misanthropic outbursts as those of Tourneur 
 and of Marston. The sense of the rottenness of the 
 country whence they were obtaining their intellectual 
 nourishment, haunted with a sort of sickening fascina- 
 tion the imaginative and psychological minds of the 
 late sixteenth century, of the men who had had time 
 to outgrow the first cynical plunge of the rebellious 
 immature contemporaries of Greene, Peele, and Mar- 
 lowe into that dissolved civilization. And of the 
 great men who were thus enthralled by Italy and 
 Italian evil, only Shakespeare and Massinger maintain 
 or regain their serenity and hopefulness of spirit^ 
 resist the incubus of horror : Shakespeare from the 
 immense scope of his vision, which permitted him 
 to pass over the base and frightful parts of human 
 nature and see its purer and higher sides ; Massinger 
 
74 EUPHORION. 
 
 from the very superficialily of his insight and the nar- 
 rowness of his sympathies, which prevented his ever 
 thoroughly realizing the very horrors he had himself 
 invented. But on the minds less elastic than that of 
 Shakespeare, and less superficial than that of Mas- 
 singer, the Italian evil weighed like a nightmare. 
 With an infinitely powerful and passionate imagina- 
 tion, and an exquisitely subtle faculty of mental analy- 
 sis ; only lately freed from the dogma of the Middle 
 Ages; unsettled in their philosophy; inclined by whole- 
 sale classical reading to a sort of negative atheism, a 
 fatalistic and half-melancholy mixture of epicurism 
 and stoicism ; yet keenly alive, from study of the 
 Bible and of religious controversies, to all questions of 
 right and wrong ; thus highly wrought and deeply 
 perplexed, the minds of the Elizabethan poets were 
 impressed by the wickedness of Italy as by the horrible 
 deeds of one whom we are accustomed to venerate as 
 our guide, whom we cannot but love as our benefactor, 
 whom we cannot but admire as our superior : it was a 
 sense of frightful anomaly, of putrescence in beauty 
 and splendour, of death in life and life in death, which 
 made the English psychologist-poets savage and 
 sombre, cynical and wrathful and hopeless. The in- 
 fluence is the same on all, and the difference of attitude 
 is slight, and due to individual characters ; but the 
 gloom is the same in each of them. In the noble and 
 tender nature of Webster the sense is one of ineffable 
 
THE ITALY OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 75 
 
 sadness, unmarred by cynicism, but unbrightened by 
 hope. The villains, even if successful until death, are 
 mere hideous phantoms — 
 
 these wretched eminent things 
 Leave no more fame behind 'em, than should one 
 Fall in a frost, and leave his print in snow — 
 
 they are the victims of tortured conscience, or, worse 
 still, the owners of petrified hearts ; there is nothing 
 to envy in them. But none the better is it for the 
 good : if Ferdinand, Bosola, Brachiano, and Flaminio 
 perish miserably, it is only after having done to death 
 the tender and brave Duchess, the gentle Antonio, the 
 chivalric Marcello ; there is virtue on earth, but there 
 is no justice in heaven. The half-pagan, half-puritanic 
 feeling of Webster bursts out in the dying speech of 
 the villain Bosola — 
 
 O, this gloomy world ! 
 In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness, 
 Doth womanish and fearful mankind live ! 
 Let worthy minds ne'er stagger in distrust 
 To suffer death or shame for what is just. 
 
 Of real justice in this life or compensation in another, 
 there is no thought : Webster, though a Puritan in 
 spirit, is no Christian in faith. On Ford the influence 
 is different ; although equal, perhaps, in genius to 
 Webster, surpassing him even in intense tragic passion, 
 he was far below Webster, and, indeed, far below all 
 his generation, in moral fibre. The sight of evil 
 
76 EUPHORION. 
 
 fascinates him ; his conscience staggers, his sympathies 
 are bedraggled in foulness ; in the chaos of good and 
 evil he loses his reckoning, and recognizes the superi- 
 ority only of strength of passion, of passion for good 
 or evil : the incestuous Giovanni, daring his enemies 
 like a wild beast at bay and cheating them of their 
 revenge by murdering the object of his horrible pas- 
 sion, is as heroic in the eyes of Ford as the magnani- 
 mous Princess of Sparta, bearing with unflinching 
 spirit the misfortunes poured down upon her, and 
 leading off the dance while messenger succeeds mes- 
 senger of evil, till, free from her duties as a queen, 
 she sinks down dead. Cyril Tourneur and John 
 Marston are far more incomplete in genius than 
 either Webster or Ford, although Tourneur sometimes 
 obtains a lurid and ghastly tragic intensity which 
 more than equals Ford when at his best ; and Marston, 
 in the midst of crabbedness and dulness, sometimes 
 has touches of pathos and Michelangelesque fore- 
 shortenings of metaphor worthy of Webster. But 
 Tourneur and Marston have neither the constant 
 sympathy with oppressed virtue of the author of the 
 " Duchess of Malfy," nor the blind fury of passion of 
 the poet of Giovanni and Annabella ; they look on 
 grim and hopeless spectators at the world of fatalistic 
 and insane wickedness which they have created, in 
 which their heroes and heroines and villains are slowly 
 entangled in inextricable evil. The men and women 
 of Tourneur and Marston are scarcely men and women 
 
THE ITALY OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 77 
 at all : they are mere vague spectres, showing their 
 grisly wounds and moaning out their miserable fate. 
 There is around them a clammy moral darkness, 
 dispelled only by the ghastly flashes of lurid virtue 
 of maniacs like Tourneur's Vindici and Hippolito ; 
 a crypt-like moral stillness, haunted by strange evil 
 murmurs, broken only by the hysterical sobs and 
 laughs of Marston's Antonios and Pandulphos. At 
 the most there issues out of the blood-reeking depth 
 a mighty yell of pain, a tremendous imprecation not 
 only at sinful man but at unsympathizing nature, like 
 that of Marston's old Doge, dethroned, hunted down, 
 crying aloud into the grey dawn-mists of the desolate 
 marsh by the lagoon — 
 
 O thou all-bearing earth 
 Which men do gape for till thou cram'st their mouths 
 And choak'st their throats for dust : O charme thy breast 
 And let me sinke into thee. Look who knocks ; 
 Andrugio calls. But O, she's deafe and blinde. 
 A wretch but leane relief on earth can finde. 
 
 The tragic sense, the sense of utter blank evil, is 
 stronger in all these Elizabethan painters of Italian 
 crime than perhaps in any other tragic writers. There 
 is, in the great and sinister pictures of Webster, of 
 Ford, of Tourneur, and of Marston, no spot of light, 
 no distant bright horizon. There is no loving suffer- 
 ing, resigned to suffer and to pardon, like that of 
 Desdemona ; no consoling affection like Cordelia's, 
 
78 EUPHORION. 
 
 in whose gentle embrace the poor bruised soul may- 
 sink into rest ; no passionate union in death with 
 the beloved, like the union of Romeo and Juliet ; 
 nothing but implacable cruelty, violent death re- 
 ceived with agonized protest, or as the release from 
 unmitigated misery with which the wretch has become 
 familiar, 
 
 As the tann'd galley slave is with his oar. 
 
 Neither is there in these plays that solemn sense of 
 heavenly vengeance, of the fatality hanging over a 
 house and which will be broken when guilt shall have 
 been expiated, such as lends a sort of serene background 
 of eternal justice to the terrible tales of Thebes and 
 Argos. There is for these men no fatality save the 
 evil nature of man, no justice save the doubling of 
 crime, no compensation save revenge : there is for 
 Webster and Ford and Tourneur and Marston no 
 heaven above, wrathful but placable ; there are no 
 Gods revengeful but just : there is nothing but this 
 blood-stained and corpse-strewn earth, defiled by lust- 
 burnt and death-hungering men, felling each other 
 down and trampling on one another blindly in the 
 eternal darkness which surrounds them. The world 
 of these great poets is not the open world with its light 
 and its air, its purifying storms and lightnings : it is 
 the darkened Italian palace, with its wrought-iron bars 
 preventing escape ; its embroidered carpets muffling 
 the foot steps ; its hidden, suddenly yawning trap- 
 
THE ITAL Y OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA TIS TS. 79 
 
 doors ; its arras-hangings concealing masked ruffians ; 
 its garlands of poisoned flowers ; its long suites of un- 
 tenanted darkened rooms, through which the wretch 
 is pursued by the half-crazed murderer ; while below, 
 in the cloistered court, the clanking armour and stamp- 
 ing horses, and above, in the carved and gilded hall, 
 the viols and lutes and cornets make a cheery trium- 
 phal concert,_and drown the cries of the victim. 
 
 II. 
 
 Such is the Italy of the Renaissance as we see it 
 in the works of our tragic playwrights : a country of 
 mysterious horror, the sinister reputation of which 
 lasted two hundred years ; lasted triumphantly through- 
 out the light and finikin eighteenth century, and found 
 its latest expression in the grim and ghastly romances 
 of the school of Ann Radcliff, romances which are but 
 the last puny and grotesque descendants of the great 
 stock of Italian tragedies, born of the first terror- 
 stricken meeting of the England of Elizabeth with 
 the Italy of the late Renaissance. Is the impression 
 received by the Elizabethan playwrights a correct 
 impression ? Was Italy in the sixteenth century 
 that land of horrors ? Reviewing in our memory the 
 literature and art of the Italian Renaissance, remember- 
 ing the innumerable impressions of joyous and healthy 
 life with which it has filled us ; recalling the bright 
 and thoughtless rhymes of Lorenzo dei Medici, of 
 
8o EUPHORION. 
 
 Politian, of Berni, and of Ariosto ; the sweet and 
 tender poetry of Bembo and Vittoria Colonna and 
 Tasso ; the bluff sensuality of novelists like Bandello 
 and Masuccio, the Aristophanesque laughter of the 
 comedy of Bibbiena and of Beolco ; seeing in our 
 mind's eye the stately sweet matrons and noble 
 senators of Titian, the virginal saints and madonnas 
 of Raphael, the joyous angels of Correggio ; — recapitu- 
 lating rapidly all our impressions of this splendid time 
 of exuberant vitality, of this strong and serene Renais- 
 sance, we answer without hesitation, and with only 
 a smile of contempt at our credulous ancestors^no. 
 The Italy of the Renaissance was, of all things that 
 have ever existed or ever could exist, the most utterly 
 unlike the nightmare visions of men such as Webster 
 and Ford, Marston and Tourneur. The only Elizabe- 
 than drama which really represents the Italy of the 
 Renaissance is the comedy of Shakespeare, of Beau- 
 mont and Fletcher, and of Ben Jonson and Massinger: 
 to the Renaissance belong those clear and sunny 
 figures, Portia, Antonio, Gratiano, Viola, Petruchio, 
 Bellario, and Almira ; their faces do we see on the 
 canvases of Titian and the frescoes of Raphael ; they 
 are the real children of the Italian Renaissance. 
 These frightful Brachianos and Annabellas and Ferdi- 
 nands and Corombonas and Vindicis and Pieros of 
 the " White Devil," of the " Duchess of Malfy," of the 
 " Revenger's Tragedy," and of " Antonio and Mellida," 
 are mere fantastic horrors, as false as the Counts 
 
THE ITALY OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 8i 
 
 Udolpho, the Spalatros, the Zastrozzis, and all thei^ 
 grotesquely ghastly pseudo-Italian brethren of eighty 
 years ago. 
 
 And, indeed, the Italy of the Renaissance, as re- 
 presented in its literature and its art, is the very nega- 
 tion of Elizabethan horrors. Of all the mystery, the 
 colossal horror and terror of our dramatists, there is 
 scarce the faintest trace in the intellectual productions 
 of the Italian Renaissance. The art is absolutely 
 stainless : no scenes of horror, no frightful martyrdoms, 
 as with the Germans under Albrecht Durer ; no 
 abominable butcheries, as with the Bolognese of the 
 seventeenth century ; no macerated saints and tattered 
 assassins, as with the Spaniards ; no mystery, no con- 
 tortion, no horrors : vigorous and serene beauty, pure 
 and cheerful life, real or ideal, on wall or canvas, in 
 bronze or in marble. The literature is analogous to 
 the art, only less perfect, more tainted with the weak- 
 ness of the flesh, less ideal, more real. It is essentially 
 human, in the largest sense of the word ; or if it cease, 
 in creatures like Aretine, to be humanly clean, it 
 becomes merely satyrlike, swinish, hircose. But it is 
 never savage in lust or violence ; it is quite free from 
 the element of ferocity. It is essentially light and 
 quiet and well regulated, sane and reasonable, never 
 staggering or blinded by excess : it is full of intelligent 
 discrimination, of intelligent leniency, of well-bred 
 reserved sympathy ; it is civilized as are the wide well- 
 paved streets of Ferrara compared with the tortuous 
 
 7 
 
82 EUPHORION. 
 
 black alleys of mediaeval Paris ; as are the well-lit, 
 clean, spacious palaces of Michelozzo or Bramante 
 compared with the unhealthy, uncomfortable mediaeval 
 castles of Durer's etchings. It is indeed a trifle too 
 civilized ^ too civilized to produce every kind of 
 artistic fruit ; it is — and here comes the crushing 
 difference between the Italian Renaissance and our 
 Elizabethans' pictures of it — it is, this beautiful rich 
 literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 
 completely deficient in every tragic element ; it has 
 intuition neither for tragic event nor for tragic cha- 
 racter ; it affords not a single tragic page in its poems 
 and novels ; it is incapable, after the most laborious 
 and conscientious study of Euripides and Seneca, 
 utterly and miserably incapable of producing a single 
 real tragedy, anything which is not a sugary pastoral 
 or a pompous rhetorical exercise. The epic poets of 
 the Italian Renaissance, Pulci, Boiardo, Berni, and 
 Ariosto, even the stately and sentimental Tasso, are 
 no epic poets at all. They are mere light and amusing 
 gossips, some of them absolute buffoons. Their ad- 
 ventures over hill and dale are mere riding parties ; 
 their fights mere festival tournaments, their enchant- 
 ments mere pageant wonders. Events like the death 
 of Hector, the slaughter of Penelope's suitors, the 
 festive massacre of Chriemhilt, the episode of Alfonso 
 the Chaste sending Bernardo del Carpio his father's 
 corpse on horseback — things like these never enter 
 their minds. When tragic events do by some 
 
THE ITAL Y OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA TISTS. 83 
 
 accident come into their narration, they cease to be 
 tragic ; they are frittered away into mere pretty con- 
 ceits like the death of Isabella and the sacrifice of 
 Olympia in the " Orlando Furioso ;." or melted down 
 into vague pathos, like the burning of Olindo and 
 Sofronia, and the death of Clorinda by the sentimental 
 Tasso. Neither poet, the one with his cheerfulness, 
 the other with his mild melancholy, brings home, 
 conceives the horror of the situation ; the one treats 
 the tragic in the spirit almost of burlesque, the other 
 entirely in the spirit of elegy. So, again, with the 
 novel writers : these professional retailers of anecdotes 
 will pick up any subject to fill their volumes. In 
 default of pleasant stories of filthy intrigue or lewd 
 jest, men like Cinthio and Bandello will gabble off 
 occasionally some tragic story, picked out of a history 
 book or recently heard from a gossip : the stories of 
 Harmodius and Aristogeiton, of Disddmona and the 
 Moorish Captain, of Romeo Montecchio and Giulietta 
 Cappelletti, of the Cardinal d'Aragona and the 
 Duchess of Amalfi, of unknown grotesque Persian 
 Sophis and Turkish Bassas^stories of murder, mas- 
 sacre, rape, incest, anything and everything, prattled 
 off, with a few words of vapid compassion and stale 
 moralizing, in the serene, cheerful, chatty manner in 
 which they recount their Decameronian escapades or 
 Rabelaisian repartees. As it is with tragic action, so 
 is it with tragic character. The literature of the country 
 which suggested to our Elizabethans their colossal vil- 
 
84 E UP HO R ION. 
 
 lains, can display only a few conventional monsters, 
 fire-eating, swashbuckler Rodomonts and Sultan 
 Malechs, strutting and puffing like the villains of 
 puppet-shows ; Aladins and Ismenos, enchanters and 
 ogres fit to be put into Don Quixote's library : mere 
 conventional rag puppets, doubtless valued as such 
 and no more by the shrewd contemporaries of Ariosto 
 and Tasso. The inhabitants of Tasso's world of 
 romance are pale chivalric unrealities, lifeless as 
 Spenser's half-allegoric knights and ladies ; those of 
 Pulci's Ardenne forests and Cathay deserts are buffoons 
 such as Florentine shopmen may have trapped out 
 for their amusement in rusty armour and garlands of 
 sausages. The only lifelike heroes and heroines are 
 Ariosto's. And they are most untragic, unromantic. 
 The men are occasionally small scoundrels, but 
 unintentionally on the part of the author. They 
 show no deep moral cancers or plague-spots ; they 
 display cheerfully all the petty dishonour and small 
 lusts which the Renaissance regarded as mere flesh and 
 blood characteristics. So also Ariosto's ladies : the 
 charming, bright women, coquettish or Amazonian, 
 are frail and fickle to the degree which was permissible 
 to a court lady, who should be neither prudish nor 
 fast ; doing unchaste things and listening to unchaste 
 words simply, gracefully, without prurience or horror ; 
 perfectly well-bred, gentili, as Ariosto calls them ; 
 prudent also, according to the notions of the day, 
 in limiting their imprudence. The adventure of 
 
THE ITALY OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 85 
 
 Fiordispina with Ricciardetto would have branded an 
 English serving- wench as a harlot ; the intentions of 
 Roger towards the lady he has just rescued from the 
 sea-monster might have blushingly been attributed by 
 Spenser to one of his satyrs ; but these were escapades 
 quite within Ariosto's notions of what was permitted 
 to a geyitil cavaliero and a nobil donzella ; and if 
 Fiordispina and Roger are not like Florimell and Sir 
 Calidore, still less do they in the faintest degree 
 resemble Tourneur and Marston's Levidulcias and 
 Isabellas and Lussuriosos. And with the exception 
 perhaps of this heroine and this hero, we cannot find 
 any very great harm in Ariosto's ladies and gentle- 
 men : we may, indeed, feel indignant when we think 
 that they replace the chaste and noble impossibilities 
 of earlier romance, the Rolands and Percivals, the 
 Beatrices and Lauras of the past; when we consider 
 that they represent for Ariosto, not the bespattered 
 but the spotless, not the real but the ideal. All this 
 may awaken in us contempt and disgust ; but if we 
 consider these figures in themselves as realities, and 
 compare them with the evil figures of our drama, we 
 find that they are mere venial sinners — light, fickle, 
 amorous, fibbing — very human in their faults ; human, 
 trifling, mild, not at all monstrous, like all the art 
 products of the Renaissance.^ 
 
 ' The "Orlando Innamorato" of Boiardo contains, parti, canto 
 8, a story too horrible and grotesque for me to narrate, of a 
 monster born of Marchino and his murdered sister-in-law, which 
 forms a strange exception to my rule, even as does, for instance. 
 
86 EUPHORION. 
 
 A serene and spotless art, a literature often impure 
 but always cheerful, rational, civilized — this is what 
 the Italian Renaissance displays when we seek in it for 
 spirits at all akin to Webster or Lope de Vega, to Hol- 
 bein or Ribera. To find the tragic we must wait for 
 the Bolognese painters of the seventeenth century, for 
 Metastasio and Alfieri in the eighteenth ; it is useless 
 seeking it in this serene and joyous Renaissance. 
 Where, then, in the midst of these spotless virgins, 
 these noble saints, these brilliant pseudo-chivalric 
 joustings and revels, these sweet and sonneteering 
 pastorals, these scurrilous adventures and loose 
 buffooneries ; where in this Italian Renaissance are 
 the horrors which fascinated so strangely our English 
 playwrights : the fratricides and incests, the frightful 
 crimes of lust and blood which haunted and half 
 crazed the genius of Tourneur and Marston ? Where 
 in this brilliant and courteous and humane and civi- 
 lized nation are the gigantic villains whose terrible 
 features were drawn with such superb awfulness of 
 touch by Webster and Ford ? Where in this Re- 
 naissance of Italian literature, so cheerful and light 
 of conscience, is the foul and savage Renaissance of 
 English tragedy ? Does the art of Italy tell an im- 
 possible, universal lie? or is the art of England the 
 victim of an impossible, universal hallucination ? 
 
 I^Iatteo <3i Giovanni's Massacre of the Innocents. Can this 
 story have been suggested, a ghastly nightmare, by the frightful 
 tale of Sigismondo Malatesta and the beautiful Borbona, which 
 was current in Boiardo's day ? 
 
THE ITAL Y OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA TISTS. 87 
 
 Neither ; for art can neither tell lies nor be the 
 victim of hallucination. The horror exists, and the 
 light-heartedness exists ; the unhealthiness atid the 
 healthiness. For as, in that weird story by Nathaniel 
 Hawthorne, the daughter of the Paduan wizard is 
 nurtured on the sap and fruit and the emanations of 
 poisonous plants, till they become her natural susten- 
 ance, and she thrives and is strong and lovely ; while 
 the youth, bred in the ordinary pure air and nourished 
 on ordinary wholesome food, faints and staggers as 
 soon as he breathes the fatal odours of the poison 
 garden, and sinks down convulsed and crazed at the 
 first touch of his mistress' blooming but death-breath- 
 ing lips ; so also the Italians, steeped in the sin of 
 their country, seeing it daily and hourly, remained 
 intellectually healthy and serene ; while the English, 
 coming from a purer moral atmosphere, were seized 
 with moral sickness of horror at what they had seen 
 and could not forget. And the nation which was 
 chaste and true wrote tales of incest and treachery, 
 while the nation which was foul and false wrote 
 poetry of shepherds and knights-errant. 
 
 The monstrous immorality of the Italian Renaiss- 
 ance, as I have elsewhere shown in greater detail, 
 was, like the immorality of any other historical period, 
 not a formal rebellion against God, but a natural 
 result of the evolution of the modern world. The 
 Italy of the Renaissance was one of the many victims 
 which inevitable moral sequence dooms to be evil in 
 
88 EUPHORION. 
 
 order that others may learn to be good : it was a 
 sacrifice which consisted in a sin, a sacrifice requiring 
 frightful expiation on the part of the victim. For 
 Italy was subjected, during well-nigh two centuries, to 
 a slow process of moral destruction ; a process whose 
 various factors — political disorganization, religious in- 
 difference, scientific scepticism, wholesale enthusiasm 
 for the antique, breaking-up of medieval standards, 
 and excessive growth of industry, commerce, and 
 speculative thought at the expense of warlike and 
 religious habits — were at the same time factors in the 
 great advent of modern civilization, of which Italy 
 was the pioneer and the victim ; a process whose 
 result was, in Italy, insensibly and inevitably to reduce 
 to chaos the moral and political organization of the 
 nation ; at once rendering men completely unable to 
 discriminate between good and evil, and enabling a 
 certain proportion of them to sin with complete im- 
 punity : creating on the one hand moral indifference, 
 and on the other social irresponsibility. Civilization 
 had kept pace with demoralization ; the faculty of 
 reasoning over cause and effect had developed at 
 the expense of the faculty of judging of actions. The 
 Italians of the Renaissance, little by little, could judge 
 only of the adaptation of means to given ends ; 
 whether means or ends were legitimate or illegitimate 
 they soon became unable to perceive and even unable 
 to ask. Success was the criterion of all action, and 
 power was its limits. Active and furious national 
 
THE ITAL V OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA TISTS. 89 
 
 wickedness there was not : there was mere moral 
 inertia on the part of the people. The Italians of the 
 Renaissance neither resisted evil nor rebelled against 
 virtue; they were indifferent to both, and a little 
 pressure sufficed to determine them to either. In the 
 governed classes, where the law was equal between 
 men, and industry and commerce kept up healthy 
 activity, the pressure was towards good. The artizans 
 and merchants lived decent lives, endowed hospitals, 
 listened to edifying sermons, and were even moved 
 (for a few moments) by men like San Bernardino or 
 Savonarola. In the governing classes, where all right 
 lay in force, where the necessity of self-defence in- 
 duced treachery and violence, and irresponsibility 
 produced excess, the pressure was towards evil. The 
 princelets and prelates and mercenery generals in- 
 dulged in every sensuality, turned treachery into a 
 science and violence into an instrument ; and some- 
 times let themselves be intoxicated into mad lust and 
 ferocity, as their subjects were occasionally intoxi- 
 cated with mad austerity and mysticism ; but the 
 excesses of mad vice, like the excesses of mad virtue, 
 lasted only a short time, or lasted only in individual 
 saints or blood-maniacs ; and the men of the Renais- 
 sance speedily regained their level of indifferent 
 righteousness and of indifferent sinfulness. Righteous- 
 ness and sinfulness both passive, without power of 
 aggression or resistance, and consequently in strange 
 and dreadful peace with each other. The wicked 
 
90 EUPHORION. 
 
 men did not dislike virtue, nor the good men vice : 
 the villain could admire a saint, and the saint could 
 excuse a, villain. The prudery of righteousness was 
 as unknown as the cynicism of evil ; the good man, 
 like Guarino da Verona, would not shrink from the 
 foul man ; the foul man, like Beccadelli, would not 
 despise the pure man. The ideally righteous citizen 
 of Agnolo Pandolfini does not interfere with the 
 ideally unrighteous prince of Machiavelli : each has 
 his own position and conduct ; and who can say 
 whether, if the positions were exchanged, the conduct 
 might not be exchanged also .'' In such a condition 
 of things as this, evil ceases to appear monstrous ; it 
 is explained, endured, condoned. The stately philo- 
 sophical historians, so stoically grand, and the 
 prattling local chroniclers, so highly coloured and so 
 gentle and graceful ; Guicciardini and Machiavelli 
 and Valori and Segni, on the one hand — Corio, Alle- 
 gretti, Matarazzo, Infessura, on the other ; all these, 
 from whom we learn the real existence of immorality 
 far more universal and abominable than our drama- 
 tists venture to show, relate quietly, calmly, with 
 analytical frigidness or gossiping levity, the things 
 which we often shrink from repeating, and sometimes 
 recoil from believing. Great statesmanlike historians 
 and humble chattering chroniclers are alike unaffected 
 by what goes on around them : they collect anecdotes 
 and generalize events without the fumes of evil, among 
 which they seek for materials in the dark places of 
 
THE ITAL Y OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 91 
 
 national or local history, ever going to their imagi- 
 nation, ever making their heart sicken and faint, and 
 their fancy stagger and reel. The life of these 
 righteous, or at least, not actively sinning men, may 
 be hampered, worried, embittered, or even broken by 
 the villainy of their fellow-men ; but, except in some 
 visionary monk, life can never be poisoned by the 
 mere knowledge of evil. Their town may be betrayed 
 to the enemy, their daughters may be dishonoured or 
 poisoned, their sons massacred ; they may, in their old 
 age, be cast starving on the world, or imprisoned or 
 broken by torture ; and they will complain and be 
 fierce in diatribe : the fiercest diatribe written against 
 any Pope of the Renaissance being, perhaps, that of 
 Platina against Paul II., who was a saint compared 
 with his successors Sixtus and Alexander, because 
 the writer of the diatribe and his friends were mal- 
 treated by this pope. When personally touched, the 
 Italians of the Renaissance will brook no villainy — the 
 poniard quickly despatches sovereigns like Galeazzo 
 Maria Sforza ; but when the villainy remains 
 abstract, injures neither themselves nor their imme- 
 diate surroundings, it awakens no horror, and the 
 man who commits it is by no means regarded as a 
 fiend. The great criminals of the Renaissance — 
 traitors and murderers like Lodovico Sforza, inces- 
 tuous parricides like Gianpaolo BagHoni, committers 
 of every iniquity under heaven like Caesar Borgia — • 
 move through the scene of Renaissance history, as 
 
92 EUPHORION. 
 
 shown by its writers great and small, quietly, serenely, 
 triumphantly ; with gracious and magnanimous bear- 
 ing ; applauded, admired, or at least endured. On 
 their passage no man, historian or chronicler, unless 
 the agent of a hostile political faction, rises up, con- 
 fronts them and says, " This man is a devil." 
 
 And devils these men were not : the judgment of 
 their contemporaries, morally completely perverted, 
 was probably psychologically correct ; they misjudged 
 the deeds, but rarely, perhaps, misjudged the man. 
 To us moderns, as to our English ancestors of the 
 sixteenth century, this is scarcely conceivable. A man 
 who does devilish deeds is of necessity a devil ; and 
 the evil Itahan princes of the Renaissance, the Borgias, 
 Sforzas, Baglionis, Malatestas, and Riarios appear, 
 through the mist of horrified imagination, so many 
 uncouth and gigantic monsters, nightmare shapes, less 
 like human beings than like the grand and frightful 
 angels of evil who gather round Milton's Satan in the 
 infernal council. Such they appear to us. But if we 
 once succeed in calmly looking at them, seeing them 
 not in the lurid lights and shadows of our fancy, but 
 in the daylight of contemporary reality, we shall little 
 by little be forced to confess (and the confession is 
 horrible) that most of these men are neither abnormal 
 nor gigantic. Their times were monstrous, not they. 
 They were not, that is clear, at variance with the moral 
 atmosphere which surrounded them ; and they were 
 the direct result of the social and political condition. 
 
THE ITAL V OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA TISTS. 93 
 
 This may seem no answer ; for although we know the 
 causes of monster births, they are monstrous none the 
 less. What I mean is not that the existence of men 
 capable of committing such actions was normal ; 
 but that the men who committed them, the con- 
 ditions being what they were, were not necessarily 
 men of exceptional character. The level of immo- 
 rality was so high that a man need be no giant to reach 
 up into the very seventh heaven of iniquity. When 
 to massacre at a banquet a number of enemies enticed 
 by overtures of peace was considered in C^sar Borgia 
 merely a rather audacious and not very holy action, 
 indicative of very brilliant powers of diplomacy, then 
 Csesar Borgia required, to commit such an action, 
 little more than a brilliant diplomatic endowment, 
 unhampered by scruples and timidity ; when a brave, 
 and gracious prince like Gianpaolo Baglioni could 
 murder his kinsmen and commit incest with his 
 sister without being considered less gracious and 
 magnanimous, then Gianpaolo Baglioni might indeed 
 be but an indifferent villain ; when treachery, lust, 
 and bloodshed, although objected to in theory, were 
 condoned in practice, and were regarded as venial 
 sins, those who indulged in them might be in fact 
 scarcely more than venial sinners. In short, where a 
 fiendish action might be committed without the per- 
 petrator being considered a fiend, there was no need 
 of his being one. And, indeed, the great villains of 
 the Renaissance never take up the attitude of fiends ; 
 
94 E UP H OR ION. 
 
 one or two, like certain Visconti or Aragonese, were 
 madmen, but the others were more or less normal 
 human beings. There was no barrier between them 
 and evil ; they slipped into it, remained in it, became 
 accustomed to it ; but a vicious determination to be 
 wicked, a feeling of the fiend within one, like that of 
 Shakespeare's Richard, or a gradual, conscious irresis- 
 tible absorption into recognized iniquity like Macbeth's, 
 there was not. The mere sense of absolute power 
 and impunity, together with the complete silence of 
 the conscience of the public at large, can make a man 
 do strange things. If Caesar Borgia be free to practise 
 his archery upon hares and deer, why should he not 
 practise it upon these prisoners ? Who will blame 
 him .' Who can prevent him ? If he had for his 
 mistress every woman he might single out from 
 among his captives, why not his sister > If he have 
 the force to carry out a plan, why should a man stand 
 in his way > The complete facility in the commission 
 of all actions quickly brings such a man to the limits 
 of the legitimate : there is no universal cry to tell him 
 where those limits are, no universal arm to pull him 
 back. He pooh-poohs, pushes them a little further, 
 and does the iniquity. Nothing prevents his grati- 
 fying his ambition, his avarice, and his lust; so he 
 gratifies them. Soon, seeking for further gratification, 
 he has to cut new paths in villainy : he has not been 
 restrained by man, who is silent; he is soon restrained 
 no longer by nature, whose only voice is in man's 
 
THE ITAL V OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA TISTS. 95 
 
 conscience. Pleasure in wanton cruelty takes the 
 same course : he prefers to throw javelins at men and 
 women to throwing javelins at bulls or bears, even as 
 he prefers throwing javelins at bulls or bears rather 
 than at targets ; the excitement is greater ; the instinct 
 is that of the soldiers of Spain and of France, who 
 invariably preferred shooting at a valuable fresco like 
 Sodoma's Christ, at Siena, or Lo Spagna's Madonna, 
 at Spoleto, to practising against a mere worthless 
 piece of wood. Such a man as Caesar Borgia is the 
 ne plus ultra of a Renaissance villain ; he takes, as 
 all do not, absolute pleasure in evil as such. Yet 
 Ceesar Borgia is not a fiend nor a maniac. He can 
 restrain himself whenever circumstances or policy 
 require it ; he can be a wise administrator, a just 
 judge. His portraits show no degraded criminal ; he 
 is, indeed, a criminal in action, but not necessarily a 
 criminal in constitution, this fiendish man who did 
 not seem a fiend to Machiavel. We are astonished at 
 the strange anomaly in the ta.stes and deeds of these 
 Renaissance villains ; we are amazed before their 
 portraits. These men, who, in the frightful light of 
 their own misdeeds, appear to us as complete demons 
 or complete madmen, have yet much that is amiable 
 and much that is sane ; they stickle at no abominable 
 lust, yet they are no bestial sybarites ; they are brave, 
 sober, frugal, enduring like any puritan ; they are 
 treacherous, rapacious, cruel, utterly indifferent to the 
 sufferings of their enemies^ yet they are gentle in 
 
96 EVPHORION. 
 
 manner, passionately fond of letters and art, superb 
 in their works of public utility, and not incapable of 
 genuinely admiring men of pure life like Bernardino 
 or Savonarola : they are often, strange to say, like the 
 frightful Baglionis of Perugia, passionately admired 
 and loved by their countrymen. The bodily portraits 
 of these men, painted by the sternly realistic art of the 
 fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, are even more 
 confusing to our ideas than their moral portraits drawn 
 by historians and chroniclers. Caesar Borgia, with his 
 long fine features and noble head, is a gracious and 
 refined prince ; there is, perhaps, a certain duplicity in 
 the well-cut lips ; the beard, worn full and peaked in 
 Spanish fashion, forms a sort of mask to the lower 
 part of the face, but what we see is noble and intellec- 
 tual. Sigismondo Malatesta has on his medals a head 
 whose scowl has afforded opportunity for various fine 
 descriptions of a blood maniac ; but the head, thus 
 found so expressive, of this monster, is yet more 
 human than the head on the medals of Lionello 
 d'Este, one of the most mild and cultivated of 
 the decently behaved Ferrarese princes. The very 
 flower of precocious iniquity, the young Baglionis, 
 Vitellis, and Orsinis, grouped round SignorelH's 
 preaching Antichrist at Orvieto, are, in their gallantly 
 trimmed jerkins and jewelled caps, the veriest assem- 
 blage of harmless young dandies, pretty, and insipid ; 
 we can scarcely believe that these mild beardless 
 striplings, tight-waisted and well-curled like girls of 
 
THE ITAL V OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA TISTS. 97 
 
 sixteen, are the terrible Umbrian brigand condottieri 
 — Gianpaolos, Simonettos, Vitellozzos, and Astorres — 
 whose abominable deeds fill the pages of the chronicles 
 of Matarazzo, of Frolliere, and of Monaldeschi. No- 
 where among the portraits of Renaissance monsters do 
 we meet with anything like those Roman emperors, 
 whose frightful effigies, tumid, toad-like Vitelliuses 
 or rage-convulsed Caracallas, fill all our museums 
 in marble or bronze or loathsome purple porphyry ; 
 such types as these are as foreign to the reality of the 
 Italian Renaissance as are the Brachianos and Lus- 
 suriosos, the Pieros and Corombonas, to the Italian 
 fiction of the sixteenth century. 
 
 Nor must such anomalies between the type of the 
 men and their deeds, between their abominable 
 crimes and their high qualities, be made a mere 
 subject for grandiloquent disquisition. The man of 
 the Renaissance, as we have said, had no need to be 
 a monster to do monstrous things ; a crime did not 
 necessitate such a moral rebellion as requires complete 
 unity of nature, unmixed wickedness ; it did not 
 precipitate a man for ever into a moral abyss where 
 no good could ever enter. Seeing no barrier between 
 the legitimate and the illegitimate, he could alternate 
 almost unconsciously between them. He was never 
 shut out from evil, and never shut out from good ; 
 the judgment of men did not dress him in a convict's 
 jacket which made evil his only companion ; it did 
 not lock him up in a moral dungeon where no ray 
 
93 EUPHORION. 
 
 of righteousness could penetrate ; he was not con- 
 demned, like the branded harlot, to hopeless infamy- 
 He need be bad only as much and as long as he chose- 
 Hence, on the part of the evil-doer of the Renaissance, 
 no necessity either for violent rebellion or for sincere 
 repentance ; hence the absence of all characters such 
 as the tragic writer seeks, developed by moral struggle, 
 warped by the triumph of vice, or consciously soiled 
 in virtue. What a " Revenger's Tragedy " might not 
 Cyril Tourneur have made, had he known all the 
 details, of the story of Alessandro de' Medici's death ! 
 What a Vindici he would have made of the murderer 
 Lorenzino ; with what a strange lurid grandeur he 
 would have surrounded the plottings of the pander 
 Brutus. But Lorenzino de' Medici had none of the 
 feeling of Tourneur's Vindici ; there was in him 
 none of the ghastly spirit of self-immolation of the 
 hero of Tourneur in his attendance upon the foul 
 creature whom he leads to his death. Lorenzino had 
 the usual Brutus mania of his day, but unmixed with 
 horror. To be the pander and jester of the Duke 
 was no pain to his nature ; there was probably no 
 sense of debasement in the knowledge either of his 
 employer or of his employment. To fasten on Alex- 
 ander, to pretend to be his devoted slave and server 
 of his lust, this piece of loathsome acting, merely 
 enhanced, by the ingenuity it required, the attraction 
 of what to Lorenzino was an act of heroism. His 
 ambition was to be a Brutus ; that he had bespattered 
 
THE ITALY OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 99 
 
 the part probably never occurred to him. Indiffer- 
 ence to good and evil permitted the men of the 
 Renaissance to mix the two without any moral sick- 
 ness, as it permitted them to alternate them without 
 a moral struggle. Such is the wickedness of the 
 Renaissance : not a superhuman fury of lust and 
 cruelty, like Victor Hugo's Lucrezia Borgia ; but an 
 indifferent, a characterless creature like the Lucrezia 
 Borgia of history : passive to surrounding influences, 
 blind to good and evil, infamous in the infamous 
 Rome, among her father and brother's courtesans 
 and cut-throats ; grave and gracious in the grave and 
 gracious Ferrara, among the Platonic poets and pacific 
 courtiers of the court of the Estensi. Thus, in the 
 complete prose and colourlessness of reality, has the 
 evil of the Renaissance been understood and repre- 
 sented only by one man, and transmitted to us in one 
 pale and delicate psychological masterpiece far more 
 loathsome than any elaborately hideous monster 
 painting by Marston or Tourneur. This man who 
 conceived the horrors of the Italian Renaissance 
 in the spirit in which they were committed is Ford. 
 In his great play he has* caught the very tone of the 
 Italian Renaissance : the abominableness of the play 
 consisting not in the coarse slaughter scenes added 
 merely to please the cockpit of an English theatre, 
 but in the superficial innocence of tone ; in its making 
 evil lose its appearance of evil, even as it did to the 
 men of the Renaissance. Gioyanni and Annabella 
 
loo EUPHORION. 
 
 make love as if they were Romeo and Juliet : there 
 is scarcely any struggle, and no remorse ; they weep 
 and pay compliments and sigh and melt in true 
 Aminta style. There is in the love of the brother 
 and sister neither the ferocious heat of tragic lust, 
 nor the awful shudder of unnatural evil ; they are 
 lukewarm, neither good nor bad. Their abominable 
 love is in their own eyes a mere weakness of the 
 flesh ; there is no sense of revolt against man and 
 nature and God ; they are neither dragged on by 
 irresistible demoniac force nor held back by the grip 
 of conscience ; they slip and slide, even like Francesca 
 and Paolo. They pay each other sweet and mawkish 
 compliments. The ferocious lust of Francesco Cenci 
 is moral compared with the way in which the " trim 
 youth " Giovanni praises Annabella's beauty ; the 
 blushing, bride-like way in which Annabella, "white in 
 her soul," acknowledges her long love. The atro- 
 ciousness of all this is, that if you strike out a word 
 or two the scene may be read with perfect moral 
 satisfaction, with the impression that this is really 
 " sacred love." For in these scenes Ford wrote with 
 a sweetness and innocence truly diabolical, not a 
 shiver of horror passing through him — serene, uncon- 
 scious ; handling the filthy without sense of its being 
 unclean, to the extent, the incredible extent, of 
 making Giovanni and Annabella swear on their 
 mother's ashes eternal fidelity in incest : horror of 
 horrors, to which no Walpurgis Night abomination 
 
THE ITAL V OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA TISTS. loi 
 
 could ever approach, this taking as witness of the un- 
 utterable, not an obscene Beelzebub with abominable 
 words and rites, but the very holiest of holies. If ever 
 Englishman approached the temper of the Italian 
 Renaissance, it was not Tourneur, nor Shelley with his 
 cleansing hell fires of tragic horror, but this sweet and 
 gentle Ford. If ever an artistic picture approached 
 the reality of such a man as Gianpaolo Baglioni, the 
 incestuous murderer whom the Frolliere chronicler, 
 enthusiastic like Matarazzo, admires, for "his most 
 beautiful person, his benign and amiable manner and 
 lordly bearing," it is certainly not the elaborately 
 villainous Francesco Cenci of Shelley, boasting like 
 another Satan of his enormous wickedness,exhausting 
 in his picture of himself the rhetoric of horror, com- 
 mitting his final enormity merely to complete the 
 crown of atrocities in which he glories ; it is no such 
 tragic impossibility of moral hideousness as this ; it 
 is the Giovanni of Ford, the pearl of virtuous and 
 studious youths, the spotless, the brave, who, after a 
 moment's reasoning, tramples on a vulgar prejudice — 
 " Shall a peevish sound, a customary form from man 
 to man, of brother and of sister, be a bar 'twixt my 
 eternal happiness and me?" who sins with a clear con- 
 science, defies the world, and dies, bravely, proudly, 
 the " sacred name " of Annabella on his lips, like a 
 chivalrous hero. The pious, pure Germany of Luther 
 will give the world the tragic type of the science- 
 damned Faustus ; the devout and savage Spain of 
 
102 EUPHORION. 
 
 Loyola will give the tragic type of Don Juan 
 damned for mockery of man and of death and of 
 heaven ; the Puritan England of Milton will give the 
 most sublimely tragic type of all, the awful figure of 
 him who says, " Evil, be thou my good." What tragic 
 type can this evil Italy of Renaissance give to the 
 world ? None : or at most this miserable, morbid, 
 compassionated Giovanni ; whom Ford would have 
 us admire, and whom we can only dispise. 
 
 The blindness to evil which constitutes the crimi- 
 nality of the Renaissance is such as to give it almost 
 an air of innocence. For the men of that time 
 were wicked solely from a complete sophistication 
 of ideas, a complete melting away (owing to slowly 
 operating political and intellectual tendencies) of all 
 moral barriers. They walked through the paths of 
 wickedness serenely as they would have trod the ways 
 of righteousness ; seeing no boundary, exercising 
 their psychic limbs equally in the open and permitted 
 spaces and in the forbidden. They plucked the fruit 
 of evil without a glance behind them, without a 
 desperate setting of their teeth ; plucked it openly, 
 calmly, as they would have plucked the blackberries 
 in the hedge ; bit into it, ate it, with perfect ease 
 and serenity, saying their prayers before and after, 
 as if it were their natural daily bread mentioned 
 in the Lord's Prayer ; no grimace or unseemly 
 leer the while ; no moral indigestion or nightmare 
 (except very rarely) in consequence. Hence the 
 
THE ITAL Y OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA TISTS. 103 
 
 serenity of their literature and art. These men and 
 women of the Italian Renaissance have, in their 
 portraits, a very pleasing nobility of aspect : serene, 
 thoughtful, healthy, benign. Titian's courtesans are 
 our archetypes of dignified womanhood ; we might 
 fancy Portia or Isabella with such calm, florid beauty, 
 so wholly unmeretricious and uncankered. The 
 humanists and priests who lie outstretched on the 
 acanthus-garlanded sarcophagi by Desiderio and 
 Rossellino are the very flowers of refined and gentle 
 men of study ; the youths in Botticelli's " Adoration 
 of The Magi," for instance, are the ideal of Boiardo's 
 chivalry, Rinaldos and Orlandos every one ; the 
 corseleted generals of the Renaissance, so calm and 
 stern and frank, the Bartolomeo Colleoni of Ver- 
 rocchio, the Gattamelata by Giorgione (or Giorgione's 
 pupil), look fit to take up the banner of the crusade : 
 that Gattamelata in the Uffizi gallery especially 
 looks like a sort of military Milton : give him a pair 
 of wings and he becomes at once Signorelli's arch- 
 angel, clothed in heavenly steel and unsheathing 
 the flaming sword of God. Compare with these 
 types Holbein's courtiers of Henry VIII. ; what 
 scrofulous hogs ! Compare Sanchez Coello's Philip 
 II. and Don Carlos ; what monomaniacs ! Compare 
 even Diirer's magnificent head of Willibald Pirkheimer : 
 how the swine nature is blended with the thinker. 
 And the swine will be subdued, the thinker will 
 triumph. Why .'' Just because there is a contest — 
 
104 EUPHORION. 
 
 because the thinker-Willibald is conscious of the 
 swine- Willibald. In this coarse, brutal, deeply stained 
 Germany of the time of Luther, affording Diirer and 
 Holbein, alas ! how many besotten and bestial types, 
 there will arise a great conflict : the obscene leering 
 Death — Death-in-Life as he really is — will skulk 
 everywhere, even as in the prints of the day, hideous 
 and powerful, trying, with hog's snout, to drive Christ 
 Himself out of limbo ; but he is known, seen, dreaded. 
 The armed knight of Durer turns away from his 
 grimacings, and urges on his steel-covered horse. He 
 visits even the best, even Luther in the Wartburg ; 
 but the good men open their Bibles, cry " Vade retro ! " 
 and throw their inkstands at him, showing themselves 
 terrified and ruffled after the combat. And these 
 Germans of Luther's are disgustingly fond of blood 
 and horrors : they like to see the blood spirt from the 
 decapitated trunk, to watch its last contortions ; they 
 hammer with a will (in Diirer's " Passion ") the nails 
 of the cross, they peel off strips of skin in the flagella- 
 tion. But then they can master all that ; they can be 
 pure, charitable ; they have gentleness for the hare 
 and the rabbit, like Luther ; they kneel piously before 
 the cross-bearing stag, like Saint Hubert. Not so the 
 Italians. They rarely or never paint horrors, or death, 
 or abominations. Their flagellated Christ, their arrow- 
 riddled Sebastian, never writhe or howl with pain ; 
 indeed, they suffer none. Judith, in Mantegna's print, 
 puts the head of Holophernes into her bag with the 
 
THE ITAL Y OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA TISTS. loj 
 
 serenity of a muse ; and the head is quite clean, 
 without loathsome drippings or torn depending strings 
 of muscle ; unconvulsed, a sort of plaster cast. The 
 tragedy of Christ, the tragedy of Judith ; the physical 
 agony shadowing the moral agony ; the awfulness of 
 victim and criminal — the whole tragic meaning was 
 unknown to the light and cheerful contemporaries of 
 Ariosto, to the cold and cynical contemporaries of 
 Machiavelli. 
 
 The tragic passion and imagination which, in the 
 
 noble and grotesque immaturity of the Middle Ages, 
 
 had murmured confusedly in such popular legends 
 
 as gave to Ezzelin the Fiend for a father, and 
 
 Death and Sin for adversaries at dice ; which had 
 
 stammered awkwardly but grandly in the school 
 
 Latin of Mussato's tragedy of " Eccerinis ; " which had 
 
 wept and stormed and imprecated and laughed for 
 
 horror in the infinite tragedy — pathetic, grand, and 
 
 grotesque, like all great tragedy — of Dante ; this 
 
 tragic passion and imagination, this sense of the 
 
 horrible and the terrible, had been forfeited by the 
 
 Italy of the Renaissance, lost with its sense of right 
 
 and wrong. The Italian Renaissance, supreme in the 
 
 arts which require a subtle and strong perception of 
 
 the excellence of mere lines and colours and lights 
 
 and shadows, which demand unflinching judgment of 
 
 material qualities ; was condemned to inferiority in the 
 
 art which requires subtle and strong perception of the 
 
 excellence of human emotion and action ; in the art 
 
io6 EUPHORION. 
 
 which demands unflinching judgment of moral motives. 
 The tragic spirit is the offspring of the conscience of 
 a people. The sense of the imaginative grandeur of 
 evil may perhaps be a forerunner of demoralization ; 
 but such a sense of wonder and awe, such an imagina- 
 tive fascination of the grandly, superhumanly wicked ; 
 such a necessity to magnify a villain into a demon 
 with archangelic splendour of power of evil, can exist 
 only in minds pure and strong, braced up to virtue, 
 virgin of evil, with a certain childlike power of wonder ; 
 minds to whom it appears that to be wicked requires 
 a powerful rebellion ; minds accustomed to nature and 
 nature's plainness, to whom the unnatural can be no 
 subject of sophistication and cynicism, but only of 
 wonder. While, in Italy, Giraldi Cinthio prattles off 
 to a gay party of ladies and gentlemen stories of 
 murder and lust as frightful as those of " Titus An- 
 dronicus," of " Giovanni and Annabella," and of the 
 "Revenger's Tragedy," in the intelligent, bantering 
 tone in which he tells his Decameronian tales ; 
 in England, Marston, in his superb prologue to the 
 second part of "Antonio and Mellida,'' doubts 
 whether all his audience can rise to the conception of 
 the terrible passions he wishes to display : 
 
 If any spirit breathes within this round 
 Uncapable of weighty passion. 
 Who winks and shuts his apprehension up 
 From common sense of what men were and are, 
 Who would not know what men must be : let such 
 Hurry amain from our black visaged shows ; 
 We shall afifright their eyes. 
 
THE ITAL Y OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA TISTS. 107 
 
 The great criminals of Italy were unconscious of being 
 criminals ; the nation was unconscious of being sinful. 
 Bembo's sonnets were the fit reading for Lucrezia 
 Borgia ; pastorals by Guarini the dramatic amusements 
 of Rannuccio Farnesi ; if Vittoria Accoramboni and 
 Francesco Cenci read anything besides their prayer- 
 book or ribald novels, it was some sugary " Aminta" or 
 " Pastor Fido : " their own tragedies by Webster and 
 Shelley they could never have understood. 
 
 And thus the Italians of the Renaissance walked 
 placidly through the evil which surrounded them ; for 
 them, artists and poets, the sky was always blue and 
 the sun always bright, and their art and their poetry 
 were serene. But the Englishmen of the sixteenth 
 century were astonished and fascinated by the evil of 
 Italy : the dark pools of horror, the dabs of infamy 
 which had met them ever and anon in the brilliant 
 southern cities, haunted them like nightmare, be- 
 spattered for them the clear blue sky, and danced, 
 black and horrible spots, before the face of the sun. 
 The remembrance of Italian wickedness weighed on 
 them like an incubus, clung to them with a frightful 
 fascination. While the foulest criminals of Italy dis- 
 cussed the platonic vapidnesses of Bembo's sonnets, 
 and wept at the sweet and languid lamentations of 
 Guarini's shepherds and nymphs ; the strong English- 
 men of the time of Shakespeare, the men whose 
 children were to unsheathe under Cromwell the sword 
 of righteousness, listei\ed awe-stricken and fascinated 
 
io3 EUPHORION. 
 
 with horror to the gloomy and convulsed, the grand 
 and frightful plays of Webster and of Tourneur. And 
 the sin of the Renaissance, which the art of Italy could 
 neither pourtray nor perceive ; appeared on the stage 
 decked in superb and awful garb by the tragic imagi- 
 nation of Elizabethan England, 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 
 
 The thought of winter is bleak and barren to our 
 mind ; the late year is chary of aesthetic as of all 
 other food. In the country it does not bring ugli- 
 ness ; but it terribly reduces and simplifies things, 
 depriving them of two-thirds of their beauty. In 
 sweeping away the last yellow leaves, the last crimson 
 clouds, and in bleaching the last green grass, it 
 effaces a whole wealth of colour. It deprives us still 
 more by actually diminishing the number of forms : 
 for what summer had left rich, various, complex, 
 winter reduces to blank uniformity. There is a whole 
 world of lovely things, shapes and tints, effects of 
 light, colour, and perspective in a wood, as long as it 
 is capriciously divided into a thousand nooks and 
 crannies by projecting boughs, bushes, hedges, and 
 hanging leaves ; and this winter clears away and 
 reduces to a Haussmanized simplicity of plan. There 
 is a smaller world, yet one quite big enough for a sum- 
 mer's day, in any hay field, among the barren oats, the 
 
112 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 moon-daisies, the seeded grasses, the sorrel, the butter- 
 cups, all making at a distance a wonderful blent effect 
 of luminous brown and lilac and russet foamed with 
 white ; and forming, when you look close into it, 
 an unlimited forest of delicately separate stems and 
 bloom and seed ; every plant detaching itself daintily 
 from an undefinable background of things like itself. 
 This winter turns into a rusty brown and green ex- 
 panse, or into a bog, or a field of frozen upturned 
 clods. The very trees, stripped of their leaves, look 
 as if prepared for diagrams of the abstraction tree. 
 Everything, in short, is reduced most philosophically 
 to its absolutely ultimate elements ; and beauty is got 
 rid of almost as completely as by a metaphysical 
 definition. This esthetic barrenness of winter is most 
 of all felt in southern climates, to which winter brings 
 none of the harsh glitter and glamour of snow and 
 ice ; leaving the frozen earth and leafless trees merely 
 bare, without the crisp sheen of snow, the glint and 
 glimmer of frost and icicles, forming for the denuded 
 rigging of branches a fantastic system of ropes and 
 folded sails. In the South, therefore, unless you 
 go where winter never comes, and autumn merely 
 merges into a lengthened spring, winter is more than 
 ever negative, dreary, barren to our fancy. Yet 
 even this southern winter gives one very lovely 
 things : things which one scarcely notices perhaps, 
 yet which would baffle the most skilled painter to 
 imitate, the most skilled poet to describe. Thus, 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 113 
 
 for instance, there is a peculiar kind of morning by no 
 means uncommon in Tuscany in what is completely 
 winter, not a remnant of autumn or a beginning of 
 spring. It is cold, but windless ; the sky full of sun, the 
 earth full of mist. Sun and mist uniting into a pale 
 luminousness in which all things lose body, become 
 mere outline ; bodiless hills taking shape where they 
 touch the sky with their curve ; clear bodiless line of 
 irregular houses, of projecting ilex roundings and 
 pointed cypresses marking the separation between hill 
 and sky, the one scarcely more solid, corporeal than 
 the other ; the hill almost as blue as the sky, the sky 
 almost as vaporous as the hill ; the tangible often 
 more ghostlike than the intangible. But the sun 
 has smitten the higher hills, and the vapours have 
 partially rolled down, in a scarcely visible fold, to 
 their feet ; and the high hill, not yet rock or earth, 
 swells up into the sky as something real, but iluid and 
 of infinite elasticity. All in front the plain is white 
 with mist ; or pinkish grey with the unseen agglo- 
 meration of bare tree boughs and trunks, of sere field ; 
 till, nearer us, the trees become more visible, the 
 short vinebearing elms in the fields, interlacing their 
 branches compressed by distance ; the clumps of pop- 
 lars, so scant and far between from near, so serried 
 and compact from afar ; and between them an occa- 
 sional flush, a tawny vapour of the orange twigged 
 osiers ; and then, still nearer, the expanse of sere 
 field, of mottled, crushed-together, yellowed grass and 
 
 9 
 
114 EUPHORION. 
 
 grey brown leaves ; things of the summer which 
 winter is burying to make room for spring. Along 
 the reaches of the river the clumps of leafless poplars 
 are grey against the pale, palest blue sky ; grey but 
 with a warmth of delicate brown, almost of rosiness. 
 Grey also is the shingle in the river bed ; the river it- 
 self either (if after rain) pale brown, streaked with pale 
 blue sky reflections ; or (after a drought), low, grey, 
 luminous throughout its surface, you might think, 
 were it not that the metallic sheen, the vacillating 
 sparkles of where the sun, smiting down, frets it into 
 k shifting mass of scintillating facets, gives you the 
 impression that this other luminousness of silvery 
 water must be dull and dead. And, looking up the 
 river, it gradually disappears, its place marked only, 
 against the all-pervading pale blue haze, by the 
 brownish grey spectre of the furthest poplar clumps. 
 
 This, I have said, is an effect which winter pro- 
 duces, nay, even a southern winter, with those com- 
 paratively few and slight elements at its disposal. 
 We see it, notice it, and enjoy its delicate loveliness ; 
 but while so doing we do not think, or we forget, that 
 the habit of noticing, nay, the power of perceiving 
 such effects as this, is one of those habits and powers 
 which we possess, so to speak, only since yesterday. 
 The possibility of reproducing in painting effects like 
 this one ; or, more truthfully, the wish to reproduce 
 them, is scarcely as old as our own century ; it is, 
 perhaps, the latest born of all our artistic wishes and 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 115 
 
 possibilities. But the possibility of any visible effect 
 being perceived and reproduced by the painter,, usually 
 precedes — at least where any kind of pictorial art 
 already exists — the perception of such effects by those 
 virho are not painters, and the attempt to. reproduce 
 them by means of words. We do not care to admit 
 that our grandfathers were too unlike ourselves, lest 
 ourselves should be found too unlike our grand- 
 children. We hold to the metaphysic fiction of man 
 having always been the same, and only his circum- 
 stances having changed ; not admitting that the very 
 change of circumstances implies something new in the 
 man who altered them ; and similarly we shrink from 
 the thought of the many things which we used never 
 to notice, and which it has required a class of men 
 endowed with special powers of vision to find out, 
 copy, and teach us to see and appreciate. Yet there 
 is scarcely one of us who has not a debt towards some 
 painter or writer for first directing his attention to 
 objects or effects which may have abounded around 
 him, but unnoticed or confused with others. The 
 painters, as I have said, the men who see more keenly 
 and who study what they have seen, naturally come 
 first ; nor does the poet usually describe what his 
 contemporary painter attempts not to paint. An ex- 
 ception might, perhaps, require to be made for Dante, 
 who would seem to have seen and described many 
 things left quite untouched by Giotto, and even by 
 Raphael ; but in estimating Dante we must be careful 
 
ii6 EUPHORION. 
 
 to distinguish the few touches which really belong to 
 him, from the great mass of colour and detail which we 
 have unconsciously added thereto, borrowing from our 
 own experience and from innumerable pictures and 
 poems which, at the moment, we may not in the least 
 remember ; and having done so, we shall be led to 
 believe that those words which suggest to us so clear 
 and coloured a vision of scenes often complex and un- 
 common, presented to his own mind only a compara- 
 tively simple and incomplete idea : the atmospheric 
 effects, requiring a more modern painter than Turner, 
 which we read between the lines of the " Inferno " and 
 the " Purgatorio," most probably existed as little for 
 Dante as they did for Giotto ; the poet seeing and 
 describing in reality only salient forms of earth and 
 rock, monotonous in tint and deficient in air, like those 
 in the backgrounds of mediaeval Tuscan frescoes and 
 panels. Be this as it may, the fact grows daily on me 
 that men have not at all times seen in the same degree 
 the nature which has always equally surrounded them ; 
 and that during some periods they have, for explicable 
 reasons, seen less not only than their successors, but 
 also than their predecessors ; and seen that little in a 
 manner conventional in proportion to its monotony. 
 There are things about which certain historic epochs 
 are strangely silent ; so much so, indeed, that the 
 breaking of the silence impresses us almost as the 
 more than human breaking of a spell ; and that silence 
 is the result of a grievous wrong, of a moral disease 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 117 
 
 which half closes the eyes of the fancy, or of a moral 
 poison which presents to those sorely aching eyes 
 only a glimmer amid darkness. And it is as the most 
 singular instance of such conditions that I should wish 
 to study, in themselves, their causes and effects, the 
 great differences existing between the ancients and 
 ourselves on the one hand, and the men of the genuine 
 Middle Ages on the other, in the degree of interest 
 taken respectively by each in external nature, the 
 seasons and that rural life which seems to bring us 
 into closest contact with them both. 
 
 There is, of course, a considerable difference between 
 the manner in which the country, its aspects and oc- 
 cupations, are treated by the poets of Antiquity and 
 by those of our own day ; in the mode of enjoying 
 them of an ancient who had read Theocritus and 
 Virgil and Tibullus, and a modern whose mind is un- 
 consciously full of the influence of Wordsworth or 
 Shelley or Ruskin. But it is a mere difference of mode ; 
 and is not greater, I think, than the difference between 
 the descriptions in the "Allegro," and the descriptions 
 in "Men and Women;" than the difference between 
 the love of our Elizabethans for the minuter details of 
 the country, the flowers by the stream, the birds in the 
 bushes, th^ ferrets, frogs, lizards, and similar small 
 creatures j and the pleasure of our own contemporaries 
 in the larger, more shifting, and perplexing forms and 
 colours of cloud, sunlight, earth, and rock. The de- 
 scription of effects such as these latter ones, nay, the 
 
ii8 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 attention and appreciation given to them, are things 
 of our own century, even as is the power and desire of 
 painting them. Landscape, in the sense of our artists 
 of to-day, is a very recent thing ; so recent that even 
 in the works of Turner, who was perhaps the earliest 
 landscape painter in the modern sense, we are forced 
 to separate from the real rendering of real effects, a 
 great deal in which the tints of sky and sea are 
 arranged arid distributed as a mere vast conventional 
 piece of decoration. Nor could it be otherwise. For, 
 in poetry as in painting, landscape could become a 
 separate and substantive art only when the interest in 
 the mere ins and outs of human adventure, in the 
 mere structure and movement of human limbs, had 
 considerably diminished. There is room, in epic or 
 drama, only for such little scraps of description as will 
 make clearer, without checking, the human action ; as 
 there is place, in a fresco of a miracle, or a little picture 
 of carousing and singing bacchantes and Venetian 
 dandies, only for such little bits of laurel grove, or dim 
 plain, or blue alpine crags, as can be introduced in 
 the gaps between head and head, or figure and figure. 
 Thus, therefore, a great difference must exist 
 between what would be felt and written about the 
 country and the seasons by an ancient, by a man of 
 the sixteenth century, or by a contemporary of our 
 own : a difference, however, solely of mode ; for we 
 feel sure that of the three men each would find some- 
 thing to delight himself and wherewith to delight 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 119 
 
 others among the elm-bounded English meadows, the 
 flat cornfields of central France, the vine and olive 
 yards of Italy — wherever, in short, he might find him- 
 self face to face and, so to speak, hand in hand with 
 Nature. But about the man of the Middle Ages 
 (unless, perhaps, in Italy, where the whole Middle 
 Ages were merely an earlier Renaissance) we could 
 have no such assurance ; nay, we might be persuaded 
 that, however great his genius, be he even a Gottfried 
 von Strassburg, or a Walther von der Vogelweide, or 
 the unknown Frenchman who has left us "Aucassin 
 et Nicolette," he would bring back impressions only 
 of two things, authorized and consecrated by the 
 poetic routine of his contemporaries — of spring and 
 of the woods. 
 
 There is nothing more characteristic of mediaeval 
 poetry than this limitation. Of autumn, of winter ; 
 of the standing corn, the. ripening fruit of summer ; of 
 all these things so dear to the ancients and to all men 
 of modern times, the Middle Ages seem to know 
 nothing. The autumn harvests, the mists and won- 
 drous autumnal transfiguration of the humblest tree, 
 or bracken, or bush ; the white and glittering splendour 
 of winter, and its cosy life by hearth or stove ; the 
 drowsiness of summer, its suddenly inspired wish for 
 shade and dew and water, all this left them stolid. 
 To move them was required the feeling of spring, the 
 strongest, most complete and stirring impression which, 
 in our temperate climates, can be given by Nature : 
 
I20 EUPHORION. 
 
 the whole pleasurableness of warm air, clear moist 
 sky, the surprise of the shimmer of pale green, of the 
 yellowing blossom on tree tops, the first flicker of 
 faint shadow where all has been uniform, colourless, 
 shadeless ; the replacing of the long silence by the 
 endless twitter and trill of birds, endless in its way as 
 is the sea, twitter and trill on every side, depths and 
 depths of it, of every degree of distance and faintness, 
 a sea of bird song ; and along with this the sense of 
 infinite renovation to all the earth and to man's own 
 heart. Of all Nature's effects this one alone goes 
 sparkling to the head ; and it alone finds a response 
 in mediaeval poetry. Spring, spring, endless spring — 
 for three long centuries throughout the world a dreary 
 green monotony of spring all over France, Provence, 
 Italy, Spain, Germany, England ; spring, spring, 
 nothing but spring even in the mysterious countries 
 governed by the Grail King, by the Fairy Morgana, 
 by Queen Proserpine, by Prester John ; nay, in the 
 new Jerusalem, in the kingdom of Heaven itself, 
 nothing but spring ; till one longs for a bare twig, for 
 a yellow leaf, for a frozen gutter, as for a draught of 
 water in the desert. The green fields and meadows 
 enamelled with painted flowers, how one detests 
 them ! how one would rejoice to see them well 
 sprinkled with frost or burnt up to brown in the dry 
 days ! the birds, the birds which warble through every 
 sonnet, canzone, sirventes, glosa, dance lay, roundelay, 
 virelay, rondel, ballade, and whatsoever else it may 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 121 
 
 be called, — how one wishes them silent for ever, or 
 their twitter, the tarantarantandei of the eternal 
 German nightingale especially, drowned by a good 
 howling wind ! After any persistent study of medi- 
 aeval poetry, one's feeling towards spring is just similar 
 to that of the morbid creature in Schubert's " Miillerin," 
 who would not stir from home for the dreadful, 
 dreadful greenness, which he would fain bleach with 
 tears, all around : 
 
 Ich mochte ziehn in die Welt hinaus, hinaus in die weite Welt, 
 Wenn's nur so griin, so griin nicht war da draussen in Wald und 
 Feld. 
 
 Moreover this mediaeval spring is the spring neither 
 of the shepherd, nor of the farmer, nor of any man to 
 whom spring brings work and anxiety and hope of 
 gain ; it is a mere vague spring of gentle-folk, or at 
 all events of well-to-do burgesses, taking their pleasure 
 on the lawns of castle parks, or the green holiday 
 places close to the city, much as we see them in the 
 first part of " Faust ; " a sweet but monotonous charm 
 of grass, beneath green lime tree, or in the South the 
 elm or plane ; under which are seated the poet and the 
 fiddler, playing and singing for the young women, 
 their hair woven with chaplets of fresh flowers, 
 dancing upon the sward. And poet after poet, Pro- 
 vencal, Italian, and German, Nithart and Ulrich, and 
 even the austere singer of the Holy Grail, Wolfram, 
 pouring out verse after verse of the songs in praise 
 
122 EUPHORION. 
 
 of spring, which they make even as girls wind their 
 garlands : songs of quaint and graceful ever-changing 
 rythm, now slowly circling, now bounding along, now 
 stamping out the measure like the feet of the dancers, 
 now winding and turning as wind and twine their 
 arms in the long-linked mazes ; while the few and 
 ever-repeated ideas, the old, stale platitudes of praise 
 of woman, love pains, joys of dancing, pleasure of 
 spring (spring, always spring, eternal, everlasting 
 spring) seem languidly to follow the life and move- 
 ment of the mere metre. Poets, these German, Pro- 
 vengal, French, and early Italian lyrists, essentially (if 
 we venture to speak heresy) not of ideas or emotions, 
 but of metre, of rythm and rhyme ; with just the 
 minimum of necessary thought, perpetually presented 
 afresh just as the words, often and often repeated and 
 broken up and new combined, of a piece of music — 
 poetry which is in truth a sort of music, dance or 
 dirge or hymn music as the case may be, more than 
 anything else. 
 
 As it is in mediaeval poetry with the seasons, so it 
 is likewise with the country and its occupations : as 
 there is only spring, so there is only the forest. Of 
 the forest, mediaeval poetry has indeed much to say ; 
 more perhaps, and more familiar with its pleasures, 
 than Antiquity. There is the memorable forest where 
 the heroes of the Nibelungen go to hunt, followed 
 by their waggons of provisions and wine ; where 
 Siegfried overpowers the bear, and returns to his 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. rrj 
 
 laughing comrades with the huge thing chained to his 
 saddle ; where, in that clear space which we see so 
 distinctly, a lawn on to which the blue black firs are 
 encroaching, Siegfried stoops to drink of the spring 
 beneath the lime tree, and Hagen drives his boar- 
 spear straight through the Nibelung's back. There is 
 the thick wood, all a golden haze through the young 
 green, and with an atmosphere of birds' song, where 
 King Mark discovers Tristram and Iseult in the cave, 
 the deceitful sword between them, as Gottfried von 
 Strassburg relates with wonderful luscious charm. 
 The forest, also, more bleak and austere, where the 
 four outlawed sons of Aymon live upon roots and wild 
 animals, where they build their castle by the Meuse. 
 Further, and most lovely of all, the forest in which 
 Nicolette makes herself a hut of branches, bracken, 
 and flowers, through which the stars peep down on 
 her whiteness as she dreams of her Lord Aucassin. 
 The forest where Huon meets Oberon ; and Guy de 
 Lusignan, the good snake-lady ; and Parzival finds on 
 the snow the feathers and the drops of blood which 
 throw him into his long day-dream ; and Owen dis- 
 covers the tomb of Merlin ; the forest, in short, which 
 extends its interminable glades and serried masses of 
 trunks and arches of green from one end to the other 
 of medizeval poetry. It is very beautiful, this forest 
 of the Middle Ages ; but it is monotonous, melancholy; 
 and has a terrible eeriness in its endlessness. For 
 there is nothing else. There are no meadows where 
 
124 EUPI-IORION. 
 
 the cows He lazily, no fields where the red and purple 
 kerchiefs of the reapers overtop the high corn ; no 
 orchards, no hayfields ; nothing like those hill slopes 
 where the wild herbs encroach upon the vines, and the 
 goats of Corydon and Damoetas require to be kept 
 from mischief; where, a little lower down, the Athe- 
 nian shopkeeper of Aristophanes goes daily to look 
 whether yesterday's hard figs may not have ripened, or 
 thevinewreathspruned last weekhave grown too lushly. 
 Nor anything of the sort of those Umbrian meadows, 
 where Virgil himself will stop and watch the white 
 bullocks splashing slowly into the shallow, sedgy 
 Clitumnus ; still less like those hamlets in the corn- 
 fields through which Propertius would stroll, follow- 
 ing the jolting osier waggon, or the procession with 
 garlands and lights to Pales or to the ochre-stained 
 garden god. Nothing of all this : there are no culti- 
 vated spots in mediaeval poetry ; the city only, and 
 the castle, and the endless, all-encompassing forest 
 
 And to this narrowness of mediaeval notions of out- 
 door life, inherited together with mediaeval subjects 
 by the poets even of the sixteenth century, must be 
 referred the curious difference existing between the ro- 
 mance poets of antiquity, like Homer in the Odyssey, 
 and the romance poets — Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, 
 Spenser, Camoens — of modern times, in the matter of 
 — how shall I express it ?— the ideal life, the fortunate 
 realms, the " Kennaqwhere." In Homer, in all the 
 ancients, the ideal country is merely a more delightful 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 125 
 
 reality; and its inhabitants happier everyday men and 
 women ; in the poetry sprung from the Middle Ages it 
 is always a fairyland constructed by mechanicians and 
 architects. For, as we have seen, the Middle Ages 
 could bequeath to the sixteenth century no ideal of 
 peaceful outdoor enjoyment. Hence, in the poetry 
 of the sixteenth century, still permeated by mediaeval 
 traditions, an appalling artificiality of delightfulness. 
 Fallen'na, Alcina, Armida, Acrasia, all imitated from 
 the original Calypso, are not strong and splendid 
 god-women, living among the fields and orchards, 
 but dainty ladies hidden in elaborate gardens, all 
 bedizened with fashionable architecture : regular 
 palaces, pleasaunces, with uncomfortable edifices, 
 artificial waterfalls, labyrinths, rare and monstrous 
 plants, parrots, apes, giraffes ; childish splendours of 
 gardening and engineering and menageries, which we 
 meet already in " Ogier the Dane " and " Huon of Bor- 
 deaux," and which later poets epitomized out of the 
 endless descriptions of Colonna's " Hypnerotomachia 
 Poliphili," and the still more frightful inventories of 
 the Amadis romances. They are, each of them, a kind 
 of anticipated Marly, Versailles, Prince Elector's Frie- 
 drichsruhe or Nymphenburg, with clipped cypresses 
 and yews, doubtless, and (O Pales and Pan !) flower- 
 beds filled with coloured plaster and spas, and cas- 
 cades spirting out (thanks to fifty invisible pumps) 
 under your feet and over your head. All the 
 vineyards and cornfields have been swept away to 
 
126 EUPHORION. 
 
 make these solemn terraces and water-works ; all the 
 cottages which, with their little wooden shrine, their 
 humble enclosure of sunflowers and rosemary and fruit 
 trees, their buzzing hives and barking dogs, were loved 
 and sung even by town rakes like Catullus and smart 
 coffeehouse wits like Horace ; all these have been swept 
 away to be replaced by the carefully constructed 
 i^wire?) bowers, the aviaries, the porticoes, the frightful 
 circular edifice (tondo e il ricco edificio), a masterpiece 
 of Palladian stucco work, in which Armida and Rinaldo, 
 Acrasia and her Knight, drearily disport themselves. 
 What has become of Calypso's island ? of the orchards 
 of Alcinous ? What would the noble knights and ladies 
 of Ariosto and Spenser think of them ? What would 
 they say, these romantic, dainty creatures, were they 
 to meet Nausicaa with the washed linen piled on her 
 waggon ? Alas ! they would take her for a laundress. 
 For it is the terrible aristocratic idleness of the Middle 
 Ages, their dreary delicacy, which hampers Boiardo, 
 Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, even in the midst of their 
 most unblushing plagiarisms from Antiquity : their 
 heroes and heroines have been brought up, surrounded 
 by equerries and duennas, elegant, useless things, or 
 at best (the knights at least) good only for aristocratic 
 warfare. Plough or prune ! defile the knightly hands ! 
 wash or cook, ply the loom like Nausicaa, Calypso, or 
 Penelope ! The mere thought sends them very nearly 
 into a faint. No : the ladies of medieval romance 
 must sit quiet, idle; at most they may sing to the 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 127 
 
 lute ; and if they work with their hands, it must be 
 some dreary, strictly useless, piece of fancy work ; they 
 are hot-house plants, all these dainty folk. 
 
 Had they no eyes, then, these poets of the Middle 
 Ages, that they could see, among all the things of 
 Nature, only those few which had been seen by their 
 predecessors ? At first one feels tempted to think so, 
 till the recollection of many vivid touches in spring 
 and forest descriptions persuades one that, enormous 
 ' as was the sway of tradition among these men, they 
 were not all of them, nor always, repeating mere con- 
 ventional platitudes. This singular limitation in the 
 mediaeval perceptions of Nature — a limitation so im- 
 portant as almost to make it appear as if the Middle 
 Ages had not perceived Nature at all — is most fre- 
 quently attributed to the prevalence of asceticism, 
 which, according to some critics, made all mediaeval 
 men into so many repetitions of Bernard of Clairvaux, 
 of whom it is written that, being asked his opinion of 
 Lake Leman, he answered with surprise that, during 
 his journey from Geneva to the Rhone Valley, he had 
 remarked no lake whatever, so absorbed had he been 
 in spiritual meditations. But the predominance of 
 asceticism has been grossly exaggerated. It was a 
 state of moral tension which could not exist uninter- 
 ruptedly, and could exist only in the classes for whom 
 poetry was not written. The mischief done by asceti- 
 cism was the warping of the moral nature of men, not 
 of their esthetic feelings; it had no influence upon 
 
128 EUPH ORION. 
 
 the vast numbers, the men and women who relished 
 the profane and obscene fleshliness and buffoonery of 
 stage plays and fabliaux, and those who favoured the 
 delicate and exquisite immoralities of Courtly poetry. 
 Indeed, the presence of whole classes of writings, of 
 which such things as Boccaccio's Tales, the " Wife of 
 Bath," and Villon's " Ballades," on the one hand, and 
 the songs of the troubadours, the poem of Gottfried, 
 and the romance or rather novel of " Flamenca," are 
 respectively but the most conspicuous examples, ought 
 to prove only too clearly that the Middle Ages, for all 
 their asceticism, were both as gross and as aesthetic in 
 sensualism as antiquity had been before them. We 
 must, therefore, seek elsewhere than in asceticism, 
 necessarily limited, and excluding the poetry-reading 
 public, for an explanation of this peculiarity of mediaeval 
 poetry. And we shall find it, I think, in that which 
 during the Middle Ages could, because it was an all- 
 regulating social condition, really create universal 
 habits of thought and feeling, namely, feudalism. A 
 moral condition like asceticism must leave unbiassed 
 all such minds as are incapable of feeling it ; but a 
 social institution like feudalism walls in the life of 
 every individual, and forces his intellectual movements 
 into given paths ; nor is there any escape, excepting 
 in places where, as in Italy and in the free towns of 
 the North, the feudal conditions are wholly or partially 
 unknown. To feudalism, therefore, would I ascribe 
 this, which appears at first so purely aesthetic, as 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 129 
 
 opposed to social, a characteristic of the Middle Ages. 
 Ever since Schiller, in his " Gods of Greece," spoke for 
 the first time of undivinized Nature {die entgotterte 
 Natur), it has been the fashion among certain critics 
 to fall foul of Christianity for having robbed the fields 
 and woods of their gods, and reduced to mere manured 
 clods the things which had been held sacred by an- 
 tiquity. Desecrated in those long mediaeval centuries 
 Nature may truly have been, but not by the holy 
 water of Christian priests. Desecrated because out of 
 the fields and meadows was driven a divinity greater 
 than Pales or Vertumnus or mighty Pan, the divinity 
 called Man. For in the terrible times when civilization 
 was at its lowest, the things of the world had been 
 newly allotted ; and by this new allotment, man — the 
 man who thinks and loves and hopes and strives, man 
 who fights and sings — was shut out from the fields 
 and meadows, forbidden the labour, nay, almost the 
 sight, of the earth ; and to the tending of kine, and 
 sowing of crops, to all those occupations which an- 
 tiquity had associated with piety and righteousness, 
 had deemed worthy of the gods themselves, was 
 assigned, or rather condemned, a creature whom 
 every advancing year untaught to think or love, or 
 hope, or fight, or strive ; but taught most utterly to 
 suffer and to despair. For a man it is difficult to call 
 him, this mediaeval serf, this lump of earth detached 
 from the field and wrought into a semblance of man- 
 hood, merely that the soil of which it is part should 
 
 10 
 
I30 EUPHORION. 
 
 be delved and sown, and then manured with its carcass 
 or its blood ; nor as a man did the Middle Ages con- 
 ceive it. The serf was not even allowed human pro- 
 genitors : his foul breed had originated in a lewd 
 miracle ; his stupidity and ferocity were as those of 
 the beasts ; his cunning was demoniac ; he was born 
 under God's curse ; no words could paint his wicked- 
 ness, no persecutions could exceed his deserts ; the 
 whole world turned pale at his crime, for he it was, he 
 and not any human creature, who had nailed Christ 
 upon the cross. Like the hunger and sores of a fox 
 or a wolf, his hunger and his sores are forgotten, never 
 noticed. Were it not that legal and ecclesiastical 
 narratives of trials (not of feudal lords for crushing 
 and contaminating their peasants, but of peasants for 
 spitting out and trampling on the consecrated wafer) 
 give us a large amount of pedantically stated detail ; 
 tell us how misery begat vice, and filth and starvation 
 united families in complicated meshes of incest, taught 
 them depopulation as a virtue and a necessity ; and 
 how the despair of any joy in nature, of any mercy 
 from God, hounded men and women into the unspeak- 
 able orgies, the obscene parodies, of devil worship ; 
 were it not for these horrible shreds of judicial evidence 
 (as of tatters of clothes or blood-clotted hairs on the 
 shoes of a murderer) we should know little or nothing 
 of the life of the men and women who, in mediaeval 
 France and Germany, did the work which had been 
 taught by Hesiod and Virgil. About all these 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY, 131 
 
 tragedies the literature of the Middle Ages, ready to 
 show us town vice and town horror, dens of prostitu- 
 tion and creaking, overweighted gibbets, as in Villon's 
 poems, utters not a word. All that we can hear is 
 the many-throated yell of mediaeval poets, noble and 
 plebeian, French, Provencal, and German, against the 
 brutishness, the cunning, the cruelty, the hideousness, 
 the heresy of the serf, whose name becomes synony- 
 mous with every baseness ; which, in mock grammatical 
 style, is declined into every epithet of wickedness ; 
 whose punishment is prayed for from the God whom 
 he outrages by his very existence ; a hideous clamour 
 of indecent jibe, of brutal vituperation, of senseless 
 accusation, of every form of words which furious hatred 
 can assume, the echoes of which reached even countries 
 like Tuscany, where serfdom was well-nigh unknown, 
 and have reached even to us in the scraps of epigram still 
 bandied about by the townsfolk against the peasants, 
 nay, by the peasants against themselves.' A monstrous 
 
 ' The reader may oppose to my views the existence of the 
 class of poems, French, Latin, and German, of which the Pro- 
 vencal Pastourela is the original type, and which represent the 
 courting, by the poet, who is, of course, a knight, of a beautiful 
 country-girl, who is shown us as feeding her sheep or spinning 
 with her distaff. But these poems are, to the best of my know- 
 ledge, all of a single pattern, and extremely insincere and arti- 
 ficial in tone, that I feel inclined to class them with the pastorals 
 — Dresden china idylls by men who had never looked a live 
 peasant in the face — of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 
 as distant descendants from the pastoral poetry of antiquity, of 
 which the chivalric poets may have got some indirect notions 
 as they did of the antique epics. It is moreover extremely 
 
132 
 
 EUPHORION. 
 
 rag doll, dressed up in shreds of many-coloured villainy, 
 without a recognizable human feature, dragged in the 
 
 likely that these love poems, in which, successfully or unsuccess- 
 fully, the poet usually offers a bribe to the woman of low degree, 
 conceal beneath the conventional pastoral trappings the intrigues 
 of minnesingers and troubadours with women of the small 
 artizan or village proprietor class. The real peasant woman — 
 the female of the villain — could scarcely have been above the 
 notice of the noblemen's servants ; and, in countries where the 
 seigneurial rights were in vigour, would scarcely have been 
 offered presents and fine words. As regards the innumerable 
 poems against the peasantry, I may refer the reader to an 
 extremely curious publication of " Carmina Medii ^vi," recently 
 made by Sig. Francesco Novati, and which contains, besides a 
 selection of specimens, a list of references on the subject of 
 poems " De Natura Rusticorum." One of the satirical de- 
 clensions runs as follows : 
 
 
 Singidariter. 
 
 
 Pluraliter. 
 
 Nom. 
 
 Hie villanus. 
 
 Nom 
 
 Hi maledicti. 
 
 Gen. 
 
 Huius rustici. 
 
 Gen. 
 
 Horum tristium. 
 
 Dat. 
 
 Huic tferfero (sic). 
 
 Dat. 
 
 His mendacibus. 
 
 Ace. 
 
 Hunc furem. 
 
 Ace. 
 
 Hos nequissimos. 
 
 Voc. 
 
 latro. 
 
 Voc. 
 
 pessimi. 
 
 AM. 
 
 Ab hoc depredatore. 
 
 AM. 
 
 Ab his infidelibus. 
 
 The accusation of heresy and of crucifying Christ is evidently 
 due to the devil-worship prevalent among the serfs, and is thus 
 alluded to in a north Italian poem, probably borrowed from the 
 French : 
 
 Christo fo da villan crucifico, 
 
 E stagom sempre in pioza, in vento, e in neve, 
 
 Perchfe havom fato cosi gran peccci. 
 
 This feeling is exactly analogous to that existing nowadays in 
 semi-barbarous countries against the Jews. The idle hated the 
 industrious, and hated them all the more when their industry 
 brought them any profit. 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 133 
 
 mud, pilloried with unspeakable ordure, paraded in 
 mock triumph like a King of Fools, and burnt in the 
 market-place like Antichrist, such is the image which 
 mediseval poetry has left us of the creature who was 
 once the pious rustic, the innocent god-beloved' 
 husbandman, on whose threshold justice stopped a 
 while when she fled from the towns of Antiquity. 
 
 Yet not so ; I can recall one, though only one,, 
 occasion in which mediaeval literature shows us the 
 serf. The place is surely the most unexpected, the 
 charming thirteenth century tale of "Aucassin et 
 Nicolette." In his beautiful essay upon that story, Mr. 
 Pater has deliberately omitted this episode, which is 
 indeed like a spot of blood-stained mud upon some 
 perfect tissue of silver flowers on silver ground. It is 
 a piece of cruellest realism, because quite quiet and 
 unforced, in the midst of a kind of fairy-land idyl of 
 almost childish love, the love of the beautiful son of 
 the lord of Beaucaire for a beautiful Saracen slave 
 girl. For, although Aucassin and Nicolette are often 
 separated, and always disconsolate — she in her wonder- 
 fully frescoed vaulted room, he in his town prison — 
 there is always surrounding them a sort of fairy land 
 of trees and flowers, a constant song of birds ; 
 although they wander through the woods and tear 
 their delicate skin, and catch their hair in brambles 
 and briars, we have always the sense of the daisies 
 bending beneath their tread, of the green leaves 
 rustling aside from their heads covered with hair 
 
134 EVPHORION. 
 
 " blond et menu crespele," Their very hardships are 
 lovely, like the hut of flowering branches and grasses 
 which Nicolette builds for herself, and through whose 
 fissures the moonlight shines and the little stars 
 twinkle : so much so, that when they weep, these two 
 beautiful and dainty creatures, we listen as if to sing- 
 ing, and with no more sense of grief than at some 
 pathetic little snatch of melody. And in the midst 
 of this idyl of lovely things ; in the midst of all these 
 delicate patternings, whose minuteness and faint tint 
 merge into one vague pleasurable impression ; stands 
 out, unintentionally placed there by the author, little 
 aware of its terrible tragic realism, the episode which 
 I am going to translate. 
 
 " Thus Aucassin wandered all day through the 
 forest, without hearing any news of his sweet love ; 
 and when he saw that dusk was spreading, he began 
 bitterly to weep. As he was riding along an old road, 
 where weeds and grass grew thick and high, he 
 suddenly saw before him, in the middle of this road, a 
 man such as I am going to describe to you. He was 
 tall, ugly ; nay, hideous quite marvellously. His face 
 was blacker than smoked meat, and so wide, that 
 there was a good palm's distance between his eyes ; 
 his cheeks were huge, his nostrils also, with a very big 
 flat nose ; thick lips as red as embers, and long teeth 
 yellow and smoke colour. He wore leathern shoes 
 and gaiters, kept up with string at the knees ; on his 
 back was a parti-coloured coat. He was leaning 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 135 
 
 upon a stout bludgeon. Aucassin was startled and 
 fearful, and said : 
 
 " ' Fair brother ( " beau frere " — a greeting corre- 
 sponding to the modern " bon homme " ) ! God be with 
 thee ! ' 
 
 " ' God bless you ! ' answered the man. 
 
 " ' What dost thou here 'i ' asked Aucassin. 
 
 " ' What is that to you .' ' answered the man. 
 
 " ' I ask thee from no evil motive,' 
 
 " ' Then tell me why,' said the man, ' you yourself 
 are weeping with such grief.? Truly, were I a rich 
 man like you, nothing in the world should make me 
 weep.' 
 
 " ' And how dost thou know me ? ' 
 
 " ' I know you to be Aucassin, the son of the Count ; 
 and if you will tell me why you weep, I will tell you 
 why I am here.' 
 
 " ' I will tell thee willingly,' answered Aucassin. 
 ' This morning I came to hunt in the forest ; I had 
 a white greyhound, the fairest in the world ; I have 
 lost him — that is why I am weeping.' 
 
 " ' What ! ' cried the man ; ' it is for a stinking hound 
 that you waste the tears of your body ? Woe to those 
 who shall pity you ; you, the richest man of this 
 country. If your father wanted fifteen or twenty 
 white greyhounds, he could get them. I am weeping 
 and mourning for more serious matters.' 
 
 " ' And what are these ? ' 
 
 " ' I will tell you. I was hired to a rich farmer to 
 
136 EUPHORION. 
 
 drive his plough, dragged by four bullocks. Three 
 days ago, I lost a red bullock, the best of the four. I 
 left the plough, and sought the red bullock on all 
 sides, but could not find him. For three days I have 
 neither eaten nor drunk, and have been wandering 
 thus. I have been afraid of going to the town, 
 where they would put me in jail, because I have not 
 wherewith to pay for the bullock. All I possess are 
 the clothes on my back. I have a mother ; and the 
 poor woman had nothing more valuable than me ; 
 since she had only an old smock wherewith to cover 
 her poor old limbs. They have torn the smock off 
 her back, and now she has to lie on the straw. It is 
 about her that I am afflicted more than about myself, 
 because, as to me, I may get some money some day 
 or other, and as to the red bullock, he may be paid 
 for when he may. And I should never weep for such 
 a trifle as that. Ah ! woe betide those who shall 
 make sorrow with you ! ' " 
 
 Inserted merely to give occasion to show Aucassin's 
 good heart in paying the twenty sols for the man's red 
 bullock ; perhaps for no reason at all, but certainly 
 with no idea of making the lover's misery seem 
 by comparison trifling — there are, nevertheless, few 
 things in literature more striking than the meeting in 
 the wood of the daintily nurtured boy, weeping over 
 the girl whom he loves with almost childish love of 
 the fancy ; and of that ragged, tattered, hideous serf, 
 at whose very aspect the Bel Aucassin stops in awe 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 137 
 
 and terror. And the attitude is grand of tliis unfor- 
 tunate creature, who neither begs nor threatens, 
 scarcely complains, and not at all for himself; but 
 merely tells his sordid misfortune with calm resigna- 
 tion, as if used to such everyday miseries, roused to 
 indignation only at the sight of the tears which the 
 fine-bred youth is shedding. We feel the dreadful 
 solemnity of the man's words ; of the reproach thus 
 thrown by the long-suffering serf, accustomed to mis- 
 fortunes as the lean ox is to blows, to that delicate 
 thing weeping for his lady love, for the lady of his 
 fancy. It is the one occasion upon which that deli- 
 cate and fantastic mediseval love poetry, that fanciful, 
 wistful stripling King Love of the Middle Ages, in 
 which he keeps high court, and through which he rides 
 in triumphal procession, laughing and fainting by 
 turns with all his dapper artificiality of woes — is 
 confronted with th,e sordid reality, the tragic imper- 
 sonation of all the dumb miseries, the lives and 
 loves, crushed and defiled unnoticed, of the peasantry 
 of those days. Yes, while they sing — Provencals, 
 minnesingers, Sicilians, sing of their earthly lady 
 and of their paramour in heaven — the hideous pea- 
 sant, whose naked granny is starving on the straw, 
 looks on with dull and tearless eyes ; crying out 
 to posterity, as the serf cries to Aucassin : " Woe to 
 those who shall sorrow at the tears of such as these." 
 
138 EUPHORIC N, 
 
 II. 
 
 But meanwhile, during those centuries which lie 
 between the dark ages and modern times, the Middle 
 Ages (inasmuch as they mean not a mere chronolo- 
 gical period, but a definite social and mental condition) 
 fortunately did not exist everywhere. Had they ex- 
 isted, it is almost impossible to understand how they 
 would ever throughout Europe have come to an end ; 
 for as the favourite proverb of Catharine of Siena has 
 it, one dead man cannot bury another dead man ; and 
 the Middle Ages, after this tedious dying of the fif- 
 teenth century, required to be shovelled into the tomb, 
 nay, rather, given the final stroke, by the Renaissance. 
 This that we foolishly call — giving a quite incorrect 
 notion of sudden and miraculous birth — the Renaissance, 
 and limit to the time of the revival of Greek humani- 
 ties, really existed, as I have repeatedly suggested, 
 wherever, during the mediseval centuries, the civiliza- 
 tion of which the twelfth and thirteenth centuries 
 were big was not, by the pressure of feudalism and 
 monasticism, made to be abortive or stillborn. Low 
 as was Italy at the very close of the dark ages, and 
 much as she borrowed for a long while from the more 
 precocious northern nations, especially France and 
 Provence ; Italy had, nevertheless, an enormous ad- 
 vantage in the fact that her populations were not 
 divided into victor and vanquished, and that the old 
 Latin institutions of town and country were never 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 139 
 
 replaced, except in certain northern and southernmost 
 districts, by feudal arrangements. The very first 
 thing which strikes us in the obscure Italian common- 
 wealths of early times, is that in these resuscitated 
 relics of Roman or Etruscan towns there is no feeling 
 of feudal superiority and inferiority ; that there is no 
 lord, and consequently no serf Nor is this the case 
 merely within the city walls. The never sufficiently 
 appreciated difierence between the Italian free burghs 
 and those of Germany, Flanders, and Provence, is 
 that the citizens depend only in the remotest and most 
 purely fictitious way upon any kind of suzerain ; and 
 moreover that the country, instead of belonging to 
 feudal nobles, belongs every day more and more com- 
 pletely to the burghers. The peasant is not a serf, but 
 one of three things — a hired labourer, a possessor of 
 property, or a farmer, liable to no taxes, paying no 
 rent, and only sharing with the proprietor the produce 
 of the land. By this latter system, existing, then as 
 now, throughout Tuscany, the peasantry was an inde- 
 pendent and well-to-do class. The land owned by 
 one man (who, in the commonwealths, was usually a 
 shopkeeper or manufacturer in the town) was divided 
 into farms small enough to be cultivated — vines, 
 olives, corn, and fruit — by one family of peasants, 
 helped perhaps by a paid labourer. The thriftier and 
 less scrupulous peasants could, in good seasons, put 
 by sufficient profit from their share of the produce to 
 suffice after some years, and with the addition of what 
 
I40 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 the women might make by washing, spinning, weav- 
 ing, plaiting straw hats (an accomplishment greatly 
 insisted upon by Lorenzo dei Medici), and so forth, 
 to purchase some small strip of land of their own. 
 Hence, a class of farmers at once living on another 
 man's land and sharing its produce with him, and 
 cultivating and paying taxes upon land belonging to 
 themselves. 
 
 Of these Tuscan peasants we get occasional glimpses 
 in the mediaeval Italian novelists — a well-to-do set of 
 people, in constant communication with the town 
 where they sell their corn, oil, vegetables, and wine, 
 and easily getting confused with the lower class of 
 artizans with whom they doubtless largely intermarried. 
 These peasants whom we see in tidy kilted tunics and 
 leathern gaiters, driving their barrel-laden bullock 
 carts, or riding their mules up to the red city gates in 
 many a Florentine and Sienese painting of the four- 
 teenth and fifteenth centuries, were in many respects 
 better off than the small artizans of the city, heaped 
 up in squalid houses, and oppressed by the greater 
 and smaller guilds. Agnolo Pandolfini, teaching 
 thrift to his sons in Alberti's charming treatise on 
 " The Government of the Family," frequently groans 
 over the insolence, the astuteness of the peasantry ; 
 and indeed seems to consider that it is impossible 
 to cope with them — a conclusion which would have 
 greatly astounded the bailiffs of the feudal proprietors 
 in the Two Sicilies and beyond the Alps. Indeed it 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 141 
 
 is impossible to conceive a stranger contrast than that 
 between the northern peasant, the starved and stunted 
 serf, whom Holbein drew, driving his lean horses 
 across the hard furrow, with compassionate Death 
 helping along the plough ; and the Tuscan farmer, 
 as shown us by Lorenzo dei Medici — the young fellow 
 who, while not above minding his cows or hoeing up 
 his field, goes into Florence once a week, offers his 
 sweetheart presents of coral necklaces, silk staylaces, 
 and paint for her cheeks and eyelashes ; who promises, 
 to please her, to have his hair frizzled (as only the 
 youths of the Renaissance knew how to be frizzled 
 and fuzzed) by the barber, and even dimly hints that 
 some day he may appear in silken jerkin and tight 
 hose, like a well-to-do burgess. No greater contrast 
 perhaps, unless indeed we should compare his sweet- 
 heart, Lorenzo's beautiful Nenciozza, with her box 
 full of jewels, her Sunday garb of damask kirtle and 
 gold-worked bodice, her almost queenly ways towards 
 her adorers, with the wretched creature, not a woman, 
 but a mere female animal, cowering among her starv- 
 ing children in her mud cottage, and looking forward, 
 in dull lethargy, after the morning full of outrages at 
 the castle, to the night, the night on the heath, lit with 
 mysterious flickers, to the horrible joys of the sacri- 
 fice which the oppressed brings to the dethroned, the 
 serf to Satan ; when, in short, we compare the peasant 
 woman described by Lorenzo with the female serf 
 resuscitated by the genius of Michelet ; nay, more 
 
142 EUPHORION. 
 
 poignantstill.with that mother in the "Dance of Death," 
 seated on the mud flood of the broken-roofed, dis- 
 mantled hovel, stewing something on a fire of twigs, 
 and stretching out vain arms to her poor tattered baby 
 boy, whom, with the good-humoured tripping step of 
 an old nurse, the kindly skeleton is leading away out 
 of this cruel world. 
 
 Such were the conditions of the peasantry of the 
 great Italian commonwealths. They were, as much 
 as the northern serfs were the reverse, creatures 
 pleasant to deal with, pleasant to watch. 
 
 The upper classes, on the other hand, differed quite 
 as much from the upper classes of feudal countries. 
 They were, be it remembered, men of business, con- 
 stantly in contact with the working classes ; Albizis, 
 Strozzis, Pandolfinis, Guinigis, Tolomeis, no matter 
 what their name, these men who built palaces and 
 churches which outdid the magnificence of northern 
 princes, and who might, at any moment, be sent 
 ambassadors from Florence, Lucca, or Siena, to the 
 French or English kings, to the Emperor or the Pope, 
 spent a large portion of their days at their office desk, 
 among the bales of their warehouses, behind the 
 counter of their shops ; they wore the same dress, had 
 the same habits, spoke the same dialect, as the weavers 
 and dyers, the carriers and porters whom they em- 
 ployed, and whose sons might, by talent and industry, 
 amass a fortune, build palaces, and go ambassadors to 
 kings in their turn. When, therefore, these merchant 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 143 
 
 nobles turned to the country for rest and relief from 
 their cares, it was not to the country as it existed for 
 the feudal noble of the North. Boar and stag hunts 
 had no attraction for quiet men of business ; forests 
 stocked with wild beasts where vineyard and cornfield 
 might have extended, would have seemed to them the 
 very height of wastefulness, discomfort, and ugliness. 
 Pacific and businesslike, they merely transferred to 
 the country the habits of thought and of life which 
 had arisen in the city. Not for them any imitation 
 of the feudal castle, turreted and moated, cut up into 
 dark irregular rooms and yards, filled with noisy re- 
 tainers and stinking hounds. On some gentle hillside 
 a well-planned palace, its rooms spacious and lofty, 
 and sparely windowed for coolness in summer ; with 
 a neat cloistered court in the centre, ventilating the 
 whole house, and affording a cool place, full of scent 
 of flowers and sound of fountains for the burning 
 afternoons ; a belvedere tower also, on which to seek 
 a breeze on stifling nights, when the very stars seem 
 faint for heat, and the dim plumy heads of cypress 
 and poplar are motionless against the misty blue sky. 
 In front a broad terrace, whence to look down towards 
 the beloved city, a vague fog of roofs in the distance ; 
 on the side and behind, elaborate garden walks walled 
 with high walls of box and oak and laurel, in which 
 stand statues in green niches ; gardens with little 
 channels to bring water, even during droughts, to the 
 myrtles, the roses, the stocks and clove pinks, over 
 
14+ E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 which bend with blossoms brilliant against the pale 
 blue sky the rose-flowered oleander, the scarlet- 
 flowered pomegranate ; also aviaries and cages full of 
 odd and harmless creatures, ferrets, guinea pigs, por- 
 cupines, squirrels, and monkeys ; arbours where wife, 
 daughters, and daughters-in-law may sew and make 
 music ; and neat lawns where the young men may 
 play at quoits, football, or swordsticks and bucklers ; 
 and then, sweeping all round the house and gardens 
 and terraces an undulating expanse of field and 
 orchard, smoke-tinted with olive, bright green in spring 
 with budding crops, russet in autumn with sere vines ; 
 and from which, in the burning noon, rises the in- 
 cessant sawing noise of the cicalas, and ever and anon 
 the high, nasal, melancholy chant of the peasant, lying 
 in the shade of barn door or fig tree till the sun shall 
 sink and he can return to his labour. If the house in 
 town, with its spacious store-rooms, its carved chapel, 
 and painted banqueting hall, large enough to hold 
 sons' children and brothers' wives and grandchildren, 
 and a whole host of poor relatives, whom the wise 
 father (as Pandolfini teaches) employs rather than 
 strangers for his clerks and overseers — if this town 
 house was the pride of the Italian burgess ; the villa, 
 with its farms and orchards, was the real joy, the 
 holiday paradise of the over-worked man. To read in 
 the cool house, with cicala's buzz and fountain plash 
 all round, the Greek and Latin authors ; to discuss 
 them with learned men ; to watch the games of the 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 145 
 
 youths and the children, this was the reward for years 
 of labour and intelligence ; but sweeter than all this 
 (how we feel it in Agnolo Pandolfini's speeches !) were 
 those occupations which the city could not give : the 
 buying and selling of plants, grain, and kine, the 
 meddling with new grafted trees, the mending of 
 spaliers, the straightening of fences, the going round 
 (with the self-importance and impatience of a cockney) 
 to see what flowers had opened, what fruit had ripened 
 over-night ; to walk through the oliveyards, among 
 the vines ; to pry into stable, pig-stye, and roosting- 
 place, taking up handfuls of drying grain, breaking 
 twigs of olives, to see how things were doing ; and to 
 have long conversations with the peasants, shrewd 
 enough to affect earnest attention when the master 
 was pleased to vent his town-acquired knowledge of 
 agriculture and gardening. Sweet also, doubtless, for 
 younger folk, or such perhaps as were fonder of 
 teaching new lute tunes to the girls than of examining 
 into cabbages, and who read Dante and Boccaccio 
 more frequently than Cicero or Sallust — ^though sweet 
 perhaps only as a vague concomitant of their lazy 
 pleasures, to listen to those songs of the peasantry 
 rising from the fields below, while lying perhaps on 
 one's back in the shaded grass, watching the pigeons 
 whirring about the belvedere tower. Vaguely pleasant 
 this also, doubtless ; but for a long while only vaguely. 
 For, during more than two centuries, the burgesses of 
 Italy were held enthralled by the Courtly poets of 
 
 II 
 
146 EVPHORION. 
 
 other countries ; listening to, and reading, at first, 
 only Provengals and Sicilians, or Italians, like Sor- 
 dello, pretending to be of Provence or Sicily ; and 
 even later, enduring in their own poets, their own 
 Guittones, Cavalcantis, Cinos, Guinicellis, nay even in 
 Dante and Petrarch's lyrics, only the repetition (how- 
 ever vivified by genius) of the old common-places of 
 Courtly love, and artificial spring, of the poetry of 
 feudal nations. But the time came when not only 
 Provencal and Sicilian, but even Tuscan, poetry was 
 neglected, when the revival of Greek and Latin letters 
 made it impossible to rewrite the threadbare medieval 
 prettinesses, or even to write in earnest in the modern 
 tongue, so stiff and thin (as it seemed) and like some 
 grotesque painted saint, when compared with the 
 splendidly fleshed antique languages, turning and 
 twining in graceful or solemn involutions, as of a 
 Pyrrhic or a maidens' dance. And it was during this 
 period, from Petrarch to Politian, that, as philologists 
 have now proved beyond dispute, the once fashionable 
 chivalric romance, and the poetry of the Provengal, 
 and Sicilian school, cast off by the upper classes, was 
 gradually picked up by the lower and especially by 
 the rural classes. Vagabond ballad-singers and story- 
 tellers — creatures who wander from house to house, 
 mending broken pottery, collecting rags or selling 
 small pedlar's wares — were the old clothesmen who 
 carried about these bits of tarnished poetic finery. 
 The people of the town, constantly in presence of the 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 147 
 
 upper classes, and therefore sooner or later aware of 
 what was or was not in fashion, did not care long for 
 the sentimental daintiness of mediaeval poetry ; be- 
 sides, satire and scurrility are as inevitable in a town 
 as are dogs in gutters and cats on roofs ; and the 
 townsfolk soon set their own buffoonish or satirical 
 ideas to whatever remained of the music of mediaeval 
 poetry: already early in the fifteenth century the 
 sonnet had become for the Florentine artizans a mere 
 scurrilous epigram. It was different in the country. 
 The peasant, at least the Tuscan peasant, is eminently 
 idealistic and romantic in his literary tastes ; it may 
 be that he has not the intellectual life required for any 
 utterances or forms of his own, and that he conse- 
 quently accepts poetry as a ready-made ornament, 
 something pretty and exotic, which is valued in pro- 
 portion to its prettiness and rarity. Be the reason 
 whatever it may, certain it is that nothing can be too 
 artificial or high-flown to please the Italian peasantry : 
 its tales are all of kings, princesses, fairies, knights, 
 winged horses, marvellous jewels, and so forth ; its 
 songs are almost without exception about love, con- 
 stancy, moon, stars, flowers. Such things have not 
 been degraded by familiarity and parody as in the 
 town ; they retain for the country folk the vague 
 charm (like that of music, automatic and indepen- 
 dent of thorough comprehension) of belonging to a 
 sphere of the marvellous ; hence they are repeated and 
 repeated with almost religious servility, as any one 
 
148 EUPHORION. 
 
 may observe who will listen to the stories and verses 
 told and sung even nowadays in the Tuscan country, 
 ■or who will glance over the splendid collections of 
 folklore made in the last twenty years. Such things 
 must suffer alteration from people who can neither 
 read nor write, and who cannot be expected to 
 remember very clearly details which, in many cases, 
 must have for them only the vaguest meaning. The 
 stories split in process of telling and re-telling, and 
 are completed with bits of other stories ; details are 
 forgotten and have to be replaced ; the same happens 
 with poetry : songs easily get jumbled together, their 
 meaning is partially obliterated, and has to be restored ; 
 or, again, an attempt is made by bold men to adapt 
 some seemingly adaptable old song to a new occasion ; 
 an old love ditty seems fit to sing to a new sweetheart 
 — names, circumstances, and details require arranging 
 for this purpose ; and hence more alterations. Now, 
 however much a peasant may enjoy the confused 
 splendours of Court life and of Courtly love, he cannot, 
 with the best will in the world, restore their details or 
 colouring if they happen to become obliterated. If 
 he chance to forget that when the princess first met 
 the wizard she was riding forth on a snow-white jennet 
 with a falcon on her glove, there is nothing to prevent 
 his describing her as walking through the meadow in 
 charge of a flock of geese ; and similarly, should he 
 happen to forget that the Courtly lover compares the 
 skin of his mistress to ivory and her eyes to Cupid's 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 149 
 
 torches, he is quite capable of filling up the gap by 
 saying that the girl is as white as a turnip and as 
 bright-eyed as a ferret. As with details of description 
 and metaphors, so also with the emotional and social 
 parts of the business. The peasant has not been 
 brought up in the idea that the way to gain a woman's 
 affection is to stick her glove on a helmet and perform 
 deeds of prowess closely resembling those of Don 
 Quixote in the Sierra Morena ; so he attempts to 
 engratiate himself by offering her presents of straw- 
 berries, figs, buttons, hooks-and-eyes, and similar 
 desirable things. Again, were the peasant to pay 
 attentions to a married woman, he would merely get 
 (what noble husbands were too well bred to dream of) 
 a sound horsewhipping, or perhaps even a sharp knife 
 thrust in his stomach ; so that he takes good care to 
 address his love songs only to marriageable young 
 women. In this way, without any deliberate attempt 
 at originality, the old Courtly poetry becomes, when 
 once removed to the country, thoroughly patched and 
 seamed with rustic ideas, feelings, and images ; while 
 never ceasing to be, in its general stuff and shape, of 
 a kind such as only professional poets of the upper 
 classes can produce. The Sicilian lyrics collected by 
 Signor Pitre, still more the Tuscan poems of Tigri's 
 charming volume, are, therefore, a curious mixture of 
 highflown sentiment, dainty imagery, and most artistic 
 arrangements of metre and diction (especially in the 
 rispetto, where metrical involution is accompanied by 
 
ijo EUPHORION. 
 
 logical involution of the most refined medieval sort), 
 with hopes and complaints such as only a farmer could 
 frame, with similes and descriptions such as only the 
 business of the field, vineyard, and dairy could suggest. 
 A mixture, but not a jumble. For as in this slow 
 process of assimilation and alteration only that was 
 remembered by the peasant which the peasant could 
 understand and sympathize with ; and only that was 
 welded into the once Courtly poetry which was suffi- 
 ciently refined to please the people who delighted in 
 the exotic refinement — as, in short, everything came 
 about perfectly simply and unconsciously, there 
 resulted what in good sooth may be considered as a 
 perfectly substantive and independent form of art, 
 with beauties and refinements of its own. And, 
 indeed, it appears to me that one might say, without 
 too much paradox, that in these peasant songs only 
 does the poetry of minnesingers and troubadours 
 become thoroughly enjoyable ; that only when the 
 conventionality of feeling and imagery is corrected by 
 the freshness, the straightforwardness, nay, even the 
 grotesqueness of rural likings, dislikings, and com- 
 parisons, can the dainty beauty of mediaeval Courtly 
 poetry ever really satisfy our wishes. Comparing 
 together Tigri's collection of Tuscan folk poetry with 
 any similar anthology that might be made of middle 
 high German and Provengal, and early Italian lyrics, 
 I feel that the adoption of Courtly mediaeval poetry 
 by the Italian peasantry of the Renaissance can be 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 151 
 
 compared more significantly than at first seemed with 
 the adoption of a once fashionable garb by country 
 folk. The peasant pulled about this Courtly lyrism, 
 oppressively tight in its conventional fit and starched 
 with elaborate rhetorical embroideries; turned it inside 
 out, twisted a bit here, a bit there, ripped open seam 
 after seam, patched and repatched with stuffs and 
 stitches of its own ; and then wore the whole thing as 
 it had never been intended to be worn ; until this 
 cast-off poetic apparel, stretched on the freer moral 
 limbs of natural folk, faded and stained by weather 
 and earth into new and richer tints, had lost all its 
 original fashionable stiffness, and crudeness of colour, 
 and niminy-piminy fit, and had acquired instead I 
 know not what grace of unexpectedness, picturesque- 
 ness, and ease.' 
 
 ' Any one who is sceptical of the Courtly derivation of the 
 Italian popular song may, besides consulting the admirable 
 book of Prof. d'Ancona, compare with the contents of Tigri's 
 famous "Canti popolari Toscani," the following scraps of 
 Sicilian and early Italian lyrics : — 
 
 The Emperor Frederick II. writes: "Rosa di maggio — 
 Colorita e fresca — Occhi hai fini — E non rifini — Di gioie dare — • 
 Lo tuo parlare — La gente innamora — Castella ed altura." 
 
 Jacopo Pugliesi says of his lady : " Chiarita in viso piu che 
 argento — Donami allegrezze — Ben eo son morto — E mal colto — 
 Se non mi dai conforto — Fior delP orto." 
 
 Inghilfredi Siciliano : " Gesu Cristo ideolla in paradiso — 
 E poi la fece angelo incarnando — Gioia aggio preso di giglio 
 novello — E vago, che sormonta ogni ricchezza — Sua dottrina 
 m' affrezza — Cosi mi coglie e olezza — Come pantera le bestie 
 selvagge." 
 
 Jacopo da Lentino : " E di virtute tutte 1' altre avanza — E 
 
152 EUPHORION. 
 
 Well ; for many a year did the song of the peasants 
 
 rise up from the fields and oliveyards unnoticed by 
 
 the good townsfolk taking their holiday at the Tuscan 
 
 villa ; but one day, somewhere in the third quarter 
 
 of the fifteenth century, the long-drawn chant of the 
 
 rispetto, telling perhaps how the singer's sweetheart 
 
 was beautiful as the star Diana, so beautiful as a baby 
 
 that the Pope christened her with his own hands ; the 
 
 quavering nasal cadence of the stornello saying by 
 
 chance — 
 
 Flower of the Palm, &c., 
 
 did at last waken the attention of one lettered man, 
 a man of curious and somewhat misshapen body and 
 mind, of features satyr-like in ugliness, yet moody 
 and mystical in their very earthiness ; a man essen- 
 tially of the senses, yet imperfect in them, without 
 taste or smell, and, over and above, with a marvellously 
 supple intellect ; weak and coarse and idealistic ; and 
 at once feebly the slave of his times, and so boldly, 
 spontaneously innovating as to be quite unconscious 
 
 somigliante a Stella h di splendore — CoUa sua conta {cf. Pro- 
 vencal coindeta, gentille) e gaia innamoranza — E piu bella h 
 che rosa e che fiore — Cristo le doni vita ed allegranza — E si la 
 cresca in gran pregio ed onore." 
 
 I must finish off what might be a much longer collection 
 with a charming little scrap, quite in rispetto tone, by 
 Guinicelli : " Vedut 'ho la lucente Stella diana — Ch' appare anzi 
 che '1 giomo renda albore — Ch' a preso forma di figura umana — 
 Sovr* ogni altra mi par che dia splendore — Viso di neve colorato 
 in grana — Occhi lucenti, gai e pien d'amore — Non credo che 
 nel mondo sia cristiana — Si plena di beltate e di valore." 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 153 
 
 of innovation : the mixed nature, or rather the nature 
 in many heterogeneous bits, of the man of letters who 
 is artistic almost to the point of being an actor, natural 
 in every style because morally connected with no 
 style at all. The man was Lorenzo di Piero dei Medici, 
 for whom posterity has exclusively reserved the civic 
 title of all his family and similar town despots, calling 
 him the Magnificent. It is the fashion at present to 
 give Lorenzo only the leavings, as it were, of our 
 admiration for the weaker, less original, nay, consider- 
 ably enervate, humanistic exquisite Politian ; and 
 this absurd injustice appears to me to show that the 
 very essence and excellence of Lorenzo is not now- 
 adays perceived. The Renaissance produced several 
 versatile and charming poets ; and, in the midst of 
 classic imitation, one or two, of whom one is certainly 
 Boiardo, of real freshness and raciness. But of this 
 new element in the Renaissance, this element which 
 is neither imitation of antiquity nor revival of mediaeval, 
 which is original, vital, fruitful, in short, modern, 
 Lorenzo is the most versatile example. He is new. 
 Renaissance, modern ; not merely in this or that 
 quality, he is so all round. And this in the first place 
 because he is so completely the man of impressions ; 
 the man not uttering wonderful things, nor elaborat- 
 ing exquisite ones, but artistically embodying with 
 marvellous versatility whatever strikes his fancy and 
 feeling — fancy and feeling which are as new as the 
 untouched sculptor's clay. And this extraordinary 
 
154 M'UPHORION. 
 
 temper of art for art's sake, or rather effect for effect 
 and form's sake, was possible in that day only in 
 a man equally without strong passions, and without 
 strong convictions. He is naturally attracted most by 
 what is most opposed to the academic, Virgilian, 
 Horatian, or Petrarchesque aestheticism of his contem- 
 poraries ; he is essentially a realist, and all the effects 
 which he produces, all the beauty, charm, or beastliness 
 of his work, corresponds to beauty, charm, or beastli- 
 ness in the reality of things. If Lorenzo writes at one 
 moment carnival songs of ribald dirtiness, at the 
 next hymns full of holy solemnity ; it is, I think, 
 merely because this versatile artist takes pleasure in 
 trying whether his face may not be painted into grin- 
 ning drunkenness, and then elongated and whitened 
 into ascetic gentleness. Instead of seeking, like most 
 of his contemporaries, to be Greek, Roman, or medi- 
 aeval by turns, he preferred trying on all the various 
 tricks of thought and feeling which he remarked 
 among his unlettered townsfolk. His realism naturally 
 drew him towards the classes where realism can deal 
 with the real ; and not the affected, the self-conscious, 
 the deliberately attempted. Hence those wonderful 
 little poems, the carnival songs of the gold-thread 
 spinners, of the pastry-cooks, of the shoemakers, 
 which give us so completely, so gracefully, the whole 
 appearance, work, manner, gesture of the people ; 
 give them to us with ease and rapidity so perfect, that 
 we scarcely know how they are given ; that we almost 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 155 
 
 forget verses and song, and actually see the pulling, 
 twisting, and cutting of the gold-threads ; that we see 
 and hear the shoemaker's hands smoothing down the 
 leather of the shoe in his hand, to convince his cus- 
 tomers of its pliability ; that we see and smell the 
 dear little pale yellow pasties nestling in the neat 
 white baskets, after having stood by and watched the 
 dough being kneaded, chopped, and floured over, the 
 iron plates heated in the oven, the soft, half-baked 
 paste twisted and bent ; nay, we feel almost as if we 
 had eaten of them, those excellent things which seem 
 such big mouthfuls but are squeezed and crunched at 
 one go like nothing at all. Hence, I mean from 
 this love of watching effects and reproducing them, 
 originated also the masterpiece of Lorenzo dei Medici, 
 the " Nencia da Barberino." 
 
 This poem, of some fifty octaves, is the result of 
 those Tuscan peasant songs, of which I have told you 
 the curious Courtly descent, at last having struck the 
 fancy of a real poet. It is, what Lorenzo's masterpiece 
 necessarily must be, in the highest degree a modern 
 performance ; as modern as a picture by Bastien 
 Lepage ; as an opera, founded upon local music, by 
 Bizet. For it is not by any manner of means a 
 pastoral, a piece of conventional poetic decoration, 
 with just a little realistic detail, more of the mere 
 conventional or more of the realistic dominating 
 according as it is a pastoral by Theocritus, or a pastoral 
 by Quinault or Metastasio. It is the very reverse of 
 
156 EUPHORION. 
 
 this : it is the attempt to obtain a large and complete, 
 detailed and balanced impression by the cunning 
 arrangement of a number of small effects which the 
 artist has watched in reality ; it is the making into a 
 kind of little idyl, something half narrative, half drama, 
 with distinct figures and accessories and background, 
 of a whole lot of little fragments imitated from the 
 peasant poetry, and set in thin, delicate rims of 
 imitation no longer of the peasant's songs, but of the 
 peasant's thoughts and speech ; a perfect piece of 
 impressionist art, marred only in rare places by an 
 attempt (inevitable in those days) to force the drawing 
 and colour into caricature. The construction, which 
 appears to be nowhere, is in reality a masterpiece ; 
 for, without knowing it, you are shown the actors, the 
 background, the ups and downs of temper, the variation 
 of the seasons ; above all you are shown the heroine 
 through the medium of the praises, the complaints, 
 the narratives of the past, the imaginings of the 
 future, of the hero, whose incoherent rhapsodizing 
 constitutes the whole poem. He, Valldra, is a well- 
 to-do young farmer ; she, Nencia, is the daughter of 
 peasant folk of the castellated village of Barberino in 
 the Mugello ; he is madly in love, but shy, and (to all 
 appearance) awkward, so that we feel convinced that 
 of all these speeches in praise of his Nenciozza, in 
 blame of her indifference, highly poetic flights and most 
 practical adjurations to see all the advantages of a 
 , good match, the young woman hears few or none ; 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 157 
 
 Vall^ra is talking not to her, but at her, or rather, 
 he is rehearsing to himself all the things which he 
 cannot squeeze out in her presence. It is the long 
 day-dream, poetic, prosaic, practical, and imaginative, 
 of a love-sick Italian peasant lad, to whom his 
 sweetheart is at once an ideal thing of beauty, a 
 goddess at whose shrine songs must be sung and 
 wreaths twined ; and a very substantial lass, who 
 cannot be indifferent to sixpenny presents, and whom 
 he cannot conceive as not ultimately becoming the 
 sharer of his cottage, the cooker of his soup, the 
 mender of his linen, the mother of his brats — a dream 
 in which image is effaced by image, and one thought 
 is expelled, unfinished, by another. She is to him 
 like the Fairy Morgana, the fairy who kept so much 
 of chivalry in her enchanted island ; she is like the 
 evening star when above his cottage it slowly pierces 
 the soft blue sky with its white brilliancy ; she is purer 
 than the water in the well, and sweeter than the 
 malmsey wine, and whiter than the miller's flour ; but 
 her heart is as hard as a pebble, and she loves driving 
 to distraction a whole lot of youths who dangle behind 
 her, captives of those heart-thievish eyes of hers. But 
 she is also a most excellent housewife, can stand any 
 amount of hard field labour, and makes lots of money 
 by weaving beautiful woollen stuff To see her going 
 to church of a morning, she is a little pearl ! her 
 bodice is of damask, and her petticoat of bright 
 colour, and she kneels down carefully where she may 
 
158 EUPHORION. 
 
 be seen, being so smart. And then, when she dances! 
 — a born dancer, bouncing like a little goat, and 
 twirling more than a mill-wheel ; and when she has 
 finished she makes you such a curtsey; no citizen's 
 wife in Florence can curtsey as she does. It was in 
 April that he first fell in love. She was picking salad 
 in the garden ; he begged her for a little, and she sent 
 him about his business. Alas, alas ! ever since then 
 his peace has been gone ; he cannot sleep, he can only 
 think of her, and follow her about ; he has become quite 
 good-for-nothing as to his field work, — yet he hears all 
 the people around laughing and saying, " Of course 
 Vall^ra will get her." Only slu will pay no heed to 
 him. She is finer to look at than the Pope, whiter than 
 the whitest wood core : she is more delectable than are 
 the young figs to the earwigs, more beautiful than the 
 turnip flower, sweeter than honey. He is more in love 
 with her than the moth is in love with the lamp ; she loves 
 to see him perishing for her. If he could cut himself 
 in two without too much pain, he would, just to let 
 her see that he carries her in his heart. No ; he would 
 cut out his heart, and when she has touched it with 
 that slender hand of hers, it would cry out, " Nencia, 
 Nencia bella." But, after all, he is not to be despised : 
 he is an excellent labourer, most learned in buying 
 and selling pigs, he can play the bagpipe beautifully ; 
 he is rich, is willing to go to any expense to please 
 her, nay, even to pay the barber double that his hair 
 may be nice and fuzzy from the crimping irons ; and 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 159 
 
 if only he were to get himself tight hose and a silk 
 jerkin, he would be as good as any Florentine burgess. 
 But she will not listen ; or, rather, she listens and laughs. 
 Yes, she sits up in bed at night and laughs herself to 
 death at the mere thought of him, that is all he gets. 
 But he knows what it is ! There is a fellow who will 
 keep sneaking about her ; if Valldra only catch him 
 near his cottage, won't he give him a taste of his long 
 new knife ! nay, rip him up and throw his bowels, like 
 those of a pig, to dry on a roof ! He is sorry — perhaps 
 he bores her — God bless you, Nencia ! — he had better 
 go and look after his sheep. 
 
 All this is not the poetry of the Renaissance 
 peasant ; it is the poem made out of his reality ; the 
 songs which Valldra sang in the fields about his Nencia 
 we must seek in the volume of Tigri ; those rispetti and 
 stornelli of to-day are the rispetti and stornelli of four 
 centuries ago ; they are much more beautiful and poetic 
 than any of Lorenzo's work ; but Lorenzo has given us 
 not merely a peasant's love-song; he has given us a 
 peasant's thoughts, actions, hopes, fears ; he has given 
 us the peasant himself, his house, his fields, and his 
 sweetheart, as they exist even now. For Lorenzo is 
 gone, and, greater than he, the paladins and ladies of 
 Boiardo and Ariosto, have followed the saints and 
 virgins of Dante into the limbo of fair unrealities ; and 
 the very Greek and Roman heroes of a hundred years 
 ago, the very knights and covenanters of forty years 
 since, have joined them ; butValldra exists stilly and still 
 
i6o EUPHORION. 
 
 in the flesh exists his Nenciozza. Everything changes, 
 except the country and the peasant. For, in the long 
 farms of Southern Tuscany, with double row of black- 
 ened balcony all tapestried with heavy ingots of Indian 
 corn, and spread out among the olives of the hillside, up 
 which twists the rough bullock road protected by its vine 
 trellis ; and in the little farms, with queer hood-shaped 
 double roofs (as if to pull over the face of the house 
 when it blows hard), and pigeon towers which show 
 that some day they must have been fortified, all about 
 Florence ; farms which I pass every day, with their 
 sere trees all round, their rough gardens of bright 
 dahlias and chrysanthemums draggled by the autumn 
 rains — in these there are, do not doubt it, still 
 Nencias : magnificent creatures, fit models for Ama- 
 zons, only just a trifle too full-blown and matronly ; but 
 with real Amazonian limbs, firm and delicate, under 
 their red and purple striped cotton frocks ; creatures 
 with heads set on necks like towers or columns, necks 
 firm set in broad, well-fleshed chest as branches in a 
 tree's trunk ; great penthouses of reddish yellow or 
 lustreless black crimped hair over the forehead ; the fore- 
 head, like the cheeks, furrowed a good deal — perhaps we 
 dainty people might say, faded and wrinkled by work 
 in the burning sun and the wind ; women whom you 
 see shovelling bread into the heated ovens, or plashing 
 in winter wiA bare arms in half-frozen streams, or 
 digging up a turnip field in the drizzle ; or on a 
 Sunday, standing listless by their door, surrounded 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. i6i 
 
 by rolling and squalling brats, and who, when they 
 slowly look up at the passer-by, show us, on those 
 monumental faces of theirs, a strange smile, a light 
 of bright eyes and white teeth ; a smile which to us 
 sophisticated townspeople is as puzzling as certain 
 sudden looks in some comely animal, but which yet 
 makes us understand instinctively that we have before 
 us a Nencia ; and that the husband yonder, though he 
 now swears at his wife, and perhaps occasionally beats 
 her, has nevertheless, in his day, dreamed, argued, 
 raged, and sung to himself just like Lorenzo's Vallera. 
 The " Nencia da Barberino " is certainly Lorenzo del 
 Medici's masterpiece : it is completely and satisfac- 
 torily worked out. Yet we may strain possibilities to 
 the point of supposing (which, however, I cannot for a 
 moment suppose) that this " Nencia " is a kind of fluke ; 
 that by an accident a beautiful and seemingly apprecia- 
 tive poem has resulted where the author, a mediseval 
 realist of a superior Villon sort, had intended only a 
 piece of utter grotesqueness. But important as is the 
 " Nencia," Lorenzo has left behind him another poem, 
 greatly inferior in completeness, but which settles 
 beyond power of doubt that in him the Renaissance 
 was not merely no longer mediseval, but most intensely 
 modern. This poem is the " Ambra." It is simply an 
 allegorical narrative of the inundation, by the river 
 Ombrone, of a portion, called Ambra, of the great 
 Medicean villa of Poggio a Caiano. Lorenzo's object 
 was evidently to write a semi-Ovidian poem, of a kind 
 
 12 
 
1 62 EUPHORION. 
 
 common in his day, and common almost up to our 
 own : a river-god, bearded, crown of reeds, urn, general 
 dampness and uproariousness of temper all quite cor- 
 rect ; and a nymph, whom he pursues, who prays to the 
 Virgin huntress to save her from his love, and who, 
 just in the nick of time, is metamorphosed into a 
 mossy stone, dimly showing her former woman's 
 shape ; the style of thing, charming, graceful, insipid, 
 of which every one can remember a dozen instances, 
 and which immediately brings up to the mind a vision 
 of grand-ducal gardens, where, among the clipped ilexes 
 and the cypress trunks, great lumbering water-gods 
 and long-limbed nymphs splash, petrified and covered 
 with melancholy ooze and yellow lichen, among the 
 stagnant grotto waters. In some respects, therefore, 
 there is in the "Ambra" somewhat more artificial, 
 more barrocco than that early Renaissance of Politian 
 and Pontano would warrant. There also several bits, 
 half graceful, half awkward, pedantic, constrained, 
 childish, delightful, like the sedge-crowned rivers 
 telling each other anecdotes of the ways and customs 
 of their respective countries, and especially the charm- 
 ing dance of zephyr with the flowers on the lawns of 
 Cyprus, which must immediately suggest pictures by 
 Piero di Cosimo and by Botticelli. So far, therefore, 
 there is plenty to enjoy, but nothing to astonish, in 
 the "Ambra." But the Magnificent Lorenzo has had 
 the extraordinary whim of beginning his allegory with 
 a description, twenty-one stanzas long, of the season 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 163 
 
 of floods. A description, full of infinitely delicate 
 minute detail : of the plants which have kept their 
 foliage while the others are bare — the prickly juniper, 
 the myrtle and bay ; of the flocks of cranes printing the 
 sky with their queer shapes, of the fish under the ice, 
 and the eagle circling slowly round the ponds — little 
 things which affect us mixed up as they are with 
 all manner of stiff classic allusions, very much as do 
 the carefully painted daisies and clover among the 
 embossed and gilded unrealities of certain old pictures. 
 From these rather finikin details, Lorenzo passes, 
 however, to details which are a good deal more than 
 details, things little noticed until almost recently : the 
 varying effect of the olives on the hillside — a grey, 
 green mass, a silver ripple, according as the wind stirs 
 them ; the golden appearance of the serene summer 
 air, and so forth ; details no longer, in short, but 
 essentially, however minute, effects. And then, 
 suddenly leaving such things behind, he rushes into 
 the midst of a real picture, a picture which you might 
 call almost impressionistic, of the growth of rivers 
 and the floods. The floods are a grand sight ; more 
 than a sight — a grand performance, a drama ; some- 
 times, God knows, a tragedy. Last night, under a 
 warm, hazy sky, through whose buff-tinted clouds 
 the big moon crept in and out, the mountain stream 
 was vaguely visible — a dark riband in its wide shingly 
 bed, when the moon was hidden ; a narrow, shallow, 
 broken stream, sheets of brilliant metallic sheen, and 
 
i64 EUPHORION. 
 
 showers of sparkling facets, when the moon was out ; 
 a mere drowsy murmur mixing with the creaking and 
 rustling of dry reeds in the warm, wet wind. Thus 
 in the evening. Look down from your window next 
 morning. A tremendous rushing mass of waters, thick, 
 turbid, reddish, with ominous steel-like lustre where 
 its coppery surface reflects the moist blue sky, now 
 fills the whole bed, shaking its short fringe of foam, 
 tossing the spray as it swirls round each still projecting 
 stone, angrily tugging at the reeds and alders which 
 flop their draggled green upon its surface ; eddying 
 faster and faster, encircling each higher rock or sand- 
 bank, covering it at last with its foaming red mass. 
 Meanwhile, the sky is covered in with vaporous grey 
 clouds, which enshroud the hills ; the clear runnels 
 dash over the green banks, spirt through the walls, 
 break their way across the roads ; the little mountain 
 torrents, dry all summer, descend, raging rivers, red 
 with the hill soil ; and with every gust of warm wind 
 the river rises higher and rushes along tremendously 
 impetuous. Down in the plain it eats angrily at the 
 soft banks, and breaks its muddy waters, fringed on 
 the surface with a sort of ominous grime of broken 
 wood and earth, higher and higher against the pier- 
 heads of the bridges ; shaking them to split their 
 masonry, while crowds of men and women look on, 
 staring at the rising water, at the planks, tables, beams, 
 cottage thatches, nay, whole trees, which it hurls at 
 the bridge piers. And then, perhaps, the terrible, 
 
THE OUTDOOR POETRY. 165 
 
 soft, balmy flood-wind persisting, there comes suddenly 
 the catastrophe ; the embankment, shaken by the 
 resistless current, cracks, fissures, gives way ; and the 
 river rushes into the city, as it has already rushed into 
 the fields, to spread in constantly rising, melancholy 
 livid pools, throughout the streets and squares. 
 
 This Lorenzo saw, and, wonderful to say, in this 
 soiled and seething river, in these torn and crumbling 
 banks, in all the dreadfulness of these things, he saw 
 a beauty and a grandeur. But he saw not merely the 
 struggle of the waters and of the land ; he — the 
 heartless man who laid his hand even upon the saved- 
 up money of orphan girls in order to keep up the 
 splendour of his house and of his bank — saw the mis- 
 fortunes of the peasantry ; the mill, the cottage by the 
 riverside, invaded by the flood ; the doors burst open by 
 the tremendous rushing stream, the stables and garners 
 filled with the thick and oozy waters ;' the poor 
 creatures, yesterday prosperous, clinging to the roof, 
 watching their sheep and cows, their hay, and straw, 
 and flour, the hemp bleached in the summer, the 
 linen spun and woven in the long winter, their 
 furniture and chattels, their labour and their hope, 
 whirled along by the foaming river. 
 
 Thus by this versatile Lorenzo dei Medici, this 
 flippant, egotistic artist and despot, has at last been 
 broken the long spell of the Middle Ages. The 
 Renaissance has sung no longer of knights and of 
 spring, but of peasants and of autumn. An immoral 
 
1 66 EUPHORION. 
 
 and humanistic time, an immoral and humanistic 
 man, have had at length a heart for the simpler, ruder, 
 less favoured classes of mankind ; an eye for the 
 bolder, grander, more solemn sights of Nature : modern 
 times have begun, modern sympathies, modern art are 
 in full swing. 
 
SYMMETRIA PRISCA. 
 
SYMMETRIA PRISCA. 
 
 Mirator veterum, discipuluoque memor, 
 Defuit una mihi symmetria prisca. Peregi 
 Quod potui ; Veniam da mihi, posteritas. 
 
 — Lionardo da Vincfs epitaph by Platino Piaito. 
 
 Into the holy enclosure which had received the 
 precious shiploads of earth from Calvary, the Pisans 
 of the thirteenth century carried the fragments of 
 ancient sculpture brought from Rome and from 
 Greece ; and in the Gothic cloister enclosing the 
 green sward and dark cypresses of the graveyard of 
 Pisa, the art of the Middle Ages came for the first 
 time face to face with the art of Antiquity. There, 
 among pagan sarcophagi turned into Christian tombs, 
 with heraldic devices chiselled on their arabesques 
 and vizored helmets surmounting their garlands, the 
 great unsigned artist of the fourteenth century, 
 Orcagna of Florence, or Lorenzetti of Siena, painted 
 the typical masterpiece of mediaeval art, the great 
 fresco of the Triumph of Death. With wonderful 
 
I70 EUPHORION. 
 
 realization of character and situation he painted the 
 prosperous of the world, the dapper youths and 
 damsels seated with dogs and falcons beneath the 
 orchard trees, amusing themselves with Decameronian 
 tales and sound of lute and psaltery, unconscious of 
 the colossal scythe wielded by the gigantic dishevelled 
 the scythe wielded by the dishevelled angel of Death, 
 and which, in a second, will descend and mow them 
 to the ground ; while the crowd of beggars, ragged, 
 maimed, paralyzed, leprous, grovelling on their 
 withered limbs, see and implore Death, and cry 
 stretching forth their arms, their stumps, and their 
 crutches. Further on, three kings in embroidered 
 robes and gold-trimmed shovel caps, Lewis the 
 Emperor, Uguccione of Pisa, and Castruccio of Lucca, 
 with their retinue of ladies and squires, and hounds 
 and hawks, are riding quietly through a wood. Sud- 
 denly their horses stop, draw back ; the Emperor's 
 bay stretches out his long neck sniffing the air ; the 
 kings strain forward to see, one holding his nose for 
 the stench of death which meets him ; and before 
 them are three open coffins, in which lie, in three 
 loathsome stages of corruption, from blue and bloated 
 putrescence to well-nigh fleshless decay, three kingly 
 corpses. This is the triumph of Death ; the grim and 
 consolatory jest of the Middle Ages : equality in decay; 
 kings, emperors, ladies, knights, beggars, and cripples, 
 this is what we all come to be, stinking corpses ; 
 Death, our lord, our only just and lasting sovereign, 
 reigns impartially over all. 
 
SYMMETRIA PRISCA. 171 
 
 But opposite, all along the sides of the painted 
 cloister, the Amazons are wrestling with the youths 
 on the stone of the sarcophagi; the chariots are dash- 
 ing forward, the Tritons are splashing in the marble 
 waves ; the Maenads are striking their timbrels in 
 their dance with the satyrs ; the birds are pecking at 
 the grapes, the goats are nibbling at the vines ; all is 
 life, strong and splendid in its marble eternity. And 
 the mutilated Venus smiles towards the broken 
 Hermes ; the stalwart Hercules, resting against his 
 club, looks on quietly, a smile beneath his beard ; and 
 the gods murmur to each other, as they stand in the 
 cloister filled with earth from Calvary, where hundreds 
 of men lie rotting beneath the cypresses, " Death will 
 not triumph for ever ; our day will come." 
 
 We have all seen them opposite to each other, these 
 two arts, the art born of Antiquity and the art born 
 of the Middle Ages ; but whether this meeting was 
 friendly or hostile or merely indifferent, is a question 
 of constant dispute. To some, mediaeval art has 
 appeared being led, Dante-like, by a magician Virgil 
 through the mysteries of nature up to a Christian 
 Beatrice, who alone knows the paths of the kingdom 
 of heaven ; others have seen mediaeval art, like some 
 strong, chaste Sir Guyon turning away resolutely from 
 the treacherous sorceress of Antiquity, and pursuing 
 solitarily the road to the true and the good ; for some 
 the antique has been an impure goddess Venus, 
 seducing and corrupting the Christian artist ; the 
 
172 EUPHORION. 
 
 antique has been for others a glorious Helen, an un- 
 attainable perfection, pursued forever by the mediaeval 
 craftsman, but seized by him only as a phantom. 
 Magician or witch ; voluptuous, destroying Venus or 
 cold and ungrasped Helen ; what was the antique to 
 this art born of the Middle Ages and developed during 
 the Renaissance? Was the relation between them 
 that of tuition, cool and abstract ; of fruitful love ; or 
 of deluding and damning example ? 
 
 The art which came to maturity in the late fifteenth 
 and early sixteenth centuries was generated in the 
 early medieval revival. The seeds may, indeed, have 
 come down from Antiquity, but they remained for 
 nearly a thousand years hidden in the withered, rot- 
 ting remains of former vegetation ; and it was not 
 till that vegetation had completely decomposed and 
 become part of the soil, it was not till putrefaction 
 had turned into germination, that artistic organism 
 timidly reappeared. The new art-germ developed 
 with the new civilization which surrounded it. Manu- 
 facture and commerce reappeared : the artizans and 
 merchants formed into communities ; the communi- 
 ties grew into towns, the towns into cities. In the 
 city arose the cathedral ; the Lombard or Byzantine 
 mouldings and traceries of the cathedral gave birth to 
 figure-sculpture ; its mosaics gave birth to painting ; 
 every forward movement of the civilization unfolded 
 as it were a new form or detail of the art, until, when 
 mediaeval civilization was reaching its moment of 
 
SYMMETRIA PRISCA. 173 
 
 consolidation, when the cathedrals of Lucca and Pisa 
 stood completed, when Niccol6 and Giovanni Pisano 
 had sculptured their pulpits and sepulchres ; painting, 
 in the hands of Cimabue and Duccio, of Giotto and 
 of Guido da Siena, freed itself from the tradition of 
 the mosaicists as sculpture had freed itself from the 
 practice of the stone-masons, and stood forth an in- 
 dependent and organic art. 
 
 Thus painting was born of a new civilization, and 
 grew by its own vital force ; a thing of the Middle 
 Ages, original and spontaneous. But contempo- 
 raneous with the mediseval revival was the resuscita- 
 tion of Antiquity ; in proportion as the new civilization 
 developed, the old civilization was exhumed ; real 
 Latin began to be studied only when real Italian 
 began to be written ; Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio 
 were at once the founders of modern literature and 
 the exponents of the literature of Antiquity ; the 
 strong young Present was to profit by the experience 
 of the Past. 
 
 As it was with literature, so it likewise was with 
 art. The most purely mediaeval sculpture, the sculp- 
 ture which has, as it were, just detached itself from 
 the capitals and porches of the cathedral, is the direct 
 pupil of the antique; and the three great Gothic 
 sculptors, Niccol6, Giovanni, and Andrea of Pisa, learn 
 from fragments of Greek and Roman sculpture how 
 to model the figure of the Redeemer and how to 
 drape the robe of our Lady. This spontaneous 
 
174 EUPHORION. 
 
 mediaeval sculpture, aided by the antique, preceded 
 by a full half-century the appearance of mediaeval 
 painting ; and thanks to the study of the works of 
 the Pisan sculptors that Cimabue and Giotto learned 
 to depart from the mummified monstrositieg of the 
 hieratic Byzantine and Roman style of Giunta and 
 Berlinghieri. Thus, through the sculpture of the 
 Pisans the painting of the school of Giotto received 
 at second-hand the teachings of Antiquity. Sculpture 
 had created painting ; painting now belonged to the 
 painters. In the hands of Giotto it developed within 
 a few years into an art which seemed almost mature, 
 an art dealing victoriously with its materials, trium- 
 phantly solving its problems, executing as if by 
 miracle all that was demanded of it. But Giottesque 
 art appeared perfect merely because it was limited ; 
 it did all that was required of it, because the required 
 was little; it was not asked to reproduce the real nor 
 to represent the beautiful ; it was asked merely to 
 suggest a character, a situation, a story. 
 
 The artistic development of a nation has its 
 parallel in the artistic development of an individual. 
 The child uses his pencil to tell a story, satisfied with 
 balls and sticks as body, head, and legs, provided he 
 and his friends can associate with them the ideas in 
 their minds. The youth sets himself to copy what he 
 sees, to reproduce forms and effects, without any aim 
 beyond the mere pleasure of copying. The mature 
 
SYMMETRIA PRISCA. 175 
 
 artist strives to obtain forms and effects of which he 
 approves ; he seeks for beauty. In the life of Italian 
 painting the generation of men who flourished at the 
 beginning of the sixteenth century are the mature 
 artists ; the men of the fifteenth century are the inex- 
 perienced youths ; the Giottesques are the children — 
 children Titanic and seraph-like, but children never- 
 theless ; and, like all children, learning more perhaps 
 in their few years than can the youth and the man 
 learn in a lifetime. 
 
 Like the child, the Giottesque painter wished to 
 show a situation or illustrate a story, and for this 
 purpose the absolute realization of objects was un- 
 necessary. Giottesque art is not incorrect art, it is 
 generalized art ; it is an art of mere outline. The 
 Giottesques could draw with great accuracy the hand : 
 the form of the fingers, the bend of the limb, they 
 could give to perfection its whole gesture and move- 
 ment, they could produce a correct and spirited outline ; 
 but within this correct outline marked off in dark paint, 
 there is but a vague, uniform mass of pale colour ; the 
 body of the hand is missing, and there remains only its 
 ghost, visible indeed, but unsubstantial, without weight 
 or warmth, eluding the grasp. The difference between 
 this spectre hand of the Giottesques, and the sinewy, 
 muscular hand which can shake and crush of Masaccia 
 and Signorelli ; or the soft hand with throbbing pulse 
 and warm pressure of Perugino and Bellini, — this 
 difference is typical of the difference between the art 
 
176 EUPHORION. 
 
 of the fourteenth century and the art of the fifteenth 
 century : the first suggests, the second realizes ; the 
 one gives impalpable outlines, the other gives tangible 
 bodies. The Giottesque cares for the figure only 
 inasmuch as it displays an action ; he reduces it to a 
 semblance, a phantom, to the mere exponent of an 
 idea ; the man of the Renaissance cares for the figure 
 inasmuch as it is a living organism, he gives it 
 substance and makes it stand out as an animate 
 reality. Thence, despite its early triumphs, the 
 Giottesque style, by its inherent nature, forbade 
 any progress ; it reached its limits at once, and the 
 followers of Giotto look almost as if they were his 
 predecessors, for the simple reason that, being unable 
 to advance, they were forced to retrograde. The 
 limited amount of artistic realization required to 
 present to the mind of the spectator a situation or 
 an allegory, had been obtained by Giotto himself, and 
 bequeathed by him to his followers ; who, finding it 
 more than sufficient for their purposes, and having no 
 love of form and reality for their own sake as an 
 incentive to further acquisition, worked on with their 
 master's materials, composing and recomposing, but 
 adding nothing of their own. Giotto had observed 
 Nature with passionate interest, because, although its 
 representation was only a means to an end, it was a 
 means which required to be mastered ; and as such 
 became in itself a sort of secondary aim ; but the 
 followers of Giotto merely utilized his observations 
 
SYMMETRIA PRISCA. 177 
 
 of Nature, and in so doing gradually conve itionalized 
 and debased these second-hand observations. Giotto's 
 forms are wilfully incomplete, because they aim at 
 mere suggestion, but they are not conventional : they 
 are diagrams, not symbols, and thence it is that Giotto 
 seems nearer to the Renaissance than do his latest 
 followers, not excepting even Orcagna. Painting, 
 which had made the most prodigious strides from 
 Giunta to Cimabue, and from Cimabue to Giotto, had 
 got enclosed within a vicious circle, in which it moved 
 for nearly a century neither backwards nor forwards : 
 painters were satisfied with suggestion ; and as long 
 as they were satisfied, no progress was possible. 
 
 From this Giottesque treadmill, painting was released 
 by the intervention of another art. The painters were 
 hopelessly mediocre ; their art was snatched from them 
 by the sculptors. Orcagna himself, perhaps the only 
 Giottesque who gave painting an onward push, had 
 modelled and cast one of the bronze gates of the 
 Florence baptistery ; the generation of artists who 
 arose at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and 
 who opened the period of the Renaissance, were 
 sculptors or pupils of sculptors. When we see these 
 vigorous lovers of nature, these heroic searchers after 
 truth, suddenly pushing aside the decrepit Giottesque 
 allegory-mongers, we ask ourselves in astonishment 
 whence they have arisen, and how those broken-down 
 artists of effete art could have begotten such a gene- 
 ration of giants. Whence do they come ? Certainly 
 
 13 
 
178 EUPHORION. 
 
 not from the studios of the Giottesques. No, they issue 
 out of the workshops of the stone-mason, of the 
 goldsmith, of the worker in bronze, of the sculptor. 
 Vasari has preserved the tradition that Masolino and 
 Paolo Uccello were apprentices of Ghiberti ; he has 
 remarked that their greatest contemporary, Masaccio, 
 " trod in the steps of Brunelleschi and of Donatello." 
 Pollaiolo and Verrocchio we know to have been equally 
 excellent as painters and as workers in bronze. Sculp- 
 ture, at once more naturalistic and more constantly 
 under the influence of the antique, had for the second 
 time laboured for painting. Itself a subordinate art, 
 without much vitality, without deep roots in the civili- 
 zation, sculpture was destined to remain the unsuc- 
 cessful pupil of the antique, and the unsuccessful 
 rival of painting ; but sculpture had for its mission to 
 prepare the road for painting and to prepare painting 
 for antique influence ; and the noblest work of Ghiberti 
 and Donatello was Masaccio, as the most lasting glory 
 to the Pisani had been Giotto. 
 
 With Masaccio began the study of nature for its 
 own sake, the desire of reproducing external objects 
 without any regard to their significance as symbols 
 or as parts of a story ; the passionate wish to arrive 
 at absolute realization. The merely suggestive out- 
 line art of the Giottesques had come to an end ; the 
 suggestion became a matter of indifference, the reali- 
 zation became a paramount interest ; the story was 
 forgotten in the telling, the religious thought was 
 
SYMMETRIA PRISCA. 179 
 
 lost in the search for the artistic form. The Giot- 
 tesques had used debased conventionalism to represent 
 action with wonderful narrative and logical power ; 
 the artists of the early Renaissance became unskilful 
 narrators and foolish allegorists almost in proportion 
 as they became skilful draughtsmen and colourists ; 
 the saints had become to Masaccio merely so many 
 lay figures on to which to cast drapery ; for Fra Filippo 
 the Madonna was a mere peasant model ; for Filippino 
 Lippi and for Ghirlandajo, a miracle meant merely an 
 opportunity of congregating a number of admirable 
 portrait figures in the dress of the day ; the Baptism 
 for Verrocchio had significance only as a study of 
 muscular legs and arms ; and the sacrifice of Noah 
 had no importance for Uccello save as a grand op- 
 portunity for foreshortenings. In the hands of the 
 Giottesques, interested in the subject and indifferent 
 to the representation, painting had remained stationary 
 for eighty years ; for eighty years did it develope in 
 the hands of the men of the fifteenth century, indif- 
 ferent to the subject and passionately interested in 
 the representation. The unity, the appearance of 
 comparative perfection of the art had disappeared 
 with the limits within which the Giottesques had 
 been satisfied to move ; instead of the intelligible 
 and solemn conventionalism of the Giottesques, we 
 see only disorder, half-understood ideas and abortive 
 attempts, confusion which reminds us of those enig- 
 matic sheets on which Leonardo or Michael Angelo 
 
I So EUPHORION. 
 
 scrawled out their ideas — drawings within drawings, 
 plans of bir'ldings scratched over Madonna heads, 
 single flowe. , upside down next to flayed arms, calcu- 
 lations, monsters, sonnets ; a very chaos of thoughts 
 and of s^iapes, in which the plan of the artist is 
 inextricably lost, which mean everything and nothing, 
 but out of whose unintelligible network of lines and 
 curves have issued masterpieces, and which only the 
 foolish or the would-be philosophical would exchange 
 for some intelligible, hopelessly finished and finite 
 illustration out of a Bible or a book of travels. 
 
 Anatomy, perspective, colour, drapery, effects of 
 light, of water, of shadow, forms of trees and flowers, 
 converging lines of architecture, all this at once ab- 
 sorbed and distracted the attention of the artists of 
 the early Renaissance; and while they studied, copied, 
 and calculated, another thought began to haunt them, 
 another eager desire began to pursue them : by the side 
 of Nature, the manifold, the baffling, the bewildering, 
 there rose up before them another divinity, another 
 sphinx, mysterious in its very simplicity and serenity 
 — the Antique. 
 
 The exhumation of the antique had, as we have 
 seen, been contemporaneous with the birth of painting ; 
 nay, the study of the remains of antique sculpture 
 had, in contributing to form Niccol6 Pisano, indirectly 
 helped to form Giotto ; the very painter of the Triumph 
 of Death had inserted into his terrible fresco two- 
 winged genii, upholding a scroll, copied without any 
 
SYMMETRIA PRISCA. i8i 
 
 alteration from some coarse Roman sarcophagus, in 
 which they may have sustained the usual Dis Manibus 
 Sacrum. There had been, on the part of both sculptors 
 and painters, a constant study of the antique ; but during 
 the Giottesque period this study had been limited to 
 technicalities, and had in no way affected the concep- 
 tion of art. The mediaeval artists, surrounded by 
 physical deformities, and seeing sanctity in sickness 
 and dirt, little accustomed to observe the human figure, 
 were incapable, both as men and as artists, of at all 
 entering into the spirit of antique art. They could 
 not perceive the superior beauty of the antique ; they 
 could recognize only its superior science and its 
 superior handicraft, and these alone they studied to 
 obtain. 
 
 Giovanni Pisano sculpturing the unfleshed, caried 
 carcases of the devils who leer, writhe, crunch, and 
 tear on the outside of Orvieto Cathedral ; and the 
 Giottesques painting those terrible green, macerated 
 Christs, hanging livid and broken from the cross 
 which abound in Tuscany and Umbria ; the artists 
 who produced these loathsome and lugubrious works 
 were indubitably students of the antique ; but they 
 had learned from it not a love for beautiful form and 
 noble drapery, but merely the general shape of the 
 limbs and the general fall of the garments : the 
 anatomical science and technical processes of Anti- 
 quity were being used to produce the most intensely 
 un-antique, the most intensely mediceval works. Thus 
 
iS2 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 matters stood in the time of Giotto. His followers, 
 who studied only arrangement, probably consulted 
 the antique as little as they consulted nature ; but 
 the contemporary sculptors were brought by the very 
 constitution of their art into close contact both with 
 Nature and with the antique ; they studied both with 
 determination, and handed over the results of their 
 labours to the sculptor-taught painters of the fifteenth 
 century. 
 
 Here, then, were the two great factors in the art of 
 the Renaissance — the study of nature, and the study 
 of the Antique : both understand slowly, imperfectly ; 
 the one counteracting the effect of the other ; the 
 study of nature now scaring away all 'antique influence, 
 the study of the antique now distorting all imitation 
 of nature; rival forces confusing the artist and marring 
 the work, until, when each could receive its due, the 
 one corrected the other, and they combined, producing 
 by this marriage of the living reality with the dead 
 but immortal beauty, the great art of Michael Angelo, 
 of Raphael, and of Titian : double, like its origin, 
 antique and modern, real and ideal. 
 
 The study of the antique is thus placed opposite 
 to the study of nature, the comprehension of the 
 works of Antiquity is the momentary antagonist of 
 the comprehension of the works of nature. And this 
 may seem strange, when we consider that antique art 
 was itself due to perfect comprehension of nature. 
 But the contradiction is easily explained. The study 
 
SYMMETRIA PRISCA. 183 
 
 of nature, as it was carried on in the Renaissance, 
 comprised the study of effects which had remained 
 unnoticed by Antiquity ; and the study of thestatue, 
 colourless, without light, shade, or perspective, ham- 
 pered, and was hampered by, the study of colour, of 
 light and shade, of perspective, and of all that a gene- 
 ration of painters would seek to learn from nature. 
 Nor was this all ; the influence of the civilization of 
 the Renaissance, of a civilization directly issued from 
 the Middle Ages, was entirely at variance with the 
 influence of antique civilization through the medium 
 of ancient art ; the Middle Ages and Antiquity, 
 Christianity and Paganism, were even more opposed 
 to each other than could be the statue and the easel 
 picture, the fresco and the bas-relief 
 
 First, then, we have the hostility between painting 
 and sculpture, between the modus operandi of the 
 modern and the modus operandi of the ancient art. 
 Antique art is, in the first place, purely linear art, 
 colourless, tintless, without light and shade ; next, it 
 is essentially the art of the isolated figure, without 
 background, grouping, or perspective. As linear art 
 it could directly affect only that branch of painting 
 which was itself linear ; and as art of the isolated 
 figure it was ever being contradicted by the constantly 
 developing arts of perspective and landscape. The 
 antique never directly influenced the Venetians, not 
 from reasons of geography and culture, but from 
 the fact that Venetian painting, founded from the 
 
i84 EUPHORION. 
 
 earliest times upon a system of colour, could not be 
 affected by antique sculpture, based upon a system of 
 modelled, colourless form ; the men who saw form only 
 through the medium of colour could not learn much 
 from purely linear form ; hence it is that even after a 
 certain amount of antique imitation had passed into 
 Venetian painting, through the medium of Mantegna, 
 the Venetian painters display comparatively little 
 antique influence. In Bellini, Carpaccio, Cima, and 
 other early masters, the features, forms, and dress are 
 mainly modern and Venetian ; and Giorgione, Titian, 
 and even the eclectic Tintoret, were more interested 
 in the bright lights of a steel breastplate than in the 
 shape of a limb ; and preferred in their hearts a shot 
 brocade of the sixteenth century to the finest drapery 
 ever modelled by an ancient. 
 
 The antique influence was naturally strongest 
 among the Tuscan schools ; because the Tuscan 
 schools were essentially schools of drawing, and the 
 draughtsman recognized in antique sculpture the high- 
 est perfection of that linear form which was his own 
 domain. Yet while the antique appealed most to the 
 linear schools, even in these it could strongly influence 
 only the purely linear part ; it is strong in the draw- 
 ings and weak in the paintings. As long as the 
 artists had only the pencil or pen, they could repro- 
 duce much of the linear perfection of the antique ; 
 they were, so to speak, alone with it ; but as soon as 
 they brought in colour, perspective, and scenery, the 
 
SYMMETRIA PRISCA. 185 
 
 linear perfection was lost in attempts at something 
 new ; the antique was put to flight by the modern. 
 Botticelli's crayon study for his Venus is almost 
 antique ; his tempera picture of Venus, with the pale 
 blue scaly sea, the laurel grove, the flower-embroidered 
 garments, the wisps of tawny hair, is comparatively 
 mediaeval ; Pinturicchio's sketch of Pans and satyrs 
 contrasts strangely with his frescoes in the library of 
 Siena ; Mantegna himself, supernaturally antique in 
 his engravings, becomes comparatively trivial and 
 modern in his oil-paintings. Do what they might, 
 draw from the antique and calculate its proportions, 
 the artists of the Renaissance found themselves baffled 
 as soon as they attempted to apply the result of their 
 linear studies to coloured pictures ; as soon as they 
 tried to make the antique unite with the modern, one 
 of the two elements was sure to succumb. In Botti- 
 celli, draughtsman and student though he was, the 
 modern, the mediaeval, that part of the art which had 
 arisen in the Middle Ages, invariably had the upper 
 hand ; his Venus, despite her forms studied from the 
 antique and her gesture imitated from some earlier 
 discovered copy of the Medicean Venus, has the woe- 
 begone prudery of a Madonna or of an abbess ; she 
 shivers physically and morally in her unaccustomed 
 nakedness, and the goddess of Spring, who comes 
 skipping up from beneath the laurel copse, does well 
 to prepare her a mantle, for in the pallid tempera 
 colour, against the dismal background of rippled sea, 
 
i86 EUPHORION. 
 
 this mediseval Venus, at once indecent and prudish, is 
 no very pleasing sight. In the Allegory of Spring in 
 the Academy of Florence, we again have the antique ; 
 goddesses and nymphs whose clinging garments the 
 gentle Sandro Botticelli has assuredly studied from 
 some old statue of Agrippina or Faustina ; but what 
 strange livid tints are there beneath those draperies, 
 what eccentric gestures are those of the nymphs, what 
 a green, ghostlike light illumines this garden of 
 Venus ! Are these goddesses and nymphs immortal 
 women such as the ancients conceived, or are they not 
 rather fantastic fairies or nixen, Titanias and Undines, 
 incorporeal daughters of dew and gossamer and mist ? 
 In Sandro Botticelli the teachings of the statue are 
 forgotten or distorted when the artist takes up his 
 palette and brushes ; in his greater contemporary, 
 Andrea Mantegna, the ever-present antique chills and 
 arrests the vitality of the modern. Mantegna, the 
 pupil of the ancient marbles of Squarcione's workshop 
 even more than the pupil of Donatello, studies for his 
 paintings not from nature, but from sculpture ; his 
 figures are seen in strange projection and foreshorten- 
 ing, like figures in a high relief seen from below ; 
 despite his mastery of perspective, they seem hewn 
 out of the background ; despite the rich colours which 
 he displays in his Veronese altar-piece, they look like 
 painted marbles, with their hard clots of stonelike 
 hair and beard, with their vacant glance and their 
 wonderful draperies, clinging and weighty like the 
 
SYMMETRIA P RISC A. 187 
 
 wet draperies of ancient sculpture. They are beautiful 
 petrifactions, or vivified statues ; Mantegna's master- 
 piece, the sepia " Judith " in Florence, is like an ex- 
 quisite, pathetically lovely Eurydice, who has stepped 
 unconscious and lifeless out of a Praxitelian bas-relief. 
 And there are stranger works than even the Judith ; 
 strange statuesque fancies, like the fight of Marine 
 Monsters and the Bacchanal among Mantegna's en- 
 gravings. The group of three wondrous creatures, at 
 once men, fish, and gods, is as grand and even more 
 fantastic than Leonardo's Battle of the Standard : a 
 Triton, sturdy and muscular, with sea-weed beard and 
 hair, wheels round his finned horse, preparing to strike 
 his adversary with a bunch of fish which he brandishes 
 above him ; on him is rushing, careering on an 
 osseous sea-horse, a strange, lank, sinewy being, fury 
 stretching every tendon, his long-clawed feet striking 
 into the flanks of his steed, his sharp, reed-crowned 
 head turned fiercely, with clenched teeth, on his oppo- 
 nent, and stretching forth a truncheon, ready to run 
 down his enemy as a ship runs down another ; and 
 further off a young Triton, with clotted hair and 
 heavy eyes, seems ready to sink wounded below the 
 rippling wavelets, with the massive head and marble 
 agony of the dying Alexander ; enigmatic figures, 
 grand and grotesque, lean, haggard, vehement, and 
 yet, in the midst of violence and monstrosity, un- 
 accountably antique. The other print, called the 
 Bacchanal, has no background : half a dozen male 
 
1 88 EUPHORION. 
 
 figures stand separate and naked as in a bas-relief. 
 Some are leaning against a vine-wreathed tub ; a 
 satyr, with acanthus-leaves growing wondrously out of 
 him, half man, half plant, is emptying a cup ; a heavy 
 Silenus is prone upon the ground ; a faun, seated 
 upon the vat, is supporting in his arms a beautiful 
 sinking youth ; another youth, grand, muscular, and 
 grave as a statue, stands on the further side. Is this 
 really a bacchanal "i Yes, for there is the paunchy 
 Silenus, there are the fauns, there the vat and vine- 
 wreaths and drinking-horns. And yet it cannot be a 
 bacchanal. Compare with it one of Rubens's orgies, 
 where the overgrown, rubicund men and women and 
 fauns tumble about in tumultuous, riotous intoxica- 
 tion : that is a bacchanal ; they have been drinking, 
 those magnificent brutes, there is wine firing their 
 blood and weighing down their heads. But here all 
 is different, in this so-called Bacchanal of Mantegna. 
 This heavy Silenus is supine like a mass of marble ; 
 these fauns are shy and mute ; these youths are grave 
 and sombre ; there is no wine in the cups, there are 
 no lees in the vat, there is no life in these magnificent 
 colossal forms ; there is no blood in their grandly 
 bent lips, no light in their wide-opened eyes ; it is not 
 the drowsiness of intoxication which is weighing 
 down the youth sustained by the faun ; it is no grape- 
 juice which gives that strange, vague glance. No; 
 they have drunk, but not of any mortal drink ; the 
 grapes are grown in Persephone's garden, the vat con- 
 
SYMMETRIA P RISC A. 189 
 
 tains no fruits that have ripened beneath our sun. 
 These strange, mute, solemn revellers have drunk of 
 Lethe, and they are growing cold with the cold of 
 death and of marble ; they are the ghosts of the dead 
 ones of antiquity, revisiting the artist of the Renais- 
 sance, who paints them, thinking he is painting life, 
 while that which he paints is in reality death. 
 
 This anomaly, this unsatisfactory character of the 
 works of both Botticelli and Mantegna, is mainly 
 technical ; the antique is frustrated in Botticelli, not 
 so much by the Christian, the mediseval, the modern 
 mode of feeling, as by the new methods and aims of 
 the new art which disconcert the methods and aims of 
 the old art ; and that which arrests Mantegna in his 
 development as a painter is not the spirit of Paganism 
 deadening the spirit of Christianity, but the laws of 
 sculpture hampering painting. But this technical 
 contest between two arts, the one not yet fully deve- 
 loped, the other not yet fully understood, is as nothing 
 compared with the contest between the two civili- 
 zations, the antique and the modern ; between the 
 habits and tendencies of the contemporaries of the 
 artists of the Renaissance and of the artists them- 
 selves, and the habits and tendencies of the antique 
 artists and their contemporaries. We are apt to think 
 of the Renaissance as of a period closely resembling 
 antiquity, misled by the inevitable similarity between 
 southern and democratic countries of whatever age ; 
 misled still less pardonably by the Ciceronian pedan- 
 
I go EUPHORION. 
 
 tries and pseudo-antique obscenities of a few human- 
 ists, and by the pseudo-Corinthian arabesques and 
 capitals of a few learned architects. But all this was 
 mere archaeological finery borrowed by a civilization 
 in itself entirely unlike that of ancient Greece. 
 
 The Renaissance, let us remember, was merely the 
 flowering time of that great medieval movement 
 which had germinated early in the twelfth century ; it 
 was merely a more advanced stage of the civilization 
 which had produced Dante and Giotto, of the civiliza- 
 tion which was destined to produce Luther and Rabe- 
 lais. The fifteenth century was merely the continua- 
 tion of the fourteenth century, as the fourteenth had 
 been of the thirteenth ; there had been growth and 
 improvement; development of the more modern, 
 diminishing of the more mediaeval elements ; but, 
 despite growth and the changes due to growth, the 
 Renaissance was part and parcel of the Middle Ages. 
 The life, thought, aspirations, and habits were medi- 
 aeval ; opposed to the open-air life, the physical train- 
 ing and the materialistic religion of Antiquity. The 
 surroundings of Masaccio and of Signorelli, nay, even 
 of Raphael, were very different from those of Phidias 
 or Praxiteles. Let us think what were the daily and 
 hourly impressions given by the Renaissance to its 
 artists. Large towns, in which thousands of human 
 beings were crowded together, in narrow, gloomy 
 streets, with but a strip of blue visible between the 
 projecting roofs ; and in these cities an incessant 
 
SYMMETRIA PRISCA. 191 
 
 commercial activity, with no relief save festivals at the 
 churches, brawls at the taverns, and carnival buffoon- 
 eries. Men and women pale and meagre for want of 
 air, and light, and movement ; undeveloped, untrained 
 bodies, warped by constant work at the loom or at 
 the desk, at best with the lumpish freedom of the 
 soldier and the vulgar nimbleness of the 'prentice. 
 And these men and women dressed in the dress of 
 the Middle Ages, gorgeous perhaps in colour, but 
 heavy, miserable, grotesque, nay, sometimes ludicrous 
 in form ; citizens in lumpish robes and long-tailed 
 caps ; ladies in stiff and foldless brocade hoops and 
 stomachers ; artizans in striped and close-adhering 
 hose and egg-shaped padded jerkin ; soldiers in lum- 
 bering armour-plates, ill-fitted over ill-fitting leather, 
 a shapeless shell of iron, bulging out and angular, in 
 which the body was buried as successfully as in the 
 robes of the magistrates. Thus we see the men and 
 women of the Renaissance in the works of all its 
 painters : heavy in Ghirlandajo, vulgarly jaunty in 
 Filippino, preposterously starched and prim in Man- 
 tegna, ludicrously undignified in Signorelli ; while 
 mediaeval stiffness, awkwardness, and absurdity reach 
 their acme perhaps in the little boys, companions of 
 the Medici children, introduced into Benozzo GozzoH's 
 Building of Babel. These are the prosperous towns- 
 folk, among whom the Renaissance artist is but too 
 glad to seek for models ; but besides these there are 
 lamentable sights, mediaeval beyond words, at every 
 
192 E UP H ORION. 
 
 street corner : dwarfs and cripples, maimed and 
 diseased beggars of all degrees of loathsomeness, 
 lepers and epileptics, and infinite numbers of monks, 
 brown, grey, and black, in sack-shaped frocks and 
 pointed hoods, with shaven crown and cropped beard, 
 emaciated with penance or bloated with gluttony. 
 And all this the painter sees, daily, hourly; it is his 
 standard of humanity, and as such finds its way into 
 every picture. It is the living ; but opposite it arises 
 the dead. Let us turn aside from the crowd of the 
 mediseval city, and look at what the workmen have 
 just laid bare, or what the merchant has just brought 
 from Rome or from Greece. Look at this : it is 
 corroded by oxides, battered by ill-usage, stained with 
 earth : it is not a group, not even a whole statue, it 
 has neither head nor arms remaining ; it is a mere 
 broken fragment of antique sculpture, — a naked body 
 with a fold or two of drapery ; it is not by Phidias 
 nor by Praxiteles, it may not even be Greek ; it may 
 be some cheap copy, made for a garden or a bath, in 
 the days of Hadrian. But to the artist of the fifteenth 
 century it is the revelation of a whole world, a world 
 in itself. We can scarcely realize all this ; but let us 
 look and reflect, and even we may feel as must have 
 felt the man of the Renaissance in the presence of 
 that mutilated, stained, battered torso. He sees in 
 that broken stump a grandeur of outline, a magnifi- 
 cence of osseous structure, a breadth of muscle and 
 sinew, a smooth, firm covering of flesh, such as he 
 
SYMMETRIA PRISCA. 193 
 
 would vainly seek in any of his living models ; he 
 sees a delicate and infinite variety of indentures, of 
 projections, of creases following the bend of every 
 limb ; he sees, where the surface still exists intact, an 
 elasticity of skin, a buoyancy of hidden life such as all 
 the colours of his palette are unable to imitate ; and 
 in this piece of drapery, negligently gathered over the 
 hips or rolled upon the arm, he sees a magnificent 
 alternation of large folds and small plaits, of straight 
 lines, and broken lines, and curves. He sees all this ; 
 but he sees more : the broken torso is, as we have 
 said, not merely a world in itself, but the revelation 
 of a world. It is the revelation of antique civilization, 
 of the palaestra and the stadium, of the sanctification 
 of the body, of the apotheosis of man, of the religion 
 of life and nature and joy ; revealed to the man of the 
 Middle Ages, who has hitherto seen in the untrained, 
 diseased, despised body but a deformed piece of base- 
 ness, which his priests tell him belongs to the worms 
 and to Satan ; who has been taught that the monk 
 living in solitude and celibacy, filthy, sick, worn out 
 with fastings and bleeding with flagellation, is the 
 nearest approach to divinity ; who has seen Divinity 
 itself, pale, emaciated, joyless, hanging bleeding from 
 the cross ; and who is for ever reminded that the 
 kingdom of this Godhead is not of this world. 
 
 What passes in the mind of that artist ">. What 
 surpri.se, what dawning doubts, what sickening fears, 
 what longings- and what remorse are not the fruit of 
 
 14 
 
194 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 this sight of Antiquity ? Is he to yield or to resist ? 
 Is he to forget the saints and Christ, and give himself 
 over to Satan and to Antiquity ? Only one man boldly 
 answered, Yes. Mantegna abjured his faith, abjured 
 the Middle Ages, abjured all that belonged to his 
 time ; and in so doing cast away from him the living 
 art and became the lover, the worshipper of shadows. 
 And only one man turned completely aside from the 
 antique as from the demon, and that man was a saint, 
 Fra Angelico da Fiesole. And with the antique, Fra 
 Angelico rejected all the other artistic influences and 
 aims of his time, the time not of Giotto or of Orcagna, 
 but of Masaccio and Uccello, of Pollaiolo and Donatello. 
 For the mild, meek, angelic monk dreaded the life of 
 his days ; dreaded to leave the flower-beds of his 
 cloister where the sunshine was tempered and the 
 noise reduced to a mere faint hum ; dreaded to soil 
 or rumple his spotless white robe and his shining 
 black cowl ; a spiritual sybarite, shrinking from 
 the sight of the crowd seething in the streets, 
 shrinking from the idea of stripping the rags off 
 the beggar in order to see his tanned and gnarled 
 limbs ; shuddering at the thought of seeking for 
 muscles in the dead, cut-open body ; fearful of every 
 whiff of life that might mingle with the incense atmo- 
 sphere of his chapel, of every cry of human passion 
 which might break through the well-ordered sweetness 
 of his chants. No ; the Renaissance did not exist for 
 him who lived in a world of diaphanous form, colour 
 
SYMMETRIA PRISCA. 195 
 
 and character, unsubstantial and unruffled ; dreaming 
 feebly of transparent-cheeked Madonnas with no 
 limbs beneath their robes ; of smooth-faced saints 
 with well-combed beard and vacant, sweet gaze, 
 seated in well-ordered masses, holy with the purity 
 of inanity ; and of divine dolls with flaxen locks, 
 floating between heaven and earth, playing upon 
 lute and viol and psaltery ; raised to faint visions of 
 angels and blessed, moving noiseless, feelingless, 
 meaningless, across the flowerets of Paradise ; of 
 assemblies of saints, arrayed in pure pink, and blue 
 and lilac, seated in the glory of an atmosphere of 
 liquid gold. And thus Fra Anglico worked on, con- 
 tent with the dearly purchased science of his masters, 
 placid, beatic, effeminate, in an sesthetical paradise of 
 his own, a paradise of sloth and sweetness, a paradise 
 for weak souls, weak hearts, and weak eyes ; patiently 
 repeating the same fleshless angels, the same boneless 
 saints, the same bloodless virgins ; happy in smooth- 
 ing the unmixed, unshaded tints of sky, and earth, and 
 dresses ; laying on the gold of the fretted heavens, 
 and of the iridescent wings, embroidering robes, in- 
 struments of music, halos, flowers, with threads of 
 gold. . . . Sweet, simple artist saint, reducing art to 
 something akin to the delicate pearl and silk embroi- 
 dery of pious nuns, to the exquisite sweetmeat cookery 
 of pious monks ; a something too delicately gorgeous, 
 too deliciously insipid for human wear or human food ; 
 no, the Renaissance does not exist for thee, either in 
 
,196 EUPH ORION. 
 
 its study of the existing reality, or in its study of 
 antique beauty. 
 
 Mantegna, the learned, the archseological, the pagan, 
 who renounces his times and his faith ; and Angelico, 
 the monk, the saint, who bolts his monastery doors 
 and sprinkles holy water in the face of the antique ; 
 the two extremes, are both exceptions. The innu- 
 merable artists of the Renaissance remained in 
 hesitation ; tried to court both the antique and the 
 modern, to unite the Pagan and the Christian — some, 
 like Ghirlandajo, in cold indifference to all but mere 
 artistic science, encrusting marble bacchanals into the 
 walls of the Virgin's paternal house, bringing together, 
 unthinkingly, antique-draped women carrying baskets 
 and noble Strozzi and Ruccellai ladies with gloved 
 hands folded over their gold brocaded skirts ; others, 
 with cheerful and childlike pleasure in both antique 
 and modern, like Benozzo, crowding together half- 
 naked youths and nymphs treading the grapes and 
 scaling the trellise with Florentine magnificos in 
 plaited skirts and starched collars, among the pines 
 and porticos, the sprawling children, barking dogs, 
 peacocks sunning themselves, and partridges picking 
 up grain, of his Pisan frescoes ; yet others using the 
 antique as mere pageant shows, allegorical mummeries 
 destined to amuse some Duke of Ferrara or Marquis 
 of Mantua, together with the hurdle races of Jews, 
 hags, and riderless donkeys. 
 
 Thus little by little the antique amalgamates with 
 
SYMMETRIA PRISCA. 197 
 
 the modern ; the art born of the Middle Ages absorbs 
 the art born of Paganism ; but how slowly, and with 
 what fantastic and ludicrous results at first ; as when 
 the anatomical sculptor Pollaiolo gives scenes of naked 
 Roman prize-fighters as martyrdoms of St. Sebastian ; 
 or when the pious Perugino (pious at least with his 
 brush) dresses up his sleek, hectic, beardless archangels 
 as Roman warriors, and makes them stand, straddling 
 beatically on thin little dapper legs, wistfully gazing 
 from beneath their wondrously ornamented helmets 
 on the walls of the Cambio at Perugia ; when he 
 masquerades meditative fathers of the Church as 
 Socrates and haggard anchorites as Numa Pompilius ; 
 most ludicrous of all, when he attires in scantiest of 
 clinging antique drapery his mild and pensive Ma- 
 donnas, and, with daintily pointed toes, places them 
 to throne bashfully on allegorical chariots as Venus 
 or Diana. 
 
 Long is the period of amalgamation,, and small are 
 the results throughout that long early Renaissance. 
 Mantegna, Piera della Francesca, Melozzo,. Ghir- 
 landajo, Filippino, Botticelli, Verrocchio, have none 
 of them shown us the perfect fusion of the two elements 
 whose union is to give us Michael Angelo, Raphael, 
 and all the great perfect artists of the early sixteenth 
 century ; the two elements axe for ever ill-combined 
 and hostile to each other ; the modern vulgarizes, the 
 antique, the antique paralyzes the modern. And 
 meanwhile the fifteenth century, the century of study, 
 
198 EUPH ORION. 
 
 of conflict, and of confusion, is rapidly drawing to a 
 close ; eight or ten more years, and it will be gone. 
 Is the new century to find the antique still dead and 
 the modern still mediaeval ? 
 
 The antique and the modern had met for the first 
 time and as irreconcilable enemies in the cloisters of 
 Pisa ; and the modern had triumphed in the great 
 mediaeval fresco of the Triumph of Death. By a 
 strange coincidence, by a sublime jest of accident, the 
 antique and the modern were destined to meet again, 
 and this time indissolubly united, in a painting repre- 
 senting the Resurrection. Yes, Signorelli's fresco in 
 Orvieto Cathedral is indeed a resurrection, the resur- 
 rection of human beauty after the long death-slumber 
 of the Middle Ages. And the artist would seem to 
 have been dimly conscious of the great allegory he 
 was painting. Here and there are strewn skulls ; 
 skeletons stand leering by, as if in remembrance of 
 the ghastly past, and as a token of former death ; but 
 magnificent youths are breaking through the crust of 
 the earth, emerging, taking shape and flesh ; arising, 
 strong and proud, ready to go forth at the bidding of 
 the Titanic angels who announce from on high with 
 trumpet blast and waving banners, that the death of 
 the world has come to an end, and that mankind 
 has arisen once more in the youth and beauty of 
 Antiquity. 
 
SYMMETRIA PRISCA. 199 
 
 II. 
 
 Signorelli's frescoes at Orvieto, at once the latest 
 works of the fifteenth century, and the latest works 
 of an old man nurtured in the traditions of Benozzo 
 Gozzoli and of Piero della Francesca, mark the begin- 
 ning of the maturity of Italian art. From them 
 Michael Angelo learns what he could not be taught 
 even by his master Ghirlandajo, the grand and cold 
 realist. He learns ; and what he has learned at 
 Orvieto he teaches with re-doubled force in Rome ; 
 and the ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel, the heroic 
 nudities, the majestic draperies, the reappearance 
 in the modern art of painting of the spirit and hand 
 of Phidias, give a new impulse and hasten on per- 
 fection. When the doors of the chapel are at length 
 opened, Raphael forgets Perugino ; Fra Bartolomeo 
 forgets Botticelli ; Sodoma forgets Leonardo ; the 
 narrower hesitating styles of the fifteenth century are 
 abandoned, as the great example is disseminated 
 throughout Italy ; and even the tumult of angels in 
 glory which the Lombard Correggio is to paint in 
 far-off Parma, and the daringly simple Bacchus and 
 Ariadne with which Tintoret will decorate the Ducal 
 Palace more than fifty years later — all that is great 
 and bold, all that is a re-incarnation of the spirit of 
 Antiquity, all that marks the culmination of Renais- 
 sance art, seems due to the impulse of Michael Angelo, 
 and, through him, to the example of Signorelli. From 
 
200 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 the celestial horseman and bounding avenging angels 
 of Raphael's Heliodorus, to the St. Sebastian of 
 Sodoma, with exquisite limbs and head, rich with 
 tendril-like locks, delicate against the brown Umbrian 
 sunset ; from the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto seated, 
 with the head and drapery of a Niobe, by the sack of 
 flour in the Annunziata cloister, to the voluptuous 
 goddess, with purple mantle half concealing her body 
 of golden white, who leans against the sculptured 
 fountain in Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, with the 
 greenish blue sky and hazy light of evening behind 
 her ; from the extremest examples of the most 
 extreme schools of Lombardy and Venetia, to the 
 most intense examples of the remotest schools of 
 Tuscany and Umbria ; throughout the art of the early 
 sixteenth century, of those thirty years which were the 
 years of perfection, we see, more or less marked, but 
 always distinct, the union of the living art born of the 
 Middle Ages with the dead art left by Antiquity, a 
 union producing life and perfection, producing the 
 great art of the Renaissance. 
 
 This much is clear and easy of definition ; but what 
 is neither clearly understood nor easily defined is 
 the manner in which the antique and the modern 
 did thus amalgamate. It is easy to speak of a 
 vague union of spirit, of the antique idea having 
 permeated the modern ; but all this explains but 
 little : art is not a metaphysical figment, and all its 
 phases and revolutions are concrete, and, so to speak, 
 
SYMMETRIA PRISCA. 201 
 
 physically explicable and definable. The union of 
 the antique with the modern meant simply the ab- 
 sorption by the art of the Renaissance of elements of 
 civilization necessary for its perfection, but not existing 
 in the mediaeval civilization of the fifteenth century ; 
 of elements of civilization which gave what the civili- 
 zation of the fifteenth century — which could give 
 colour, perspective, grouping, and landscape — could 
 never have afforded : the nude, drapery, and gesture. 
 
 The naked human body, which the Greeks had 
 trained, studied, and idolized, did not exist in the 
 fifteenth century ; in its stead there was only the un- 
 dressed body, ill-developed, untrained, pinched, and 
 distorted by the garments only just cast off; cramped 
 and bent by sedentary occupations, livid with the 
 plague-spots of the Middle Ages, scarred with the whip- 
 marks of asceticism. This stripped body, unseen and 
 unfit to be seen, unaccustomed to the air and to the 
 eyes of others, shivered and cowered for cold and for 
 shame. The Giottesques ignored its very existence, 
 conceiving humanity as a bodiless creature, with face 
 and hands to express emotion, and just enough mal- 
 formed legs and feet to be either standing or moving ; 
 further, beneath the garments, there was nothing. 
 The realists of the fifteenth century tore off the clothes 
 and drew the ugly thing beneath ; and bought the 
 corpses from the lazar-houses, and stole them from 
 the gallows ; in order to see how bone fitted into bone, 
 and muscle was stretched over muscle. They learned 
 
202 E UP H ORION. 
 
 to perfection the anatomy of the human frame, but 
 they could not learn its beauty ; they became even 
 reconciled to the ugliness they were accustomed to 
 see ; and, with their minds full of antique examples, 
 Verrocchio, Donatello, Pollaiolo, and Ghirlandajo, the 
 greatest anatomists of the fifteenth century, imitated 
 their coarse and ill-made living models even while 
 imagining that they imitated antique marbles. 
 
 So much for the nude. Drapery, as the ancients 
 understood it in the delicate plaits of Greek chiton 
 and chlamys, in the grand folds of Roman toga, the 
 fifteenth century could not show ; it knew only the 
 stiff, scanty raiment of the active classes ; the un- 
 shapely masses of lined cloth of the merchants and 
 magistrates ; the prudish and ostentatious starched 
 dress of the women ; and the lumpish garb of the monks. 
 
 The artist of the fifteenth century knew drapery 
 only as an exotic ; an exotic with whose representation 
 the habit of seeing mediaeval costume was for ever 
 interfering. On the stripped, unseemly, indecent body 
 he places, with the stiffness of artificiality, drapery 
 such as he has never seen upon any living creature ; , 
 the result is awkwardness and rigidity. And what 
 attitude, what gesture, can he expect from this stripped 
 and artificially draped model ? None, for the model 
 scarce knows how to stand in so unaccustomed a con- 
 dition of body. The artist must seek for attitude and 
 gesture among his townsfolk, and among them he rarely 
 finds any save trivial, awkward, often vulgar movement. 
 
SYMMETRTA P RISC A. 203 
 
 They have never been taught how to stand or to move 
 with grace and dignity ; and the artist studies attitude 
 and gesture in the market-place or the bull-baiting 
 ground, where Ghirlandajo found his jauntily strutting 
 idlers, and Verrocchio his brutally staggering prize- 
 fighters. Between the constrained attitudinizing of 
 Byzantine and Giottesque tradition, and the imitation 
 of the movements of clodhoppers and ragamuffins, 
 the realist of the fifteenth century would wander hope- 
 lessly without the help of the antique. Without it 
 genius and science are of no avail ; the position of 
 Christ in baptism in the paintings of Verrocchio and 
 Ghirlandajo is servile ; the movements of the "Thunder- 
 stricken " in Signorelli's lunettes is a comic mixture of 
 the brutish and the melodramatic ; the magnificently 
 drawn youth at the door of the prison in Filippino's 
 Liberation of St. Peter is gradually going to sleep and 
 collapsing in a fashion which is anything but noble. 
 
 And the same applies to sculptured figures or to 
 figures standing isolated like statues ; no Greek would 
 have ventured upon the swaggering position, with 
 legs apart and elbows out, of Donatello's St. George, 
 or Perugino's St. Michael ; and a young Athenian 
 who should have assumed the attitude of Verrocchio's 
 David, with tripping legs and hand clapped on his 
 hip, would have been made to sit in a corner as a 
 saucy little ragamuffin. 
 
 Coarse nude,stiff drapery, commonplace attitude, was . 
 all that the fifteenth century could offer to its artists ; 
 
204 EUPHORION. 
 
 but Antiquity could offer more and very different 
 things : the naked body developed by the most 
 artistic training, drapery the most natural and refined, 
 and attitude and gesture regulated by an education 
 the most careful and artistic ; and all these things 
 Antiquity did give to the artists of the Renaissance. 
 They did not copy antique statues instead of living 
 naked men and women, but they corrected the faults 
 of their living models by the example of the statues ; 
 they did not copy antique stone draperies in coloured 
 pictures, but they arranged the robes on their models 
 with the antique folds well in their memory ; they did 
 not give the gestures of statues to living figures, but 
 they made the living figures move in accordance with 
 those principles of harmony which they had found 
 exemplified in the statues. 
 
 They did not imitate the antique, they studied 
 it ; they obtained through the fragments of antique 
 sculpture a glimpse into the life of antiquity, and that 
 glimpse served to correct the vulgarism and distortion 
 of the mediaeval life of the fifteenth century. In the 
 perfection of Italian painting, the union of antique 
 and modern being consummated, it is perhaps difficult 
 to disentangle what really is antique from what is 
 modern ; but in the earlier times, when the two elements 
 were still separate, we can see them opposite each other 
 and compare them in the works of the greatest artists. 
 Wherever, as a rule, in the paintings of the early Re- 
 naissance, there is realism, marked by the costume of 
 
SYMMETRIA P RISC A. 205 
 
 the times, there is ugliness of form and vulgarity of 
 movement ; where there is idealism, marked by imita- 
 tion of the antique, the nude, and drapery, there is 
 beauty and dignity. We need only compare Filip- 
 pino's Scene before the Proconsul with his Raising of 
 the King's Son in the Brancacci Chapel ; the grand 
 attitude and draperies of Ghirlandajo's Zachariah 
 with the ungraceful dress and movements of the Floren- 
 tine citizens surrounding him ; Benozzo Gozzoli's noble 
 naked figure of Noah with his ungainly, hideously 
 dressed figure of Cosimo de' Medici ; Mantegna's 
 exquisite Judith with his preposterous Marquis of 
 Mantua ; in short, all the purely realistic with all the 
 purely idealistic painting of the fifteenth century. We 
 may give one last instance. In Signorelli's Orvieto 
 frescoes there is a figure of a young man, with aquiline 
 features, long crisp hair and strongly developed throat, 
 which reappears unmistakably in all the compositions, 
 and in some of them twice and thrice in various posi- 
 tions. His naked figure is grand, his attitudes very 
 fine, his thrown-back head superb, whether he be 
 slowly and painfully emerging from the earth, staggered 
 and gasping with his newly infused life, or sinking 
 oppressed on the ground, broken and crushed by the 
 sound of the trumpet of judgment ; or whether he be 
 moving forward with ineffable longing towards the 
 angel about to award him the crown of the blessed ; 
 in all these positions he is heroically beautiful. We 
 meet him again, unmistakable, but how different, in the 
 
2o6 EUPHORION. 
 
 realistic group of the " Thunder-stricken " — the long, 
 lank youth, with spindle-shanks and egg-shaped body, 
 bounding forward, with grotesque strides, over the 
 uncouth heap of dead bodies, ungainly masses with 
 soles and nostrils uppermost, lying in beast-like 
 confusion. This youth, with something of a harlequin 
 in his jumps and his ridiculous thin legs and prepos- 
 terous padded body, is evidently the model for the 
 naked demi-gods of the Resurrection and the Para- 
 dise : he is the handsome boy as the fifteenth century 
 gave him to Signorelli ; opposite, he is the living 
 youth of the fifteenth century idealized by the study 
 of ancient sculpture ; just as the " Thunder-stricken " 
 may be some scene of street massacre such as Signo- 
 relli might have witnessed at Cortona or Perugia ; while 
 the agonies of the "Hell" are the grouped and rythmic 
 agonies taught by the antique ; just as the two arch- 
 angels of the " Hell," in their armour of Baglioni's 
 heavy cavalry, may represent the modern element, 
 and the same archangels, naked, with magnificent fly- 
 ing draperies, blowing the trumpets of the Resurrec- 
 tion, may show the antique element in Renaissance art. 
 The antique influence was not, indeed, equally 
 strong throughout Italy. It was strongest in the 
 Tuscan school, which, seeking for perfection of linear 
 form, found that perfection in the antique ; it was 
 weakest in the Lombard and Venetian schools, which 
 sought for what the antique could not give, light and 
 shade and colour. The antique was most efficacious 
 
SYMMETRIA PRJSCA. 207 
 
 where it was most indispensable, and it was more 
 necessary to a Tuscan, strong only with his charcoal 
 or pencil, than to Lionardo's Lombards, who could 
 make an imperfect figure, beckoning mysteriously from 
 out of the gloom, more fascinating than the finest 
 drawn Florentine Madonna, and could surround an 
 insignificant head with the wondrous sheen and 
 ripple of hair, as with an aureole of poetry ; it was 
 also less necessary to Giorgione and Titian, who 
 could hide coarse limbs beneath their draperies of 
 precious ruby, and transfigure, by the liquid gold of 
 their palettes, a peasant woman into a goddess. But 
 even the Lombards, even the Venetians, required the 
 antique influence. They could not perhaps have 
 obtained it direct like the Tuscans : the colourists 
 and masters of light and shade might never have 
 understood the blank lines and faint shadows of the 
 marble ; but they received the antique influence, strong 
 but modified by the medium through which it had 
 passed, from Mantegna ; and the relentless self-sacri- 
 fice to Antiquity, the self-paralyzation of the great 
 artist, was not without its use : from Venetian Padua, 
 Mantegna influenced the Bellini and Giorgione ■ from 
 Lombard Mantua, he influenced Leonardo ; and Man- 
 tegna's influence was that of the antique. 
 
 What would have been the art of the Renaissance 
 without the antique ? The speculation is vain, for 
 the antique had influenced it, had been goading it on 
 ever since the earliest times ; it had been present at 
 
2o8 EUPHORION. 
 
 its birth, it had affected Giotto through Niccolo Pisano, 
 and Masaccio through Ghiberti ; the antique influence 
 cannot be conceived as absent in the history of Italian 
 painting. So far, as a study of the impossible, it 
 would be useless to speculate respecting the fate of 
 Renaissance art if uninfluenced by the antique. But 
 lest we forget that this antique influence did exist, 
 lest, grown ungrateful, we refuse it its immense share 
 in producing Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Titian, 
 we may do well to turn to an art born and bred like 
 Italian art, in the Middle Ages ; like it, full of strength 
 and power of self-development, but which, unlike 
 Italian art, was not directly influenced by the antique. 
 This art is the great German art of the early sixteenth 
 century ; the art of Aldegrever, of Altdorfer, of 
 Wohlgemuth, of Kranach, of Albrecht Diirer and 
 Hans Holbein, whom they resemble as Pinturicchio 
 and Lo Spagna resemble Perugino, as Palma and 
 Paris Bordone resemble Titian. This is an art born 
 in a civilization less perfect indeed than that of Italy, 
 narrower, as Niirnberg or Basle is narrower than 
 Florence ; but resembling it in habits, dress, religion, 
 above all, the main characteristic of being mediaeval ; 
 and its masters, as great as their Italian contem- 
 poraries in all the technicalities of the art, and in 
 absolute honesty of endeavour, may show what the 
 Italian art of the sixteenth century might have been 
 without the antique. Let us therefore open a port- 
 
SYMMETRIA PRISCA. 209 
 
 folio of those wonderful minute yet grand engravings 
 of the old Germans. They are for the most part 
 Scriptural scenes or allegories, quite analogous to 
 those of the Italians, but purely realistic, conscious 
 of no world beyond that of an Imperial City of the 
 year 1520. Here we have the whole turn-out, male 
 and female, of a German free-town, in the shape of 
 scenes from the lives of the Virgin and saints ; here 
 are short fat burghers, with enormous blotchy, bloated 
 faces and little eyes set in fat, their huge stomachs 
 protruding from under their jackets ; here ai'e blear- 
 eyed ladies, tall, thin, wrinkled though not old, with 
 figures like hungry harpies, stalking about in high 
 headgears and stiff gowns, or sitting by the side of 
 lean and stunted pages, singing (with dolorous voice) 
 to lutes ; or promenading under trees with long- 
 shanked, high-shouldered gentlemen, with vacant 
 sickly face and long scraggy hair and beard, their 
 bony elbows sticking out under their slashed doublets. 
 These courtly figures culminate in Diirer's mag- 
 nificent plate of the wild man of the woods kissing 
 the hideous, leering Jezebel in her brocade and 
 jewels. Even the poor Madonnas, seated in front 
 of village hovels or windmills, smile the smile 
 of starved, sickly sempstresses. It is a stunted,, 
 poverty-stricken, plague-sick, society, this mediaeval 
 society of burghers and burghers' wives ; the air 
 
 IS 
 
2 to EUPHORION. 
 
 seems bad and heavy, and the h'ght wanting physi- 
 cally and morally, in these old free-towns ; there is 
 intellectual sickness as well as bodily in those musty 
 gabled houses ; the mediaeval spirit blights what 
 revival of healthiness may exist in these common- 
 wealths. And feudalism is outside the gates. There 
 are the brutal, leering men-at-arms, in slashed, puffed 
 doublets and heavy armour, face and dress as un- 
 human as possible, standing grimacing at the blood 
 spirting from John the Baptist's decapitated trunk, 
 as in Kranach's horrible print, while gaping spectators 
 fill the castle-yard ; there are the castles high on 
 rocks amidst woods, with miserable villages below, 
 where the Prodigal Son wallows among the swine, 
 and the tattered boors tumble about in drunkenness, 
 or rest wearied on their spades. There are the Middle 
 Ages in full force. But had these Germans of the 
 days of Luther really no thought beyond their own 
 times and their own country .' Had they really no 
 knowledge of the antique } Not so ; they had heard 
 from their learned men, from Willibald Pirkheimer 
 and Ulrich von Hutten, that the world had once been 
 peopled with naked gods and goddesses. Nay, the 
 very year perhaps that Raphael handed to his en- 
 graver, Marc Antonio, his magnificent drawing of the 
 Judgment of Paris, Lukas Kranach bethought him to 
 represent the story of the good Knight Paris giving 
 the apple to the Lady Venus. There, on Mount 
 
SYMMETRIA PRISCA. 211 
 
 Ida, with a castellated rock in the distance, the 
 charger of Paris browses beneath some stunted 
 larches ; the Trojan knight's helmet, with its mon- 
 strous beak and plume, lies on the ground ; and 
 near it reclines Paris himself, lazy, in complete armour, 
 with frizzled fashionable beard. To him, all wrinkled 
 and grinning with brutal lust, comes another bearded 
 knight, with wings to his vizored helmet. Sir Mercury, 
 leading the three goddesses, short, fat-cheeked Ger- 
 man wenches, housemaids stripped of their clothes, 
 stupid, brazen, indifferent. And Paris is evidently 
 prepared with his choice : he awards the apple to the 
 fattest, for among a half-starved, plague-stricken peo- 
 ple like this, the fattest must needs be the chosen of 
 gods and men. 
 
 No, such pagan scenes are mere burlesques, coarse 
 mummeries, such as may have amused Nurnberg and 
 Augsburg during Shrovetide, when drunken louts 
 figured as Bacchus and sang drinking songs by Hans 
 Sachs. There is no reality in all this ; there is no 
 belief in pagan gods. If we would see the haunting 
 divinity of the German Renaissance, we shall find 
 him prying and prowling in nearly every scene of real 
 life ; him, the ever present, the king of the Middle 
 Ages, whose triumph we have seen on the cloister 
 wall at Pisa, the Lord Death. His fleshless face peers 
 from behind a bush at Zatzinger's stunted, fever- 
 stricken lady and imbecile gentleman ; he sits grin- 
 
212 EUPHORION. 
 
 ning on a tree in Urs Grafs allegory, while the cynical 
 knights, with haggard, sensual faces, crack jokes with the 
 fat woman squatted below ; he puts his hand into the 
 basket of Diirer's tattered pedlar ; he leers hideously 
 at the stirrup of Diirer's armed and stalwart knight. 
 He dances with all mankind from the emperor to the 
 ploughman in Holbein's plates. No gods of youth and 
 nature, no Hercules, no Hermes, no Venus, have in- 
 vaded his German territories, as they invaded even 
 his own palace, the burial-ground at Pisa ; the antique 
 has not perverted Diirer and his fellows, as it per- 
 verted Masaccio and Signorelli and Mantegna, from 
 the mediaeval worship of Death. 
 
 The Italians had seen the antique and had let them- 
 selves be seduced by it, despite their civilization and 
 their religion. Let us only rejoice thereat. There 
 are indeed some, and among them the great English 
 critic who is irrefutable when he is a poet, and irra- 
 tional when he becomes a philosopher ; — there are 
 some who tell us that in its union with antique art, 
 the art of the followers of Giotto embraced death, and 
 rotted away ever after. There are others, more mode- 
 rate but less logical, who would teach us that in uniting 
 with the antique, the mediaeval art of the fifteenth 
 century purified and sanctified the beautiful but evil 
 child of Paganism ; that the goddess of Scopas and 
 the athlete of Polyclete were raised to a higher sphere 
 when Raphael changed the one into a Madonna, and 
 Michael Angelo metamorphosed the other into a 
 
SYMMETRIA P RISC A. in 
 
 prophet But both schools of criticism are in the wrong , 
 Every civilization has its- inherent evil ; Antiquity had 
 its inherent evils, as the Middle Ages had theirs ; An- 
 tiquity may have bequeathed to the Renaissance the 
 bad with the good, as the Middle Ages had bequeathed 
 to the Renaissance the good with the bad. But the 
 art of Antiquity was not the evil, it was the good of 
 Antiquity ; it was born of its strength and its purity 
 only, and it was the incarnation of its noblest qualities. 
 It could not be purified, because it was spotless ; it 
 could not be sanctified, because it was holy. It could 
 gain nothing from the art of the Middle Ages, alter- 
 nately strong in brutal reality, and languid in mystic 
 inanity ; the men of the Renaissance could, if they 
 influenced it at all, influence the antique only for evil ; 
 they belonged to an inferior artistic civilization, and 
 if we conscientiously seek for the spiritual improve- 
 ments brought by them into antique types, we shall see 
 that they usually consist in spoiling their perfect pro- 
 portions ; in making necks longer and muscles more 
 prominent ; in rendering more or less flaccid, or meagre 
 or coarse, the grand and delicate forms of antique 
 art. And when we have examined into this purified 
 art of the Renaissance, when we have compared coolly 
 and equitably, we may perhaps confess that, while 
 the Renaissance added immense wealth of beauty in 
 colour, perspective, and grouping, it took away some- 
 thing of the perfection of simple lines and modest 
 light and shade of the antique ; we may admit to our- 
 selves that the grandest saint by Raphael is meagre 
 
214 EUPHORION. 
 
 and stunted, and the noblest Virgin by Titian is over- 
 blown and sensual by the side of the denii-gods and 
 amazons of antique sculpture. 
 
 The antique perfected the art of the Renaissance, 
 it did not corrupt it. The art of the Renaissance fell 
 indeed into shameful degradation soon after the period 
 of its triumphant union with the antique ; and 
 Raphael's grand gods and goddesses, his exquisite 
 Eros and radiant Psyche of the Farnesina, are indeed 
 succeeded but too soon by the Olympus of Giulio 
 Romano, an Olympus of harlots and acrobats, who 
 smirk and mouth and wriggle and sprawl ignobly on 
 the walls and ceilings of the dismantled palace which 
 crumbles away among the stunted willows, the stag- 
 nant pools, and rank grass of the marshes of Mantua. 
 But this is no more the fault of Antiquity than it is 
 the fault of the Middle Ages ; it is the fault of that 
 great principle of life and of change which makes all 
 things organic, be they physical or intellectual, ger- 
 minate, grow, attain maturity, and then fade, wither, 
 and rot. The dead art of Antiquity could never have 
 brought the art of the Renaissance to an untimely 
 end ; the art of the Renaissance decayed because it 
 was mature, and died because it had lived. 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART 
 I. 
 
 Real and ideal — these are the handy terms, admiring 
 or disapproving, which criticism claps with random 
 facility on to every imaginable school. This artist 
 or group of artists goes in for the real — the upright, 
 noble, trumpery, filthy real ; that other artist or group 
 of artists seeks after the ideal — the ideal which may 
 mean sublimity or platitude. We summon every 
 living artist to state whether he is a realist or an 
 idealist ; we classify all dead artists as realists or 
 idealists ; we treat the matter as if it were one of 
 almost moral importance. Now the fact of the case 
 is that the question of realism and idealism, which 
 we calmly assume as already settled or easy to settle 
 by our own sense of right and wrong, is one of the 
 tangled questions of art-philosophy ; and one, more- 
 over, which no amount of theory, but only historic 
 fact, can ever set right. For, to begin with, we find 
 realism and idealism coming before us in different 
 ways and with different meaning and importance. 
 
2i8 EUPHORION. 
 
 All art which is not addressing (as decrepit art is 
 forced to do) faculties to which art does not spontane- 
 ously and properly appeal — all art is decorative, orna- 
 mental, idealistic therefore, since it consciously or 
 unconsciously aims, not merely at reproducing the 
 already existing, but at producing something which 
 shall repay the looking at it, something which shall orna- 
 ment, if not a place, at least our lives ; and such making 
 of the ornamental, of the worth looking at, necessarily 
 implies selection and arrangement — that is to say, 
 idealism. At the same time, while art aims definitely 
 at being in this sense decorative, art may very possibly 
 aim more immediately at merely reproducing, without 
 selection or arrangement, the actually existing things 
 of the world ; and this in order to obtain the mere 
 power of representation. In short, art which is ideal- 
 istic as a master will yet be realistic as a scholar : it 
 decorates when it achieves, it copies when it studies. 
 But this is only half the question. Certain whole 
 schools may be described as idealistic, others as 
 realistic, in tendency ; and this, not in their study, but 
 in their achievement. One school will obviously be 
 contented with forms the most unselected and vulgar ; 
 others will go but little out of their way in search of 
 form-superiority ; while yet others, and these we must 
 emphatically call idealistic, are squeamish to the last 
 degree in the choice and adaptation of form, anxious 
 to get the very best, and make the very best of it. 
 Yet, en thinking over it, we shall find that realistic 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 219 
 
 and idealistic schools are all, in their achievements, 
 equally striving after something which is not the mere 
 reproduction of the already existing as such — striving, 
 in short, after decoration. The pupil of Perugino 
 will, indeed, wait patiently to begin his work until he 
 can find a model fit for a god or goddess ; while the 
 fellow-craftsman of Rembrandt will be satisfied with 
 the first dirty old Jew or besotten barmaid that comes 
 to hand. But the realistic Dutchman is not, therefore, 
 any the less smitten with beauty, any the less eager 
 to be ornamental, than the idealistic Italian : his man 
 and woman he takes indeed with off-hand indifference, 
 but he places them in that of which the Italian shall 
 perhaps never have dreamed, in that on which he has 
 expended all his science, his skill, his fancy, in that 
 which he gives as his addition to the beautiful things 
 of art — in atmosphere, in light, which are to the every- 
 day atmosphere and light what the patiently sought 
 for, carefully perfected god or goddess model of 
 Raphael is to the everyday Jew, to the everyday 
 barmaid, of Rembrandt. 
 
 The ideal, for the man who is quite coarsely realistic 
 in his figures, exists in the air, light, colour ; and in 
 saying this I have, so to speak, turned over the page 
 too quickly, forestalled the expression of what I can 
 prove only later: the disconnection of such comparative 
 realism and idealism as this (the only kind of realism, 
 let us remember, which can exist in great art) with 
 any personal bias of the artist, its intimate dependence 
 
220 EUPHORION. 
 
 upon the constitution and tendency of art, upon its 
 preoccupations about form, or colour, or light, in a 
 given country and at a given moment. And now I 
 should wish to resume the more orderly treatment 
 of the subject, which will lead us in time to the second 
 half of the question respecting realism and idealism. 
 These considerations have come to me in connec- 
 tion with the portrait art of the Renaissance ; and this 
 very simply. For portrait is a curious bastard of art, 
 sprung on the one side from a desire which is not 
 artistic, nay, if anything, opposed to the whole nature 
 and function of art: the desire for the mere likeness of 
 an individual. The union with this interloping tendency, 
 so foreign to the whole aristocratic temper of art, has 
 produced portrait ; and by the position of this hybrid, 
 or at least far from regularly bred creature ; by the 
 amount of the real artistic quality of beauty which it 
 is permitted to retain by the various schools of art, 
 we can, even as by the treatment of similar social 
 interlopers we can estimate the necessities and ten- 
 dencies of various states of society, judge what are 
 the conditions in which the various schools of art 
 struggle for the object of their lives, which is the 
 beautiful. 
 
 I have said that art is realistic in its periods or 
 moments of study ; and this is essentially the case 
 even with the school which in many respects was the 
 most unmistakably decorative and idealistic in inten- 
 tion : the school of Giotto. The Giottesques are 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 221 
 
 more than decorative artists, they are decorators in 
 the most literal sense. Painting with them is merely 
 one of the several arts and crafts enslaved by mediaeval 
 architecture and subservient to architectural effects. 
 Their art is the only one which is really and success- 
 fully architecturally decorative ; and to appreciate this 
 we must contrast their fresco-work with that of the 
 fifteenth century and all subsequent times. Masaccio, 
 Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, turn the wall into a mere badly 
 made frame ; a gigantic piece of cardboard would do 
 as well, and better; the colours melt into one another, 
 the figures detach themselves at various degrees of 
 relief ; those upon the ceiling and pendentives are 
 frequently upside down ; yet these figures, which are 
 so difficult to see, are worth seeing only in themselves, 
 and not in relation to their position. The masonry 
 is no longer covered, but carved, rendered uneven with 
 the cavities and protrusions of perspective. In Man- 
 tegna's frescoes the wall becomes a slanting theatre 
 scene, cunningly perspectived like Palladio's Teatro 
 Olimpico ; with Correggio, wall, masonry, everything, 
 is dissolved, the side or cupola of a church becomes a 
 rent in the clouds, streaming with light. 
 
 Not so with the Giottesque frescoes : the wall, the 
 vault, the triumphant masonry is always present and 
 felt, beneath the straight, flat bands of uniform colour ; 
 the symmetrical compartments, the pentacle.?, triangles, 
 and segments, and borders of histories, whose figures 
 never project, whose colours are separate as those in 
 
222 EUPHORION. 
 
 a mosaic. The Giottesque frescoes, with their tiers 
 and compartments of dark blue, their vague figures 
 dressed in simple ultramarines, greens, dull reds, and 
 purples ; their geometrical borders and pearlings and 
 dog-tooths ; cover the walls, the ribbed and arched 
 ceilings, the pointed raftering almost like some 
 beautiful brown, blue, and tarnished gold leather- 
 hangings ; the figures, outlined in dark paint, have 
 almost the appearance of being stencilled on the wall. 
 Such is Giottesque painting : an art which is not 
 merely essentially decorative, but which is, moreover, 
 what painting and sculpture remained throughout the 
 Gothic period, subservient to the decorative effect of 
 another art ; an art in which all is subordinated to 
 architectural effect, in which form, colour, figures, 
 houses, the most dramatic scenes of the most awful 
 of all dramas, everything is turned into a kind of 
 colossal and sublime wall-paper ; and such an art 
 as this would lead us to expect but little realism, 
 little deliberate and slavish imitation of the existing. 
 Yet wherever there is life in this Gothic art (which 
 has a horrible tendency, piously unobserved by critics, 
 to stagnate into blundering repetition of the same 
 thing), wherever there is progress, there is, in the 
 details of that grandiose, idealistic decoration, real- 
 ism of the crudest kind. Those Giottesque workers, 
 who were not content with a kind of Gothic Byzan- 
 tinism ; those who really handed over something vital 
 to their successors of the fifteenth century, while 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 223 
 
 repeating the old idealistical decorations ; were study- 
 ing with extraordinary crudeness of realism. Every- 
 thing that was not conventional ornament or type 
 was portrait ; and portrait in which the scanty technical 
 means of the artist, every meagre line and thin dab 
 of colour, every timid stroke of brush or of pencil, went 
 towards the merciless delineation not merely of a body 
 but of a soul. And the greater the artist, the more 
 cruel the portrait : cruellest in representation of utter 
 spiritual baseness in the two greatest of these ideal- 
 istic decorators ; Giotto, and his latest disciple, Fra 
 Angelico. Of this I should like to give a couple of 
 examples. 
 
 In Giotto's frescoes at Santa Croce — one of the 
 most lovely pieces of mere architectural decoration 
 conceivable — there are around the dying and the dead 
 St. Francis two groups of monks, which are astound- 
 ingly realistic. The solemn ending of the ideally 
 beautiful life of sanctity which was so fresh in the 
 memory of Giotto's contemporaries, is nothing beyond 
 a set of portraits of the most absolutely mediocre 
 creatures, moral and intellectual, of creatures the most 
 utterly incapable of religious enthusiasm that ever 
 made religion a livelihood. They gather round the 
 dying and the dead St. Francis, a noble figure, not at 
 all ecstatic or seraphic, but pure, strong, worn out 
 with wise and righteous labour, a man of thought and 
 action, upon whose hands and feet the stigmata of 
 supernatural rapture are a mere absurdity. The 
 
224 E UP H ORION. 
 
 monks are presumably his immediate disciples, those 
 fervent and delicate poetic natures of whom we read 
 in the " Fioretti di San Francesco." To represent them 
 Giotto has painted the likeness of the first half-dozen 
 friars he may have met in the streets near Santa 
 Croce : not caricatures, nor ideals, but portraits, 
 Giotto has attempted neither to exalt nor to degrade 
 them into any sort of bodily or spiritual interesting- 
 ness. They are not low nor bestial nor extremely 
 stupid. They are in various degrees dull, sly, routinist, 
 prosaic, pedantic ; their most noteworthy characteristic 
 is that they are certainly the men who are not called 
 by God. They are no scandal to the Church, but 
 no honour ; they are sloth, stupidity, sensualism, and 
 cunning not yet risen to the dignity of a vice. They 
 look upon the dying and the dead saint with indif- 
 ference, want of understanding, at most a gape or a 
 bright look of stupid miscomprehension at the stig- 
 mata : they do not even perceive that a saint is a 
 different being from themselves. With these frescoes 
 of Giotto I should wish to compare Fra Angelico's 
 great ceremonial crucifixion in the cloister chapel of 
 San Marco of Florence ; for it displays to an extra- 
 ordinary degree that juxtaposition of the most con- 
 ventionally idealistic, pious decorativeness with the 
 realism straightforward, unreflecting, and heartless to 
 the point of becoming perfectly grotesque. The fresco 
 is divided into two scenes : on the one side the cruci- 
 fixion, the mystic actors of the drama, on the other 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 225 
 
 the holy men admitted to its contemplation. A sense 
 that holy things ought to be old-fashioned, a respect 
 for Byzantine inanity which invariable haunted the 
 Giottesques in their capacity of idealistic decorators, 
 of men who replaced with frescoes the solemn lifeless 
 splendours of mosaic ; this kind of artistico-religious 
 prudery has made Angelico, who was able to fore- 
 shorten powerfully the brawny crucified thieves, repre- 
 sent the Saviour dangling from the cross bleached, bone- 
 less, and shapeless, a thing that is not dead because it 
 has never been alive. The holy persons around stand 
 rigid, vacant, against their blue nowhere of background, 
 with vague expanses of pink facelookingneitheroneway 
 nor the other ; mere modernized copies of the strange, 
 goggle-eyed, vapid beings on the old Italian mosaics. 
 This is not a representation of the actual reality of the 
 crucifixion, like Tintoret's superb picture at S. Rocco, 
 or Diirer's print, or so many others, which show the 
 hill, the people, the hangman, the ladders and ropes 
 and hammers and tweezers : it is a sort of mystic 
 repetition of it; subjective, if I may say so; existing 
 only in the contemplation of the saints on the opposite 
 side, who are spectators only in the sense that a con- 
 templative Christian may be said to be the mystic 
 spectator of the Passion. The thing for the painter 
 to represent is fervent contemplation, ecstatic realiza- 
 tion of the past by the force of ardent love and belief; 
 the condition of mind of St. Francis, St. Catherine of 
 
 Siena, Madame Guyon : it is the revelation of the great 
 
 16 
 
226 EUPHORION. 
 
 tragedy of heaven to the soul of the mystic. Now, 
 how does Fra Angelico represent this? A row of 
 saints, founders of orders, kneel one behind the other, 
 and by their side stand apostles and doctors of the 
 Church ; admitting them to the sight of the super- 
 human, with the gesture, the bland, indifferent vacuity 
 of the Cameriere Segreto or Monsignore who intro- 
 duces a troop of pilgrims to the Pope ; they are privi- 
 leged persons, they respect, they keep up decorum, 
 they raise their eyes and compress their lips with cere- 
 monious reverence ; but. Lord ! they have gone through 
 it all so often, they are so familiar with it, they don't 
 look at it any longer ; they gaze about listlessly, they 
 would yawn if they were not too well bred for that. 
 The others, meanwhile, the sainted pilgrims, the men 
 whose journey over the sharp stones and among the 
 pricking brambles of life's wilderness finds its final 
 reward in this admission into the presence of the 
 Holiest, kneel one by one, with various expressions : 
 one with the stupid delight of a religious sightseer ; 
 his vanity is satisfied, he will next draw a rosary from 
 his pocket and get it blessed by Christ Himself ; he 
 will recount it all to his friends at home. Another is 
 dull and gaping, a clown who has walked barefoot 
 from Valencia to Rome, and got imbecile by the way ; 
 yet another, prim and dapper ; the rest indifferent^ 
 looking restlessly about them, at each other, at their 
 feet and hands, perhaps exchanging mute remarks 
 about the length of time they are kept waiting ; those 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 227 
 
 at the end of the kneeling procession, St. Peter Martyr 
 and St. Giovanni Gualberto especially, have the bored, 
 listless, devout look of the priestlets in the train of a 
 bishop. All these figures, the standing ones who 
 introduce and the kneeling ones who are being intro- 
 duced, are the most perfect types of various states of 
 dull, commonplace, mediocre routinist superstition ; 
 so many Camerlenghi on the one hand, so many 
 Passionists or Propagandists on the other : the first 
 aristocratic, bland and bored ; the second, dull, list- 
 less, mumbling, chewing Latin Prayers which never 
 meant much to their minds, and now mean nothing ; 
 both perfectly I'everential and proper in behaviour, 
 with no more possibility of individual fervour of belief 
 than of individual levity of disbelief: the Church, as 
 it exists in well-regulated decrepitude. And thus 
 does the last of the Giottesques, the painter of glorified 
 Madonnas and dancing angels, the saint, represent 
 the saints admitted to behold the supreme tragedy of 
 the Redemption. 
 
 Thus much for the Giottesques. The Tuscans of 
 the early Renaissance developed up to the utmost, 
 assisted by the goldsmiths and sculptors, who taught 
 them modelling and anatomy, that realistic element 
 of Giottesque painting. Its ideal decorative part had 
 become impossible. Painting could no longer be a 
 decoration of architecture, and it had not yet the means 
 of being ornamental in itself; it was an art which did 
 not achieve, but merely studied. Among its exercises 
 
228 EUPHORION. 
 
 in anatomy, modelling, perspective, and so forth, always 
 laborious and frequently abortive, its only spontaneous, 
 satisfactory, mature production was its portrait work, 
 Portraits of burghers in black robes and hoods ; of 
 square-jawed youths with red caps stuck on to their 
 fuzzy heads, of bald and wrinkled scholars and mag- 
 nificoes ; of thinly bearded artizans ; people who stand 
 round the preaching Baptist or crucified Saviour, look 
 on at miracle or martyrdom, stolid, self-complacent, 
 heedless, against their background of towered, walled, 
 and cypressed city — of buttressed square and street ; 
 ugly but real, interesting, powerful among the grotesque 
 agglomerations of bag-of-bones nudities, bunched and 
 taped-up draperies and out-of-joint architecture of the 
 early Renaissance frescoes ; at best among its picture- 
 book and Noah's-ark prettinesses of toy-box cypresses, 
 vine trellises, inlaid house fronts, rabbits in the grass, 
 and peacocks on the roofs ; for the early Renaissance, 
 with the one exception of Masaccio, is in reality a 
 childish time of art, giving us the horrors of school- 
 hour blunders and abortions varied with the delights of 
 nursery wonderland : maturity, the power of achieving,^ 
 the perception of something worthy of perception, 
 comes only with the later generation, the one imme- 
 diately preceding the age of Raphael and Michael 
 Angelo ; with Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, Filippino, Botti- 
 celli, Perugino, and their contemporaries. 
 
 But this period is not childish, is not immature in 
 everything. Or, rather, the various arts which exist 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 229 
 
 together at this period are not all in the same stage 
 of development. While painting is in this immature 
 ugliness, and ideal sculpture, in works like Verrocchio's 
 and Donatello's David, only a cleverer, more expe- 
 rienced, but less legitimate kind of painting, painting 
 more successful in the present, but with no possible 
 future ; the almost separate art of portrait-sculpture 
 arises again where it was left by Graeco-Roman 
 masters, and, developing to yet greater perfection, 
 gives in marble the equivalent of what painting will 
 be able to produce only much later : realistic art 
 which is decorative ; beautiful works made out of ugly 
 materials. 
 
 The vicissitudes of Renaissance sculpture are 
 strange : its life, its power, depend upon death ; it is an 
 art developed in the burying vault and cloister ceme- 
 tery. During the Middle Ages sculpture had had its 
 reason, its vital possibility, its something to influence, 
 nay, to keep it alive, in architecture ; but with the dis- 
 appearance of Gothic building disappears also the 
 possibility of the sculpture which covers the portals of 
 Chartres and the belfry of Florence. The pseudo- 
 classic colonnades, entablatures, all the thin bastard 
 Ionic and Corinthian of Alberti and Bramante, did not 
 require sculpture, or had their own little supply of un- 
 fleshed ox-skulls, greengrocer's garlands, scallopings 
 and wave-linings, which, with a stray siren and one 
 or two bloated emperors' heads, amply sufficed. On 
 the other hand, mediaeval civilization and Christian 
 
230 EUPHORION. 
 
 dogma did not encourage the production of naked or 
 draped ideal statues like those which Antiquity stuck 
 on countless temple fronts, and erected at every 
 corner of square, street, or garden. The people of the 
 Middle Ages were too grievously ill grown, distorted, 
 hideous, to be otherwise than indecent in nudity ; they 
 may have had an instinct of the kind, and, ugly as 
 they knew themselves to be, they must yet have found 
 in forms like those of Verrocchio's David insufficient 
 beauty to give much pleasure. Besides, if the Middle 
 Ages had left no moral room for ideal sculpture once 
 freed from the service of architecture, they had still 
 less provided it with a physical place. Such things 
 could not be set up in churches, and only a very 
 moderate number of statues could be wanted as open- 
 air monuments in the narrow space of a still Gothic 
 city ; and, in fact, ideal heroic statues of the early 
 Renaissance are fortunately not only ugly, but com- 
 paratively few in number. There remained, therefore 
 for sculpture, unless contented to dwindle down into 
 brass and gold miniature work, no regular employ- 
 ment save that connected with sepulchral monuments. 
 During the real Middle Ages, and in the still Gothic 
 north, the ornamentation of a tomb belonged to archi- 
 tecture : from the superb miniature minsters, pillared 
 and pinnacled and sculptured, cathedrals within the 
 cathedral, to the humbler foliated arched canopy, pro- 
 tecting a simple sarcophagus at the corner of many a 
 street inLombardy. The sculptor's work was but the low 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 231 
 
 relief on the church flags, the timidly carved, outlined, 
 cross-legged knight or praying priest, flattened down 
 on his pillow as if ashamed even of that amount of 
 prominence, and in a hurry to be trodden down and 
 obliterated into a few ghostly outlines. But to this 
 humiliated prostrate image, to this flat thing doomed 
 to obliteration, came the sculptor of the Renaissance, 
 and bade the wafer-like simulacrum fill up, expand, 
 raise itself, lift itself on its elbow, arise and take 
 possession of the bed of state, the catafalque raised 
 high above the crowd, draped with brocade, carved 
 with rich devices of leaves and beasts of heraldry, 
 roofed over with a dai's, which is almost a triumphal 
 arch, garlanded with fruits and flowers, upon which 
 the illustrious dead were shown to the people ; but 
 made eternal, and of eternal magnificence, by the 
 stone-cutter, and guarded, not for an hour by the 
 liveried pages or chaunting monks, but by winged 
 genii for all eternity. Some people, I know, call this 
 a degradation, and say that it was the result of corrupt 
 pride, this refusal to have the dear or illustrious dead 
 scraped out any longer by the shoe-nails of every 
 rufiian, rubbed out by the knees of every kitchen 
 wench ; but to me it seems that it was due merely to 
 the fact that sculpture had lost its former employment, 
 and that a great art cannot (thank Heaven ! ) be 
 pietistically self-humiliating. Be this as it may, the 
 sculpture of the Renaissance had found a new and 
 singularly noble line of work, the one in which it was 
 
232 EUPH ORION. 
 
 great, unique, unsurpassed, because untutored. It 
 worked here without models, to suit modern require- 
 ments, with modern spirit ; it was emphatically 
 modern sculpture ; the only modern sculpture which 
 can be talked of as something original, genuine, valu- 
 able, by the side of antique sculpture. Greek Antiquity 
 had evaded death, and neglected the dead ; a garland 
 of monads and fauns among ivy leaves, a battle of 
 amazons or centaurs ; in the late semi-Christian, 
 platonic days, some Orphic emblem, or genius ; at 
 most, as in the exquisite tombs of the Keramikos of 
 Athens, a figure, a youth on a prancing steed, like the 
 Phidian monument of Dexileus ; a maiden, draped 
 and bearing an urn ; but neither the youth nor the 
 maiden is the inmate of the tomb : they are types, 
 living types, no portraits. Nay, even where Antiquity 
 shows us Death or Hermes, gently leading away the 
 beloved ; the spirit, the ghost, the dead one, is unin- 
 dividual. " Sarkophagen und Urnen bekranzte der 
 Heide mit Leben," said Goethe ; but it was the life 
 which was everlasting because it was typical : the life 
 not which had been relinquished by the one buried 
 there, but the life which the world danced on, forget- 
 ful, round his ashes. The Romans, on the contrary, 
 graver and more retentive folk than the Greeks, as 
 well as more domestic, less coffee-house living, appear 
 to have inherited from the Etruscans a desire to pre- 
 serve the effigy of the dead, a desire unknown to the 
 Greeks. But the Etrusco-Roman monuments, where 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 233 
 
 husband and wife stare forth togaed and stolaed, half 
 reduced to a conventional crop-headedness, grim and 
 stiff as if sitting unwillingly for their portrait ; or 
 reclining on the sarcophagus-lid, neither dead, nor 
 asleep, nor yet alive and awake, but with a hieratic 
 mummy stare, have little of JEsthetic or sympathetic 
 value. The early Renaissance, then, first bethought 
 it of representing the real individual in the real death 
 slumber. And I question whether anything more 
 fitting could be placed on a tomb than the effigy of the 
 dead as we saw them just before the coffin-lid closed 
 down ; as we would give our all to see them but one 
 little moment longer; as they continue to exist for our 
 fancy within the grave ; for to any but morbid feelings 
 the beloved can never suffer decay. Whereas a por- 
 trait of the man in life, as the throning popes in St. 
 Peter's, seems heartless and derisive ; such monuments 
 striking us as conceived and ordered by their inmates 
 while alive, like Michael Angelo's Pope Julius, and 
 Browning's Bishop, who was so preoccupied about his 
 tomb in St. Praxed's Church. The Renaissance, the 
 late Middle Ages, felt better than this : on the 
 extreme pinnacle, high on the roof, they might indeed 
 place against the russet brick or the blue sky, amid 
 the hum of life and the movement of the air, the 
 living man, like the Scaligers, the mailed knight on 
 his charger, lance in rest ; but in the church below, 
 under the funereal pall, they could place only the body 
 such as it may have lain on the bier. 
 
234 EUPHORION. 
 
 And that figure on the bier was the great work of 
 Renaissance sculpture. Inanimate and vulgar when 
 in heroic figures they tried to emulate the ancients, 
 the sculptors of the fifteenth century have found their 
 own line. The modesty, the simplicity, the awful and 
 beautiful repose of the dead ; the individual character 
 cleared of all its conflicting meannesses by death, 
 simplified, idealized as it is in the memory of the 
 survivors — all these are things which belong to the 
 Renaissance. As the Greeks gave the strong, smooth 
 life-current circulating through their heroes ; so did 
 these men of the fifteenth century give the gentle and 
 harmonious ebbing after-life of death in their sepulchral 
 monuments. Things diffioult to describe, and which 
 must be seen and remembered. There is the monu- 
 ment, now in the museum at Ravenna, by a sculptor 
 whose name, were it known, would surely be among 
 the greatest, of the condottiere, Braccioforte : the body 
 prone in its heavy case of armour, not yet laid out in 
 state, but such as he may have been found in the 
 evening, when the battle was over, under a tree where 
 they had carried him to die while they themselves 
 went back to fight ; the head has fallen back, side- 
 ways, weighed down by the helmet, which has not 
 even been unbuckled, only the face, the clear-cut, 
 austere features, visible beneath the withdrawn vizor ; 
 the eyes have not been closed ; and there are few 
 things more exquisite and solemn at once in all 
 sculpture, than the indication of those no longer seeing 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 235 
 
 eyes, of that broken glance, beneath the half-closed 
 lids. There is RosselHno's Cardinal of Portugal at 
 S. Miniato a Monte : the slight body, draped in epis- 
 copal robes, lying with delicate folded hands, in 
 gracious decorum of youthful sanctity ; the strong 
 delicate head, of clear feature and gentle furrow of 
 suffering and thought, a face of infinite purity of 
 strength, strength still ungnarled by action : a young 
 priest, who in his virginal dignity is almost a noble 
 woman. And there is the Ilaria Guinigi of Jacopo 
 della Querela (the man who had most natural affinity 
 with the antique of all these sculptors, as one may see 
 from the shattered remains of the Fonte Gaia of 
 Siena), the lady stretched out on the rose-garlanded 
 bed of state in a corner of Lucca Cathedral, her feet 
 upon her sleeping dog, her sweet, girlish head, with 
 wavy plaits of hair encircled by a rose-wreathed, 
 turban-like diadem, lying low on round cushions ; the 
 bed gently giving way beneath the beautiful, ample- 
 bosomed body, round which the soft robe is chastely 
 gathered, and across which the long-sleeved arms 
 are demurely folded ; the most beautiful lady (whose 
 majestic tread through the palace rooms we can well 
 imagine) that the art of the fifteenth century has re- 
 corded. There is, above all, the Carlo Marsuppini of 
 Desiderio da Settignano, the humanist Secretary of 
 the Commonwealth, lying on the sarcophagus, superb 
 with shell fretwork and curling acanthus, in Santa 
 Croce of Florence. For the youthful beauty of the 
 
236 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 Cardinal of Portugal and of the Lady Ilaria are 
 commonplace compared with the refinement of this 
 worn old face, with scant wavy hair and thin, gently 
 furrowed, but by no means ploughed-up features. 
 The slight figure looks as if in life it must have 
 seemed almost transparent ; and the hands are very 
 pathetic : noble, firm hands, subtle of vein and wrist, 
 crossed simply, neither in prayer nor in agony, but in 
 gentle weariness, over the book on his breast. That 
 book is certainly no prayer-book ; rather a volume of 
 Plato or Cicero : in his last moments the noble old 
 man has longed for a glance over the familiar pages ; 
 they have placed the book on his breast, but it has 
 been too late ; the drowsiness of death has overtaken 
 him, and with his last sigh he has gently folded his 
 hands over the volume, with the faint, last clinging to 
 the things beloved in this world. 
 
 Such is that portrait sculpture of the early Renais- 
 sance, its only sculpture, if we except the exquisite work 
 in babies and angels just out of the nursery of the Rob- 
 bias, which is a real achievement. But how achieved ? 
 This art is great just by the things which Antiquity 
 did not. And what are those things ? Shall we say 
 that it is sentiment ^ But all fine art has tact, antique 
 art most certainly ; and as to pathos, why, any quiet 
 figure of a dead man or woman, however rudely carved, 
 has pathos ; nay, there is pathos in the poor puling, 
 hysterical art which makes angels draw the curtains 
 of fine ladies' bedchambers, and fine, ladies, in hoop or 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 237 
 
 limp Grecian dress, faint (the smelling bottle, Betty !) 
 over their lord's coffin ; there is pathos, to a decently 
 constituted human being, wherever (despite all ab- 
 surdities) we can imagine that there lies some one 
 whom it was bitter to see departing, to whom it was 
 bitter to depart. Pathos, therefore, is not the question ; 
 and, if you choose to call it sentiment, it is in reality 
 a sentiment for line and curve, for stone and light. 
 The great question is. How did these men of the 
 Renaissance make their dead people look beautiful .'' 
 For they were not all beautiful in life, and ugly folk 
 do not grow beautiful merely because they are dead. 
 The Cardinal of Portugal, the beautiful Ilaria herself, 
 were you to sketch their profile and place it by the 
 side of no matter what ordinary antique, would greatly 
 fall short of what we call sculpturesque beauty ; and 
 many of the others, old humanists and priests and 
 lawyers, are emphatically ugly : snub or absurdly 
 hooked noses, retreating or deformedly overhanging 
 foreheads, fleshy noses, and flabby cheeks, blear eyes 
 and sunk-in mouths ; and a perfect network of wrinkles 
 and creases, which, hard as it is to say, have been 
 scooped out not merely by age, but by low mind, 
 fretting and triumphant animalism. Now, by what 
 means did the sculptor — the sculptor, too unac- 
 quainted with sculptural beauty (witness his ugly 
 ideal statues), to be able, like the man who turned the 
 successors of Alexander into a race of leonine though 
 crazy demi-gods — to insidiously idealize these ugly and 
 
238 EUPHORION. 
 
 insignificant features ; by what means did he turn 
 these dead men into things beautiful to see ? I have 
 said that he took up art where Grasco-Roman Antiquity 
 had left it. Remark that I say Graeco- Roman, and I 
 ought to add much more Roman than Greek. For 
 Greek sculpture, nurtured in the habit of perfect form, 
 art to which beauty was a cheap necessity, invariably 
 idealized portrait, idealized it into beauty or inanity. 
 But v^fhen Greek art had run its course ; when beauty 
 of form had well-nigh been exhausted or begun to 
 pall ; certain artists, presumably Greeks, but working 
 for Romans, began to produce portrait work of quite 
 a new and wonderful sort : the beautiful portraits of 
 ugly old men, of snub little boys, work which was 
 clearly before its right time, and was swamped by 
 idealized portraits, insipid, nay, inane, from the elegant 
 revivalist busts of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius down 
 to the bonnet blocks of the lower empire. Of this 
 Roman portrait art, of certain heads of half-idiotic 
 little CjEsar brats, of sly and wrinkled old men, things 
 which ought to be so ugly and yet are so beautiful, 
 we say, at least, perhaps unformulated, we think, 
 " How Renaissance ! " And the secret of the beauty 
 of these few Graeco-Roman busts, which is also that 
 of Renaissance portrait sculpture, is that the beauty is 
 quite different in kind from the beauty of Greek ideal 
 sculpture, and obtained by quite different means. 
 
 It is, essentially, that kind of beauty which I began 
 by saying belonged to realistic art, to the art which is 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 239 
 
 not squeamish about the object which it represents, 
 but is squeamish about the manner and medium in 
 which that indifferent object is represented ; it is a kind 
 of beauty, therefore, more akin to that of Rembrandt 
 and Velasquez than to that of Michael Angelo or 
 Raphael. It is the beauty, not of large lines and 
 harmonies, beauty residing in the real model's forms, 
 beauty real, wholesale, which would be the same if 
 the man were not marble but flesh, not in a given 
 position but moving ; but it is a beauty of combina- 
 tions of light and surface, a beauty of texture opposed 
 to texture, which would probably be unperceived in 
 the presence of the more regal beauty of line and 
 colour harmonies, and which those who could obtain 
 this latter would employ only as much as they were 
 conducive to such larger beauties. And this beauty 
 of texture opposed to texture and light combined with 
 surface is a very real thing ; it is the great reality of 
 Renaissance sculpture : this beauty, resulting from 
 the combination, for instance, in a commonplace face, 
 of the roughness and coarser pore of the close shaven 
 lips and chin with the smoothness of the waxy 
 hanging cheeks ; the one catching the light, the other 
 breaking it into a ribbed and forked penumbra. The 
 very perfection of this kind of work is Benedetto da 
 Maiano's bust of Pietro Mellini in the Bargello at 
 Florence. The elderly head is of strongly marked 
 osseous structure, yet fleshed with abundant and flaccid 
 flesh, hanging in folds or creases round the mouth and 
 
240 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 chin, yet not flobbery and floppy, but solid, though 
 yielding, creased, wrinkled, crevassed rather as a sandy 
 hillside is crevassed by the trickling waters ; semi- 
 solid, promising slight resistance, waxy, yielding 
 to the touch. But all the flesh has, as it were, gravi- 
 tated to the lower part of the face, conglomerated, 
 or rather draped itself, about the mouth, firmer for 
 sunken teeth and shaving ; and the skin has remained 
 alone across the head, wrinkled, yet drawn in tight 
 folds across the dome-shaped skull, as if, while the 
 flesh disappeared, the bone also had enlarged. And 
 on the temples the flesh has once been thick, the bone 
 (seemingly) slight ; and now the skin is being drawn, 
 recently, and we feel more and more every day, into a 
 radiation of minute creases, as if the bone and flesh 
 were having a last struggle. Now in this head there 
 is little beauty of line (the man has never been good- 
 looking), and there is not much character in the sense 
 of strongly marked mental or moral personality. I 
 do not know, nor care, what manner of man this may 
 have been. The individuality is one, not of the mind 
 but of the flesh. What interests, attaches, is not the 
 character or temperament, but the bone and skin, the 
 creases and folds of flesh. And herein also lies the 
 beauty of the work. I do not mean its interest or 
 mere technical skill, I mean distinctly visible and 
 artistic beauty. 
 
 Thus does the sculptor of the Renaissance get 
 beauty, visible beauty, not psychologic interest, out of 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 241 
 
 a plain human being ; but tlie beauty (and this is the 
 distinguishing point of what I must call realistic 
 decorative art) does not exist necessarily in the plain 
 human being : he merely affords the beginning of a 
 pattern which the artist may be able to carry out. A 
 person may have in him the making of a really beau- 
 tiful bust and yet be ugly ; just as the same person may 
 afford a subject for a splendid painting and for an 
 execrable piece of sculpture. The wrinkles and creases 
 in a face like that of Benedetto da Maiano's Mellini 
 would probably be ugly and perhaps disgusting in the 
 real reddish, flaccid, discoloured flesh ; while they are 
 admirable in the solid and supple-looking marble, in 
 its warm and delicate bistre and yellow. Material has 
 an extraordinary effect upon form ; colour, though 
 not a positive element in sculpture, has immense 
 negative power in accentuating or obliterating the 
 mere line. All form becomes vague and soft in the 
 dairy flaccidness of modern ivory; and clear and 
 powerful in the dark terra cotta, which can ennoble 
 even the fattest and flattest faces with its wonderful 
 faculty for making mere surface markings, mere 
 crowsfeet, interesting. Thus also with bronze : the 
 polished, worked bronze, of fine chocolate burnish 
 and reddish reflections, mars all beauty of line ; how 
 different the unchased, merely rough cast, greenish, 
 with infinite delicate greys and browns, making, for 
 instance, the head of an old woman like an exquisite, 
 withered, shrivelled, veined autumnal leaf. It is 
 17 
 
242 EUPHORION. 
 
 moreover, as I have said, a question of combination of 
 surface and light, this art which makes beautiful busts 
 of ugly men. The ideal statue of the Greeks intended 
 for the open air ; fit to be looked at under any light, 
 high or low, brilliant or veiled, had indeed to be pre- 
 pared to look well under any light ; but to look well 
 under any light means not to use any one particular 
 relation of light as an ally ; the surface was kept 
 modestly subordinated to the features, the features 
 which must needs look well at all moments and from 
 all points of view. But the Renaissance sculptor 
 knew where his work would be placed ; he could cal- 
 culate the effect of the light falling invariably through 
 this or that window ; he could make a fellow-workman 
 of that light, present for it to draw or to obliterate 
 what features he liked, bid it sweep away such or such 
 surfaces with a broad stream, cut them with a deep 
 shadow, caress their smooth chiselling or their rough 
 grainings, mark as with a nail the few large strokes of 
 the point which gave the firmness to the strained 
 muscle or stretched skin. Out of this model of his, 
 this plain old burgess, he and his docile friend the light, 
 could make quite a new thing ; a new pattern of bosses 
 and cavities, of smooth sweeps and tracked lines, of 
 creases and folds of flesh, of pliable linen and rough 
 brocade of dress : something new, something which, 
 without a single feature being straightened or short- 
 ened, yet changed completely the value of the whole 
 assemblage of features ; something undreamed of by 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 243 
 
 nature in moulding that ugly old merchant or humanist. 
 With this art which produced works like Desiderio 
 da Settignano's Carlo Marsuppini and Benedetto da 
 Maiano's Pietro Mellini, is intimately connected the 
 art of the great medallists of the Renaissance — Fasti, 
 Guacialotti, Niccolib Fiorentino, and, greatest of all, 
 Pisanello. Its excellence depends precisely upon its 
 independence of the ideal work of Antiquity ; nay, 
 even upon the fact that, while the ancients, striking 
 their coins in chased metal dies, obtained an astonish- 
 ing minuteness and clearness of every separate little 
 stroke and dint, and were therefore forced into an 
 almost more than sculptural perfection of mere line, 
 of mere profile and throat and elaborately composed 
 hair, a sort of sublime abstraction of the possible 
 beauty of a human face, as in the coins of Syracuse 
 and also of Alexander ; the men of the fifteenth 
 century employed the process of casting the bronze 
 in a concave mould obtained by the melting away of 
 a medallion in wax ; in wax, which taking the living 
 impress of the artist's finger, and recalling in its firm 
 and yet soft texture the real substance of the human 
 face, insensibly led the medallist to seek, not sharp 
 and abstract lines, but simple, strongly moulded 
 bosses ; not ideal beauty, but the real appearance of 
 life. It is, moreover, a significant fact that while the 
 men who, half a century or so later, made fine, charac- 
 terless die-stamped medals in imitation of the antique, 
 Caradossi and Benvenuto for instance, were gold- 
 
244 EUPHORION. 
 
 smiths and sculptors, workers with the chisel, artists 
 seeking essentially for abstract elegance of line ; the 
 two greatest medallists of the early Renaissance, 
 Vittore Pisano and Matteo di Pasti, were both of them 
 painters ; and painters of the Northern Italian school, 
 to whom colour and texture were all important, and 
 linear form a matter of indifference. And indeed, if 
 we look at the best work of what I may call the wax 
 mould medallists of the fifteenth century, even at the 
 magnificent marble medallions of the laurel-wreathed 
 head of Sigismund Malatesta on the pillars of his 
 church at Rimini, modelled by Pasti, we shall see 
 that these men were preoccupied almost exclusively 
 with the almost pictorial effect of the flesh in its 
 various degrees of boss and of reaction of the light ; 
 and that the character, the beauty even, which they 
 attained, is essentially due to a skilful manipulation 
 of texture, and surface, and light — one might almost 
 say of colour. We all know Pisanello's famous heads 
 of the Malatesti of Rimini : the saturnine Sigismund, 
 the delicate dapper Novello, the powerful yet beauti- 
 ful Isotta ; but there are other Renaissance medals 
 which illustrate my meaning even better, and connect 
 my feelings on the subject of this branch of art more 
 clearly with my feelings towards such work as Bene- 
 detto's Pietro Mellini. Foremost among these is 
 the perhaps somewhat imperfect and decidedly gro- 
 tesque, but astonishingly powerful, naif and character- 
 istic Lorenzo del Medici by Niccolo Fiorentino, the 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 245 
 
 real grandeur of whose conception of this coarse yet 
 imaginative head may be profitably contrasted with 
 the classicizing efforts after the demi-god or successor 
 of Alexander in PoUaiolo's famous medal of the Pazzi 
 conspiracy. Next to this I would place a medal by 
 Guacialotti of Bishop Niccolo Palmieri, with the 
 motto, " Nudus egressus sic redibo " — singularly ap- 
 propriate to the shameless fleshliness of the personage, 
 with his naked fat chest and shoulders, his fat, pig- 
 like cheeks and greasy-looking bald head ; a hideous 
 beast, yet magnificent in his bestiality like some huge 
 fattened porker. These medals give us, as does the 
 bust of Pietro Mellini, beauty of the portrait despite 
 ugliness of the original. But there are two other 
 medals, this time by Pisanello, and, as it seems to 
 me, perhaps his masterpieces, which show the quite 
 peculiar way in which this homely charm of portrai- 
 ture amalgamates, so as to form a homogeneous and 
 most seemingly simple whole, with the homely charm 
 of certain kinds of pure and simple youthful types. 
 One of these (the reverse of which fantastically repre- 
 sents the four elements, the wooded earth, the starry 
 sky, the rippled sea, the sun, all in one sphere) is the 
 portrait of Don Inigo d'Avalos ; the other that of 
 Cecilia Gonzaga. This slender beardless boy in the 
 Spanish shovel hat and wisp of scarf twisted round 
 the throat; and this tall, long-necked girl, with sloping 
 shoulders and still half-developed bosom ; are, so to 
 speak, brother and sister in art, in Pisanello's wonder- 
 
246 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 ful genius. The relief of the two medals is extremely- 
 low, so that in certain lights the effigies vanish almost 
 completely, sink into the pale green surface of the 
 bronze ; the portraits are a mere film, a sort of haze 
 which has arisen on the bronze and gathered into 
 human likeness ; but in this film, this scarce percep- 
 tible relief, we are made to perceive the slender osseous 
 structure, the smooth, sleek, childish blond ilesh and 
 hair, the delicate, undecided pallor of extreme youth 
 and purity, even as we might in some elaborate por- 
 trait by Velasquez, but with a springlike healthiness 
 which Velasquez, painting his lymphatic Hapsburgs, 
 rarely has. 
 
 Such is this Renaissance art of medals, this side 
 branch of the great realistic portraiture in stone of 
 the Benedettos, Desiderios, and Rossellinos ; a perfect 
 thing in itself ; and one which, if we muse over it in 
 connection with the more important works of fifteenth 
 century sculpture, will perhaps lead us to think that, 
 as the sculpture of Antiquity, in its superb idealism, 
 its devotion to the perfect line and curve of beauty, 
 achieved the highest that mere colourless art can 
 achieve — thanks to the very purity, sternness, and nar- 
 rowness of its sculpturesque feeling — so also, perhaps, 
 modern sculpture, should it ever re-arise, must be 
 a continuation of the tendencies of the Renaissance, 
 must be the humbler sister of painting, must seek for 
 the realistic portrait and begin, perhaps, with the 
 realistic medal. 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. ^47 
 
 II. 
 
 This kind of realism, where only the model is ugly, 
 while the portrait is beautiful ; which seeks decorative 
 value by other means than the intrinsic excellence of 
 form in the object represented, this kind of realism is 
 quite different in sort from the realisms of immature 
 art, which, aiming at nothing beyond a faithful copy, 
 is content with producing an ugly picture of an ugly 
 thing. Now this latter kind of realism endured in 
 painting some time after decorative realism such as I 
 have described had reached perfection in sculpture. 
 Nor was it till later, and when the crude scholastic 
 realism had completely come to an end, that there 
 became even partially possible in painting decorative 
 realism analogous to what we have noticed in sculp- 
 ture ; while it was not till after the close of the Italian 
 Renaissance period that the painters arose in Spain 
 and the Netherlands who were able to treat their 
 subjects with the uncompromising decorative realism 
 of Desiderio or Rosellino or Benedetto da Maiano. 
 For the purely imitative realism of the painters of 
 the early Renaissance was succeeded in Italy by ideal- 
 ism, which matured in the great art of intrinsically 
 beautiful linear form of Michael Angelo and Raphael, 
 and the great art of intrinsically beautiful colour 
 form of Giorgione and Titian. These two schools 
 were bound to be, each in its degree, idealistic. 
 Complete power of mere representation in tint and 
 
24-3 EUPHORION 
 
 colour having been obtained through the realistic 
 drudgery of the early Renaissance, selection in the 
 objects thus to be represented had naturally arisen ; 
 and the study of the antique had further hastened 
 and directed this movement of art no longer to study 
 but to achieve, to be decorative once more, decorative 
 no longer in subservience to architecture, but as the 
 separate and self-sufficing art of painting. Selec- 
 tion, therefore, which is the only practical kind of 
 idealism, had begun as soon as painting was possessed 
 of the power of representing objects in their relations 
 of line and colour, with that amount of light and 
 shadow requisite to the just appreciation of the rela- 
 tions of form and the just relations of colour. Now art 
 which stops short at this point of representation must 
 inevitably be, if decorative at all, idealistically decora- 
 tive ; it must be squeamish respecting the objects 
 represented, respecting their real structure, colour, 
 position, and grouping. For, of the visible impres- 
 sions received from an object, some are far more 
 intrinsic than others. Suppose we see a woman, 
 beautiful in the structure of her body, and beautiful 
 in the colour of her person and her draperies, standing 
 under a light which is such as we should call beautiful 
 and interesting : of these three qualities one will be 
 intrinsic in the woman, the second very considerably 
 so, the third not at all. For, let us call that woman 
 away and replace her immediately by another woman 
 chosen at random. We shall immediately perceive 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 249 
 
 that we have lost one pleasurable impression, that of 
 beautiful bodily structure : the woman has taken away 
 her well-shapen body. Next we shall perceive a 
 notable diminution in the second pleasurable impres- 
 sion : the woman has taken with her, not indeed her 
 well-tinted garments, which we may have bestowed 
 on her successor, but her beautifully coloured skin 
 and hair, so that of the pleasing colour-impression 
 will remain only as much as was due to, and may 
 have been retained with, the original woman's clothes. 
 But if we look for our third pleasurable impression, 
 our beautiful light, we shall find that unchanged, 
 whether it fall upon a magnificently arrayed goddess 
 or upon a sordid slut. And, conversely, the beautiful 
 woman, when withdrawn from that light and placed 
 in any other, will be equally lovely in form, even if 
 we cast her in plaster, and lose the colour of her skin 
 and hair ; or if we leave her not only the beautiful 
 tints of her flesh and hair, but her own splendidly 
 coloured garments, we shall still have, in whatsoever 
 light, a magnificent piece of colour. But if we recall 
 the poor ugly creature who has succeeded her from 
 out of that fine effect of light, we shall have nothing 
 but a hideous form invested in hideous colour. 
 
 This rough diagram will be sufficient to explain 
 my thought respecting the relative degree to which 
 the art dealing with linear form, that dealing with 
 colour and that dealing with light, with the medium 
 in which form and colour are perceived ; is each 
 
2 jo EUPHORION. 
 
 respectively bound to be idealistically or realistically 
 decorative. Now painting was aesthetically mature, 
 possessed the means to achieve great beauty, at a time 
 when of the three modes of representation there had 
 as yet developed only those of linear form and colour; 
 and the very possibility and necessity of immediately 
 achieving all that could be achieved by these means 
 delayed for a long time the development of the third 
 mode of representation : the representation of objects 
 as they appear with reference to the light through 
 which they are seen. A beginning had indeed been 
 made. Certain of Correggio's effects of light, even 
 more an occasional manner of treating the flesh and 
 hair, reducing both form and colour to a kind of vague 
 boss and vague sheen, such as they really present in 
 given effects of light, a something which we define 
 roughly as eminently modern in the painting of his 
 clustered cherubs ; all this is certainly a beginning of 
 the school of Velasquez. Still more so is it the case 
 with Andrea del Sarto, the man of genius whom critics 
 love to despatch as a mediocrity, because his art, 
 which is art altogether for the eyes, and in which he 
 innovated more than any of his contemporaries, does 
 not afford any excuse for the irrelevancies of orna- 
 mental criticism ; with him the appearance of form 
 and colour, acted upon by light, the relative values of 
 which flesh and draperies consist with reference to 
 the surrounding medium, all this becomes so evident 
 a preoccupation and a basis for decorative effects, as 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 351 
 
 to give certain of his works an almost startling air of 
 being modern. But this tendency comes to nothing : 
 the men of the sixteenth century appear scarcely to 
 have perceived wherein lay the true excellence of this 
 "Andrea senza errori," deeming him essentially the 
 artist of linear perfection ; while the innovations of 
 Correggio in the way of showing the relations of flesh 
 tones and light ended in the mere coarse gala 
 illuminations in which his successors made their 
 seraphs plunge and sprawl. There was too much to 
 be done, good and bad, in the way of mere linear form 
 and mere colour ; and as art of mere linear form and 
 colour, indifferent of all else, did the art of the Italian 
 Renaissance run to seed. 
 
 I said at the beginning of this paper that the degree 
 to which any art is strictly idealistic, can be measured 
 by the terms which it will make with portrait. For as 
 portrait is due to the desire to represent a person quite 
 apart from that person affording material for decora- 
 tion, it is evident that only the art which can call 
 in the assistance of decorative materials, independent 
 of the represented individual, can possibly make a 
 beautiful picture out of an ugly man ; while the art 
 which deals only with such visible peculiarities as are 
 inherent in the individual, has no kind of outlet, is 
 cornered, and can make of a repulsive original only 
 a repulsive picture. The analogy to this we have 
 already noticed in sculpture : antique sculpture, con- 
 sidering only the linear bosses which existed equally 
 
2S2 EUPHORION. 
 
 in the living man and in the statue, could not afford 
 to represent plain people ; while Renaissance sculp- 
 ture, extracting a large amount of beauty out of com- 
 binations of surface and light, was able, as long as it 
 could arrange such an artificial combination, to dis- 
 pense with great perfection in the model. Nay, if we 
 except Renaissance statuary as a kind of separate 
 art, we may say that this independence of the object 
 portrayed is a kind of analytic test, enabling us to 
 judge at a glance, and by the degree of independence 
 from the model, the degree to which any art is re- 
 moved from the mere line and boss of antique sculp- 
 ture. In the statue standing free in any light that 
 may chance to come, every form must be beautiful 
 from every point ; but in proportion as the new ele- 
 ments of painting enter, in proportion as the actual 
 linear form and boss is marked and helped out by 
 grouping, colour, and light and shade, does the actual 
 perfection of the model become less important ; until, 
 under the reign of light as the chief factor, it becomes 
 altogether indifferent. In this fact lies the only 
 rational foundation for the notion, made popular by 
 Hegel, that painting is an art in which beauty is of 
 much less account than in sculpture ; failing to under- 
 stand that the sum total of beauty remained the same, 
 whether dependent upon the concentration of a single 
 element or obtained by the co-operation of several 
 consequently less singly important elements. 
 
 But to return to the question of portrait art. From 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 253 
 
 what we have seen, it is clear that art which requires 
 perfection of form will be reduced to ugliness if 
 cramped in the obtaining of such perfection, whereas 
 art which can obtain beauty by other means will still 
 have a chance when reduced to imitate ugly objects. 
 Hence it is that while the realistically decorative art 
 of the seventeenth century can make actually beauti- 
 ful things of the portraits of ugly people, the ideal- 
 istically decorative art of the Renaissance produces 
 portraits which are cruelly ugly in proportion as the 
 art is purely idealistic. Yet even in idealism there 
 are degrees : the more the art is confined to mere 
 linear form, to the exclusion of colour, the uglier will be 
 the portraits. With Michael Angelo the difficulty was 
 simplified to impossibility : he could not paint portrait 
 at all ; and in his sculptured portraits of the two 
 Medicean dukes at S. Lorenzo he evaded all attempt 
 at likeness, making those two men into scarcely more 
 than two architectural monsters, half-human cousins 
 of the fantastic creatures who keep watch on the 
 belfries and gurgoyles of a Gothic cathedral. It is 
 almost impossible to think of Michael Angelo attempt- 
 ing portrait : the man's genius cannot be constrained 
 to it, and what ought to be mere ugliness would come 
 out idealized into grandiose monstrosity. Men like 
 Titian and Tintoret are at the other end of the scale 
 of ideal decoration : they are bordering upon the 
 domain of realism. Hence they can raise into interest, 
 by the mere power of colour, many an insignificant 
 
154 EUPHORION. 
 
 type ; yet even they are incapable of dealing with 
 absolute ugliness, with absence of fine colour, or, if 
 they do deal with it, there is an immediate improve- 
 ment upon the model, and the appearance of truthful- 
 ness goes. Between the absolute incapacity for deal- 
 ing with ugliness of Michael Angelo, and the power of 
 compromising with it of Titian and Tintoret, Raphael 
 stands half-way : he can call in the assistance of colour 
 just sufficiently to create a setting of carefully har- 
 monized draperies and accessories, beautiful enough 
 to allow of his filling it up with the most cruelly ugly 
 likeness which any painter ever painted. Far too 
 much has been written about Raphael in general, but 
 not half enough about Raphael as a portrait-painter ; 
 for by the side of the eclectic idealist, who combined 
 and balanced beauty almost into insipidity, is the most 
 terribly, inflexibly veracious portrait-painter that ever 
 was. Compared with those sternly straightforward 
 portraits of his Florentine and Roman time, where 
 ugliness and baseness are never attenuated by one 
 tittle, and alloyed nobility or amiability, as with his 
 finer models, like the two Donis, husband and wife, 
 and Bibbiena, is never purified of its troubling ele- 
 ment ; compared with them the Venetian portraits 
 are mere insincere, enormously idealized pieces of 
 colour-harmony ; nay, the portraits of Velasquez are 
 mere hints — given rapidly by a sickened painter striv- 
 ing to make those scrofulous Hapsburgs no longer 
 mere men, but keynotes of harmonies of light — of 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 255 
 
 what the people really are. For Velasquez seems to 
 show us the temperament, the potentiality of his 
 people, and to leave us, with a kind of dignified and 
 melancholy silence as to all further, to find out what 
 life, what feelings and actions, such a temperament 
 implies. But Raphael shows us all : the temperament 
 and the character, the real active creature, with all the 
 marks of his present temper and habits, with all the 
 indications of his immediate actions upon him : com- 
 pletely without humour or bitterness, without the 
 smallest tendency to twist the reality into caricature 
 or monstrosity, nay, perhaps without much psychologic 
 analysis to tell him the exact meaning of what he is 
 painting, going straight to the point, and utterly ruth- 
 less from sheer absence of all alternative of doing 
 otherwise than he does. There is nothing more 
 cruelly realistic in the world, cruel not only to the 
 base originals but to the feelings of the spectator, 
 than the harmony of villainies, of various combina- 
 tions of black and hog-like bestiality, and fox and 
 wolf-like cunning and ferocity with wicked human 
 thought and self-command, which Raphael has en- 
 shrined in that splendid harmony of scarlet silk and 
 crimson satin, and purple velvet and dull white 
 brocade, as the portraits of Leo X. and his cardinals 
 Rossi and Dei Medici. 
 
 The idealistic painter, accustomed to rely upon the 
 intrinsic beauty which he has hitherto been able to 
 select or create ; accustomed also to think of form as 
 
256 EUPHORION. 
 
 something quite independent of the medium through 
 which it is seen, scarcely conscious of the existence 
 of light and air in his habit of concentrating all at- 
 tention upon a figure placed, as it were, in a sort of 
 vacuum of indifference ; — this idealistic artist is left 
 without any resources when bid to paint an ugly 
 man or woman. With the realistic artist, to whom 
 the man or woman is utterly indifferent, to whom the 
 medium in which they are seen is everything, the case 
 is just reversed : let him arrange his light, his atmo- 
 spheric effect, and he will work into their pattern no 
 matter what plain or repulsive wretch. To Velasquez 
 the flaccid yellowish fair flesh, with its grey downy 
 shadows, the limp pale drab hair, which is grey in the 
 light and scarcely perceptibly blond in the shade, all 
 this unhealthy, bloodless, feebly living, effete mass of 
 humanity called Philip IV. of Spain, shivering in 
 moral ansemia like some dog thorough bred into 
 nothingness, becomes merely the foundation for a 
 splendid harmony of pale tints. Again, the poor 
 little baby princess, with scarce visible features, seem- 
 ingly kneaded (but not sufficiently pinched and 
 modelled) out of the wet ashes of an aiito dafe, in 
 her black-and-white frock (how different from the 
 dresses painted by Raphael and Titian !), dingy and 
 gloomy enough for an abbess or a cameriera major, 
 this childish personification of courtly dreariness, 
 certainly born on an Ash Wednesday, becomes the 
 principal strands for a marvellous tissue of silvery and 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 257 
 
 ashy light, tinged yellowish in the hair, bluish in the 
 eyes and downy cheeks, pale red in the lips and the 
 rose in the hair; something to match which in beauty 
 you must think of some rarely seen veined and 
 jaspered rainy twilight, or opal-tinted hazy winter 
 morning. Ugliness, nay, repulsiveness, vanish, sub- 
 dued into beauty, even as noxious gases may be sub- 
 dued into health-giving substances by some cunning 
 chemist. The difference between such portraits as 
 these and the portraits by Raphael does not however 
 consist merely in the beauty : there is also the fact 
 that if you take one of Velasquez's portraits out of 
 their frame, reconstitute the living individual, and bid 
 him walk forth in whatsoever light may fall upon him, 
 you will have something infinitely different from the 
 portrait, and of which your only distinct feeling will 
 be that a fine portrait might be made of the creature ; 
 whereas it is a matter of complete indifference whether 
 you see Raphael's Leo X. in the flesh or in his gilded 
 frame. 
 
 Whatever may fairly be said respecting the relative 
 value of idealistic and realistic decorative art is really 
 also connected with this latter point. Considering 
 that realistic art is merely obtaining beauty by atten- 
 tion to other factors than those which preoccupy 
 idealistic art, that the one fulfils what the other neg- 
 lects — taking the matter from this point of view, it 
 would seem as if the two kinds of arts were, so to 
 speak, morally equal ; and that any vague sense of 
 
2^8 EUPHORION. 
 
 mysterious superior dignity clinging to idealistic art 
 was a mere shred of long discarded pedantry. But 
 it is not so. For realistic art does more than merely 
 bring into play powers unknown to idealistic art : it 
 becomes, by the possession of these powers, utterly 
 indifferent to the intrinsic value of the forms repre- 
 sented : it is so certain of making everything lovely by 
 its harmonies of light and atmosphere that it almost 
 prefers to choose inferior things for this purpose. 
 I am thinking at present of a picture by I forget what 
 Dutchman in our National Gallery, representing in 
 separate compartments five besotten-looking creatures, 
 symbolical of the five senses : they are ugly, brutish, 
 with I know not what suggestion of detestable tem- 
 perament in their bloodshot flesh and vermilion lips, 
 as if the whole man were saturated with his appetite. 
 Yet the Dutchman has found the means of making 
 these degraded types into something which we care 
 to look at, and to look at on account of its beauty ; 
 even as, in lesser degree, Rubens has always managed 
 to make us feel towards his flaccid, veal-complexioned, 
 fish-eyed women, something of what we feel towards 
 the goddesses of the Parthenon ; towards the white- 
 robed, long-gloved ladies, with meditative face beneath 
 their crimped auburn hair, of Titian. 
 
 Viewed in one way, there is a kind of nobility in 
 the very fact that such realistic art can make us 
 pardon, can redeem, nay almost sanctify, so much. 
 But is it right thus to pardon, redeem, and sanctify; 
 
THE PORTRAIT ART. 259 
 
 thus to bring the inferior on to the level of the su- 
 perior ? Nay, is it not rather wrong to teach us to 
 endure so much meanness and ugliness in creatures, 
 on account of the nobility with which they are repre- 
 sented ? Is this not vitiating our feelings, blunting 
 our desire for the better, our repugnance for the 
 worse ? 
 
 A great and charitable art, this realistic art of the 
 seventeenth century, and to be respected for its very 
 tenderness towards the scorned and castaway things 
 of reality; but accustoming us, perhaps too much, like 
 all charitable and reclaiming impulses, to certain un- 
 worthy contacts : in strange contrast herein with that 
 narrow but ascetic and aristocratic art of idealism, 
 which, isolated and impoverished though it may be, 
 has always the dignity of its immaculate purity, of its 
 unswerving judgment, of its obstinate determination 
 to deal only with the best. A hard task to judge 
 between them. But be this as it may, it is one of the 
 singular richnesses of the Italian Renaissance that 
 it knew of both tendencies ; that while in painting 
 it gave the equivalent of that rigid idealism of the 
 Greeks which can make no compromise with ugli- 
 ness ; in sculpture it possessed the equivalent of the 
 realism of Velasquez, which can make beauty out of 
 ugly things, even as the chemist can make sugar out 
 of vitriol. 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 
 
 " Le donne, i cavalier, 1' armi, gli amori." 
 
 I. 
 
 Throughout the tales of Charlemagne and his 
 warriors, overtopping by far the crowd of paladins 
 and knights, move two colossal mailed and vizored 
 figures — Roland, whom the Italians call Orlando and 
 the Spaniards Roldan, the son of Milon d'Angers and 
 of Charlemagne's sister ; and Renaud or Rinaldo, the 
 lord of Montauban, and eldest of the famous four sons 
 of Aymon. These are the two representative heroes, 
 equal but opposed, the Achilles and Odysseus, the 
 Siegfried and Dietrich, of the Carolingian epic ; and 
 in each is personified, by the unconscious genius of 
 the early Middle Ages, one of the great political 
 movements, of the heroic struggles, of feudalism. 
 For there existed in feudalism two forces, a centri- 
 petal and a centrifugal — a force which made for the 
 supremacy of the kingly overlordship, and a force 
 which made for the independence of the great vassals. 
 
264 EUPHORION. 
 
 Hence, in the poetry which is the poetry of feudalism, 
 two distinct currents of feeling, two distinct epics — the 
 epic of the devoted loyalty of all the heroes of France 
 to their wise and mighty emperor Charlemagne, 
 triumphant even in misfortune ; and the epic of the 
 hopeless resistance against a craven and capricious 
 despot Charles of the most righteous and whole- 
 hearted among his feudataries : the epic of Roland, 
 and the epic of Renaud. Of the first there remains 
 to us, in its inflexible and iron solemnity, an original 
 rhymed narrative, " The Chanson de Roland," which 
 we may read perhaps almost in the selfsame words in 
 which it was sung by the Normans of William in their 
 night watch before the great battle. The centripetal 
 force of feudalism gained the upper hand, and the 
 song of the great empire, of the great deeds of 
 loyal prowess, was consecrated in the feudal monarchy. 
 The case was different with the tale of resistance and 
 rebellion. The story of Renaud soon became a dan- 
 gerous lesson for the great barons ; it fell from the 
 hands of the nobles to those of humbler folk ; and it is 
 preserved to us no longer in mediaeval verse, but in a 
 prose version, doubtless of the fifteenth century, under 
 the name, familiar on the stalls of village fairs, of '" Les 
 Quatre Fils Aymon." But, as Renaud is the equal of 
 Roland, so is this humble prose tale nevertheless the 
 equal of the great song of Roncevaux ; and even now, 
 it would be a difficult task to decide which were the 
 grander, the tale of loyalty or the tale of resistance. 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 265 
 
 In each of these tales, the " Chanson de Roland " and 
 the " Quatre Fils Aymon," there is contained a picture 
 of its respective hero, which sums up, as it were, the 
 whole noble character of the book ; and which, the 
 picture of the dying Roland and the picture of the 
 dying Renaud, I would fain bring before you before 
 speaking of the other Roland and the other Renaud, 
 the Orlando of Ariosto and the Rinaldo of Boiardo. 
 The traitor Ganelon has enabled King Marsile to 
 overtake with all his heathenness the rear-guard of 
 Charlemagne between the granite walls of Roncevaux ; 
 the Franks have been massacred, but the Saracens 
 have been routed ; Roland has at last ceded to the 
 prayers of Oliver and of Archbishop Turpin ; three 
 times has he put to his mouth his oliphant and blown 
 a blast to call back Charlemagne to vengeance, till 
 the blood has foamed round his lips and his temple 
 has burst. Oliver is dead, the Archbishop is dying, 
 Roland himself is slowly bleeding to death. He goes 
 down into the defile, heaped with corpses, and seeks 
 for the bodies of the principal paladins, Ivon and 
 Ivaire, the Gascon Engelier, Gorier and Gerin, Bdrenger 
 and Otho, Anseis and Salamon, and the old Gerard of 
 Rousillon ; and one by one drags them to where the 
 Archbishop lies dying. And then, when to these 
 knights Roland has at last added his own beloved 
 comrade Oliver, he bids the Archbishop bless all the 
 dead, before he die himself. Then, when he has reve- 
 rently crossed Turpin's beautiful priestly hands over 
 
266 EUPHORION. 
 
 his breast, he goes forth to shatter his sword Durendal 
 against the rocks ; but the good sword has cut the rock 
 without shivering ; and the coldness of death steals 
 over Roland. He stretches himself upon a hillock 
 looking towards Spain, and prays for the forgiveness 
 of his sins ; then, with Durendal and his ivory horn 
 by his side, he stretches out the glove of his right 
 hand to God. " He has stretched forth to God the 
 glove of his right hand ; St. Gabriel has received it. 
 Then his head has sunk on his arm ; he has gone, with 
 clasped hands, to his end. God sends him one of his 
 cherubim and St. Michael of Peril. St. Gabriel has 
 come with them. They carry the soul of the Count 
 up to paradise." 
 
 More solitary, and solemn and sad even, is the end 
 of the other hero, of the great rebel Renaud of Mon- 
 tauban. At length, after a lifetime wasted in fruitless 
 attempts to resist the iniquity of the emperor, to 
 baffle his power, to shame him by magnanimity into 
 justice, the four sons of Aymon, who have given up 
 their youth, their manhood, the dearest things to their 
 heart, respect to their father and loyalty to their 
 sovereign, rather than countenance the injustice of 
 Charlemagne to their kinsman, have at last obtained 
 to be pardoned ; to be pardoned, they, heroes, by a 
 dastardly tyrant, and to quietly sink, broken-hearted 
 into nothingness. The eldest, Renaud, returning 
 from exile and the Holy Land, finds that his wife 
 Clarisse has pined for him and died ; and then, putting 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 267 
 
 away his armour from him, and dressing in a pilgrim's 
 frock made of the purple serge of the dead lady's robe, 
 he goes forth to wander through the world ; not very 
 old in years, but broken-spirited ; at peace, but in 
 solitude of heart. And one evening he arrives at 
 Cologne. We can imagine the old knight, only half 
 aware of the sunshine of the evening, the noise of the 
 streets, the looks of the crowd, the great minster 
 rising half-finished in the midst of the town by the 
 Rhine, the cries and noise and chipping of the masons ; 
 unconscious of all this, half away : with his brothers 
 hiding in the Ardennes, living on roots and berries, at 
 bay before Charlemagne ; or wandering ragged and 
 famishing through France ; with King Yon brilliant 
 at Toulouse, seeing perhaps for the first time his bride 
 Clarisse, or the towers of Montauban rising under the 
 workmen's hands ; thinking perhaps of the frightful 
 siege, when all, all had been eaten in the fortress, and 
 his children Aymonnet and Yonnet, all thin and 
 white, knelt down and begged him to slaughter his 
 horse Bayard that they might eat ; perhaps of that 
 journey, when he and his brothers, all in red-furred 
 robes with roses in their hands, rode prisoners of 
 King Charles across the plain of Vaucouleurs ; perhaps 
 of when he galloped up to the gallows at Montfaucon, 
 and cut loose his brother Richard ; or of that daring 
 ride to Paris, where he and his horse won the race, 
 snatched the prize from before Charlemagne and 
 sped off crying out that the winner was Renaud of 
 
268 EUPH ORION. 
 
 Montauban ; or, perhaps, seeing once more the sad, 
 sweet face of the Lady Clarisse, when she had burned 
 all her precious stuffs and tires in the castle-yard, and 
 lay dead without him to kiss her cold mouth ; of 
 seeing once more his good horse Bayard, when he 
 kissed him in his stall before giving him to be killed 
 by Charlemagne. Thinking of all that past, seeing 
 it all within his mind, and seeing but little of the 
 present ; as, in the low yellow light, he helped, for his 
 bread, the workmen to heave the great beams, to 
 carry the great stones of the cathedral, to split the 
 huge marble masses while they stared in astonished 
 envy ; as he sat, unconscious of their mutterings, 
 eating his dry bread and porridge in the building 
 docks by the river. And then, when wearied, he had 
 sunk to sleep in the hay-loft, dreaming perchance that 
 all this evil life was but a dream and the awakening 
 therefrom to happiness and strength ; the jealous work- 
 men came and killed him with their base tools, and 
 cast him into the Rhine. They say that the huge 
 body floated on the water, surrounded by a great 
 halo ; and that when the men of the banks, seeing this, 
 reverently fished it out, they found that the noble 
 corpse was untouched by decay, and still surrounded 
 by a light of glory. And thus, it seems to me, this 
 Renaud, this rebel baron of whose reality we know 
 nothing, has floated surrounded by a halo of poetry 
 down the black flood of the Middle Ages (in which 
 so much has sunk) ; and when we look upon his face, 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIAROD. 269 
 
 and see its beauty and strength and solemness, we 
 feel, like the people of the Rhine bank, inclined to 
 weep, and to say of this mysterious corpse, " Surely 
 this is some great saint." 
 
 Of each of these heroes thus shown us by the 
 Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance also, by the 
 hand of two of her greatest poets, has given us a 
 picture. And first, of Roland. Of him, of Count 
 Orlando, we are told by Messer Lodovico Ariosto, that 
 in consequence of his having discovered, in a certain 
 pleasant grotto among the ferns and maidenhair, 
 words graven on the rock (interrupted, doubtless, by 
 the lover's kisses) which revealed that the Princess 
 Angelica of Cathay had disdained him for Medoro, 
 the fair-haired page of the King of the Moors ; Count 
 Orlando went straightway out of his mind, and hanging 
 up his armour and stripping off his clothes, galloped 
 about on his bare-backed horse, slaughtering cows and 
 sheep instead of Saracens ; until it pleased God, moved 
 by the danger of Christendom and the prayers of 
 Charlemagne, to permit Astolfo to ride on the hippo- 
 griff's back up to the moon, and bring back thence 
 the wits of the great paladin contained in a small phial. 
 We all know that merry tale. What the Renaissance 
 has to say of Renaud of Montauban is even stranger 
 and more fantastic. One day, says Matteo Boiardo, 
 in the fifteenth canto of the second part of his "Orlando 
 Innamorato," as Rinaldo of Montalbano,the contemner 
 of love, was riding in the Ardennes, he came to a 
 
270 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 clearing in the forest, where, close to the fountain of 
 Merlin, a wonderful sight met his eyes. On a flowery 
 meadow were dancing three naked damsels, and sing- 
 ing with them danced also a naked youth, dark of 
 eyes and fair of hair, the first down on his lips, so 
 that some might have said it was and others that it 
 was not there. On Rinaldo's approach they broke 
 through their singingand dancing.andrushedupon him, 
 pelting him with roses and hyacinths and violets from 
 their baskets, and beating him with great sheaves of 
 lilies, which burnt like flames through the plates of his 
 armour to the very marrow of his bones. Then when 
 they had dragged him, tied with garlands, by the feet 
 round and round the meadow ; wings, eyed not with 
 the eyes of a peacock but with the eyes of lovely 
 damsels, suddenly sprouted out of their shoulders, and 
 they flew off, leaving the poor baron, bruised on the 
 grass, to meditate upon the vanity of all future resist- 
 ance to love. 
 
 Such are the things which the Middle Ages and 
 the Renaissance found to tell us of the two great 
 heroes of Carolingian poetry. And the explanation 
 of how it came to pass, that for the Roland of the 
 song of Roncevaux was substituted the Orlando of 
 Ariosto, and for the Renaud of " Les Quatre Fils 
 Aymon " the Rinaldo of Matteo Boiardo — means 
 simply that which I desire here to study : the meta- 
 morphoses of mediaeval romance stuffs, and, more 
 especially, the vicissitudes of the cycle of Charlemagne. 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 271 
 
 II. 
 
 We are apt to think of the Middle Ages as if they 
 were the companion-piece to Antiquity ; but no such 
 ideal correspondence exists between the two periods. 
 Antiquity is all of a piece, and the Middle Ages, on 
 the contrary, are heterogeneous and chaotic. For 
 Antiquity is the steady and uniform development of 
 civilization in one direction and with one meaning ; 
 there are great differences between its various epochs, 
 but they are as the differences between the budding, 
 the blossoming, and the fading stages of one plant : 
 life varies, but is one. The Middle Ages, on the 
 other hand, are a series of false starts, of interruptions 
 and of new departures; a perpetual confusion. For, 
 if we think over them, we shall see that these centuries 
 called mediaeval are occupied by the effort of one 
 people, or one generation, to put to rights and settle 
 down among as much as it can save of the civilization 
 of Antiquity. And the sudden overwhelming of this 
 people or this generation by another, which puts all 
 the elaborate arrangements into disarray, adds to the 
 ruins of Antiquity the ruins of more recent times ; and 
 then this destroying generation tries to put things 
 straight, to settle down, and is in its turn interrupted 
 by the advent of some new comer who begins the 
 game afresh. 
 
 As it is with peoples, so also is it with ideas ; 
 scarcely has a scheme of life or of philosophy or of art 
 
272 EUPHORION. 
 
 taken shape and consistence before, from out of the 
 inexhaustible chaos of mediaeval thought and feeling, 
 there issue new necessities, new aspirations, which put 
 into confusion all previous ones. The Middle Ages 
 were like some financial crisis : a little time, a little 
 credit, money will fructify, wealth will reappear, the 
 difficult moment will be tided over; and so with 
 civilization. But unfortunately the wealth of ideas 
 began to accumulate in the storehouse only just long 
 enough to bring down a rout of creditors, people who 
 rifled the bank, and went home to consume or invest 
 their money in order to be succeeded by others. 
 Hence, in the matter of civilization, the Middle Ages 
 ended in an extraordinary slow ruin, a bankruptcy 
 like that which overtook France before '89, and from 
 which, as France was restored by the bold seizure and 
 breaking up of property of the revolution, the world 
 was restored by the bold breaking of feudal and 
 spiritual mortmain, the restoring of wasted energies 
 to utility, of that great double revolution, the Renais- 
 sance and the Reformation. Be this as it may, 
 mankind throughout the Middle Ages appears to 
 have been in a chronic condition of packing up and 
 unpacking, and packing up again ; one after another 
 a nation, a race, a philosophy, a political system came 
 to the front and was pushed back again into limbo : 
 Germans and Kelts and Latins, French civilization 
 of the day of Abdlard, Provengal civilization of the 
 days of the Raymonds, brilliant and evanescent 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 273 
 
 Hohenstauffen supremacy, papacy at Canossa and at 
 Avignon, Templars triumphant and Templars per- 
 secuted ; scholasticism, mysticism, feudalism, demo- 
 cracy, communism : influences all these perpetually 
 rising up and being trodden down, till they all rotted 
 away in the great stagnation of the fifteenth century ; 
 and only in one part of the world, where the conflict was 
 more speedily ended, where one'set of tendencies early 
 triumphed, where stability was temporarily obtained, 
 in Italy alone did civilization continue to be nurtured 
 and developed for the benefit of all mankind. In 
 such a state of affairs only such things could flourish 
 and mature as were safe from what I have called, for 
 want of a better expression, the perpetual unpacking 
 and repacking, the perpetual being on the move, of the 
 Middle Ages ; and among such things foremost was 
 art, the essential art of the times, architecture, which, 
 belonging to the small towns, to the infinite minority 
 of the democracy, who worked and made money and 
 let the great changes pass over their heads, thrived 
 almost as something too insignificant for notice. 
 But it was different with literature. Cathedrals once 
 built cannot so easily be changed ; new peoples, new 
 ideas, must accept them. But poetry — the thing which 
 every nation insists upon having to suit its own taste, 
 the thing which every nation and every generation 
 carries about with it hither and thither, the thing 
 which can be altered to suit every passing whim — 
 poetry was, of all the fluctuating things of the Middle 
 19 
 
274 EUPHORION. 
 
 Ages, perhaps the most fluctuating of all. And fluctu- 
 ating also because, as none of these various nations, 
 tendencies, aspirations, dominated sufficiently long to 
 produce any highly organized art, there remained 
 no standard works, nothing recognizedly perfect, 
 which would be kept for its perfection and gather 
 round it imitations, so as to form the nucleus of any 
 homogeneous tradition. The Middle Ages, so full of 
 fashions in literary matters, possessed no classics ; the 
 minnesingers knew nothing of the stern old Teutonic 
 war songs ; the meistersangers had forgotten the 
 minnesingers ; the trouveres and troubadours knew 
 nothing of the " Chanson de Roland," and Villon knew 
 nothing of them. Only in Italy, where the Middle 
 Ages came to an end and the Renaissance began with 
 the Lombard league, was there established a tradition 
 of excellence, with men like Dante, Petrarch, and Boc- 
 caccio, handed down from generation to generation ; 
 even as, while in the north there came about the 
 strange modification which substituted the French of 
 Rabelais for the French of Chrestien de Troyes, the 
 German of Luther for the German of Wolfram von 
 Eschenbach, the Italian language, from Ciullo dAl- 
 camo almost to Boiardo and Lorenzo dei Medici, re- 
 mained virtually identical. The result of this, which I 
 may call the heterogeneousness and instability of the 
 Middle Ages, was that not merely literary forms were 
 for ever arising and being superseded, but literary 
 subject matter was continually undergoing a process 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 275 
 
 of transformation. While in Antiquity the great epic 
 and tragic stuffs remained well-nigh unaltered, and 
 the stories of Valerius Flaccus and ApoUonius Rhodius 
 were merely the stories which had been current since 
 the days of Homer; during the course of the Middle 
 Ages every epic cycle, and every tale belonging 
 thereunto, was gradually adulterated, mingled with, 
 swamped by, some other cycle or tale, nay, rather, 
 every other cycle and every other tale, the older ones 
 trying to save their popularity by admixture with 
 the more recent, till at last all mythical significance, 
 all historical meaning, all national character, all 
 psychological reality, were lost in the chaotic result. 
 And meanwhile, in the absence of any stable lan- 
 guage, of any durable literary fashion, the Middle 
 Ages were unable to give to these epic stuffs, at any 
 one period of their life of metamorphose, a form 
 sufficiently artistically valuable to secure anything 
 beyond momentary vogue, to secure for them the 
 immortality of the great Greek tales of adventure and 
 warfare and love. Thus it came about that the epic 
 cycle of Charlemagne, after supplanting in men's 
 minds the grand sagas of the pagan North, was itself 
 supplanted by the Arthurian cycle ; that the Prankish 
 stories absorbed the wholly discrepant elements of 
 their more fortunate Keltic rivals ; that both cycles, 
 having lost all character through fusion and through 
 obliteration by time, became more meaningless gene- 
 ration by generation and year by year, until when the 
 
276 EUPHORION. 
 
 Middle Ages had come to an end, and the great poets 
 of the Renaissance were ready to give this old 
 medieval epic stuff a definitive and durable artistic 
 shape, there came to the hands of Boiardo and 
 Ariosto, of Tasso and Spenser, only a strange, trum- 
 pery material, muddled by jongleurs and romance 
 writers, and reduced to mere fairy stuff, taken seriously 
 onlyby Don Quixote, and by the authors of the volumes 
 of insane twaddle called after Amadis of Gaul and 
 all his kinsmen. 
 
 Such a condition of perpetual change as explains, 
 in my belief, why the mediaeval epic subjects were 
 wanted, can be made clear only by examples. I shall 
 therefore try to show the transformations which were 
 undergone by one or two principal mediaeval epic 
 subjects as a result of a mixture with other epic cycles ; 
 of a gradual adaptation to a new state of civilization ; 
 and finally of their gradual separation from all kind 
 of reality and real interests. 
 
 First of all, let us look at the epic cycle, which, 
 although known to us only in poems no older than 
 those of the trouveres and minnesingers who sang of 
 Charlemagne and Arthur, is in leality far more 
 ancient, and on account of its antiquity and its conse- 
 quent disconnection with mediaeval religious and 
 political interests, was thrown aside even by the 
 nations to which it belonged, by the Scandinavians 
 who took to writing sagas about the wars of Charle- 
 magne against Saracens, and by the Germans who 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 277 
 
 preferred to hear the adventures of Welsh and Breton 
 Launcelots and Trlstrams. I am alluding to the 
 stories connected with the family and life of the hero 
 called Sigurd by the Scandinavians, and Siegfried by 
 the Germans. Of these we possess a Norse version 
 called the Volsunga Saga, magnificently done into 
 English by Mr. William Morris; which, although 
 written down at the end of the twelfth century, in the 
 very time therefore of Chrestien de Troyes, Wolfram 
 von Eschenbach, and Gottfried von Strassburg, and 
 subsequently to the presumed writing of the " Chanson 
 de Roland" and the Nibelungenlied, shows us in reality 
 the product of a people, the distant Scandinavians of 
 Iceland, who were five or six hundred years behind 
 the French, Germans, and English of the twelfth cen- 
 tury. In the Volsunga Saga, neither Christianity nor 
 feudalism is yet dreamed of ; and it is for this reason 
 that I wish to compare it with the Nibelungenlied, in 
 order to show how enormously the old epic stuff was 
 altered by the new civilization. The whole social and 
 moral condition of the two versions is different. In 
 the old Scandinavian civilization, where the Viking is 
 surrounded and served by clansmen, the feeling of 
 blood relationship is the strongest in people's hearts ; 
 strangely and fearfully shown in the introductory tale 
 of Signy, who, in order to avenge her father Volsung, 
 killed by her husband, goes forth, altered in face by 
 Hj agio arts, to the woods to her brother Sigmund, that. 
 
278 EUPHORION. 
 
 unwittingly, he may beget with her the only man 
 fit to avenge the Volsungs ; and then sends the boy 
 Sinfjotli to the man he has hitherto considered merely 
 as his uncle, bidding the latter kill him if he prove 
 unworthy of his incestuous birth, or train him to 
 vengeance. The three together murder the husband 
 and legitimate children of Signy, and set the palace 
 on fire ; which, being done, the queen, having accom- 
 plished her duty to her kin, accomplishes that towards 
 her husband, and calmly returns to die in the burning 
 hall. Here (and apparently again in the case of the 
 children of Sigurd and Brynhilt) incest becomes a 
 family virtue. This being the frightful preponderance 
 of the feeling of blood relationship, it is quite natural 
 that the Scandinavian Chriemhilt (called in the Vol- 
 sunga Saga, Gudrun) should not resent the murder 
 of her husband Siegfried or Sigurd by her brothers at 
 the instigation of. the jealous Brynhilt (who has in a 
 manner been Sigurd's wife before he made her over to 
 Chriemhilt's eldest brother) ; and that, so far from 
 seeking anyrevenge against them, she should, when her 
 second husband Atli sends for her brothers in order to 
 rob and murder them, first vainly warn them of the 
 plot, and then, when they have been massacred, kill 
 Atli and her children by him in order to avenge her 
 brothers. The slackening of the tribal feeling, the idea 
 of fidelity in love and sanctity of marriage belonging 
 to Christianity and feudalism, rendered such a story 
 unintelligible to the Germans of the Othos and 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 279 
 
 Henrys. In the Nibelungenlied, the whole story of 
 the massacre of the brothers is changed. Chriemhilt 
 never forgives the murder of Siegfried, and it is not 
 Etzel = Atli for the sake of plunder, but she herself 
 for the sake of revenge, who decoys her brothers and 
 murders them ; it is she who with her own hand cuts 
 off the head of Gunther to expiate his murder of Sieg- 
 fried. To our feelings, more akin to those of the feudal 
 Christians of Franconia than to those of the tribal 
 Scandinavians of the Edda, the second version is far 
 more intelligible and interesting — the story of this 
 once gentle and loving Chriemhilt, turned by the 
 murder of her beloved into a fury, and plotting to 
 avenge his death by the death of all her kinsfolk, 
 must be much grander and more pathetic than the 
 story of this strange Gudrun, who sits down patiently 
 beneath the injury done to her by her brothers, but 
 savagely avenges them on her new husband, and her 
 own and his innocent children ; to us this persistence 
 of tribal feeling, destroying all indignation and love, is 
 merely unnatural, confusing, and repulsive. But this 
 alteration for the better in one of the incidents of 
 the tale is a mere fluke ; and. the whole main plot of 
 the originally central figures awfe completely obliterated 
 by the new state of civilization, and rendered merely 
 trivial and grotesque. In the Volsunga Saga Sigurd, 
 overcome by enchantments, has forgotten his wife (or 
 mistress, a vague mythical relationship) ; and, with all 
 sense of the past obliterated, has made her over to the 
 
28o EUPHORION. 
 
 brother of his new wife Gudrun ; and Brynhilt kills 
 her faithless love to dissolve the second marriage and 
 be reunited with him in death. In the Nibelungen- 
 lied Siegfried, although the flower of knighthood, con- 
 quers by foul play the Amazon Brunhilt to reward 
 Gunther for the hand of his sister ; nay, in a comic 
 and loathsome scene he forces her into the embraces 
 of the craven Gunther ; and then he gets killed by 
 Brunhilt's machinations ; when, after most unqueenly 
 bickerings, the proud Amazon is brutally told by 
 Siegfried's wife of the dirty trick which has given 
 her to Gunther. After this, it is impossible to realize, 
 when Siegfried is murdered and all our sympathies 
 called on to his side, the utterly out-of-character, 
 blackguardly behaviour which has brought the hero 
 to his death. Similarly the conception of the charac- 
 ter and position of Brynhilt is entirely disfigured and 
 rendered inane in the Nibelungenlied : of that superb 
 demi-goddess of the Scandinavians, burnt on the pyre 
 with her falcons and dogs and horses and slaves, by 
 the side of the demi-god Sigurd, whom she has loved 
 and killed, lest the door of Valhalla, swinging after 
 him, should shut her out from his presence ; of her 
 there remains in the German mediaeval poem only 
 a virago (more like the giantesses of the Amadis 
 romances) enraged at having been defeated and gro- 
 tesquely and grossly pummelled into wedlock by a 
 man not her husband, and then slanged like a fishwife 
 by her envious sister-in-law. 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 281 
 
 The old, consistent, grandly tragic tale of the mys- 
 terious incests and revenges of a race ofdemi-gods has 
 lost its sense, its point in the attempt to arrange it to 
 suit Christian and feudal ideas. The really fine por- 
 tions of the Nibelungenlied are exactly those which 
 have no real connection with the original story, 
 gratuitous additions by mediaeval poets :- the deli- 
 cately indicated falling in love of Siegfried and 
 Chriemhilt, the struggles of Markgraf Riidger be- 
 tween obedience to his feudal superior and fidelity 
 towards his friends and guests ; and, above all, the 
 canto of the death of Siegfried. This last is different, 
 intensely different, from the rugged and dreary 
 monotony of the rest ; this most poetical, almost 
 Spenserian or Ariostesque realizat?Ion of the scene ; 
 this beautiful picture (though worked with the needle 
 of the arras-worker rather than with pencil or brush) 
 of the wood, the hunt, the solitary fountain in the 
 Odenwald, where, with his spear propped against the 
 lime-tree, Siegfried was struck down into the clover 
 and flowers, and writhed with Hagen's steel through 
 his back. This canto is certainly interpolated by 
 some first-rate poet, at least a Gottfried or a Walther, 
 to whom that passage of the savage old droning song of 
 death had suggested a piece of new art ; it is like the 
 fragments of exquisitely chiselled leafage and figures 
 which you sometimes find encrusted — by whom .' where- 
 fore? — quite isolated in the midst of the rough and 
 lichen-stained stones of some rude Norman or Lombard 
 
282 EUPHORION. 
 
 church. All the rest of the Nibelungenlied gives an 
 impression of effeteness ; there is no definiteness of 
 idea such as that of the Volsunga Saga ; the battles 
 are mere vague slaughter, no action, no realized move- 
 ment, or (excepting Riidger) no realized motive of 
 conduct. Shape and colour would seem to have 
 been obliterated by repetition and alteration. Yet 
 even these alterations could not make the tale of Sieg- 
 fried survive among the Germans of the Middle Ages ; 
 nay, the more the alterations the less the interest; 
 the want of consistency and colour due to rearrange- 
 ment merely accelerated the throwing aside of a sub- 
 ject which, dating from pagan and tribal times, had 
 become repugnant to the new generations. All the 
 mutilations in the world could not make the old 
 Scandinavian tales of betrayed trust, of revenge and 
 triumphant bloodshed, at all sympathetic to men 
 whose religious and social ideals were those of for- 
 giveness and fidelity ; even stripped of its incestuous 
 mysteries and of its fearful tribal love, the tale of 
 Sigurd and Brynhilt, reduced to the tale of Chriemhilt's 
 revenge, was unpalatable : no more attempts were 
 made at re-writing it, and the poems of Walther, of 
 Gottfried, of Wolfram, of Ulrich, and of Tannhauser, 
 full as they are of references to stories of the Caro- 
 lingian and Arthurian cycles, nay, to Antique and 
 Oriental tales, contain no allusion to the personages of 
 the Nibelungenlied. The old epic of the Gothic races 
 had been pushed aside by the triumphant epic of the 
 obscure and conquered Kelts. 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 283 
 
 There are few phenomena in the history of ideas 
 and forms more singular than that of the sudden 
 conquest of the poetry of dominant or distant nations 
 by the poetic subjects of a comparatively small race, 
 sheared of all political importance, restricted to a 
 trifling territory, and well-nigh deprived of their 
 language ; and of this there can be found no more 
 striking example than the sudden ousting of the 
 Carolingian epic by the cycle of Arthur. 
 
 The Kelts of Britain and Ireland possessed an epic 
 cycle of their own, which came to notice only when 
 they were dispossessed of their last strongholds by 
 Saxons and Normans, and which immediately spread 
 with astounding rapidity all over Europe. The van- 
 quished race became fashionable ; themselves, their 
 art and their poetry, began to be sought for as a 
 war-enhanced loot. The heroic tales of the Kelts 
 were transcribed in Welsh, and translated into Latin, 
 by order of the Norman and Angevine kings, glad, 
 it would seem, to oppose the old Briton to the Saxon 
 element. The Keltic songs were carried all over 
 France by Breton bards, to whose music and rhymes, 
 with only a general idea of the subjects, the neo- 
 Latin-speaking Franks listened with the sort of 
 stolid satisfaction with which English or Germans of 
 a hundred years ago listened to Italians singing 
 Metastasio's verses. But soon the songs and tales 
 were translated ; and French poets imitated in their 
 language, northern and southern, the graceful metres 
 
284 EUPHORION. 
 
 of the Keltic lays, and altered and arranged their 
 subjects. So that, in a very short time, France, and 
 through it Germany, was inundated with Keltic stories. 
 This triumph of the vanquished race was not without 
 reason. The Kelts, early civilized by Rome and 
 Christianity, had a set of stories and a set of heroes 
 extremely in accordance with mediaeval ideas, and 
 requiring but very little alteration. The considerable 
 age of their civilization had long obliterated all traces 
 of pagan and tribal feeling in their tales. Their 
 heroes, originally, like those of all other people, 
 divinities intimately connected with natural pheno- 
 mena, had long lost all cosmic characteristics, long 
 ceased to be gods, and, manipulated by the fancy of a 
 race whose greatness was quite a thing of the past, 
 had become a sort of golden age ideals — the men of a 
 distant period of glory, which was adorned with every 
 kind of perfection, till it became as unreal as fairy- 
 land. Fairyland, in good sooth, was this country of 
 the Keltic tales ; and there is a sort of symbolical 
 significance in the fact of its lawgiver Merlin, and its 
 emperor Arthur, being both of them not dead, like 
 Sigurd, like Dietrich, like Charlemagne and Roland, 
 but lying in enchanted sleep. Long inaction and the 
 day-dreaming of idleness had refined and idealized the 
 heroes of this Keltic race — a race of brilliant fancy and 
 almost southern mobility, and softened for a long time 
 by contact with Roman colonists and Christian priests. 
 They were not the brutal combatants of an active 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 285 
 
 fighting age, like the heroes of the Edda and of the 
 Carolingian cycles ; nor had they any particular mili- 
 tary work to do, belonging as they did to a people 
 huddled away into inactivity. Their sole occupation 
 was to extend abroad that ideal happiness which 
 reigned in the ideal court of Arthur ; to go forth on the 
 loose and see what ill-conditioned folk there might 
 yet be who required being subdued or taught manners 
 in the happy kingdom which the poor insignificant 
 Kelts connected with some princelet of theirs who 
 centuries before may have momentarily repelled the 
 pagan Saxons. Hence in the Keltic stories, such as 
 they exist in the versions previous to the conquest by 
 the Norman kings, and previous also to any commu- 
 nications with other peoples, the distinct beginning 
 of what was later to be called knight-errantry ; of 
 heroes, creations of an inactive nation, having no 
 special military duties, going forth to do what good 
 they may at random, unforced by any necessity, and 
 following a mere sesthetico-romantic plan of perfecting 
 themselves by deeds of valour to become more worthy 
 of their God, their King, and their Lady : religion, 
 loyalty, and love, all three of them mere aesthetic 
 abstractions, becoming the goal of an essentially 
 aesthetic, unpractical system of self-improvement, such 
 as was utterly incompatible with any real and serious 
 business in life. Idle poetic fancies of an inert people, 
 the Knights of the Round Table have no mission save 
 that of being poetically perfect. Such was the spirit 
 
286 EUPHORION. 
 
 of Keltic poetry ; and, as it happened, tVis spirit 
 satisfied the imaginative wants of mediaeval society 
 just at the moment when political events diffused 
 in other countries the knowledge of the Arthurian 
 legends. The old Teutonic tales of Sigurd, Gudrun, 
 and Dietrich, had long ceased to appeal, in their 
 mutilated and obliterated condition, to a society to 
 whom tribal feeling and pagan heroism were odious, 
 and whose religion distinctly reproved revenge. These 
 semi-mythological tales had been replaced by another 
 cycle : the purely realistic epic, which had arisen 
 during the struggles between the Christian west 
 against the pagan north-east and the Mohammedan 
 south, and which, originating in the short battle-songs 
 narrating the exploits of the predecessors and help- 
 mates of Charlemagne, had constituted itself into large 
 narratives of which the " Song of Roland " represents 
 the artistic culmination. These narratives of mere 
 military exploits, of the battles of a strong feudal aris- 
 tocracy animated by feudal loyalty and half-religious, 
 half-patriotic fury against invading heathenness, had 
 perfectly satisfied the men of the earliest Middle Ages, 
 of the times when feudalism was being established and 
 the church being reformed ; when the strong military 
 princelets of the North were embarking with their 
 barons to conquer new kingdoms in England and in 
 Italy and Greece ; when the whole of feudal Europe 
 hurled itself against Asia in the first Crusades. But 
 the condition of things soon altered : the feudal 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 287 
 
 hierarchy was broken up into a number of semi-in- 
 dependent little kingdoms or principalities, struggling, 
 with the assistance of industrial and mercantile classes, 
 to become absolute monarchies ; princes who had been 
 mere generals became stay-at-home diplomatists, 
 studious of taxation and intrigue, surrounded no 
 longer by armed vassals, but by an essentially urban 
 court, in constant communication with the money- 
 making burghers. Religion, also, instead of being a 
 matter of fighting with infidel invaders, turned to fan- 
 tastic sectarianism and emotional mysticism. With 
 the sense of futility, of disappointment, attendant on 
 the later Crusades, came also a habit of roaming in 
 strange countries, of isolated adventure in search of 
 wealth or information, a love of the distant, the half- 
 understood, the equivocal ; perhaps even a hankering 
 after a mysterious compromise between the religion of 
 Europe and the religions of the East, such as appears 
 to have existed among the Templars and other Franks 
 settled in Asia. 
 
 There was, throughout feudal society, a sort of 
 languor, a morbid longing for something new, now 
 that the old had ceased to be possible or had 
 proved futile ; after the great excitement of the Cru- 
 sades it was impossible to be either sedately idle or 
 quietly active, even as it is with all of us during the 
 days of weariness and restlessness after some long 
 journey. To such a society the strongly realistic 
 Carolingian epic had ceased to appeal : the tales of 
 
288 EUPHORION. 
 
 the Welsh and Breton bards, repeated by t'rouvere 
 and jongleur, troubadour and minnesinger, came as a 
 revelation. The fatigued, disappointed, morbid, ima- 
 ginative society of the later Crusades recognized in 
 this fairyland epic of a long refined, long idle, nay, 
 effete race, the realization of their own ideal : of 
 activity unhampered by aim or organization, of senti- 
 ment and emotion and action quite useless and un- 
 necessary, purely subservient to imaginative gratifica- 
 tion. These Arthurs, Launcelots, Tristrams, Kays, 
 and Gawains, fantastic phantoms, were also far more 
 artistically malleable than the iron Rolands, Olivers, 
 and Renauds of earlier days ; that unknown kingdom 
 of Britain could much more easily be made the im- 
 possible ideal, in longing for which squeamish and 
 lazy minds might refuse all coarser reality. Moreover, 
 those who listened to the tales of chivalry were 
 different from those who had listened to the Caro- 
 lingian stories ; and, therefore, required something 
 different. They were courtiers, and one half of them 
 were women. Now the Carolingian tales, originally 
 battle-songs, sung in camps and castles to mere 
 soldiers, had at first possessed no female characters 
 at all ; and when gradually they were introduced, it 
 was in the coarsest barrack or tap-room style. The 
 Keltic tales, on the contrary, whether from national 
 tradition, or rather from longer familiarity with Chris- 
 tian culture and greater idleness of life, naturally 
 made women and women's love the goal of a great 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 289 
 
 many adventures which an . effete nation could no 
 longer ascribe to patriotic movements. But this was 
 not all. The religious feeling of the day was ex- 
 tremely inclined to mysticism, in which aesthetic, 
 erotic, and all kinds of morbid and ill-defined tenden- 
 cies were united, which was more than anything else 
 tinged with a semi- Asiatic quietism, a longing for the 
 passive ecstasy of Nirvana. This religious side of 
 mediaeval life was also gratified by the Arthurian 
 romances. Oddly enough, there existed an old Welsh 
 or Breton tale about the boy Peredur, who from a 
 complete simpleton became the prince of chivalry, 
 and his many adventures connected with a certain 
 mysterious blood-dripping lance, and a still more 
 mysterious basin or grail (an allusion to which is said 
 by M. de la Villemarqud to be contained in the origi- 
 nally Keltic name of Percival), which possessed magic 
 properties akin to those of the purse of Fortunatus, 
 or the pipkin in the story of " Little pot, boil ! " The 
 story, whose original mythical meaning had been lost 
 in the several centuries of Christianity, was very 
 decayed and obscure ; and the fact of the blood on 
 the lance being that of a murdered kinsman of Pere- 
 dur, and of the basin containing the head of the same 
 person cut off by Gloucester witches, was evidently 
 insufficient to account for all the mystery with which 
 these objects were surrounded. The French poets of 
 the Middle Ages, strongly imbued with Oriental legends 
 
 brought back by the Crusaders, saw at a glance the 
 
 20 
 
2 go E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 meaning of the whole story : the lance was the lance 
 with which Longinus had pierced the Saviour's side ; 
 the Grail was the cup which had received His blood, 
 nay, it was the cup of the Last Supper. A tale about 
 the preservation of these precious relics by Joseph of 
 Arimathaea, was immediately connected therewith ; a 
 theory was set up (doubtless with the aid of quite un- 
 christian. Oriental legends) of a kind of kingdom of 
 the keepers of the Grail, of a vague half-material, half- 
 spiritual state of bliss connected with the service of 
 the Grail, which fed its knights (and here the Templars 
 and their semi-oriental mysteries, for which they were 
 later so frightfully misused, certainly come into play) 
 with food which is at once of the body and of the soul. 
 Thus the Keltic Peredur, bent upon massacring the 
 Gloucester witches to avenge his uncle, was turned 
 into a saintly knight, seeking throughout a more and 
 more perfect life for the kingdom of the Grail : the 
 Perceval of Chrestien de Troyes, the Parzifal of 
 Wolfram von Eschenbach, whom later romance 
 writers (wishing to connect everything more closely 
 with Arthur's court) replaced by the Sir Galahad of 
 the "Morte d' Arthur," while the guest of the Grail 
 became a sort of general mission of several knights, 
 a sort of spiritual crusade to whose successful cham- 
 pions Percival, Bors, and Galahad, the Middle Ages 
 did not hesitate to add the arch-adulterer Launcelot. 
 
 Thus did the Arthurian tales answer the require- 
 ments of the languid, dreamy, courtly, lady-serving 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 291 
 
 and religiously mystic sons and grandsons of those 
 earlier Crusaders whose aspirations had been expressed 
 by the rough and solemn heroes of Carolingian tales. 
 The Carolingian tales were thrown aside, or were kept 
 by the noble mediaeval poets only on condition of 
 their original meaning being completely defaced by 
 wholesale admixture of the manners and adventures 
 belonging to the Arthurian cycles. The paladins 
 were forced to disport themselves in the same fairy- 
 land as the Knights of the Round Table ; and many 
 mediaeval poems the heroes of which, like Ogier of 
 Denmark and Huon of Bordeaux, already existed in 
 the Carolingian tales, are in reality, with their romantic 
 loves, their useless adventures, their Morgana's castles 
 and Oberon's horns, offshoots of the Keltic stories, 
 which were as rich in every kind of supernatural 
 (being, in fact, pagan myths turned into fairy tales) 
 as the genuine Carolingian subjects, whose origin was 
 entirely historical, were completely devoid of such 
 things. Arthur and his ladies and knights : Guenevere, 
 Elaine, Enid, Yseult, Launcelot, Geraint, Kay, Gawain, 
 Tristram, and Percival-Galahad, were the real heroes 
 and heroines of the courtly nobles and the courtly 
 poets of this second phase of mediaeval life. The 
 Teuton Charlemagne, Roland and Oliver were as 
 completely forgotten of the poets who met in that 
 memorable combat of the Wartburg, as were the 
 Teuton Sigurd and Dietrich. And if the Carolingian 
 cycle survived, however much altered, I think it must 
 
292 EUPHORION. 
 
 have been thanks to the burghers and artizans of the 
 Netherlands and of Provence, to whom the bluff, 
 matter-of-fact heroism, the simple, gross, but not ille- 
 gitimate amours of Carolingian heroes, were more 
 satisfactory than any mystic quest of the Grail, any 
 refined adultery of Guenevere or Yseult. 
 
 But the inevitable fate of all mediaeval epics awaited 
 this triumphant Arthurian cycle: the fate of being ob- 
 literated by passing from one nation and civilization 
 to another, long before the existence of any poetic art 
 adequate to its treatment. Of this I will take as an 
 example one of the mediseval poems which has the 
 greatest reputation, the masterpiece (according to most 
 critics, with whom I find it difificult, in the presence 
 of a poet like Gottfried von Strassburg, to agree) of 
 probably the most really poetical and earnest school of 
 poetry which the pre-Dantesque Middle Ages pos- 
 sessed — the " Parzifal " of Wolfram von Eschenbach. 
 
 The paramount impression (I cannot say the 
 strongest, for strong impressions are incompatible 
 with such work as this) left by the masterpiece of 
 Wolfram von Eschenbach, is that of the most aston- 
 ishing vagueness, iluidity, haziness, vaporousness. In 
 reading it one looks back to that rudely hewn and 
 extremely obliterated Nibelungenlied, as to something 
 quite astonishingly clear, detailed and strongly marked 
 as to something distinctly artistic. Indeed by the 
 side of " Parzifal " everything seems artistic ; Hart- 
 mann von Aue reads like Chaucer, "Aucassin et 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 293 
 
 Nicolette" is as living as "Cymbeline," " Chevy Chase" 
 seems as good as the battles of Homer. It is not a 
 narrative, but a vague mooning; a knight illiterate, 
 not merely like his fellow minnesingers, in the way 
 of reading and writing, but in the sense of complete 
 absence of all habit of literary form ; extremely noble 
 and pure of mind, chaste, gentle, with a funny, puzzled 
 sense of humour, reminding one distantly of Jean 
 Paul in his drowsy moments ; a hanger-on of courts, 
 but perfectly simple-hearted and childlike ; very poor 
 and easily pleased : such is, for good and for bad, 
 Herr Wolfram von Eschenbach, the only real person- 
 ality in his poem. And he narrates, in a mooning, 
 digressive, good-natured, drowsy tone, with only a rare 
 awaking of interest, a story which he has heard from 
 some one else, and that some one else from a series 
 of other some one elses (Chrestien de Troyes, a 
 legendary Provengal Chiot or Guyot, perhaps even 
 the original Welsh bard) ; all muddled, monotonous, 
 and droning ; events and persons ill-defined, without 
 any sense of the relative importance of anything, 
 without clear perception of what it is all about, or at 
 least without the power of keeping the matter straight 
 before the reader. A story, in point of fact, which is 
 no story at all, but a mere series of rambling adven- 
 tures (adventures which are scarcely adventures, having 
 no point or plot) of various people with not much 
 connection and no individuality — Gachmuret, Parzifal, 
 Gawain, Loherangrein,Anfortas, Feirefis — pale ghosts 
 
294 EUPHORION. 
 
 of beings, moving in a country of Kennaqwhere, 
 Aquitaine, Anjou, Brittany, Wales, Spain, and heaven 
 knows what wondrous Oriental places ; a misty coun- 
 try with woods and towns and castles which are in- 
 finitely far apart and yet quite near each other; which 
 seem to sail about like cloud castles round the only solid 
 place in the book, Plimizol, where Arthur's court, 
 with round table constantly spread, is for ever estab- 
 lished. A no place, nowhere ; yet full of details : 
 minute inventories of the splendid furniture of castles 
 (castles where ? how reached ?) ; infinitely inferior in 
 this matter even to the Nibelungenlied, where you are 
 made to feel so vividly (one of the few modern and 
 therefore clear things therein) the long, dreary road 
 from Worms to Bechlarn, and thence to Etzelburg, 
 though of none of them is there anything beyond a 
 name. For the Nibelungen story had been localized 
 in what to narrator and audience was a reality, the 
 country in which themselves lived, where themselves 
 might seek out the abbey in which Siegfried was 
 buried, the well in the Odenwald near which he was 
 stabbed ; where they knew from merchant and pilgrim 
 the road taken by the Nibelungs from Santen to 
 Worms, by the Burgundians from Worms to Hungary. 
 But here in " Parzifal " we are in a mere vague world 
 of anywhere, the world of Keltic and Oriental romance 
 become mere cloudland to the Thuringian knight. 
 And similarly have the heroes of other nations, the 
 Arthurs, Gawains, Gachmurets, of Wales and Anjou, 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 29; 
 
 become mere vague names ; they have become liqui- 
 fied, lost all shape and local habitation. They are 
 mere names, these ladies and knights of Herr Wolfram, 
 names with fair pink and white faces, names magnifi- 
 cently draped in bejewelled Oriental stuffs and em- 
 bossed armour ; they have no home, no work, nothing 
 to do. This is the most remarkable characteristic of 
 " Parzifal," and what makes it so typical of the process 
 of growing inane through overmuch alteration, which 
 prevented the mediaeval epics ever turning into an 
 Iliad or an Odyssey ; this that it is essentially idle 
 and all about nothing. The feudal relations strongly 
 marked in the German Nibelungenlied have melted 
 away like the distinctions of race : every knight is 
 independent, not a vassal nor a captain, a Volker or 
 Hagen, or Roland or Renaud followed by his men ; 
 but an isolated individual, without even a squire, 
 wandering about alone through this hazy land of 
 nowhere. Knight-errantry, in the time of the great 
 Guelph and Ghibelline struggles, every bit as ideal as 
 that of Spenser or Cervantes ; and with the difference 
 that Sir Calidore and Sir Artegal have an appointed 
 task, some Blatant Beast or other nuisance to over- 
 come ; and that Don Quixote has the general rescuing 
 of all the oppressed Princesse Micomiconas, and the 
 destruction of all windmills, and the capturing of all 
 helmets of Mambrino, and the establishing all over 
 the world of the worship of Dulcinea. But these 
 knights of Wolfram von Eschenbach have no more 
 
296 EUPHORION. 
 
 this mission than they have the politico-military 
 missions of a Riidger or a Roland. They are all 
 riding about at ramdom, without any particular 
 pagans, necromancers, or dragons to pursue. The very 
 service of the Holy Grail, which is the main interest 
 of the poem, consists in nothing apparently except 
 living virtuously at the Castle of Montselvasche, and 
 virtuously eating and drinking the victuals provided 
 miraculously. To be admitted to this service, no 
 initiation, no mission, nothing preliminary seems 
 required. Parzifal himself merely wanders about 
 vaguely, without doing any specified thing. The fact 
 is that in this poem all has become purely ideal ; ideal 
 to the point of utter vacuity : there is no connection 
 with any human business. Of all the heroes and 
 heroines we hear that they are perfectly chaste, truth- 
 ful, upright ; and they are never put into any situation 
 to test these qualities : they are never placed in the 
 way of temptation, never made to fight with evil, or 
 to decide between it and good. The very religion of 
 the Holy Grail consists in doing nothing : not a word 
 about relieving the poor or oppressed, of tending the 
 sick, of delivering the Holy Sepulchre, of defending 
 that great injured One, Christ. To be Grail Knight 
 or even Grail King means to be exactly the same as 
 before. Where in this vague dreamland of passive 
 purity and heroism, of untempted chastity and untried 
 honour, where are the earthly trials of Tristram, of 
 Guenevere, of Riidger, of Renaud .' Where the moral 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 297 
 
 Struggles of the Middle Ages ? Where is Godfrey, or 
 Francis, or Dominick ? Nowhere. All has disappeared, 
 melted away ; Christianity and Paganism themselves 
 have melted away or into each other, as in the easy 
 meeting of the Pagan Feirefis and the Christian 
 Parzifal, and in the double marriage of Gachmuret with 
 the Indian Belakahe and the Welsh Herzeloid ; there 
 remains only a kind of Buddhistic Nirvana of vague 
 passive perfection, but without any renunciation ; and 
 in a world devoid of evil and full of excellent brocade 
 and armour and eatables, and lovely maidens who 
 dress and undress you, and chastely kiss you on the 
 mouth ; a world without desire, aspiration, or combat, 
 vacantly happy and virtuous. A world purely ideal, 
 divorced from all reality, unsubstantial like the kingdom 
 of Gloriana, but, unlike Spenser's, quite unshadowed 
 by any puritan sadness, by any sense of evil, untroubled 
 by allegorical vices ; cheerful, serene, filled with flowers 
 and song of birds, but as unreal as the illuminated 
 arabesques of a missal. In truth, perhaps more to be 
 compared with an eighteenth century pastoral, an ideal 
 created almost in opposition to reality ; a dream of 
 passiveness and liberty (as of light leaves blown about) 
 as the ideal of the fiercely troubled, struggling, tightly 
 fettered feudal world. The ideal, perhaps, of only one 
 moment, scarcely of a whole civilization ; or rather 
 (how express my feeling T) an accidental combination 
 of an instant, as of spectre vapour arisen from the mix- 
 ture of Kelt and Teuton, of Frank and Moslem. Is it 
 
298 EUPHORION. 
 
 Christian, Pagan, Mohamnnedan ? None of all these. 
 A simple-looking vaporous chaos of incongruous, 
 but not conflicting, elements: a poem of virtue without 
 object, of knighthood without work, of religion without 
 dogma ; in this like its central interest, the Grail : a mys- 
 tery, a cup, a stone ; a thing which heals, feeds, speaks ; 
 animate or inanimate? Stone of the Caaba or chalice 
 of the Sacrament ? Merely a mysterious holy of holies 
 and good of goods, which does everything and nothing, 
 means nothing and requires nothing ; is nothing. 
 
 III. 
 
 Thus was obliterated, in all its national and tradi- 
 tional meaning, the heroic cycle of Arthur; and by the 
 same process of slow adaptation to new intellectual 
 requirements which had completely wiped out of 
 men's memory the heroic tales of Siegfried, which had 
 entirely altered the originally realistic character of 
 the epic of Charlemagne. But unreal and ideal as 
 had become the tales of the Round Table, and dis- 
 connected with any national tradition, the time came 
 when even these were not sufficiently independent of 
 reality to satisfy the capricious imagination of the later 
 Middle Ages. At the end of the fourteenth century 
 was written, most probably in Portuguese by Vasco 
 de Lobeira, the tale of " Amadis de Gaula,'' which was 
 followed by some forty or fifty similar books telling the 
 adventures of all the brothers, nephews, sons, grand- 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 299 
 
 sons, and great-grandsons, an infinite succession, of 
 the original Amadis ; which, translated into all lan- 
 guages and presently multiplied by the press, seem to 
 have usurped the place of the Arthurian stories in 
 feudal countries until well-nigh the middle of the 
 sixteenth century ; and which were succeeded by no 
 more stories of heroes, but by the realistic comic 
 novels of the type of " Lazarillo de Tormes," and the 
 buffoon philosophic extravaganzas of " Gargantua." 
 Further indeed it was impossible to go than did medi- 
 aeval idealism in the Amadises. Compared with them 
 the most fairy-tale-like Arthurian stories are perfect 
 historical documents. There remains no longer any 
 connection whatsoever with reality, historical or 
 geographical : the whole world seems to have been 
 expeditiously emptied of all its contents, to make room 
 for kingdoms of Gaul, of Rome, of the Firm Island, of 
 Sobradisa, etc., which are less like the Land West of the 
 Moon and East of the Sun than they are like Sancho 
 Panza's island. All real mankind, past, present, and 
 future, has similarly been swept away and replaced 
 by a miraculous race of Amadises, Lisvarts, Galaors, 
 Gradasilias, Orianas, Pintiquinestras, Fradalons, and 
 so forth, who flit across our vision, in company with 
 the indispensable necromancers, fairies, dwarfs, giants, 
 and duennas, like some huge ballet : things without 
 character, passions, pathos ; knights who are never 
 wounded or killed, princesses who always end with 
 marrying the right man, enchanters whose heads 
 
300 EUPHORION. 
 
 are always chopped off, foundlings who are always 
 reinstated in their kingdom, inane paper puppets 
 bespangled with impossible sentiment, tinsel and rags 
 which are driven about like chaff by the wind-puffs of 
 romance. The advent of the Amadises is the coming 
 of the Kingdom of Nonsense, the sign that the last 
 days of chivalric romance have come ; a little more, 
 and the Licentiate Alonzo Perez will take his seat in 
 Don Quixote's library, and Nicholas the Barber light 
 his faggots in the yard. 
 
 But, as if in compensation of the usurpation of 
 which they had been the victims, the Carolingian tales, 
 pushed out of the way by the Arthurian cycle, were 
 not destined to perish. Thrown aside with contempt 
 by the upper classes, who were engrossed by the Round 
 Table and the Holy Grail, the tales of Charlemagne 
 and his paladins, largely adulterated with Arthurian 
 elements, were apparently cherished by a lower class 
 of society: burgesses, artizans, and such-like, for whom 
 that Arthurian world was far too etherial and too deli- 
 cately immoral ; and to this circumstance is due 
 the fact that the humiliated Carolingian tales even- 
 tually received an artistic embodiment which was not 
 given to the Arthurian stories. While troubadours and 
 minnesingers were busy with the court of Arthur, 
 and grave Latinists like Rusticiano of Pisa wrote 
 of Launcelot and Guenevere ; the Carolingian epics 
 seem to have been mainly sung about by illiterate 
 jongleurs, and to have busied the pens of prose hack- 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 301 
 
 writers for the benefit of townsfolk. The free towns 
 of the Netherlands and of Germany appear to have 
 been full of this unfashionable literature : the Caro- 
 lingian cycle had become democratic. And, inas- 
 much as it was literature no longer for knights and 
 courtiers, but for artizans and shopkeepers, it went, of 
 course, to the pre-eminently democratic country of 
 the Middle Ages — Italy. This was at a time when 
 Italian was not yet a recognized language, and when 
 the men and women who talked in Tuscan, Lombard, 
 or Venetian dialects, wrote in Latin and in French. 
 And while Francesca and Paolo read the story of 
 Launcelot most probably in good mediaeval langue 
 doil, as befitted people of high birth; the jongleurs, 
 who collected crowds so large as to bar the streets 
 and require the interference of the Bolognese magis- 
 trates, sang of Roland and Oliver in a sort of lingua 
 Franca of French Lombard. French jongleurs sing- 
 ing in impossible French-Italian ; Italian jongleurs 
 singing in impossible French ; Paduan penny-a-liners 
 writing Carolingian cyclical novels in French, not of 
 Paris, assuredly, but of Padua — a comical and most 
 hideous jabber of hybrid languages — this was how 
 the Carolingian stories became popular in Italy. 
 Meanwhile, the day came when the romantic Arthu- 
 rian tales had to dislodge in Italy before the invasion 
 of the classic epic. Troy, Rome, and Thebes had 
 replaced Tintagil and Caerleon in the interest of the 
 cultured classes long before the beginning of the 
 
302 EUPHORION. 
 
 fifteenth century; when Poggio, in the very midst of 
 the classic revival, still told of the comically engrossed 
 audience which surrounded the vagabonds singing of 
 Orlando and Rinaldo. The effete Arthurian cycle, 
 superseded in Spain and France by the Amadis 
 romances, was speedily forgotten in Italy ; but the 
 Carolingian stories remained ; and when Italian poetry 
 arose once more after the long interregnum between 
 Petrarch and Lorenzo dei Medici, and looked about 
 for subjects, it laid its hand upon them. But when, 
 in the second half of the fifteenth century, those old 
 tales of Charlemagne received, after so many centuries 
 of alterations and ephemeral embodiments, that artis- 
 tic form which the Middle Ages had been unable to 
 give them, the stories themselves, and the way in 
 which they were regarded, were totally different from 
 what they had been in the time of Theroulde, or of 
 the anonymous author of the "Quatre Fils Aymon ;" 
 the Renaissance, with its keen artistic sense, made out 
 of the Carolingian tales real works of art, but works 
 of art which were playthings. To begin with, the 
 Carolingian stories had been saturated with Arthurian 
 colour : they had been furnished with all the knight- 
 errantry, all the gallantry, all the enchantments, the 
 fairies, giants, and necromancers of the Keltic legends; 
 and, moreover, they had lost, by infinite repetition, all 
 the political realism and meaning so striking in the 
 "Chanson de Roland" and the "Quatre Fils Aymon;" 
 a confusion and unreality further increased by the 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 303 
 
 fact that the Italians had no original connection with 
 those tales, that to them real men and plans were no 
 better than imaginary ones, and that the minstrels 
 who sang in the market-place, and the laborious prose- 
 writers who compiled such collections as that called 
 of the " Reali di Francia," were equally free in their 
 alterations and adaptations, creating unknown relation- 
 ships, inventing new adventures, suppressing essential 
 historical points, with no object save amusing their 
 audience or readers with new stories about familiar 
 heroes. Such was the condition of the stories them- 
 selves. The attitude of the public towards them was, 
 by the middle of the fifteenth century, one of com- 
 plete incredulity and frivolous amusement ; the pala- 
 dins were as unreal as the heroes of any granny's 
 fairy tale. The people wanted to hear of wonderful 
 battles and adventures, of enchantments and love- 
 makings ; but they wanted also to laugh ; and, scepti- 
 cal, practical, democratic, the artizans and shopkeepers 
 of Florence — to whom, paying, as they did, expensive 
 mercenaries who stole poultry and never got wounded 
 on any account, all chivalry or real military honour 
 was the veriest nursery rubbish — such people as 
 crowded round the cantastoria of mercato vecchio, must 
 indeed have found much to amuse them in these tales 
 of so different an age. 
 
 And into such crowds there penetrated to listen and 
 watch (even as the Magnificent Lorenzo had elbowed 
 among the carnival ragamuffins of Florence, and had 
 
304 EUPHORION. 
 
 slid in among the holiday-making peasants of Poggio 
 a Caiano) a learned man, a poet, an intimate of the 
 Medicis, of Politian, Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola, 
 Messer Luigi Pulci, the same who had written the semi- 
 allegorical, semi-realistic poem about Lorenzo dei 
 Medici's gala tournament. There was a taste in the 
 house of the Medici, together with the taste for platonic 
 philosophy, classical erudition, religious hymns, and 
 Hebrew kabbala, for a certain kind of realism, for the 
 language and mode of thinking of the lower classes, as 
 a reaction from Petrarchesque conventionality.. As 
 the Magnificent Lorenzo had had the fancy to string 
 together in more artistic shape the quaint and graceful 
 love poems, hyperbolical, realistic, tender, and abusive, 
 of the Tuscan peasantry ; so also Messer Luigi Pulci 
 appears to have been smitten with the notion of trying 
 his hand at a chivalric poem like those to which he 
 and his friends had listened among the butchers and 
 pork-shops, the fishmongers and frying bo^ .hs of the 
 market, and giving an impression, in its ideas and 
 language, of the people to whom such strains were 
 sung. But Luigi Pulci was vastly less gifted as a 
 poet than Lorenzo dei Medici ; Florentine prentices 
 are less aesthetically pleasing than Tuscan peasants, 
 and the " Morgante Maggiore " is a piece of work of 
 a sort utterly inferior to the " Nencia da Barberino.*' 
 Still the " Morgante Maggiore '' remains, and will 
 remain, as a very remarkable production of grotesque 
 art. Just as Lorenzo dei Medici was certainly not 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 305 
 
 without a deliberate purpose of selecting the quaint- 
 ness and gracefulness of peasant life ; even so, and 
 perhaps more, Luigi Pulci must have had a deliberate 
 intention of producing a ludicrous effect ; in both cases 
 the deliberate attempt is very little perceptible, in the 
 " Nencia da Barberino " from the genius of Lorenzo, 
 in the " Morgante Maggiore " from the stolidity of 
 Pulci. The " Morgante," of which parts were prob- 
 ably written as a mere sample to amuse a supper party, 
 became interesting to Pulci, in the mere matter of 
 inventing and stringing together new incidents ; and 
 despite its ludicrous passages, it must have been more 
 seriously written by him, and more seriously listened 
 to by his friends, than would a similar production 
 now-a-days. For the men of the Renaissance, no 
 matter how philosophized and cultured, retained the 
 pleasure in mere incident, which we moderns seem to 
 have given over to children and savages ; and Lorenzo, 
 Ficino, and Politian probably listened to the adven- 
 tures of Luigi Pulci's paladins and giants with much 
 the same interest, and only a little more conscious 
 sense of grotesqueness, with which the crowd in the 
 market listened to Cristofano dell' Altissimo and 
 similar story-tellers. The " Morgante Maggiore," 
 therefore, is neither really comic nor really serious. 
 It is not a piece of realistic grotesqueness like " Gar- 
 gantua '' or " Pantagruel," any more than it is a serious 
 ideal work like " Amadis de Gaula : " the proportion 
 
 of deliberately sought effects is small ; the great bulk, 
 21 
 
3o6 EUPHORION. 
 
 serious or comic, seems to have come quite at random. 
 It is not a caricatured reproduction of the poems of 
 chivalry sung in the market, for they were probably 
 serious, stately, and bald, with at most an occasional 
 joke ; it is the reproduction of the joint impression 
 received from the absurd, harum-scarum, unpractical 
 world of chivalry of the poet, and the real world of 
 prose, of good-humoured buffoonish coarseness with 
 which the itinerant poet was surrounded. The pala- 
 dins are no Don Quixotes, the princesses no Dulcineas, 
 the battles are real battles ; but the language is that 
 of Florentine wool-workers, housewives, cheese-sellers, 
 and ragamuffins, crammed with the slang of the 
 market-place, its heavy jokes and perpetual sententious 
 aphorism. Moreover the prominence given to food 
 and eating is unrivalled except by Rabelais : the 
 poet must have lounged with delight through the 
 narrow mediaeval lanes, crowded with booths and 
 barrows, sniffing with rapture the mingled scents of 
 cheese, pork, fish, spices, and a hundred strange con- 
 comitant market smells. And the market, that 
 classic mercato vecchio (alas, finally condemned and 
 destroyed by modern sanitary prudishness, and which 
 only those who have seen can conceive in its full 
 barbarous, nay, barbaric Pantagruelian splendour of 
 food, blood, and stenches) of Florence, is what we 
 think of throughout the poem. And, when Messer 
 Luigi comes to narrate, with real gravity and after the 
 due invocation of the Virgin, the Trinity, and the saints. 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. TP't 
 
 the tremendous disaster of Roncevaux, he uses such 
 words and such similes, that above the neighing of 
 horses and the clash of hurtling armour and the yells 
 of the combatants we suddenly hear the nasal sing- 
 song of Florentine tripe-vendors and pumpkin-pod- 
 sellers, the chaffer and oaths and laughter of the glut- 
 tonous crowd pouring through the lanes of Calimala 
 and PelHcceria ; nay (horrible and grotesque miracle), 
 there seems to rise out of the confused darkness of 
 the battle-filled valley, there seems to disengage itself 
 (as out of a mist) from the chaos of heaped bodies, 
 and the flash of steel among the whirlwinds of dust, a 
 vision, more and more distinct and familiar, of the 
 crowded square with its black rough-hewn, smoke- 
 stained houses, ornamented with Robbia-ware angels 
 and lilies or painted madonnas ; of its black butchers' 
 dens, outside which hang the ghastly disembowelled 
 sheep with blood-stained fleeces, the huge red-veined 
 hearts and livers; of the piles of cabbage and cauli- 
 flowers, the rows of tin ware and copper saucepans, 
 the heaps of maccaroni and pastes, of spices and 
 drugs ; the garlands of onions and red peppers and 
 piles of apples ; the fetid sliminess of the fish tressels ; 
 the rough pavement oozy and black, slippery with 
 cabbage-stalks, puddled with bullock's blood, strewn 
 with plucked feathers — all under the bright blue sky, 
 with Giotto's dove-coloured belfry soaring high above ; 
 a vision, finally, of one of those deep dens, with walls 
 all covered with majolica plates and dishes and 
 
3o8 EUPHORION. 
 
 flashing brass-embossed trenchers, in the dark depths 
 of which crackles perennially a ruddy fire, while a 
 huge spit revolves, offering to the flames now one 
 now the other side of scores of legs of mutton, rounds 
 of beef, and larded chickens, trickling with the butter 
 unceasingly ladled by the white-dressed cooks. 
 Roncisvalle, Charlemagne, the paladins, paganism, 
 Christendom — what of them ? "I believe in capon, 
 roast or boiled, and sometimes done in butter ; in 
 mead and in must ; and I believe in the pasty and 
 the pastykins, mother and children ; but above all 
 things I believe in good wine " — as Margutte snuffles 
 out in his catechism ; and as to Saracens and pala- 
 dins, past, present, and future, a fig for them ! 
 
 But meanwhile, for all that Florentine burgesses, 
 artizans, and humorists may think, there is in this 
 Italy of the Renaissance something besides Florence; 
 there is a school of poetry, disconnected with the 
 realisms of Lorenzo and Pulci, with the Ovidian 
 Petrarchisms of Politian. There is Ferrara. Lying, 
 as they do, between the Northern Apennine slopes of 
 Modena and the Euganean hills, the dominions of the 
 House of Este appear at first sight merely as part and 
 parcel of Lombardy, and we should expect from them 
 nothing very different from that which we expect from 
 Milan or Bologna or Padua. But the truth is different ; 
 all round Ferrara, indeed, stretches the fertile flatness 
 of Lombard cornfields, and they produce, as infallibly 
 as they produce their sacks of grain and tuns of wine 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 309 
 
 and heaps of silk cocoon, the intellectual and social 
 equivalents of such things in Renaissance Italy : in- 
 dustry, wealth, comfort, scepticism, art. But on either 
 side, into the defiles of the Euganean hills to the 
 north, into the widening torrent valleys of the Mode- 
 nese Apennines to the south, the Marquisate of Este 
 stretches up into feudalism, into chivalry, into the 
 imaginative kingdom of the Middle Ages. Medi- 
 aevalism, feudalism, chivalry, indeed, of a very modified 
 sort ; and as different from that of France and 
 Germany as differ from the poverty-stricken plains 
 and forests and arid moors of the north these Italian 
 mountain slopes, along which the vines crawl in long 
 trellises, and the chestnuts rise in endlessly superposed 
 tiers of terraces, cultivated by a peasant who is not the 
 serf, but the equal sharer in profits with the master of 
 the soil. And on one of those fertile hill-sides, looking 
 down upon a narrow valley all a green-blue shimmer 
 with corn and vine-bearing elms, was born, in the 
 year 1434, Matteo Maria Boiardo, in the village which 
 gave him the title, one of the highest in the Estensian 
 dominions, of Count of Scandiano. Here, in the 
 Apennines, Scandiano is a fortified village, also a 
 castle, doubtless half turned into a Renaissance villa, 
 but mediaeval and feudal nevertheless ; but the name 
 of Scandiano belongs also, I know not for what reason, 
 to a certain little red-brick palace on the outskirts of 
 Ferrara, beautifully painted with half-allegorical, half- 
 realistic pageant frescoes by Cosimo Tura, and en- 
 
3IO E UP MORION. 
 
 closing a sweet tangled orchard-garden ; to all of 
 which, being the place to which Duke Borso and Duke 
 Ercole were wont to retire for amusement, the Ferra- 
 rese have given the further name of Schifanoia, which 
 means, " fly from cares." This little coincidence of 
 Scandiano the feudal castle in the Apennines, and 
 Scandiano the little pleasure palace at Ferrara, seems 
 to give, by accidental allegory, a fair idea of the 
 double nature of Matteo Boiardo, of the Ferrarese 
 court to which he belonged, and of the school of poetry 
 (including the more notable but less original work of 
 Ariosto) which the genius of the man and the character 
 of the court succeeded together in producing. 
 
 To understand Boiardo we must compare him with 
 Ariosto ; and to understand Ariosto we must compare 
 him with Boiardo ; both belong to the same school, 
 and are men of very similar genius, and where the one 
 leaves off the other begins. But first, in order to 
 understand the character of this poetry which, in the 
 main, is identical in Boiardo and in his more successful 
 but less fascinating pupil Ariosto, let us understand 
 Ferrara. It was, in the late fifteenth and early six- 
 teenth centuries, a chivalric town of Ariostesque 
 chivalry : feudalism turned courtly and elegant, and, 
 moreover, very liberal and comfortable by prepon- 
 derance of democratic and industrial habits ; a mili- 
 tary court, of brave mercenary captains full of dash 
 and adventure, not mere brigands and marauders, 
 having studied strategy, like the little Umbrian chief- 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 311 
 
 tains ; a court orderly, elegant, and brilliant : a prince 
 not risen from behind a counter like Medicis and Pe- 
 truccis, nor out of blood like Baglionis and Sforzas, but 
 of a noble old house whose beginnings are lost in the 
 mist of real chivalry and real paladinism ; a duke with 
 a pretence of feudal honour and decorum, at whose 
 court men were all brave and ladies all chaste — with 
 the little licenses of baseness and gallantry admitted 
 by Renaissance chivalry. A bright, brilliant court at 
 the close of the fifteenth century ; and more stable 
 than the only one which might have rivalled it, the 
 Feltrian court of Urbino, too small and lost among 
 the Umbrian bandits. A bright, brilliant town, also, 
 this Ferrara : not mercantile like Florence, not mere 
 barracks like Perugia ; a capital, essentially, in its rich 
 green plain by the widened Po, with its broad handsome 
 streets (so different from the mediaeval exchanges of 
 Bologna, and the feudal alleys of Perugia), its well- 
 built houses, so safe and modern, needing neither 
 bravi nor iron window bars, protected (except against 
 some stray murder by one of the Estensi themselves), 
 by the duke's well-organized police ; houses with well- 
 trimmed gardens, like so many Paris hotels ; and with 
 the grand russet brick castle, military with its moat 
 and towers, urban with its belvederes and balconies, in 
 the middle, well placed to sweep away with its guns 
 (the wonderful guns of the duke's own making) any 
 riot, tidily, cleanly, without a nasty heap of bodies and 
 slop of blood as in the narrow streets of other towns, 
 
312 EUPHORION. 
 
 Imagine this bright capital, placed, moreover, in the 
 richest centre of Lombardy, with glitter of chivalry 
 from the Euganean hills and Apennines (castellated 
 with Este, Monselice.Canossa, and Boiardo's own Scan- 
 diano); with gorgeous rarities of commerce from Venice 
 and Milan — a central, unique spot. It is the natural 
 home of the chivalrous poets of the Renaissance, 
 Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso ; as Florence is of the Politians 
 and Pulcis (Hellenism and back-shopery) ; and Venice 
 of the literature of lust, jests, cynicism, and adventure, 
 Aretine, Beolco, Calmo, and Poliphilo-Colonna. In 
 that garden, where the white butterflies crowd among 
 the fruit trees bowed down to the tall grass of the palace 
 of Schifanoia — a garden neither grand nor classic, but 
 elegiac and charming — we can imagine Boiardo or 
 Ariosto reading their poems to just such a goodly 
 company as Giraldi Cinthio (a Ferrarese, and fond 
 of romance, too) describes in the prologue of his 
 " Ecatomiti : " gentle and sprightful ladies, with the 
 splendid brocaded robes, and the gold-filleted golden 
 hair of Dosso Dossi's wonderful Alcina Circe; graceful 
 youths like the princely St. John of Benvenuto 
 Garofalo ; jesters like Dosso's at Modena ; brilliant 
 captains like his St. George and St. Michael ; and a 
 little crowd of pages with doublets and sleeves laced 
 with gold tags, of sedate magistrates in fur robes 
 and scarlet caps, of white-dressed maids with in- 
 struments of music and embroidery frames and hand 
 looms, like those which Cosimo Tura painted for Duke 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 313 
 
 Borso on the walls of this same Schifanoia palace. 
 Such is the audience ; now for the poems. 
 
 The stuff of Boiardo and Ariosto is the same: that 
 old mediaeval stuff of the Carolingian poems, coloured, 
 scented with Arthurian chivalry and wonder. The 
 knight-errantry of the Keltic tales is cleverly blended 
 with the pseudo-historical' military organization of 
 the Carolingian cycle. Paladins and Saracens are 
 ingeniously manoeuvred about, now scattered in little 
 groups of twos and threes, to encounter adventures 
 in the style of Sir Launcelot or Amadis ; now gathered 
 into a compact army to crash upon each other as at 
 Roncevaux ; or else wildly flung up by the poet to 
 alight in fairyland, to find themselves in the caverns 
 of Jamschid, in the isles where Oberon's mother 
 kept Caesar, and Morgana kept Ogier, in the boats, 
 entering subterranean channels, of Sindbad and 
 Huon of Bordeaux ; a constant alternation of in- 
 dividual adventure and wholesale organized cam- 
 paigns, conceived and carried out with admirable 
 ingenuity. So much for the deeds of arms. The 
 deeds of love are also compounded of Carolingian and 
 Arthurian, but flavoured with special Renaissance 
 feeling. There is a great deal of rapid love-making 
 between too gallant knights and too impressionable 
 ladies ; licentious amours which we moderns lay at the 
 door of Boiardo and Ariosto, not knowing that the 
 licentiousness of the Olivers and Ogiers and Guerins 
 and Huons of mediaeval poetry, of the sentimental 
 
314 EUPHORION. 
 
 Amadises, Galaors, and Lisvarts of the fourteenth 
 century, whom the Renaissance has toned down in 
 Rogers and Rinaldos and Ricciardettos, is by many 
 degrees worse. A moral improvement also (for all 
 the immorality of the Renaissance) in the eschewing 
 of the never-failing adultery of the Arthurian ro- 
 mances, and the appropriation to legitimately faithful 
 love of the poetical devotion which Tristram and 
 Launcelot bear to other men's wives. To this are 
 added, and more by Ariosto than by Boiardo, two 
 essentially Italian elements : something of the nobility 
 of passion of the Platonic sonneteers ; and a good dose 
 of the ironical, scurrilous, moralizing immoral anecdote 
 gossiping of Boccaccio and Sacchetti. Such is the 
 stuff. The conception, though rarely comic, and 
 sometimes bond fide serious, is never earnest. All 
 this is a purely artistic world, a world of decorative 
 arabesque incident, intended to please, scarcely ever 
 to move, or to move, at most, like some Decameronian 
 tale of Isabella and the Basil Plant, or Constance and 
 Martuccio. On the other hand, there is none of the 
 grotesque irreverence of Pulci. Boiardo and Ariosto 
 are not in earnest ; they are well aware that their heroes 
 and heroines are mere modern men and women tricked 
 out in pretty chivalric trappings, driven wildly about 
 from Paris to Cathay, and from Spain to the Orkneys — 
 on Tony Lumpkin's principle of driving his mother 
 round and round the garden plot till she thought herself 
 on a heath six miles off — without ever really changing 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 315 
 
 place. But they do not, like Pulci, make fun of their 
 characters. They write chivalry romances not for 
 Florentine pork-butchers and wool-carders, but for 
 gallant ladies and gentlemen, to whom, with duels, 
 tournaments, serenades, and fine speeches, chivalry is 
 an admired name, though no longer a respected reality. 
 The heroes of Boiardo and of Ariosto are always 
 bold and gallant and glittering, the spirit of romance 
 is in them ; a giant Sancho Panza like Morgante, 
 redolent of sausage and cheese, would never be ad- 
 mitted into the society of a Ferrarese Orlando. The 
 art of Boiardo and of Ariosto is eminently pageant 
 art, in which sentiment and heroism are but as one 
 element among many ; there is no pretence at reality 
 (although there is a good deal of incidental realism), 
 and no thought of the interest in subject and persons 
 which goes with reality. It is a masquerade, and one 
 whose men and women must, I think, be imagined 
 in a kind of artistic fancy costume : a mixture of the 
 Renaissance dress and of the antique, as we see it in 
 the prints of contemporary pageants, and in Venetian 
 and Ferrarese pictures ; that Circe of Dosso's, in the 
 Borghese gallery of Rome, seated in her stately wine- 
 lees and gold half-heraldically and half-cabalistically 
 patterned brocade, before the rose-bushes of the little 
 mysterious wood, is the very ideal of the Falerinas 
 and Alcinas, of the enchantresses of Boiardo and 
 Ariosto. Pageant people, these of the Ferrarese 
 poets ; they only play at being in forests and deserts. 
 
2,5 EUPHORION. 
 
 as children play at being on volcanoes or in Green- 
 land by the nursery fire. It is a kind of dressing up, 
 a masquerading of the fancy ; not disguising in order 
 to deceive, but rather laying hold of any pretty or 
 brilliant impressive garb that comes to hand, and 
 putting that on in conjunction with many odds and 
 ends, as an artist's guests might do with the silks and 
 velvets and Oriental properties of a studio. These 
 knights and ladies, for ever tearing about from Scot- 
 land to India, never, in point of fact, get any further 
 than the Apennine slopes where Boiardo was born, 
 where Ariosto governed the Garfagnana. They ride 
 for ever (while supposed to be in the Ardennes or in 
 Egypt) across the velvet moss turf, all patterned with 
 minute starry clovers and the fallen white ropy 
 chestnut blossom, amidst the bracken beneath the 
 slender chestnut trees, the pale blue sky looking in 
 between their spreading branches ; at most they lose 
 their way in the intricacies of some seaside pineta, 
 where the feet slip on the fallen needles, and the sun 
 slants along the vistas of serried, red, scaly trunks, 
 among the juniper and gorse and dry grass and 
 flowers growing in the sea sand. Into the vast medi- 
 EEval forests of Germany and France, Boiardo and 
 Ariosto's fancy never penetrated. 
 
 Such is the school : a school represented in its 
 typical character only by Boiardo and Ariosto, but to 
 which belong, nevertheless, with whatever differences, 
 Tasso, Spenser, Camoens, all the poets of Renaissance 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 317 
 
 romance. Now of the two leaders thereof. Here I 
 feel that I can speak only personally ; tell only of 
 my own personal impressions and preferences. Com- 
 paring together Boiardo and Ariosto, I am, of course, 
 aware of the infinite advantages of the latter. Ariosto 
 is a man of far more varied genius ; he is an artist, 
 while Boiardo is an amateur ; he is learned in arranging 
 and ornamenting ; he knows how to alternate various 
 styles, how to begin and how to end. Moreover, he 
 is a scholarly person of a more scholarly time : he is 
 familiar with the classics, and, what is more important, 
 he is familiar with the language in which he is writing. 
 He writes exquisitely harmonious, supple, and brilliant 
 Tuscan verse, with an infinite richness of diction ; while 
 poor Boiardo jogs along in a language which is not the 
 Lombard dialect in which he speaks, and which is very 
 uncouth and awkward, as is every pure language for 
 a provincial ; indeed, so much so, that the pedantic 
 Tuscans require Berni to make Tuscan, elegant, to 
 ingentilire, with infinite loss to quaintness and charm, 
 the "Orlando Innamorato" of poor Ferrarese Boiardo. 
 Moreover, Ariosto has many qualities unknown to 
 Boiardo ; wit, malice, stateliness, decided eloquence 
 and power of simile and apostrophe ; he is a symphony 
 for full orchestra, and Boiardo a mere melody played 
 on a single fiddle, which good authorities (and no one 
 dare contest with Italians when they condemn any- 
 thing not Tuscan as jargon) pronounce to be no 
 Cremona. All these advantages Ariosto certainly 
 
3i8 EUPHORION. 
 
 has ; and I do not quarrel with those who prefer him 
 for them. But many of them distinctly take away 
 from my pleasure. I confess that I am bored by the 
 beautifully written moral and allegorical preludes of 
 Ariosto's cantos ; I would willingly give all his apho- 
 rism and all his mythology to get quickly to the 
 story. Also, I resent his admirable rhetorical flourishes 
 about his patrons, his Ercoles, Ippolitos, and Isabellas 
 — they ring false, dreadfully false and studied ; and 
 Boiardo's quickly despatched friendly greeting of his 
 friends, his courteous knights and gentle ladies, pleases 
 me much better. Moreover, the all-pervading con- 
 sciousness of the existence of Homer, Virgil, nay, 
 Statius and Lucan, every trumpery antique epic- 
 monger, annoys me, giving an uncomfortable doubt 
 as to whether Ariosto did not try to make all this 
 nonsense serious, and this romance into an epic ; all 
 this occasional Virgilian stateliness, alternated with 
 a kind of polished Decameronian gossipy cynicism, 
 diverts my attention, turns paladins and princesses 
 too much into tutor-educated gentlemen, into Bandello 
 and Cinthio-reading ladies of the sixteenth century. 
 The picture painted by Ariosto is finer, but you see 
 too much of the painter ; he and his patrons take up 
 nearly the whole foreground, and they have affected, 
 idealized faces and would-be dignified poses. For 
 these and many other reasons, I personally prefer 
 Boiardo ; and perhaps the best reason for my pre- 
 ference is the irrational one that he gives me more 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 319 
 
 pleasure. My preferences, my impressions, I have 
 said, are in this matter, much less critical than per- 
 sonal. Hence I can speak of Boiardo only as he 
 affects me. 
 
 When first I read Boiardo, I was conscious of a 
 curious phenomenon in myself I must confess to 
 reading books usually in a very ardent or rather weary 
 manner, either way in a hurry to finish them. As it 
 happened, when I borrowed Boiardo, I had a great 
 many other things on hand which required my time 
 and attention ; yet I could not make up my mind to 
 return the book until I had finished it, though my 
 intention had been merely to satisfy my curiosity by 
 a dip into it. I went on, without that eager desire to 
 know what follows which one has in a novel ; drowsily 
 with absolute reluctance to leave off, like the reluctance 
 to rise from the grass beneath the trees with only 
 butterflies and shadows to watch, or the reluctance to 
 put aside some fairy book of Walter Crane's. It was 
 like strolling in some quaint, ill-trimmed, old garden, 
 finding fresh flowers, fresh bits of lichened walls, fresh 
 fragments of broken earthenware ornaments; or, rather, 
 more like a morning in the Cathedral Library at 
 Siena, the place where the gorgeous choir books are 
 kept, itself illuminated like missal pages by Pinturic- 
 chio : amused, delighted, not moved nor fascinated ; 
 finding every moment something new, some charming 
 piece of gilding, some sweet plumed head, some quaint 
 little tree or town; making a journey of lazy discovery 
 
320 EUPHORION. 
 
 in a sort of world of Prince Charmings, the real realm 
 of the " Faery Queen," quite different in enchantment 
 from the country of Spenser's Gloriana, with its pale 
 allegoric ladies and knights, half-human, half-meta- 
 physical, and its make-believe allegorical ogres and 
 giants. This is the real Fairyland, this of Boiardo : 
 no mere outskirts of Ferrara, with real, playfully 
 cynical Ferrarese men and women tricked out as 
 paladins and Amazons, and making fun of their 
 disguise, as in Ariosto ; no wonderland of Tasso, with 
 enchanted gardens copied out of Bolognese pictures 
 and miraculous forests learned from theatre mechani- 
 cians, wonders imitated by a great poet from the card- 
 board and firework wonders of Bianca Cappello's 
 wedding feasts. This is the real fairyland, the wonder- 
 land of mediaeval romance and of Persian and Arabian 
 tales, no longer solemn or awful, but brilliant, sunny, 
 only half believed in ; the fairyland of the Renaissance, 
 superficially artistic, with its lightest, brighLast fancies, 
 and its charming realities ; its cloistered and painted 
 courts with plashing fountains, its tapestried and inlaid 
 rooms, its towered and belvedered villas, its quaint 
 clipped gardens full of strange Oriental plants and 
 beasts ; and all this transported into a country of 
 wonders, where are the gardens of the Hesperides, the 
 fountain of Merlin, the tomb of Narcissus, the castle 
 of Morgan-le-Fay ; every quaint and beautiful fancy, 
 antique and mediaeval, mixed up together, as in some 
 Renaissance picture of Botticelli or Rosselli or Filip- 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 321 
 
 pino, where knights in armour descend from Pegasus 
 before Roman temples, where swarthy white-turbaned 
 Turks, with oddly bunched-up trousers and jewelled 
 caftans, and half-naked, oak-crowned youths, like genii 
 descended, pensive and wondering, from some antique 
 sarcophagus, and dapper princelets and stalwart knights, 
 and citizens and monks, all crowd round the altar of 
 some wonder-working Macone or Apolline or Trevi- , 
 gante ; some comic, dreadful, apish figure, mummed 
 up in half-antique, half-oriental garb. Or else we are 
 led into some dainty, pale-tinted panel of Botticelli, 
 where the maidens dance in white clinging clothes, 
 strewing flowers on to the flower-freaked turf ; or into 
 some of Poliphilo's vignettes, where the gentle ladies, 
 seated with lute and viol under vine-trellises, welcome 
 the young gallant, or poet, or knight. 
 
 Such is the world of Boiardo. Spenser has once 
 or twice peeped in, painted it, and given us exquisite 
 little pictures, as that of Malecasta's castle, all hung 
 with mythological tapestries, that of the enchanted 
 chamber of Britomart, and those of Sir Calidore meet- 
 ing the Graces and of Hellenore dancing with the 
 Satyrs ; but Spenser has done it rarely, trembling to 
 return to his dreary allegories. Equal to these single 
 pictures by Spenser, Boiardo has only one or two, but 
 he keeps us permanently in the world where such 
 pictures are painted. Boiardo is not a great artist 
 like Spenser ; but he is a wizard, which is better. He 
 leads us, unceasingly, through the little dreamy laurel- 
 
 23 
 
322 EUPHORION. 
 
 woods, where we meet crisp-haired damsels tied to 
 pine-trees, or terrible dragons, or enchanted wells, 
 through whose translucent green waters we see 
 brocaded rooms full of fair ladies ; he ferries us ever 
 and anon across shallow streams, to the castles where 
 gentil donzelle wave their kerchiefs from the pillared 
 belvedere ; he slips us unseen into the camps and 
 council-rooms of the splendidly trapped Saracens, 
 like so many figures out of Filippino's frescoes ; he 
 conducts us across the bridges where giants stand 
 warders, to the mysterious carved tombs whence issue 
 green and crested snakes, who, kissed by a paladin, 
 turn into lovely enchantresses ; he takes us beneath 
 the beds of rivers and through the bowels of the earth 
 where kings and knights turned into statues of gold, 
 sit round tables covered with jewels, illumined by 
 carbuncles more wonderful than that of Jamschid ; or 
 through the mazes of fairy gardens, where every ear 
 of corn, cut off, turns into a wild beast, and every 
 fallen leaf into a bird, where hydras watch in the waters 
 and lamias rear themselves in the grass, where Orlando 
 must fill his helmet with roses lest he hear the voice 
 of the sirens ; where all the wonders of Antiquity — the 
 snake-women, the Circes, the sirens, the hydras and 
 fauns live, strangely changed into something infinitely 
 quaint and graceful, still half-antique, yet already half- 
 Arabian or Keltic, in the midst of the fairyland of 
 Merlin and of Oberon — live, move, transform them- 
 selves afresh ; where the golden-haired damsels and 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 323 
 
 the stripling knights, delicate like Pinturicchio's Prince 
 Charmings, gallop for ever on their enchanted coursers, 
 within enchanted armour, invincible, invulnerable, 
 under a sky always blue, and through an unceasing 
 spring, ever onwards to new adventures. Adventures 
 which the noble, gentle Castellan of Scandiano, poet 
 and knight and humorist, philanthropical philosopher 
 almost from sheer goodness of heart, yet a little crazy, 
 and capable of setting all the church bells ringing in 
 honour of the invention of the name of Rodomonte 
 — relates not to some dully ungrateful Alfonso or 
 Ippolito, but to his own guests, his own brilliant 
 knights and ladies, with ever and anon an effort to 
 make them feel, through his verse, some of those 
 joyous spring-tide feelings which bubble up in himself; 
 as when he remembers how, " Once did I wander on 
 a May morning in a fair flower-adorned field on a 
 hillside overlooking the sea, which was all tremulous 
 with light ; and there, among the roses of a green 
 thorn-brake, a damsel was singing of love ; singing 
 so sweetly that the sweetness still touches my heart ; 
 touches my heart, and makes me think of the great delight 
 it was to listen;" and how he would fain repeat that 
 song, and indeed an echo of its sweetness runs through 
 his verse. Meanwhile, stanza pours out after stanza, 
 adventure grows out of adventure, each more won- 
 derful, more gorgeous than its predecessor. To which 
 listen the ladies, with their white, girdled dresses and 
 crimped golden locks ; the youths, with their soft 
 
324 EUPHORION. 
 
 beardless faces framed in combed-out hair, with their 
 daggers on their hips and their plumed hats between 
 their fingers ; and the serious bearded men, in silken 
 robes ; drawing nearer the poet, letting go lute or 
 violin or music-book as they listen on the villa terrace 
 or in some darkened room, where the sunset sky turns 
 green- blue behind the pillared window, and the roses 
 hang over the trellise of the cloister. And as they 
 did four hundred years ago, so do we now, rejoice. 
 The great stalwart naked forms of Greece no longer 
 leap and wrestle or carry their well-poised baskets of 
 washed linen before us ; the mailed and vizored knights 
 of the Nibelungen no longer clash their armour to the 
 sound of Volker's red fiddle-bow ; the glorified souls 
 of Dante no longer move in mystic mazes of light 
 before the eyes of our fancy. All that is gone. But 
 here is the fairyland of the Renaissance. And thus 
 Matteo Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, goes on, adding 
 adventure to adventure, stanza to stanza, in his castle 
 villa, or his palace at Ferrara. But suddenly he stops 
 and his bright fiddle and lute music jars and ends : 
 " While I am singing, O Redeeming God, I see all Italy 
 set on fire by these Gauls, coming to ravage I know 
 not what fresh place." 
 
 And thus, with the earlier and more hopeful Re- 
 naissance of the fifteenth century, Matteo Boiardo 
 broke off with his "Orlando Innamorato." The perfect 
 light-heartedness, the delight in play of a gentle, 
 serious, eminently kindly nature, which gives half the 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 325 
 
 charm to Boiardo's work, seems to have become im- 
 possible after the ruin of Italian liberty and prosperity, 
 the frightful showing up of Italy's moral and social 
 and political insignificance at the beginning of the 
 sixteenth century. Lombardy especially became a 
 permanent battle-field, and its towns mere garrison 
 places of French, German, Spanish, and Swiss bar- 
 barians, whose presence meant slaughter and pillage 
 and every foulest outrage ; and then, between the 
 horrors of the unresisted invasions and the unresisted 
 exactions, came plague and famine, and industry and 
 commerce gradually died out. A few princes, sub- 
 sidised and guarded by French or Imperialists, kept 
 up an appearance of cheerfulness, but the courts even 
 grew more gloomy as the people grew more miserable. 
 There is more joking, more resonant laughter in 
 Ariosto than in Boiardo, but there is very much less 
 serenity and cheerfulness ; ever and anon a sort of 
 bitterness, a dreary moralizing tendency, a still more 
 dreary fit of prophesying future good in which he has 
 no belief, comes over Ariosto. Berni, who rewrote the 
 " Orlando Innamorato " in choice Tuscan, and who 
 underlined every faintly marked jest of Boiardo's, with 
 evident preoccupation of the ludicrous effects of the 
 " Morgante Maggiore " — Berni even could not keep up 
 his spirits ; into the middle of Boiardo's serene fairy- 
 land adventures he inserted a description of the sack 
 of Rome which is simply harrowing. All real cheer- 
 fulness departed from the people, to be replaced only 
 
326 EUPHORION. 
 
 by pleasure in the debaucheries of the buffoonish 
 obscenity of Aretino, Bandello, and so forth, to which 
 the men of the dying Italy of the Renaissance listened 
 as the roysterers of the plague of Florence, with the 
 mortal sickness almost upon them, may have listened 
 to the filthy songs which they trolled out in their 
 drunkenness. Or at best, the poor starved, bruised, 
 battered, humiliated nation may have tried to be 
 cheerful on the principle of its harlequin playwright 
 Beolco, who, more honest than the Ariostos and 
 Bibbienas, and Aretines, came forward on his stage of 
 planks at Padua, and after describing the ruin and 
 wretchedness of the country, the sense of dreariness 
 and desolation, which made young folk careless of 
 marriage, and the very nightingales (he thought) 
 careless of song, recommended his audience, since 
 they could not even cry thoroughly and to feel any 
 the better for it, to laugh, if they still were able. 
 Boiardo was forgotten ; his spirit was unsuited to the 
 depression, gloomy brutality, gloomy sentimentality, 
 which grew every day as Italy settled down after its 
 Renaissance-Shrovetide in the cinders and fasting of 
 the long Lent of Spanish and Jesuit rule. 
 
 Still the style of Boiardo was not yet exhausted ; the 
 peculiar kind of fairy epic, the peculiar combination of 
 chivalric and classic elements of which the " Orlando 
 Innamorato " and the " Orlando Furioso," had been 
 the great examples, still fascinated poets and public. 
 The Renaissance, or what remained of it, was now no 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. ZV 
 
 longer confined to Italy ; it had spread, paler, more 
 diluted, shallower, over the rest of Europe. To follow 
 the filiation of schools, to understand the intellectual 
 relationships of individuals, of the latter half of the 
 sixteenth century, it becomes necessary to move from 
 one country to another. And thus the two brother 
 poets of the family of Boiardo, its two last and much 
 saddened representatives, came to write in very 
 different languages and under very different circum- 
 stances. These two are Tasso and our own Spenser. 
 They are both poets of the school of the " Orlando 
 Innamorato," both poets of a reaction, of a kind of 
 purified Renaissance : the one of the late Italian 
 Renaissance emasculated by the Council of Trent and 
 by Spain ; the other of the English Renaissance, in 
 its youth truly, but, in the individual case of Spenser, 
 timidly drawn aside from the excesses of buoyant life 
 around. In the days of the semi-atheist dramatists, 
 all flesh and blood and democracy, Spenser steeps 
 himself in Christianity and chivalry, even as Tasso 
 does, following on the fleshly levity and scepticism of 
 Boiardo, Berni, and Ariosto. There is in both poets 
 a paleness, a certain diaphanous weakness, an absence 
 of strong tint or fibre or perfume ; in Tasso the pallor 
 of autumn, in Spenser the paleness of spring : autumn 
 left sad and leafless by the too voluptuous heat and 
 fruitfulness of summer ; spring still pale and pinched 
 by winter, with timid nipped grass and unripe stiff 
 buds and catkins, which never suggest the tangle of 
 
328 EUPHORION. 
 
 bush, grasses, and magnificent flowers and fruits, sweet, 
 splendid, or poisonous, which the sun will make out 
 of them. The Renaissance, in the past for Tasso, in 
 the proximate and very visible future for Spenser, has 
 frightened both ; the cynicism and bestiality of men 
 like Machiavelli and Aretino ; the godless, muscular 
 lustiness of Marlowe, Greene, and Peele, seen in a 
 glimpse by Tasso and Spenser, have given a shock to 
 their sensitive nature, have made them turn away and 
 hide themselves from a second sight of it. They both 
 take refuge in a land of fiction, of romance, from the 
 realities into which they dread to splash ; a world un- 
 substantial, diaphanous, faint-hued, almost passionless, 
 which they make out of beauty and heroism and 
 purity, which they alembicize and refine, but into 
 which there never enters any vital element, anything 
 to give it flesh and bone and pulsing life : it is a mere 
 soap bubble. And beautiful as is this world of their 
 own making, it is too negative even for them ; they 
 move in it only in imagination, calm, serene, vacant, 
 almost sad. There is in it, and in themselves, a some- 
 thing wanting ; and the remembrance of that unholy 
 life of reality which jostled and splashed their delicate 
 souls, comes back and haunts them with its evil 
 thought. There is no laugh — what is worse, no smile 
 — in these men. Incipient puritanism, not yet the 
 terrible brawny reality of Bunyan, but a vague, grey 
 spectre, haunts Spenser ; and the puritanism of Don 
 Quixote, the vague, melancholy, fantastic reverting 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 329 
 
 from the evil world of to-day to an impossible world 
 of chivalry, is troubling the sight of Tasso. He 
 cannot go crazy like Don Quixote, and instead he 
 grows melancholy ; he cannot believe in his own 
 ideals ; he cannot give them life, any more than can 
 Spenser give life to his allegoric knights and ladies, 
 because the life would have to be fetched by Tasso 
 out of the flesh of Ariosto, and by Spenser out of the 
 blood of Marlowe ; and both Tasso and Spenser 
 shrink at the thought of what might with it be in- 
 oculated or transfused ; and they rest satisfied with 
 phantoms. The phantoms of Spenser are more 
 shadowy, much more utterly devoid of human cha- 
 racter ; they are almost metaphysical abstractions, 
 and they do not therefore sadden us : they are too 
 unlike living things to seem very lifeless. But the 
 phantoms of Tasso, he would fain make realities ; he 
 works at every detail of character, history, or geo- 
 graphy, which may make his people real ; they are 
 not, as with Spenser, elves and wizards flitting about 
 in a nameless fairyland, characterless and passionless ; 
 they are historical creatures, captains and soldiers in 
 a country mapped out by the geographer ; but they 
 are phantoms all the more melancholy, these beautiful 
 and heroic Clorindas and Erminias and Tancreds 
 and Godfreys — why .■' because the real world around 
 Tasso is peopled with Brachianos and Corombonas, 
 and Annabellas and Giovannis, creatures for Webster 
 and Ford ; and because this world of chivalry is, in 
 
330 EUPHORION. 
 
 his Italy, as false as the world of Amadis and 
 Esplandian in Toboso and Barcelona for poor Don 
 Quixote. Melancholy therefore, and dreamy, both 
 Tasso and Spenser, with nothing they can fully love 
 in reality, because they see it tainted with reality and 
 evil ; without the cheerful falling back upon everyday 
 life of Ariosto and Shakespeare \ and with a strange 
 fancy for fairyland, for the distant, for the Happy 
 Islands, the St. Brandan's Isles, the country of the 
 fountain of youth, the country of which vague reports 
 have come back with the ships of Raleigh and Ponce 
 de Leon. Tasso and Spenser are happiest, in their 
 calm, melancholy way, when they can let themselves 
 go in day-dreams, and talk of things in which they do 
 not believe, of diamond shields which stun monsters, 
 of ointments which cure all ills of body and of soul, 
 of enchanted groves whose "trees sound with voices 
 and lutes, of boats in which, steered by fairies, we can 
 glide across the scarcely rippled summer sea, and, 
 watching the ruins of the past, time and reality left 
 behind, set sail for some strange land of bliss. And 
 there is in the very sensuousness and love of beauty 
 of these men a vagueness and melancholy, a constant 
 sense of the fleeting and of the eternal, as in that 
 passage, translated from the languidly sweet Italian 
 perfection of Tasso into the timid, almost scentless, 
 English of Spenser — " Cosi trapassa al trapassar d'un 
 giorno." 
 
 So passeth, in the passing of a day, 
 
 Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 331 
 
 Ne more doth florish.after first decay, 
 
 That earst was sought to deck both bed and bowre 
 
 Of many a lady, and many a Paramowre. 
 
 Gather therefore the Rose whilest yet is prime. 
 
 For soone comes age that will her pride deflowre ; 
 
 Gather the Rose of love whilest yet is time, 
 
 Whilest loving thou mayest loved be withe equall crime. 
 
 A sense of evanescence, of dreamlikeness, quite dif- 
 ferent from the thoughtless enjoyment of Boiardo, 
 from the bold and manly facing of the future, the 
 solemn, strong sense of life and death as of waking 
 realities, of the Elizabethan dramatists, even of weak- 
 lings like Massinger and Beaumont. In Tasso and in 
 Spenser there is no such joyousness, no such solemnity ; 
 only a dreamy watching, a regret which is scarcely a 
 regret, at the evanescence of pale beauty and pale life, 
 of joys feebly felt and evils meekly borne. 
 
 With Tasso and Spenser comes to a close the school 
 of Boiardo, the small number of real artists who finally 
 gave an enduring and beautiful shape to that strangely 
 mixed and altered material of romantic epic left behind 
 by the Middle Ages ; comes to an end at least till 
 our own day of appreciative and deliberate imitation 
 and selection and rearrangement of the artistic forms 
 of the past. Until the revival (after much study and 
 criticism) by our own poets of Arthur and Gudrun and 
 the Fortunate Isles, the world had had enough of 
 mediaeval romance. Chivalry had avowedly ended in 
 chamberlainry ; the devotion to women in the official 
 routine of the cicisbeo ; the last romance to which the 
 
332 EUPHORION. 
 
 late Renaissance had clung, which made it sympathize 
 with Huon, Ogier, Orlando, and Rinaldo, which had 
 made it take delight still in the fairyland of Oberon, 
 of Fallerina, of Alcina, of Armida, of Acrasia, the 
 romance of the new world, had also turned into prose, 
 prose of blood-stained filth. The humanistic and 
 rationalistic men of the Renaissance had doubtless 
 early begun to turn up their noses in dainty dilettantism 
 or scientific contempt, at what were later to be called 
 by Montaigne, " Ces Lancelots du Lac, ces Amadis, 
 ces Huons et tels fatras di livres a quoy I'enfance 
 s'amuse ; " and by Ben Jonson : 
 
 Public nothings, 
 Abortives of the fabulous dark cloister, 
 Sent out to poison courts, and infect manners — 
 
 the public at large was more constant, and still retained 
 a love for mediaeval romance. But more than hu- 
 manities, more than scientific scepticism and religious 
 puritanism, did the slow dispelling of the illusion of 
 Eldorado and the Fortunate Isles. Mankind set sail 
 for America in brilliant and knightly gear, believing 
 in fountains of youth and St. Brandan's Isles, with 
 Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser still in its pockets. It 
 returns from America either as the tattered fever- 
 stricken ruffian, or as the vulgar, fat upstart of Spanish 
 comedy, returns without honour or shame, holding 
 money (and next to money, negroes) of greater account 
 than any insignia of paladinship or the Round Table ; 
 it is brutal, vulgar, cynical ; at best very sad, and it 
 
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO. 333 
 
 gets written for its delectation the comic- tragic novels 
 of rapscallions, panders, prostitutes, and card-sharpers, 
 which, from " Lazarillo de Tormes " to " Gil Bias," 
 and from " Gil Bias " to " Tom Jones," finally replace 
 the romances of the Launcelots, Galahads, Rinaldos, 
 and Orlandos. 
 
 Thus did the mediaeval romantic-epic stuffs suffer 
 alteration, adulteration, and loss of character, through- 
 out the long period of the Middle Ages, without ever 
 receiving an artistic shape, such as should make all 
 men preserve and cherish them for the only thing 
 which makes men preserve and cherish such things — 
 that never to be wasted quality, beauty. The Middle 
 Ages were powerless to endow therewith their own 
 subjects ; so the subjects had to wait, altering more 
 and more with every passing day, till the coming of 
 the Renaissance. And by that time these subjects 
 had ceased to have any serious meaning whatever; 
 the Roland of the song of Roncevaux had become the 
 crazy Orlando of Ariosto ; the Renaud of the " Quatre 
 Fils Aymon," had become the Rinaldo, thrashed 
 with sheaves of lilies by Cupid, of Matteo Boiardo. 
 The Renaissance took up the old epic-romantic 
 materials and made out of them works of art ; but 
 works of art which, as I said before, were playthings. 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 
 
 On laying down the "Vita Nuova" our soul is at first 
 filled and resounding with the love of Beatrice. 
 Whatever habits or capacities of noble loving may 
 lurk within ourselves, have been awakened by the 
 solemn music of this book, and have sung in unison 
 with Dante's love till we have ceased to hear the voice 
 of his passion and have heard only the voice of our 
 own. When the excitement has diminished, when 
 we have grown able to separate from our own feelings 
 the feelings of the man dead these five centuries and 
 a half, and to realize the strangeness, the obsoleteness 
 of this love which for a moment had seemed our love ; 
 then a new phase of impressions has set in, and the 
 " Vita Nuova " inspires us with mere passionate awe : 
 awe before this passion which we feel to be no longer 
 our own, but far above and distant from us, as in some 
 rarer stratum of atmosphere ; awe before this woman 
 who creates it, or rather who is its creation. Even as 
 23 
 
338 EUPHORION. 
 
 Dante fancied that the people of Florence did when 
 the bodily presence of this lady came across their 
 path, so do we cast down our glance as the image of 
 Beatrice passes across our mind. Nay, the glory of 
 her, felt so really while reading the few, meagre words 
 in the book, is stored away in our heart, and clothes 
 with a faint aureole the lady — if ever in our life we 
 chance to meet her — in whom, though Dante tells us 
 nothing of stature, features, eyes or hair, we seem to 
 recognize a likeness to her on whose passage " ogni 
 lingua divien tremando muta, e gli occhi non ardiscon 
 di guardare." Passion like this, to paraphrase a line 
 of Rossetti's, is genius ; and it arouses in such as look 
 upon it the peculiar sense of wonder and love, of awe- 
 stricken raising up of him who contemplates, which 
 accompanies the contemplation of genius. 
 
 But it may be that one day we feel, instead of this, 
 wonder indeed, but wonder mingled with doubt. 
 This ideal love, which craves for no union with its 
 object ; which seeks merely to see, nay, which is satis- 
 fied with mere thinking on the beloved one, will strike 
 us with the cold and barren glitter of the miraculous. 
 This Beatrice, as we gaze on her, will prove to be no 
 reality of flesh and blood like ourselves ; she is a form 
 modelled in the semblance of that real, living woman 
 who died six centuries ago, but the substance of which 
 is the white fire of Dante's love. And the thought 
 will arise that this purely intellectual love of a scarce- 
 noticed youth for a scarce-known woman is a thing 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 339 
 
 which does not belong to Hfe, neither sweetening nor 
 ennobling any of its real relations ; that it is, in its 
 dazzling purity and whiteness, in fact a mere strange 
 and sterile death light, such as could not and should 
 not, in this world of ours, exist twice over. And, lest we 
 should ever be tempted to think of this ideal love for 
 Beatrice as of a wonderful and beautiful, but scarcely 
 natural or useful phenomenon, I would wish to study 
 the story of its origin and its influence. I would wish 
 to show that had it not burned thus strangely con- 
 centrated and pure, the poets of succeeding ages could 
 not have taken from that white flame of love which 
 Dante set alight upon the grave of Beatrice, the spark 
 of ideal passion which has, in the noblest of our 
 literature, made the desire of man for woman and of 
 woman for man burn clear towards heaven, leaving 
 behind the noisome ashes and soul-enervating vapours 
 of earthly lust , 
 
 I. 
 
 The centuries have made us ; forcing us into new 
 practices, teaching us new habits, creating for us new 
 capacities and wants ; adding, ever and anon, to the 
 soul organism of mankind features which at first were 
 but accidental peculiarities, which became little by 
 little qualities deliberately sought for and at length 
 inborn and hereditary characteristics. And thus, in 
 what we call the Middle Ages, there was invented by 
 the stress of circumstances, elaborated by half-con- 
 
340 EUPHORION. 
 
 scious effort and bequeathed as an unalienable habit, 
 a new manner of loving. 
 
 The women of classical Antiquity appear to us in 
 poetry and imaginative literature as one of two things : 
 the wife or the mistress. The wife, Penelope, Andro- 
 mache, Alkestis, nay, even the charming young bride 
 in Xenophon's " QEconomics," is, while excluded from 
 many concerns, distinctly reverenced and loved in her 
 own household capacity ; but the reverence is of the 
 sort which the man feels for his parents and his house- 
 hold gods, and the affection is calm and gently 
 rebuking like that for his children. The mistress, on 
 the other hand, is the object of passion which is often 
 very vehement, but which is always either simply 
 fleshly or merely fancifully aesthetic or both, and which 
 entirely precludes any save a degrading influence upon 
 the sensual and suspicious lover. Even Tibullus, in 
 love matters one of the most modern among the 
 ancients, and capable of painting many charming and 
 delicate little domestic idyls even in connection with 
 a mere bought mistress, is perpetually accusing his 
 Delia of selling herself to a higher bidder, and sighing 
 at the high probability of her abandoning him for the 
 Illyrian praetor or some other rich amateur of pretty 
 women. The barbarous North — whose songs have 
 come down to us either, like the Volsunga Saga 
 translated by Mr. Morris, in an original pagan version, 
 or else, as the Nibelungenlied, recast during the 
 early Middle Ages — the North tells us nothing of the 
 
MEDIMVAL LOVE. 341 
 
 venal paramour, but knows nothing also beyond the 
 wedded wife; more independent and mighty perhaps 
 than her counterpart of classical Antiquity, but 
 although often bought, like Brynhilt or Gudrun, at 
 the expense of tremendous adventures, cherished 
 scarcely more passionately than the wives of Odysseus 
 and Hector. Thus, before the Middle Ages, there 
 existed as a rule only a holy, but indifferent and 
 utterly unlyrical, love for the women, the equals of 
 their husbands, wooed usually of the family and 
 solemnly given in marriage without much consultation 
 of their wishes ; and a highly passionate and singing, 
 but completely profligate and debasing, desire for 
 mercenary though cultivated creatures like the Delias 
 and Cynthias of Tibullus and Propertius, or highborn 
 women, descended, like Catullus' Lesbia, in brazen dis- 
 honour to their level, women towards whom there could 
 not possibly exist on the part of their lovers any sense 
 of equality, much less of inferiority. To these two 
 kinds of love, chaste but cold, and passionate but 
 unchaste, the Middle Ages added, or rather opposed, 
 a new manner of loving, which, although a mere 
 passing phenomenon, has left the clearest traces 
 throughout our whole mode of feeling and writing. 
 
 To describe mediaeval love is a difficult matter, and 
 to describe it except in negations is next to impossi- 
 bility. I conceive it to consist in a certain sentimental, 
 romantic, idealistic attitude towards women, not by 
 any means incompatible however with the grossest 
 
342 EUPHORION. 
 
 animalism ; an attitude presupposing a complete 
 moral, sesthetical, and social superiority on the part of 
 the whole sex, inspiring the very highest respect and 
 admiration independently of the individual's qualities ; 
 and reaching the point of actual worship, varying 
 from the adoration of a queen by a courtier to the 
 adoration of a shrine by a pilgrim, in the case of the 
 one particular lady who happens to be the beloved ; 
 an attitude in the relations of the sexes which results 
 in love becoming an indispensable part of a noble life, 
 and the devoted attachment to one individual woman 
 a necessary requisite of a gentlemanly training. 
 
 Medieval love is not merely a passion, a desire, an 
 affection, a habit ; it is a perfect occupation. It 
 absorbs, or is supposed to abso rb, the individual ; it 
 permeates his life like a religion. It is not one of the 
 interests of life, or, rather, one of life's phases ; it is 
 the whole of life, all other interests and actions either 
 sinking into an unsingable region below it, or merely 
 embroidering a variegated pattern upon its golden 
 background. Mediaeval love, therefore, never obtains 
 its object, however much it may obtain the woman ; 
 for the object of mediaeval love, as of mediaeval reli- 
 gious mysticism, is not one particular act or series of 
 acts, but is its own exercise, of which the various inci- 
 dents of the drama between man and woman are 
 merely so many results. It has not its definite stages, 
 like the love of the men of classical Antiquity or the 
 heroic time of the North : its stages of seeking, obtain- 
 
MEDIAEVAL LOVE. 343 
 
 ing, cherishing, guarding ; it is ahvays at the same 
 point, always in the same condition of half-religious, 
 half-courtier-like adoration, whether it be triumphantly 
 successful or sighingly despairing. The man and 
 the woman — or rather, I should say, the knight and 
 the lady, for medieval love is an aristocratic pri- 
 vilege, and the love of lower folk is not a theme for 
 song — the knight and the lady, therefore, seem 
 always, however knit together by habit, nay, by inex- 
 tricable meshes of guilt, somehow at the same distance 
 from one another. Once they have seen and loved 
 each other, their passion burns on always evenly, 
 burns on (at least theoretically) to all eternity. It 
 seems almost as if the woman were a mere shrine, a 
 mysterious receptacle of the ineffable, a grail cup, a 
 consecrated wafer, but not the ineffable itself. For 
 there is always in mediaeval love, however fleshly 
 the incidents which it produces, a certain Platonic 
 element ; that is to say, a craving for, a pursuit of, 
 something which is an abstraction ; an abstraction 
 impossible to define in its constant shifting and shim- 
 mering, and which seems at one moment a social 
 standard, a religious ideal, or both, and which merges 
 for ever in the dazzling, vague sheen of the Eternal 
 Feminine. Hence, one of the most distinctive features 
 of medieval love, an extraordinary sameness of into- 
 nation, making it difficult to distinguish between the 
 bond fide passion for which a man risks life and honour, 
 and the mere conventional gallantry of the knight 
 
344 EUPHORION. 
 
 who sticks a lady's glove on his helmet as a compli- 
 ment to her rank ; nay, between the impure adoration 
 of an adulterous lamia like Yseult, and the mystical 
 adoration of a glorified Mother of God ; for both are 
 women, both are ladies, and therefore the greatest 
 poet of the early Middle Ages, Gottfried von Strass- 
 burg, sings them both with the same religious respect, 
 and the same hysterical rapture. This mediaeval love 
 is furthermore a deliberately expected, sought-for, and 
 received necessity in a man's life ; it is not an acci- 
 dent, much less an incidental occurrence to be lightly 
 taken or possibly avoided : it is absolutely indispen- 
 sable to man's social training, to his moral and 
 ^sthetical self-improvement; it is part and parcel of 
 manhood and knighthood. Hence, where it does not 
 arise of itself (and where a man is full of the notion of 
 such love, it is rare that it does not come but too 
 soon) it has to be sought for. Ulrich von Liechten- 
 stein, in his curious autobiography written late in the 
 twelfth century, relates how ever since his childhood 
 he had been aware of the necessity of the loyal love 
 service of a lady for the accomplishment of knightly 
 duties ; and how, as soon as he was old enough to love, 
 he looked around him for a lady whom he might 
 serve ; a proceeding renewed in more prosaic days 
 and with a curious pedantic smack, by Lorenzo dei 
 Medici ; and then again, perhaps for the last time, by 
 the Knight of La Mancha, in that memorable discus- 
 sion which ended in the enthronement as his heart's 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 345 
 
 queen of the unrivalled Dulcinea of Toboso. Frowen- 
 dienst, " lady's service," is the name given by Ulrich 
 von Liechtenstein, a mediaeval Quixote, outshining by 
 far the mad Proven5alsRudel and Vidal,to the memoirs 
 very delightfully done into modern German by Lud- 
 wig Tieck ; and " lady's service " is the highest occupa- 
 tion of knightly leisure, the subject of the immense 
 bulk of mediaeval poetry. " Lady's service " in deeds of 
 arms and song, in constant praise and defence of the 
 beloved, in heroic enterprise and madcap mummery, 
 in submission and terror to the wondrous creature 
 whom the humble servant, the lover, never calls by 
 her sacred name, speaking of her in words unknown 
 to Antiquity, dompna, dame, frowe, madonna — words 
 of which the original sense has almost been forgotten, 
 although there cleave to them even now ideas higher 
 than those associated with thepuella of the ancients, 
 the wib of the heroic days — lady, mistress — the titles 
 of the Mother of God, who is, after all, only the mysti- 
 cal Soul's Paramour of the mediaeval world. " Lady's 
 service " — the almost technical word, expressing the 
 position, half-serf-like, half-religious, the bonds of 
 complete humility and never-ending faithfulness, the 
 hopes of reward, the patience under displeasure, the 
 pride in the livery of servitude, the utter absorption of 
 the life of one individual in the life of another ; which 
 constitute in Provence, in France, in Germany, in 
 England, in Italy, in the fabulous kingdoms of 
 Arthur and Charlemagne, the strange new thing 
 which I have named Mediaeval Love. 
 
346 EUPHORION. 
 
 Has such a thing really existed ? Are not these 
 mediaeval poets leagued together in a huge conspiracy 
 to deceive us ? Is it possible that strong men have 
 wept and fainted at a mere woman's name, like the 
 Count of Nevers in " Flamenca," or that their mind 
 has swooned away in months of reverie like that of 
 Parzifal in Eschenbach's poem ; that worldly wise and 
 witty men have shipped off and died on sea for love 
 of an unseen woman like Jaufre Rudel ; or dressed in 
 wolfs hide and lurked and fled before the huntsmen 
 like Peire Vidal ; or mangled their face and cut off 
 their finger, and, clothing themselves in rags more 
 frightful than Nessus' robe, mixed in the untouchable 
 band of lepers like Ulrich von Liechtenstein ? Is it 
 possible to believe that the insane enterprises of the 
 Amadises, Lisvarts and Felixmartes of late mediaeval 
 romance, that the behaviour of Don Quixote in the 
 Sierra Morena, ever had any serious models in reality ? 
 Nay, more difficult still to believe — because the whole 
 madness of individuals is more credible than the half- 
 madness of the whole world — is it possible to believe 
 that, as the poems of innumerable trouveres and 
 troubadours, minnesingers and Italian poets, as the 
 legion of mediaeval romances of the cycles of Charle- 
 magne, Arthur, and Amadis would have it, that during 
 so long a period of time society could have been 
 enthralled by this hysterical, visionary, artificial, in- 
 credible religion of mediaeval love ? It is at once too 
 grotesque and too beautiful, too high and too low, to 
 
MEDIMVAL LOVE. 347 
 
 be credible ; and our first impulse, on closing the 
 catechisms and breviaries, the legendaries and hymn- 
 books of this strange new creed, is to protest that the 
 love poems must be allegories, the love romances 
 solar myths, the Courts of Love historical bungles; 
 that all this mediaeval world of love is a figment, a 
 misinterpretation, a falsehood. 
 
 But if we seek more than a mere casual impression ; 
 if, instead of feeling sceptical over one or two frag- 
 ments of evidence, we attempt to collect the largest 
 possible number of facts together ; if we read not one 
 mediaeval love story, but twenty — not half a dozen 
 mediaeval love poems, but several scores ; if we 
 really investigate into the origin of the apparent myth, 
 the case speedily alters. Little by little this which had 
 been inconceivable becomes not merely intelligible^ 
 but inevitable ; the myth becomes an historical phe- 
 nomenon of the most obvious and necessary sort. 
 Mediaeval love, which had seemed to us a poetic fiction, 
 is turned into a reality ; and a reality, alas, which is 
 prosaic. Let us look at it. 
 
 Mediaeval love is first revealed in the sudden and 
 almost simultaneous burst of song which, like the 
 twitter and trill so dear to trouv^res, troubadours, and 
 minnesingers, fills the woods that yesterday were 
 silent and dead, and greeted the earliest sunshine, 
 the earliest faint green after the long winter numbness 
 of the dark ages, after the boisterous gales of the 
 earliest Crusade. The French and Provencals sang 
 
348 EUPHORION. 
 
 first, the Germans later, the Sicilians last ; but al- 
 though we may say after deliberate analysis, such 
 or such a form, or such or such a story, was known 
 in this country before it appeared in that one, all 
 imitation or suggestion was so rapid that with regard 
 to the French, the Provengals, and the Germans at 
 least, the impression is simultaneous ; only the Sicilians 
 beginning distinctly later, forerunners of the new love 
 lyric, wholly different from that of trouveres, trouba- 
 dours, and minnesingers, of the Italians of the latter 
 thirteenth century. And this simultaneous revelation 
 of mediaeval love takes place in the last quarter 
 of the twelfth century, when Northern France had 
 already consolidated into a powerful monarchy, and 
 Paris, after the teachings of Abelard, was recognized 
 as the intellectual metropolis of Europe ; when south 
 of the Loire the brilliant Angevine kings held the 
 overlordship of the cultured Raymonds of Toulouse 
 and of the reviving Latin municipalities of Provence ; 
 when Germany was welded as a compact feudal mass 
 by the most powerful of the Stauffens ; and the papacy 
 had been built up by Gregory and Alexander into 
 a political wall against which Frederick and Henry 
 vainly battered ; when the Italian commonwealths 
 grew slowly but surely, as yet still far from guessing 
 that the day would come when their democracy should 
 produce a new civilization to supersede this trium- 
 phant mediaeval civilization of the early Capetiens, the 
 Angevines, and the Hohenstauffens. Europe was 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 349 
 
 setting forth once more for the East ; but no longer 
 as the ignorant and enthusiastic hordes of Peter the 
 Hermit : Asia was the great field for adventure, the 
 great teacher of new luxuries, at once the Eldorado 
 and the grand tour of all the brilliant and inquisitive 
 and unscrupulous chivalry of the day. And, while 
 into the West were insidiously entering habits and 
 modes of thought of the East ; throughout Germany 
 and Provence, and throughout the still obscure free 
 burghs of Italy, was spreading the first indication of 
 that emotional mysticism which, twenty or thirty 
 years later, was to burst out in the frenzy of spiritual 
 love of St. Francis and his followers. The moment 
 is one of the most remarkable in all history : the 
 premature promise in the twelfth century of that 
 intellectual revival which was delayed throughout 
 Northern Europe until the sixteenth. It is the mo- 
 ment when society settled down, after the anarchy 
 of eight hundred years, on its feudal basis ; a basis 
 fallaciously solid, and in whose presence no one might 
 guess that the true and definitive Renaissance would 
 arise out of the democratic civilization of Italy. 
 
 Such is the moment when we first hear the almost 
 universal song of mediseval love. This song comes 
 from the triumphantly reorganized portion of society, 
 not from the part which is slowly working its way to 
 reorganization ; not from the timidly encroaching 
 burghers, but from the nobles. The reign of town 
 poetry, of fabliaux and meistersang, comes later ; the 
 
3SO EUPHORION. 
 
 poets of the early Middle Ages, trouv^res, troubadours, 
 and minnesingers are, with barely one or two excep- 
 tions, all knights. And their song comes from the 
 castle. Now, in order to understand mediaeval love, 
 we must reflect for a moment upon this feudal castle, 
 and upon the kind of life which the love poets of the 
 late twelfth and early thirteenth century — whether 
 lords like Bertram de Born, and Guillaume de Poitiers, 
 among the troubadours ; the Vidame de Chartres, Meu- 
 risses de Craon, and the Duke of Brabant among the 
 trouveres of Northern France ; like Ulrich von Liech- 
 tenstein among the minnesingers ; or retainers and 
 hangers-on like Bernard de Ventadour and Armand 
 de Mareulh, like Chrestiens de Troyes, Gaisses Brulez, 
 or Quienes de Bdthune, like Walther, Wolfram, and 
 Tannhauser — great or small, good or bad, saw before 
 them and mixed with in that castle. The castle of a 
 great feudatory of the early Middle Ages, whether 
 north or south of the Loire, in Austria or in Fran- 
 conia, is like a miniature copy of some garrison town 
 in barbarous countries. There is an enormous nu- 
 merical preponderance of men over women ; for only 
 the chiefs in command, the overlord, and perhaps one or 
 two of his principal kinsmen or adjutants, are per- 
 mitted the luxury of a wife ; the rest of the gentlemen 
 are subalterns, younger sons without means, youths 
 sent to learn their military duty and the ways 
 of the world : a whole pack of men without wives, 
 without homes, and usually without fortune. High 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 351 
 
 above all this deferential male crowd, moves the lady 
 of the castle : highborn, proud, having brought her 
 husband a dower of fiefs often equal to his own, and 
 of vassals devoted to her race. About her she has 
 no equals ; her daughters, scarcely out of the nurse's 
 hands, are given away in marriage ; and her com- 
 panions, if companions they may be called, are the 
 waiting ladies, poor gentlewomen situated between 
 the maid of honour and the ladies' maid, like that 
 Brangwaine whom Yseult sacrifices to her intrigue with 
 Tristram, or those damsels whom Flamenca gives 
 over to the squires of her lover Guillems ; at best, 
 the wife of one of her husband's subalterns, or some 
 sister or aunt or widow kept by charity. Round this 
 lady — the stately, proud lady perpetually described 
 by medieval poets — flutters the swarm of young men, 
 all day long, in her path : serving her at meals, 
 guarding her apartments, nay, as pages, admitted 
 even into her most secret chamber ; meeting her for 
 ever in the narrowness of that castle life, where every 
 unnecessary woman is a burden usurping the place 
 of a soldier, and, if possible, replaced by a man. 
 Servants, lacqueys, and enjoying the privileges of 
 ubiquity of lacqueys, yet, at the same time, men of 
 good birth and high breeding, good at the sword and 
 at the lute ; bound to amuse this highborn woman, 
 fading away in the monotony of feudal life, with 
 few books to read or unable to read them, and far 
 above all the household concerns which devolve on 
 
35 2 EUPHORION. 
 
 the butler, the cellarer, the steward, the gentleman 
 honourably employed as a servant. To them, to these 
 young men, with few or no young women of their own 
 age with whom to associate, and absolutely no un- 
 married girls who could be a desirable match, the lady 
 of the castle speedily becomes a goddess, the impersona- 
 tion at once of that feudal superiority before which they 
 bow, of that social perfection which they are com- 
 manded to seek, and of that womankind of which the 
 castk affords so few examples. To please her, this lazy, 
 bored, highbred woman, with all the squeamishness 
 and caprice of high birth and laziness about her, 
 becomes their ideal ; to be favourably noticed, their 
 highest glory ; to be loved, these wretched mortals, 
 by this divinity — that thought must often pass 
 through their brain and terrify them with its delicious 
 audacity ; oh no, such a thing is not possible. But it 
 is. The lady at first, perhaps most often, singles out 
 as a pastime some young knight, some squire, some 
 page ; and, in a half-queenly, half-motherly way, 
 corrects, rebukes his deficiencies, undertakes to teach 
 him his duty as a servant. The romance of the 
 " Petit Jehan de Saintr^," written in the fifteenth 
 century, but telling, with a delicacy of cynicism worthy 
 of Balzac, what must have been the old, old story of 
 the whole feudal Middle Ages, shows the manner in 
 which, while feeling that he is being trained to knightly 
 courtesy and honour, the young man in the service of 
 a great feudal lady is gradually taught dissimulation, 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 353. 
 
 lying, intrigue ; is initiated by the woman who looms 
 above him like a saint into all the foulness of adultery. 
 Adultery ; a very ugly word, which must strike 
 almost like a handful of mud in the face whosoever 
 has approached this subject of mediseval love in 
 admiration of its strange delicacy and enthusiasm. 
 Yet it is a word which must be spoken, for in it is 
 the explanation of the whole origin and character of 
 this passion which burst into song in the early Middle 
 Ages. This almost religious love, this love which 
 conceives no higher honour than the service of the 
 beloved, no higher virtue than eternal fidelity — this 
 love is the love for another man's wife. Between un- 
 married young men and young women, kept carefully 
 apart by the system which gives away a girl without 
 her consent and only to a rich suitor, there is no 
 possibility of love in these early feudal courts ; the 
 amours, however licentious, between kings' daughters 
 and brave knights, of the Carolingian tales, belong to 
 a different rank of society, to the prose romances made 
 up in the fourteenth century for the burgesses of 
 cities ; the intrigues, ending in marriage, of the princes 
 and princesses of the cycle of Amadis, belong to a 
 different period, to the fifteenth century, and to courts 
 where feudal society scarcely exists ; the squires, the 
 young knights who hang about a great baronial estab- 
 lishment of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, have 
 still to make their fortune, and do not dream of mar- 
 riage. The husband, on the other hand, the great lord 
 24 
 
354 EUPHORION. 
 
 or successful knightly adventurer, married late in life, 
 and married from the necessity, for ever pressing upon 
 the feudal proprietor, of adding on new fiefs and new 
 immunities, of increasing his importance and inde- 
 pendence in proportion to the hourly increasing 
 strength and claims of the overlord, the king, who 
 casts covetous eyes upon him — the husband has not 
 married for love ; he has had his love affairs with the 
 wives of other men in his day, or may still have 
 them ; this lady is a mere feudal necessity, she is 
 required to give him a dower and give him an heir, 
 that is all. If the husband does not love, how much 
 less can the wife ; married, as she is, scarce knowing 
 what marriage is, to a man much older than herself, 
 whom most probably she has never seen, to whom 
 she is a mere investment. Nay, there is not even the 
 after-marriage love of the ancients : this wife is not 
 the housekeeper, the woman who works that the man's 
 house may be rich and decorous ; not even the nurse 
 of his children, for the children are speedily given over 
 to the squires and duennas ; she is the woman of 
 another family who has come into his, the stranger 
 who must be respected (as that most typical mediaeval 
 wife, Eleanor of Guienne, was respected by her 
 husbands) on account of her fiefs, her vassals, her 
 kinsfolk ; but who cannot be loved. Can there be 
 love between man and wife ? There cannot be love 
 between man and wife. This is no answer of mine, 
 fantastically deduced from medieval poetry. It is the 
 
MEDIMVAL LOVE. 355 
 
 answer solemnly made to the solemnly asked question 
 by the Court of Love held by the Countess of Cham- 
 pagne in 1 1 74, and registered by Master Andrew the 
 King of France's chaplain : " Dicimus enim et stabilito 
 tenore firmamus amorem non posse inter duos jugales 
 suas extendere vires.'' And the reason alleged for this 
 judgment brings us back to the whole conception of 
 mediseval love as a respectful service humbly waiting 
 for a reward : " For," pursues the decision published 
 by Andr^ le Chapelain, " whereas lovers grant to each 
 other favours freely and from no legal necessity, 
 married people have the duty of obeying each other's 
 wishes and of refusing nothing to one another." " No 
 love is possible between man and wife,'' repeat the 
 Courts of Love which, consisting of all the highborn 
 ladies of the province and presided by some mighty 
 queen or princess, represent the social opinions of the 
 day. " But this lady," says a knight (Miles) before 
 the love tribunal of Queen Eleanor, '' promised to me 
 that if ever she should lose the love of her lover, she 
 would take me in his place. She has wedded the man 
 who was her lover, and I have come to claim fulfil- 
 ment of her promise." The court discusses for awhile. 
 " We cannot," answers Queen Eleanor, " go against the 
 Countess of Champagne's decision that love cannot 
 exist between man and wife. We therefore desire this 
 lady to fulfil her promise and give you her love." Again, 
 there come to the Court of Love of the Viscountess 
 of Narbonne a knight and a lady, who desire to know 
 
3S6 EUPHORION. 
 
 whether, having been once married, but since divorced, 
 a love engagement between them would be honourable. 
 The viscountess decides that " Love between those 
 who have been married together, but who have since 
 been divorced from one another, is not to be deemed 
 reprehensible ; nay, that it is to be considered as 
 honourable." And these Courts of Love,be it remarked, 
 were frequently held on occasion of the marriage of 
 great personages ; as, for instance, of that between 
 Louis VIL and Eleanor of Poitiers in 1137. The 
 poetry of the early Middle Ages follows implicitly 
 the decisions of these tribunals, which reveal a state 
 of society to which the nearest modern approach is 
 that of Italy in the eighteenth century, when, as 
 Goldoni and Parini show us, as Stendhal (whose " De 
 I'Amour " may be taken as the modern " Breviari 
 d'Amor ") expounds, there was no impropriety possible 
 as long as a lady was beloved by any one except her 
 own husband. No love, therefore, between unmarried 
 people (the cyclical romances, as before stated, and 
 the Amadises, belong to another time of social con- 
 dition, and the only real exception to my rule of which 
 I can think is the lovely French tale of " Aucassin et 
 Nicolette ") ; and no love between man and wife. But 
 love there must be ; and love there consequently is ; 
 love for the married woman from the man who is not 
 her husband. The feudal lady, married without being 
 consulted and without having had a chance of know- 
 ing what love is, yet lives to know love ; lives to be 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 357 
 
 taught it by one of these many bachelors bound to 
 flutter about her in military service or social duty ; 
 lives to teach it herself. And she is too powerful in 
 her fiefs and kinsmen, too powerful in the public 
 opinion which approves and supports her, to be 
 hampered by her husband. The husband, indeed, 
 has grown up in the same habits, has known, before 
 marrying, the customs sanctioned by the Courts of 
 Love ; he has been the knight of some other man's 
 wife in his day, what right has he to object ? As in 
 the days of Italian cecisbei, the early mediaeval lover 
 might say with Goldoni's Don Alfonso or Don 
 Roberto, "I serve your wife — such or such another 
 serves mine, what harm can there be in it .' " (" lo 
 servo vostra moglie, Don Eugenio favorisce la mia ; che 
 male c' ^?" I am quoting from memory.) And as a 
 fact, we hear little of jealousy ; the amusement of En 
 Barral when Peire Vidal came in and kissed his sleep- 
 ing wife ; and the indignation of all Provence for the 
 murder of Guillems de Cabestanh (buried in the same 
 tomb with the lady who had been made to eat of his 
 heart) — showing from opposite sides how the society 
 accustomed to Courts of Love looked upon the duties 
 of husbands. 
 
 Such was the social life in those feudal courts 
 whence first arises the song of mediaeval love, and 
 that this is the case is proved by the whole huge 
 body of early mediaeval poetry. We must not judge, 
 as I have said, either by poems of much earlier date, 
 
35S EUPHORION. 
 
 like the Nibelungen and the Carolingian chansons de 
 g^este, which merely received a new form in the early 
 Middle Ages ; still less from the prose romances of 
 M^lusine, Milles et Amys, Palemon and Arcite, and a 
 host of others which were elaborated only later and 
 under the influence of the quite unfeudal habits of the 
 great cities ; and least of all from that strange late 
 southern cycle of the Amadises, from which, odd as it 
 seems, many of our notions of chivalric love have, 
 through our ancestors, through the satirists or burlesque 
 poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, been 
 inherited. We must look at the tales which, as we 
 are constantly being told by trouv^res, troubadours, 
 and minnesingers, were the fashionable reading of the 
 feudal classes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries : 
 the tales best known to us in the colourless respecta- 
 bility of the collection made in the reign of Edward 
 IV. by Sir Thomas Malory, and called by him the 
 " Morte d'Arthur " — of the ladies and knights of 
 Arthur's court ; of the quest of the Grail by spotless 
 knights who were bastards and fathers of bastards ; 
 of the intrigues of Tristram of Lyoness and Queen 
 Yseult ; of Launcelot and Guenevere ; the tales which 
 Francesca and Paolo read together. We must look, 
 above all, at the lyric poetry of France, Provence, 
 Germany, and Sicily in the early Middle Ages. 
 
 Vos qui trh% bien ameis i petit mentendeis 
 Por I'amor de Ihesu les pucelles ameis. 
 Nos trouvons en escris de sainte auctoriteis 
 Ke pucelle est la flor de loyaulment ameir. 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 3^9 
 
 This strange entreaty to love the maidens for the 
 sake of Christ's love, this protest of a nameless 
 northern French poet (Wackernagel, Altfranzosische 
 Lieder and Leiche IX.) against the adulterous passion 
 of his contemporaries, comes to us, pathetically 
 enough, solitary, faint, unnoticed in the vast chorus, 
 boundless like the spring song of birds or the sound 
 of the waves, of poets singing the love of other men's 
 wives. But, it maybe objected — how can we tell that 
 these love songs, so carefully avoiding all mention of 
 names, are not addressed to the desired bride, to the 
 legitimate wife of the poet ? For several reasons ; 
 and mainly, for the crushing evidence of an undefin- 
 able something which tells us that they are not. The 
 other reasons are easily stated. We know that feudal 
 habits would never have allowed to unmarried women 
 (and women were married when scarcely out of their 
 childhood) the opportunities for the relations which 
 obviously exist between the poet and his lady ; and 
 that, if by some accident a young knight might fall 
 in love with a girl, he would address not her but her 
 parents, since the Middle Ages, who were indifferent 
 to adultery, were, like the southern nations among 
 whom the married woman is not expected to be 
 virtuous, extreme sticklers for the purity of their 
 unmarried womankind. Further, we have no instance 
 of an unmarried woman being ever addressed during 
 the early Middle Ages, in those terms of social respect 
 — madame, domna, frowe, madonna — which essen- 
 
36o EUPHORION. 
 
 tially belong to the mistress of a household ; nor do 
 these stately names fit in with any theory which would 
 make us believe that the lady addressed by the poet 
 is the jealously guarded daughter of the house with 
 whom he is plotting a secret marriage, or an elope- 
 ment to end off in marriage. This is not the way 
 that Romeo speaks to Juliet, nor even that the 
 princesses in the cyclical romances and in the Ama- 
 dises are wooed by their bridegrooms. This is not 
 the language of a lover who is broaching his love, and 
 who hopes, however timidly, to consummate it before 
 all the world by marriage. It is obviously the lan- 
 guage of a man either towards a woman who is taking 
 a pleasure in keeping him dangling without favours 
 which she has implicitly or explicitly promised ; or 
 towards a woman who is momentarily withholding 
 favours which her lover has habitually enjoyed. And 
 in a large proportion of cases the poems of trouveres, 
 troubadours, and minnesingers are the expression of 
 fortunate love, the fond recollection or eager expec- 
 tation of meetings with the beloved. All this can 
 evidently not be connected with the wooing, however 
 stealthy, however Romeo-and-Juliet-like of a bride ; 
 still less can it be explained in reference to love 
 within wedlock. A man does not, however loving, 
 worship his wife as his social superior ; he does not 
 address her in titles of stiff respect ; he does not sigh 
 and weep and supplicate for love which is his due, 
 and remind his wife that she owes it him in return 
 
MEDIMVAL LOVE. 361 
 
 for loyal, humble, discreet service. Above all, a man 
 (except in some absurd comedy perhaps, where the 
 husband, in an age of cicisbeos, is in love with his own 
 wife and dares not admit it before the society which 
 holds "that there can be no love between married 
 folk " ) — a husband, I repeat, does not beg for, arrange, 
 look forward to, and recall with triumph or sadness, 
 secret meetings with his own wife. Now the secret 
 meeting is, in nearly every aristocratic poet of the 
 early poetry, the inevitable result of the humble praises 
 and humble requests for kindness ; it is, most obviously, 
 the reward for which the poet is always importun- 
 ing. Mediaeval love poetry, compared with the love 
 poetry of Antiquity and the love poetry of the revival 
 of letters, is, in its lyric form, decidedly chaste ; but 
 it is perfectly explicit ; and, for all its metaphysical 
 tendencies and its absence of clearly painted pictures, 
 the furthest possible removed from being Platonic^ 
 One of the most important, characteristic, and artis- 
 tically charming categories of mediaeval love lyrics 
 is that comprising the Provengal serena and alba, 
 with their counterparts in the langue d'oil, and the 
 so-called Wachtlieder of the minnesingers ; and 
 this category of love poetry may be defined as the 
 drama, in four acts, of illicit love. The faithful lover 
 has received from his lady an answer to his love, the 
 place and hour are appointed ; all the day of which 
 the evening is to bring him this honour, he goes heavy 
 hearted and sighing : " Day, much do you grow for my 
 
362 EUP MORION. 
 
 grief, and the evening, the evening and the long hope 
 kills me.'' Thus far the serena, the evening song, 
 of Guiraut Riquier. A lovely anonymous alba, 
 whose refrain, " Oi deus, oi deus ; de 1' alba, tan tost 
 ve ! " is familiar to every smatterer of Provencal, 
 shows us the lady and her knight in an orchard 
 beneath the hawthorn, giving and taking the last 
 kisses while the birds sing and the sky whitens with 
 dawn. " The lady is gracious and pleasant, and many 
 look upon her for her beauty, and her heart is all in 
 loving loyally ; alas, alas, the dawn ! how soon it 
 comes ! — " Oi deus, oi deus ; de 1' alba, tan tost ve 1 " 
 The real alba is the same as the German Wacht- 
 lieder, the song of the squire or friend posted at the 
 garden gate or outside the castle wall, warning the 
 lovers to separate. " Fair comrade (Bel Companho), 
 I call to you singing, ' Sleep no more, for I hear the 
 birds announcing the day in the trees, and I fear that 
 the jealous one may find you ; ' and in a moment it will 
 be day, ' Bel Companho, come to the window and look 
 at the signs in the sky ! you will know me a faithful 
 messenger ; if you do it not, it will be to your harm, 
 and in a moment it will be dawn (et ades sera 1' alba). 
 Bel Companho, since I left you I have not slept nor 
 raised myself from my knees ; for I have prayed to 
 God the Son of Saint Mary, that he should send me 
 back my faithful comrade, and in a moment it will be 
 dawn ! '" In this alba of Guiraut de Borneulh, the 
 lover comes at last to the window, and cries to his 
 
MEDIAEVAL LOVE. i^}, 
 
 watching comrade that he is too happy to care either 
 for the dawn or for the jealous one. The German 
 Wachtlieder are even more expHcit. " He must away 
 at once and without delay," sings the watchman in 
 a poem of Wolfram, the austere singer of Parz'fal 
 and the Grail Quest ; " let him go, sweet lady ; let 
 him away from thy love so that he keep his honour 
 and life. He trusted himself to me that I should 
 bring him safely hence ; it is day ..." " Sing what 
 thou wilt, watchman," answers the lady, " but leave 
 him here." In a far superior, but also far less chaste, 
 poem of Heinrich von Morungen, the lady, alone and 
 melancholy, wakes up remembering the sad white 
 light of morning, the sad cry of the watchman, which 
 separated her from her knight. Still more frankly, 
 and in a poem which is one of the few real master- 
 pieces of Minnesang, the lady in Walther von der 
 Vogelweide's " Under der linden an der Heide " 
 narrates a meeting in the wood. " What passed 
 between us shall never be known by any ! never by 
 any, save him and me — yes, and by the little nightin- 
 gale that sang Tandaradei ! The little bird will surely 
 be discreet." 
 
 The songs of light love for another's wife of trouba- 
 dour, trouvere, and minnesinger, seem to have been 
 squeezed together, so that all their sweet and acrid 
 perfume is, so to speak, sublimated, in the recently 
 discovered early Provencal narrative poem called 
 "Flamenca." Like the "Tristram" of Gottfried von 
 
364 EUPHORION. 
 
 Strassburg, like all these light medijeval love lyrics 
 of which I have been speaking, the rhymed story of 
 " Flamenca/' a pale and simple, but perfect petalled 
 daisy, has come up in a sort of moral and intellectual 
 dell in the winter of the Middle Ages — a dell such as 
 you meet in hollows of even the most wind-swept 
 southern hills, where, while all round the earth is 
 frozen and the short grass nibbled away by the frost, 
 may be found even at Christmas a bright sheen of 
 budding wheat beneath the olives on the slope, a 
 yellow haze of sun upon the grass in which the little 
 aromatic shoots of fennel and mint and marigold 
 pattern with greenness the sere brown, the frost-burnt ; 
 where the very leafless fruit trees have a spring-like rosy 
 tinge against the blue sky, and the tufted little osiers 
 flame a joyous orange against the greenness of the hill. 
 Such spots there are — and many — in the winter of 
 the Middle Ages ; though it is not in them, but where 
 the rain beats, and the snow and the wind tugs, that 
 grow, struggling with bitterness, the great things of 
 the day : the philosophy of Abelard, the love of man 
 of St. Francis, the patriotism of the Lombard com- 
 munes ; nor that lie dormant, fertilized in the cold 
 earth, the great things of art and thought, the great 
 things to come. But in them arise the delicate winter 
 flowers which we prize : tender, pale things, without 
 much life, things either come too soon or stayed too 
 late, among which is "Flamenca ; " one of those roses, 
 nipped and wrinkled, but stained a brighter red by 
 
MEDIMVAL LOVE. 365 
 
 the frost, which we pluck in December or in March ; 
 beautiful, bright, scentless roses, which, scarce in bud, 
 already fall to pieces in our hand. " Flamenca " is 
 simply the narrative of the loves of the beautiful wife 
 of the bearish and jealous Count Archambautz, and 
 of Guillems de Nevers, a brilliant young knight who 
 hears of the lady's sore captivity, is enamoured before 
 he sees her, dresses up as the priest's clerk, and 
 speaks one word with her while presenting the mass 
 book to be kissed, every holiday ; and finally deceives 
 the vigilance of the husband by means of a subter- 
 ranean corridor, which he gets built between his 
 inn and the bath-room of the lady at the famous 
 waters of Bourbon - les - Bains. In this world of 
 "Flamenca,'' which is in truth the same world as 
 that of the " Romaunt of the Rose," tjie " Morte 
 d'Arthur," and of the love poets of early France 
 and Germany, conjugal morality and responsibility 
 simply do not exist. It seems an unreal pleasure- 
 garden, with a shadowy guardian — impalpable to 
 us gross moderns — called Honour, but where, as it 
 seems, Love only reigns. Love, not the mystic and 
 melancholy god of the " Vita Nuova," but a fop- 
 pish young deity, sentimental at once and sensual, of 
 fashionable feudal life : the god of people with no 
 apparent duties towards others, unconscious of any 
 restraints save those of this vague thing called 
 honour ; whose highest mission for the knight, as put 
 in our English " Romaunt of the Rose " is to — 
 
366 EUPHORION. 
 
 Set thy might and alle thy witte 
 Wymmen and ladies for to plese, 
 And to do thyng that may hem ese ; 
 
 while, for the lady, it is expressed with perfect sim- 
 pHcity of shamelessness by Flamenca herself to her 
 damsels, teaching them that the woman must yield 
 to the pleasure of her lover. Now love, when young, 
 when, so to speak, but just born and able to feed (as 
 a newborn child on milk, without hungering for more 
 solid food) on looks and words and sighs ; love thus 
 young, is a fair-seeming godhead, and the devotion to 
 him a pretty and delicate piece of sestheticism. And 
 such it is here in "Flamenca,'' where there certainly 
 exists neither God nor Christ, both complete absentees, 
 whose priest becomes a courteous lover's valet, whose 
 church the place for amorous rendezvous, whose 
 sacrifice of mass and prayer becomes a means of 
 amorous correspondence : Cupid, in the shape of his 
 slave Guillems de Nevers — become patarin (zealot) for 
 love — peeping with shaven golden head from behind 
 the missal, touching the lady's hand and whispering 
 with the words of spiritual peace the declaration of 
 love, the appointment for meeting. God and Christ, 
 I repeat, are absentees. Where they are I know not ; 
 perhaps over the Rhine with the Lollards in their 
 weavers' dens, or over the Alps in the cell of St. 
 Francis ; not here, certainly, or if here, themselves 
 become the mere slaves of love. But this King Love, 
 as long as a mere infant, is a sweet and gracious 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 367 
 
 divinity, surrounded by somewhat of the freshness 
 and hawthorn sweetness of spring which seem to ac- 
 company his favourite Guillems. Guillems de Nevers, 
 " who could still grow," this brilliant knight and trou- 
 badour, in his white silken and crimson and purple 
 garments and soundless shoes embroidered with 
 flowers, this prince of tournaments and tensos, who 
 hearing the sorrows of the beautiful Flamenca, loves 
 her unseen, sits sighing in sight of her prison bower, 
 and faints like a hero of the Arabian Nights at her 
 name, and has visions of her as St. Francis has of 
 Christ ; this younger and brighter Sir Launcelot, is 
 an ideal little figure, whom you might mistake for 
 Love himself as described in the " Romaunt of the 
 Rose ; " Love's avatar or incarnation, on whose ap- 
 pearance the year blooms into spring, the fruit trees 
 blossom, the birds sing, the girls dance at eve round 
 the maypoles ; behind whom, while reading this poem, 
 we seem to see the corn shine green beneath the 
 olives, the white-blossomed branches slant across the 
 blue sky. For is he not the very incarnation of 
 chivalry, of beauty, and of love .? So much for this 
 King Love while but quite young. Unfortunately he 
 is speedily weaned of his baby food of mere blushing 
 glances and sighed-out names ; and then his aspect, 
 his kingdom's aspect, the aspect of his votaries, under- 
 goes a change. The profane but charming game of 
 the loving clerk and the missal is exchanged for the . 
 more coarse hide-and-seek of hidden causeways and 
 
368 EUPHORION. 
 
 tightened bolts, with jealous husbands guarding the 
 useless door ; Guillems becomes but an ordinary Don 
 Juan or Lovelace, Flamenca but a sorry, sneaking 
 adulteress, and the gracious damsels mere common 
 sluts, curtseying at the loan (during the interview of 
 nobler folk) of the gallant's squires. For the scent of 
 May, of fresh leaves and fallen blossoms, we get the 
 nauseous vapours of the bath-room ; and, alas. King 
 Love has lost his aureole and his wings and turned 
 keeper of the hot springs, sought out by the gouty 
 and lepers, of Bourbon-les-Bains ; and in closing 
 this book, so delightfully begun, we sicken at the 
 whiff of hot and fetid moral air as we should sicken 
 in passing over the outlet of the polluted hot water. 
 
 " But where is the use of telling us all this t " the 
 reader will ask ; " every one knows that illicit passion 
 existed and exists, and has its chroniclers, its singers 
 in prose and in verse. But what has all this poetry 
 of common adultery to do with a book like the ' Vita 
 Nuova,' with that strange new thing, that lifelong 
 worship of a woman, which you call mediaeval love ? " 
 This much : that out of this illicit love, and out of it, 
 gross as it looks, alone arises the possibility of the 
 " Vita Nuova ; " arises the possibility of the romantic 
 and semi-religious love of the Middle Ages. Or, 
 rather, let us say that this mere loose love of the a/das 
 and Wachtlieder and " Flamenca," is the substratum, 
 nay, is the very flesh and blood, of the spiritual passion 
 to which, in later days, we owe the book of Beatrice. 
 
MEDIAEVAL LOVE. 369 
 
 It is a harsh thing to say, but one which all sociology 
 teaches us, that as there exists no sensual relation 
 which cannot produce for its ennoblement a certain 
 amount of passion, so also does there exist no passion 
 (and Phsedrus is there to prove it) so vile and loath- 
 some as to be unable to weave about itself a glamour 
 of ideal sentiment. The poets of the Middle Ages 
 strove after the criminal possession of another man's 
 wife. This, however veiled with fine and delicate 
 poetic expressions, is the thing for which they wait 
 and sigh and implore ; this is the reward, the 
 supremely honouring and almost sanctifying reward 
 which the lady cannot refuse to the knight who has 
 faithfully and humbly served her. The whole bulk of 
 the love lyrics of the early Middle Ages are there tu 
 prove it ; and if the allusions in them are not suffi- 
 ciently clear, those who would be enlightened may 
 study the discussions of the allegorical persons even 
 in the English (and later) version of Guillaume de 
 Lorris' " Roman de la Rose ; " and turn to what, were 
 it in langue d'oc, we should call a tenso of Guillaume 
 li Viniers among Matzner's " Altfranzosische Lieder- 
 dichter." The catastrophe of Ulrich von Liechten- 
 stein's " Frowendienst,'' where the lady, the " virtuous," 
 the " pure," as he is pleased to call her, after making 
 him cut off his finger, dress in leper's clothes, chop 
 off part of his upper lip, and go through the most 
 marvellous Quixotic antics dressed in satin and pearls 
 and false hair as Queen Venus, and jousting in this 
 25 
 
370 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 costume with every knight between Venice and 
 Styria, all for her honour and glory ; pulls the gallant 
 in a basket up to her window, and then lets him drop 
 down into the moat which is no better than a sewer ; 
 this grotesque and tragically resented end of Ulrich's 
 first love service speaks volumes on the point. The 
 stories in Nostradamus' " Lives of the Troubadours," 
 the incidents in Gottfried's " Tristan und Isolde,'' nay, 
 the adventures even in our expunged English " Morte 
 d'Arthyr," relating to the birth of Sir Galahad, are 
 as explicit as anything in Brant6me or the Queen 
 of Navarre ; the most delicate love songs of Provence 
 and Germany are cobwebs spun round Decameronian 
 situations. And all this is permitted, admitted, 
 sanctioned by feudal society even as the cechbeos of 
 the noble Italian ladies were sanctioned by the society 
 of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the 
 mediaeval castle, where, as we have seen, the lady, 
 separated from her own sex, is surrounded by a swarm 
 of young men without a chance of marriage, and 
 bound to make themselves agreeable to the wife of a 
 military superior ; the woman soon ceases to be the 
 exclusive property of her husband, and the husband 
 speedily discovers that the majority, hence public 
 ridicule, are against any attempt at monopolizing her. 
 Thus adultery becomes, as we have seen, accepted as 
 an institution under the name of service ; and, like all 
 other social institutions, developes a morality of its 
 own — a morality within immorality, of faithfulness 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 371 
 
 within infidelity. The lady must be true to her 
 knight, and the knight must be true to his lady : the 
 Courts of Love solemnly banish from society any 
 woman who is known to have more than one lover. 
 Faithfulness is the first and most essential virtue of 
 mediaeval love ; a virtue unknown to the erotic poets 
 of Antiquity, and which modern times have inherited 
 from the Middle Ages as a requisite, even (as the 
 reproaches of poets of the Alfred de Musset school 
 teach us) in the most completely illicit love. Tristram 
 and Launcelot, the two paragons of knighthood, are 
 inviolably constant to their mistress : the husband 
 may and must be deceived, but not the wife who 
 helps to deceive him. Yseult of Brittany and Elaine, 
 the mother of Galahad, do not succeed in breaking 
 the vows made to Yseult the Fair and to Queen 
 Guenevere. The beautiful lady in the hawthorn 
 alba "a son cor en amar lejalmens." But this 
 loyal loving is for the knight who is warned to depart, 
 certainly not for the husband, the gilos, in whose 
 despite (" Bels dous amios, baizem nos eu e vos — Aval 
 els pratz on chantols auzellos — Tot fassam en despeit 
 del gilos ") they are meeting. The ladies of the min- 
 nesingers are " pure," " good," " faithful " (and each 
 and all are pure, good, and faithful, as long as they do 
 not resist) from the point of view of the lover, not of 
 the husband, if indeed a husband be permitted to have 
 any point of view at all. And as fidelity is the 
 essential virtue in these adulterous connections, so in- 
 
372 EUPHORION. 
 
 fidelity is the greatest crime that a woman (and even 
 a man) can commit, the greatest misfortune which fate 
 can send to an unhappy knight. That he leaves a 
 faithful mistress behind him is the one hope of the 
 knight who, taking the cross, departs to meet the 
 scimitars of Saladin's followers, the fevers, the plagues, 
 the many miserable deaths of the unknown East. 
 " If any lady be unfaithful," says Quienes de Bethune, 
 " she will have to be unfaithful with some base 
 wretch." 
 
 Et les dames ki castement vivront 
 
 Se loiaut^ font a ceus qui iront ; 
 
 Et seles font par mal conseil folaje, 
 
 A lasques gens et mauvais le feron 
 
 Car tout li bon iront en cest voiage 
 
 " I have taken the cross on account of my sins," sings 
 Albrecht von Johansdorf, one of the most earnest of 
 the minnesingers ; " now let God help, till my return, 
 the woman who has great sorrow on my account, in 
 order that I may find her possessed of her honour ; 
 let Him grant me this prayer. But if she change her 
 life {i.e., take to bad courses), then may God forbid 
 my ever returning." The lady is bound (the Courts 
 of Love decide this point of honour) to reward her 
 faithful lover. " A knight," says a lady, in an anony- 
 mous German song published by Bartsch, " has served 
 nie according to my will. Before too much time 
 elapse, I must reward him ; nay, if all the world were 
 to object, he must have his way with me " (" und 
 waerez al der Werlte leit, so muoz sin wille an mir 
 
MEDIAEVAL LOVE. 373 
 
 ergdn "). But, on the other hand, the favoured knight 
 is bound to protect his lady's good fame. 
 
 Se jai mamie en tel point mis. 
 
 Que tout motroit (m'octroit) sans esformer, 
 
 Tant doi je miex sonnor gaiter — 
 
 thus one' of the interlocutors in a French jeu-parti, 
 published by Matzner ; a rule which, if we may judge 
 from the behaviour of Tristram and Launcelot, and 
 from the last remnants of mediaeval love lore in 
 modern French novels, means simply that the more 
 completely a man has induced a woman to deceive 
 her husband, the more stoutly is he bound to deny, 
 with lies, rows, and blows, that she has ever done any- 
 thing of the sort. Here, then, we find established, as 
 a very fundamental necessity of this socially recog- 
 nized adultery, a reciprocity of fidelity between lover 
 and mistress which Antiquity never dreamed of even 
 between husband and wife (Agamemnon has a perfect 
 right to Briseis or Chryseis, but Clytaemnestra has no 
 right to ^gisthus) ; and which indeed could scarcely 
 arise as a moral obligation except where the woman 
 was not bound to love the man (which the wife is) 
 and where her behaviour towards him depended 
 wholly upon her pleasure, that is to say, upon her 
 satisfaction with his behaviour towards her. This, 
 which seems to us so obvious, and of which every 
 day furnishes us an example in the relations ol 
 the modern suitor and his hoped-for wife, could not, 
 at a time when women were married by family 
 
374 EUPHORION. 
 
 arrangement, arise except as a result of illegitimate 
 love. Horrible as it seems, the more we examine 
 into this subject of mediaeval love, the more shall we 
 see that our whole code of Grandisonian chivalry 
 between lovers who intend marriage is derived from 
 the practice of the Launcelots and Gueneveres, not 
 from that of the married people (we may remember 
 the manner in which Gunther woos his wife Brunhilt 
 in the Nibelungenlied) of former ages ; nay, the more 
 we shall have to recognize that the very feeling which 
 constitutes the virtuous love of modern poets is de- 
 rived from the illegitimate loves of the Middle Ages. 
 -. Let us examine what are the habits of feeling and 
 thinking which grow out of this reciprocal fidelity 
 due to the absence of all one-sided legal pressure in 
 this illegitimate, but socially legitimated, love of the 
 early Middle Ages ; which are added on to it by the 
 very necessities of illicit connection. The lover, having 
 no right to the favours of his mistress, is obliged, 
 in order to win and to keep them, to please her by 
 humility, fidelity, and such knightly qualities as are 
 the ideal plumage of a man : he must bring home to 
 her, by showing the world her colours victorious in 
 serious warfare, in the scarcely less dangerous play of 
 tournaments, and by making her beauty and virtues 
 more illustrious in his song than are those of other 
 women in the songs of their lovers — he must bring 
 home to her that she has a more worthy servant than 
 her rivals ; he must determine her to select him and 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 375 
 
 to adhere to her selection. Now mediaeval husbands 
 select their wives, instead of being selected ; and once 
 the woman and the dowry are in their hands, trouble 
 themselves but little whether they are approved of or 
 not. On the other hand, the mistress appears to her 
 lover invested with imaginative, ideal advantages 
 such as cannot surround her in the eyes of her 
 husband : she is, in nearly every case, his superior in 
 station and the desired of many beholders ; she is 
 bound to him by no tie which may grow prosaic and 
 wearisome ; she appears to him in no domestic 
 capacity, can never descend to be the female drudge ; 
 her possession is prevented from growing stale, her 
 personality from becoming commonplace, by the 
 difficulty, rareness, mystery, adventure, danger, which 
 even in the days of Courts of Love attach to illicit 
 amours ; above all, being for this man neither the 
 housewife nor the mother, she remains essentially and 
 continually the mistress, the beloved. Similarly the 
 relations between the knight and the lady, untroubled 
 by domestic worries, pecuniary difficulties, and 
 squabbles about children, remain, exist merely as 
 love relations, relations of people whose highest and 
 sole desire is to please one another. Moreover, and 
 this is an important consideration, the lady, who is 
 a mere inexperienced, immature girl when she first 
 meets her husband, is a mature woman, with cha- 
 racter and passions developed by the independence of 
 conjugal and social life, when she meets her lover j 
 
376 EUPHORION. 
 
 whatever power or dignity of character she may- 
 possess is ripe ; whatever intensity of aspiration and 
 passion may be latent is ready to come forth ; for the 
 first time there is equality in love. Equality ? Ah, 
 no. This woman who is the wife of his feudal superior, 
 this woman surrounded by all the state of feudal 
 sovereignty, this woman who, however young, has 
 already known so much of life, this woman whose 
 love is a free gift of grace to the obscure, trembling 
 vassal who has a right not even to be noticed ; this 
 lady of mediaeval love must always remain immeasur- 
 ably above her lover. And, in the long day-dreams 
 while watching her, as he thinks unseen, while singing 
 of her, as he thinks unheard, there cluster round her 
 figure, mistily seen in his fancy, those vague and 
 mystic splendours which surround the new sovereign 
 of the Middle Ages, the Queen of Heaven ; there 
 mingles in the half-terrified raptures of the first kind 
 glance, the first encouraging word, the ineffable 
 passion stored up in the Christian's heart for the 
 immortal beings who, in the days of Bernard and 
 Francis, descend cloud-like on earth and fill the cells 
 of the saints with unendurable glory. 
 
 And thus, out of the baseness of habitual adultery, 
 arises incense-like, in the early medieval poetry, a new 
 kind of love — subtler, more imaginative, more pas- 
 sionate, a love of the fancy and the heart, a love 
 stimulating to the perfection of the individual as is 
 any religion ; nay, a religion, and one appealing more 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 277 
 
 completely to the complete man, flesh and soul, than 
 even the mystical beliefs of the Middle Ages. And 
 as, in the fantastic song of Ritter Tannhauser, whose 
 liege lady, so legend tells, was Dame Venus herself, 
 the lady bids the knight go forth and fetch her green 
 water which has washed the setting sun, salamanders 
 snatched from the flame, the stars out of heaven ; so 
 would it seem as if this new power in the world, this 
 poetically worshipped woman, had sent forth mankind 
 to seek wonderful new virtues, never before seen on 
 earth. Nay, rather, as the snowflakes became green 
 leaves, the frost blossoms red and blue flowers, the 
 winter wind a spring-scented breeze, when Bernard 
 de Ventadorn was greeted by his mistress ; so also 
 does it seem as if, at the first greeting of the world by 
 this new love, the mediseval winter had turned to 
 summer, and there had budded forth and flowered a 
 new ideal of manly virtue, a new ideal of womanly 
 grace. 
 
 But evil is evil, and evil is its fruit. Out of circum- 
 stances hitherto unknown, circumstances come about 
 for the first time owing to the necessities of illegiti- 
 mate passion, have arisen certain new and nobler 
 characters of sexual love, certain new and beautiful 
 conceptions of manly and womanly nature. The 
 circumstances to which these are owed are pure in 
 themselves, they are circumstances which in more 
 modern times have characterized the perfectly legiti- 
 mate passion of lovers held asunder by no social law. 
 
378 EUPHORION. 
 
 but by mere accidental barriers — from Romeo and 
 Juliet to the Master of Ravenswood and Lucy Ash- 
 ton ; and pure so far have been the spiritual results. 
 But these circumstances were due, in the early Middle 
 Ages, to the fact of adultery; and to the new ideal 
 of love has clung, even in its purity, in its superior 
 nobility, an element of corruption as unknown to 
 gross and corrupt Antiquity as was the delicacy and 
 nobility of mediaeval love. The most poetical and 
 pathetic of all mediseval love stories, the very incar- 
 nation of all that is most lyric at once and most 
 tragic in the new kind of passion, is the story, told 
 and retold by a score of poets and prose writers, of 
 the loves of Yseult of Ireland and of Sir Tristram : 
 who, as the knight was bringing the princess to his 
 uncle and her affianced. King Mark of Cornwall, 
 drank together by a fatal mistake a philter which 
 made all such as partook of it in common inseparable 
 lovers even unto death. Every one knows the result : 
 how Yseult came to her husband already the paramour 
 of Tristram ; how Brangwaine, her damsel, feeling that 
 this unhallowed passion was due to her having left 
 within reach the potion intended for the King and 
 Queen of Cornwall, devoted herself, at the price of 
 her maidenhood, to connive in the amours of the 
 lovers whom she had made; how King Mark was 
 deceived, and doubted, and was deceived again ; how 
 Tristram fled to Brittany, but how, despite his seem- 
 ing marriage with another and equally lovely Yseult, 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 379 
 
 he remained faithful to the Queen of Cornwall. One 
 version tells that Mark slew his nephew while he 
 sat harping to Queen Yseult ; another that Tristram 
 died of grief because his scorned though wedded wife 
 told him that the white-sailed ship, bearing his mistress 
 to meet him, bore the black sail which meant that she 
 was not on board ; but all versions, I think, agree in 
 ending with the fact, that the briar-rose growing on 
 the tomb of the one, slowly trailed its flowers and 
 thorns along till it had reached also the grave of the 
 other, and knit together, as love had knit together with 
 its sweet blossoms and sharp spines, the two fated 
 lovers. The Middle Ages were enthralled by this 
 tale ; but they were also, occasionally, a little shocked 
 by it. Poets and prose writers tampered every now and 
 then with incidents and characters, seeking to make it 
 appear that, owing to the substitution of the waiting- 
 maid, and the neglect of the wedded princess of 
 Brittany, Yseult had never belonged to any man save 
 Tristram, nor Tristram to any woman save Yseult ; 
 or that King Mark had sent his nephew to woo the 
 Irish queen's daughter merely in hopes of his perish- 
 ing in the attempt, and that his whole subsequent 
 conduct was due to a mere unnatural hatred of a 
 better knight than himself; touching up here and 
 there with a view to justifying and excusing to some 
 degree the long series of deceits which constituted the 
 whole story. Thus the more timid and less gifted. 
 But when, in the very first years (1210") of the thirteenth 
 
jSo EUPHORION. 
 
 century, the greatest mediasval poet that preceded 
 Dante, the greatest German poet that preceded Goethe, 
 Meister Gottfried von Strassburg, took in hand the 
 old threadbare story of "Tristan und Isolde," he 
 despised all alterations of this sort, and accepted the 
 original tale in its complete crudeness. 
 
 For, consciously or unconsciously, Gottfried had 
 conceived this story as a thing v/holly unknown in 
 his time, and no longer subject to any of those neces- 
 sities of constant re-arrangement which tormented 
 mediaeval poets : he had conceived it not as a tale, but 
 as a novel. Gottfried himself was probably but little 
 aware of what he was doing ; the poem that he was 
 writing probably fell for him into the very same cate- 
 gory as the poems of other men ; but to us, with our 
 experience of so many different forms of narrative, it 
 must be evident that " Tristan und Isolde " is a new 
 departure, inasmuch as it is not the story of deeds and 
 the people who did them, like the true epic from 
 Homer to the Nibelungen; nor the story of people 
 and the adventures which happened to them, like all 
 romance poetry from " Palemon and Arcite," to the 
 " Orlando Furioso ; " but, on the contrary, the story of 
 the psychological relations, the gradual metamor- 
 phosis of soul by soul, between two persons. The 
 long introductory story of Tristram's youth must not 
 mislead us, nor all the minute narrations of the killing 
 of dragons and the drinking of love philters : Gott- 
 fried, we must remember, was certainly no deliberate 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 381 
 
 innovator, and these things are the mere inevitable 
 externalities of mediaeval poetry, preserved with dull 
 slavish care by the re-writer of a well-known tale, but 
 enclosing in reality something essentially and start- 
 lingly modern : the history of a passion and of the 
 spiritual changes which it brings about in those who 
 are its victims. 
 
 To meet again this purely psychological interest 
 we must skip the whole rest of the Middle Ages, nay, 
 skip even the great period of dramatic literature, not 
 stopping till we come to the end of the seventeenth 
 and beginning of the eighteenth century, to the 
 " Princesse de Cloves," to " Clarissa Harlowe," nay, 
 really, to " The Nouvelle Hdlolse." For even in 
 Shakespeare there is always interest and importance 
 in the action and reaction of subsidiary characters, in 
 the event, in the accidental ; there is intrigue, chance, 
 misunderstanding, fate — active agencies of which 
 Othello and Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo, are 
 helpless victims ; there is, even in this psychological 
 English drama of the Elizabethans, fate in the shape 
 of lago, in the shape of the Ghost, in the shape of the 
 brothers of Webster's duchess ; fate in the shape of a 
 ring, a letter, a drug, but fate always. And in this 
 " Tristan und Isolde " of Gottfried von Strassburg is 
 there not fate also in the love potion intended for 
 King Mark, and given by the mistake of Brangwaine 
 to Mark's bride and his nephew > To this objection, 
 which will naturally occur to any reader who is not 
 
382 EUPHORION. 
 
 acquainted with the poem of Gottfried, I simply 
 answer, there is not. The love potion there is, but 
 it does not play the same part as do, for instance, the 
 drugs of Friar Laurence and his intercepted letter. 
 Suppose the friar's narcotic to have been less endur- 
 ing in its action, or his message to have reached in 
 safety, why then Juliet would have been awake instead 
 of asleep, or Romeo would not have supposed her 
 to be dead, and instead of the suicide of the two 
 lovers, we should have had the successful carying off 
 of Juliet by Romeo. Not so with Gottfried. The 
 philter is there, and a great deal is talked about it ; 
 but it is merely one of the old, threadbare trappings 
 of the original story, which he has been too lazy to 
 suppress ; it is merely, for the reader, the allegorical 
 signal for an outburst of passion which all our subse- 
 quent knowledge of Tristram and Yseult shows us 
 to be absolutely inevitable. In Gottfried's poem, the 
 drinking of the potion signifies merely that all the 
 rambling, mediaeval prelude, not to be distinguished 
 from the stories of " Morte d'Arthur," and of half the 
 romances of the Middle Ages, has come to a close and 
 may be forgotten ; and that the real work of the 
 great poet, the real, matchless tragedy of the four 
 actors — Tristram, Yseult, Mark, and Brangwaine — has 
 begun. 
 
 Yet if we seek again to account to ourselves for this 
 astonishing impression of modernness which we receive 
 from Gottfried's poem, we recognize that it is due to 
 
MEDIAEVAL LOVE. 383 
 
 something far more important than the mere pre- 
 cocious psychological interest ; nay, rather, that this 
 psychological interest is itself dependent upon the 
 fact which makes "Tristan und Isolde," so modern to 
 our feelings. This fact is simply that the poem of 
 Gottfried is the earliest, and yet perhaps almost the 
 completest, example of a literary anomaly which An- 
 tiquity, for all its abominations, did not know : the 
 glorification of fidelity in adultery, the glorification of 
 excellence within the compass of guilt. Older times 
 — more distant from our own in spirit, though not 
 necessarily in years — have presented us with many 
 themes of guilt : the guilt which exists according to 
 our own moral standard, but not according to that of 
 the narrator, as the magnificently tragic Icelandic 
 incest story of Sigmund and Signy ; the guilt which 
 has come about no one well knows how, an unfortu- 
 nate circumstance leaving the sinner virtually stainless, 
 in his or her own eyes and the eyes of others, like the 
 Homeric Helen ; the heroic guilt, where the very 
 heroism seems due to the self-sacrifice of the sinner's 
 innocence, of Judith; the struggling, remorseful guilt, 
 hopelessly overcome by fate and nature, of Phaedra ; 
 the dull and dogged guilt, making the sinner scarce 
 more than a mere physical stumbling-block for others, 
 of the murderer Hagen in the Nibelungenlied ; and, 
 finally, the perverse guilt, delighting in the conscious- 
 ness of itself, of demons like Richard and lago, of 
 ■libidinous furies like the heroines of Tourneur and 
 
384 EUPHORION. 
 
 Marston. The guilt theme of " Tristan und Isolde " 
 falls into none of these special categories. This theme, 
 unguessed even by Shakespeare, is that of the virtuous 
 behaviour towards one another of two individuals 
 united in sinning against every one else. Gottfried 
 von Strassburg narrates with the greatest detail how 
 Tristram leads to the unsuspecting king the un- 
 blushing, unremorseful woman polluted by his own 
 embraces ; how Yseult substitutes on the wedding night 
 her spotless damsel Brangwaine for her own sullied 
 self; then, terrified lest the poor victim of her dis- 
 honour should ever reveal it, attempts to have her bar- 
 barously murdered, and, finally, seeing that nothing 
 can shake the heroic creature's faith, admits her once 
 more to be the remorseful go-between in her amours. 
 He narrates how Tristram dresses as a pilgrim and 
 carries the queen from a ship to the shore, in order 
 that Yseult may call on Christ to bear witness by a 
 miracle that she is innocent of adultery, never having 
 been touched save by that pilgrim and her own hus- 
 band ; and how, when the followers of King Mark 
 have surrounded the grotto in the wood, Tristram 
 places the drawn sword between himself and the 
 sleeping queen, as a symbol of their chastity which 
 the king is too honest to suspect. He draws, with 
 a psychological power truly extraordinary in the 
 beginning of the thirteenth century, the two other 
 figures in this love drama : King Mark, cheated, dis- 
 honoured, oscillating between horrible doubt, igno- 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 385 
 
 minious suspicion and more ignominious credulity, 
 his love for his wife, his trust in his nephew, his in- 
 capacity for conceiving ill-faith and fraud, the very 
 gentleness and generosity of his nature, made the 
 pander of guilt in which he cannot believe ; and, on 
 the other side, Brangwaine, the melancholy, mute 
 victim of her fidelity to Yseult, the weak, heroic soul, 
 rewarded only with cruel ingratitude, and condemned 
 to screen and help the sin which she loathes and for 
 which she assumes the awful responsibility. All this 
 does Gottfried do, yet without ever seeming to per- 
 ceive the baseness and wickedness of this tissue of 
 lies, equivocations, and perjuries in which his lovers hide 
 their passion ; without ever seeming to guess at the 
 pathos and nobility of the man and the woman who 
 are the mere trumpery obstacles or trumpery aids to 
 their amours. He heaps upon Tristram and Yseult 
 the most extravagant praises : he is the flower of all 
 knighthood, and she, the kindest, gentlest, purest, and 
 noblest of women ; he insists upon the wickedness of 
 the world which is for ever waging war upon their 
 passion, and holds up to execration all those who seek 
 to spy out their secret. Gottfried is most genuinely 
 overcome by the ideal beauty of this inextinguishable 
 devotion, by the sublimity of this love which holds 
 the whole world as dross ; the crimes of the lovers 
 are for him the mere culminating point of their moral 
 grandeur, which has ceased to know any guilt save 
 absence of love, any virtue save loving. And so 
 26 
 
386 EUPHORION. 
 
 serene is the old minnesinger's persuasion, that it 
 obscures the judgment and troubles the heart even 
 of his reader ; and we are tempted to ask ourselves, 
 on laying down the book, whether indeed this could 
 have been sinful, this love of Tristram and Yseult 
 which triumphed over everything in the world, and 
 could be quenched only by death. That circle of hell 
 where all those who had sinfully loved were whirled 
 incessantly in the perse=:dark, stormy air, appeared 
 in the eyes even of Dante as a place less of punish- 
 ment than of glory; and, especially since the Middle 
 Ages, all mankind looks upon that particular hell- 
 pit with admiration rather than with loathing. And 
 herein consists, more even than in any deceptions 
 practised upon King Mark or any ingratitude mani- 
 fested towards Brangwaine, the sinfulness of Tristram 
 and Yseult : sinfulness which is not finite like the in- 
 dividual lives which it offends, but infinite and im- 
 mortal as the heart and the judgment which it perverts. 
 For such a tale, and so told, as the tale of Gottfried 
 von Strassburg, makes us sympathize with this fidelity 
 and devotion of a man and woman who care for 
 nothing in the world save for each other, who are 
 dragged and glued together by the desire and habit 
 of mutual pleasure ; it makes us admire their readi- 
 ness to die rather than be parted, when their whole 
 life is concentrated in their reciprocal sin, when their 
 miserable natures enjoy, care for, know, only this 
 miserable love. It makes us wink with leniency at the 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 387 
 
 dishonour, the baseness, the cruelty, to which all this 
 easy virtue is due. And such sympathy, such admir- 
 ation, such leniency, for howsoever short a time they 
 may remain in our soul, leave it, if they ever leave it 
 completely and utterly, less strong, less clean than it 
 was before. We have all of us a lazy tendency to 
 approve of the virtue which costs no trouble ; to 
 contemplate in ourselves or others, with a spurious 
 moral satisfaction, the development of this or that 
 virtuous quality in souls which are deteriorating in 
 undoubted criminal self-indulgence. We have all of 
 us, at the bottom of our hearts, a fellow feeling for all 
 human affection ; and the sinfulness of sinners like 
 Tristram and Yseult lies largely in the fact that they 
 pervert this legitimate and holy sympathy into a 
 dangerous leniency for any strong and consistent love, 
 into a morbid admiration for any irresistible mutual 
 passion, making us forget that love has in itself no 
 moral value, and that while self-indulgence may often 
 be innocent, only self-abnegation can ever be holy. 
 
 The great mediaeval German poem of Tristram and 
 Yseult remained for centuries a unique phenomenon ; 
 only John Ford perhaps, that grander and darker 
 twin spirit of Gottfried von Strassburg, reviving, even 
 among the morbidlypsychologicaland crime-fascinated 
 followers of Shakespeare, that new theme of evil — the 
 heroism of unlawful love. But Gottfried had merely 
 manipulated with precocious analytical power a mode 
 of feeling and thinking which was universal in the 
 
388 EUPHORION. 
 
 feudal Middle Ages ; the great epic of adultery was 
 forgotten, but the sympathetic and admiring interest 
 in illegitimate passion remained ; and was transmitted, 
 wherever the Renaissance or the Reformation did not 
 break through such transmission of mediaeval habits, 
 as an almost inborn instinct from father to son, from 
 mother to daughter. And we may doubt whether the 
 important class of men and women who write and 
 read the novels of illicit love, could ever have existed, 
 had not the psychological artists of modern times, 
 from Rousseau to George Sand, and from Stendhal to 
 Octave Feuillet, found ready prepared for them in the 
 countries not re-tempered by Protestantism, an asso- 
 ciation of romance, heroism, and ideality with mere 
 adulterous passion, which was unknown to the cor- 
 ruption of Antiquity and to the lawlessness of the Dark 
 Ages, and which remained as a fatal alloy to that 
 legacy of mere spiritual love which was left to the 
 world by the love poets of early feudalism. 
 
 II. 
 
 The love of the troubadours and minnesingers, of 
 the Arthurian tales, which show that love in narrative 
 form, was, as we have seen, polluted by the selfishness, 
 the deceitfulness, the many unclean necessities of 
 adulterous passion. Elevated and exquisite though 
 it was, it could not really purify the relations of man 
 and woman, since it was impure. Nay, we see that 
 through its influence the grave and simple married 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 389 
 
 love of the earlier tales of chivalry, the love of 
 Siegfried for Chriemhilt, of Roland for his bride Belle 
 Aude, of Renaud for his wife Clarisse, is gradually 
 replaced in later fiction by the irregular love-makings 
 of Huon of Bordeaux, Ogier the Dane, and Artus of 
 Brittany ; until we come at last to the extraordinary 
 series of the Amadis romances, where every hero 
 without exception is the bastard of virtuous parents, 
 who subsequently marry and discover their foundling : 
 a state of things which, even in the corrupt Renais- 
 sance, Boiardo and Ariosto found it necessary to 
 reform in their romantic poems. With idealizing re- 
 finement, the chivalric love of the French, Provengal, 
 and German poets brings also a kind of demoralization 
 which, from one point of view, makes the spotless 
 songs of Bernard de Ventadour and Armaud de 
 Mareulh, of Ulrich von Liechtenstein and Frauenlob, 
 less pure than the licentious poems addressed by the 
 Greeks and Romans to women who, at least, were 
 not the wives of other men. 
 
 Shall all this idealizing refinement, this almost 
 religious fervour, this new poetic element of chivalric 
 love remain useless ; or serve only to subtly pollute 
 while pretending to purify the great singing passion .? 
 Not so. But to prevent such waste of what in itself is 
 pure and precious, is the mission of another country, 
 of another civilization ; of a wholly different cycle of 
 poets who, receiving the new element of mediasval 
 love after it has passed through and been sifted by a 
 
390 EUPHORION. 
 
 aumber of hands shall cleanse and recreate it in the 
 fire of intellectual and almost abstract passion, pro- 
 ducing that wonderful essence of love which, as the 
 juices squeezed by alchemists out of jewels purified 
 the body from all its ills, shall purify away all the 
 diseases of the human soul. 
 
 While the troubadours and minnesingers had 
 been singing at the courts of Angevine kings and 
 Hohenstauffen emperors, of counts of Toulouse and 
 dukes of Austria, a new civilization, a new political 
 and social system, had gradually been developing in 
 the free burghs of Italy ; a new life entirely the 
 reverse of the life of feudal countries. The Italian 
 cities were communities of manufacturers and mer- 
 chants, into which only gradually, and at the sacrifice 
 of every aristocratic privilege and habit, a certain 
 number of originally foreign feudatories were gradually 
 absorbed. Each community consisted of a number of 
 mercantile families, equal before the law, and illustrious 
 or obscure according to their talents or riches, whose 
 members, instead of being scattered over a wide area 
 like the members of the feudal nobility, were most 
 often gathered together under one roof — sons, brothers, 
 nephews, daughters, sisters and daughters-in-law, 
 forming a hierarchy attending to the business of 
 factory or counting-house under the orders of the 
 father of the family, and to the economy of the house 
 under the superintendence of the mother ; a manner 
 of living at once business-like and patriarchal, ex- 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. ■jgi 
 
 pounded by the interlocutors in Alberti's " Governo 
 della Famiglia," and which lasted until the disso- 
 lution of the commonwealths and almost to our own 
 times. Such habits imply a social organization, an 
 intercourse between men and women, and a code 
 of domestic morality the exact opposite to those of 
 feudal countries. Here, in the Italian cities, there are 
 no young men bound to loiter, far from their homes, 
 round the wife of a military superior, to whom her 
 rank and her isolation from all neighbours give 
 idleness and solitude. The young men are all of them 
 in business, usually with their own kinsfolk ; not in 
 their employer's house, but in his office ; they have no 
 opportunity of seeing a woman from dawn till sunset. 
 The women, on their side, are mainly employed at 
 home : the whole domestic arrangement depends upon 
 them, and keeps their hands constantly full ; working, 
 and working in the company of their female relatives 
 and friends. Men and women are free comparatively 
 little, and then they are free all together in the same 
 places ; hence no opportunities for tete-d-teie. Early 
 Italian poetry is fond of showing us the young poet 
 reading his verses or explaining his passion to those 
 gentle, compassionate women learned in love, of whom 
 we meet a troop, beautiful, vague, half-arch, half- 
 melancholy faces, consoling Dante in the " Vita 
 Nuova," and reminding Guido Cavalcanti of his lady 
 far off at Toulouse. But such women almost invariably 
 form a group ; they cannot be approached singly. Such 
 
392 EUPHORION. 
 
 a state of society inevitably produces a high and strict 
 morality. In these early Italian cities (who have 
 borrowed, we must remember, the greater part of their 
 Decameronian literature from France) a case of in- 
 fidelity is punished ruthlessly ; the lover banished or 
 killed ; the wife for ever lost to the world, perhaps 
 condemned to solitude and a lingering death in the 
 fever tracts, like Pia dei Tolomei. A complacent 
 deceived husband is even more ridiculous (the deceived 
 husband is notoriously the chief laughing stock of 
 all mediseval free towns) than is a jealous husband 
 among the authorized and recognized cicisbeos of a 
 feudal court. Indeed the respect for marriage vows 
 inevitable in this busy democratic mediaeval life is 
 so strong, that long after the commonwealths have 
 turned into despotisms, and every social tie has been 
 dissolved in the Renaissance, the wives and daughters 
 of men stained with every libidinous vice, nay, of the 
 very despots themselves — Tiberiuses and Neros on a 
 smaller scale — remain spotless in the midst of evil ; 
 and authorized adultery begins in Italy only under 
 the Spanish rule in the late sixteenth century. 
 
 Such were the manners and morals of the Italian 
 commonwealths when, about the middle of the thir- 
 teenth century, the men of Tuscany, now free and 
 prosperous, suddenly awoke to the consciousness that 
 they had a soul which desired song, and a language 
 which was spontaneously singing. It was the moment 
 when painting was beginning to claim for the figures 
 of real men and women the walls and vaulted spaces 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 393 
 
 whence had hitherto glowered, with vacant faces and 
 huge ghostlike eyes, mosaic figures, from their shimmer- 
 ing golden ground ; the moment when the Pisan artists 
 had, sculptured solemnly draped madonnas and kings 
 not quite unworthy of the carved sarcophagi which 
 stood around them ; the moment when, merging 
 together old Byzantine traditions and Northern ex- 
 amples, the architects of Florence, Siena, and Orvieto 
 conceived a style which made cathedrals into mar- 
 vellous and huge reliquaries of marble, jasper, alabaster, 
 and mosaics. The medieval flowering time had come 
 late, very late, in Italy ; but the atmosphere was only 
 the warmer, the soil the richer, and Italy put forth a 
 succession of exquisite and superb immortal flowers 
 of art when the artistic sap of other countries had 
 begun to be exhausted. But the Italians, the Tuscans, 
 audacious in the other arts, were diffident of them- 
 selves with regard to poetry. Architecture, painting, 
 sculpture, had been the undisputed field for plebeian 
 craftsmen, belonging exclusively to the free burghs 
 and disdained by the feudal castles ; but poetry was 
 essentially the aristocratic, the feudal art, cultivated 
 by knights and cultivated for kings and barons. It 
 was probably an unspoken sense of this fact which 
 caused the early Tuscan poets to misgive their own 
 powers and to turn wistfully and shyly towards the 
 poets of Provence and of Sicily. There, beyond the 
 seas, under the last lords of Toulouse and the brilliant 
 mongrel Hohenstauffen princes, were courts, knights, 
 and ladies ; there was the tradition of this courtly art 
 
394 EUPHORION. 
 
 of poetry ; and there only could the sons of Florentine 
 or Sienese merchants, clodhoppers in gallantry and 
 song, hope to learn the correct style of thing. Hence 
 the history of the Italian lyric before Dante is the 
 history of a series of transformations which connect a 
 style of poetry absolutely feudal and feudally immoral, 
 with the hitherto unheard-of platonic love subtleties 
 of the "Vita Nuova." And it is curious, in looking 
 over the collections of early Italian lyrists, to note the 
 alteration in tone as Sicily and the feudal courts are 
 left further and further behind. Ciullo d' Alcamo, 
 flourishing about 1190, is the only Italian-writing 
 poet absolutely contemporaneous with the earlier and 
 better trouveres, troubadours, and minnesingers ; and 
 he is also the only one who resembles them very 
 closely. His famous tenso, beginning " Rosa fresca 
 aulentissima " (a tolerably faithful translation heads 
 the beautiful collection of the late Mr. D. G. Rossetti), 
 is indeed more explicitly gross and immoral than the 
 majority of Provencal and German love-songs : loose 
 as are many of the albas, serenas, wachtlieder, and 
 even many of the less special forms of German and 
 Provencal poetry, I am acquainted with none of them 
 which comes up to this singular dialogue, in which a 
 man, refusing to marry a woman, little by little wins 
 her over to his wishes and makes her brazenly invite 
 him to her dishonour. Between Ciullo d' Alcamo 
 and his successors there is some gap of time, and a 
 corresponding want of gradation. Yet the Sicilian 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 395 
 
 poets of the courts of Hohenstauffen and Anjou, 
 recognizable by their name or the name of their town, 
 Inghilfredi, Manfredi, Ranieri and Ruggierone da 
 Palermo, Tommaso and Matteo da Messina, Gugliel- 
 motto d' Otranto, Rinaldo d' Aquino, Pier delle Vigne, 
 either maintain altogether unchanged the tone of the 
 troubadours, or only gradually, as in the remarkable 
 case of the Notary of Lentino, approximate to the 
 platonic poets of Tuscany. The songs of the arche- 
 type of Sicilian singers, the Emperor Frederick II., 
 are completely Proven9al in feeling as in form, though 
 infinitely inferior in execution. With him it is always 
 the pleasure which he hopes from his lady, or the 
 pleasure which he has had — "Quando ambidue sta- 
 vamo in allegranza alia dolce fera ; " "Pregovi donna 
 mia — Per vostra cortesia — E pregovi che sia — Quelle 
 che lo core disia." Again : " Sospiro e sto in rancura 
 — Ch' io son si disioso — E pauroso — Mi fate penare — 
 Ma tanto m' assicura — Lo suo vise amoroso — E lo 
 gioioso — Riso e lo sguardare — E lo parlare — Di questa 
 criatura — Che per paura — Mi face penare — E di- 
 morare — Tant' h fina e pura — Tanto h saggia e 
 cortese — Non credo che pensasse — Ne distornasse — 
 Di ci6 che m' impromise." It is, this earliest Italian 
 poetry, like the more refined poetry of troubadours 
 and minnesingers, eminently an importuning of high- 
 born but loosely living women. From Sicily and 
 Apulia poetry goes first, as might be expected (and 
 as probably sculpture went) to the seaport Pisa, 
 
396 EUPHORION. 
 
 thence to the neighbouring Lucca, considerably before 
 reaching Florence. And as it becomes more Italian 
 and urban, it becomes also, under the strict vigilance 
 of burgher husbands, considerably more platonic. In 
 Bologna, the city of jurists, it acquires (the remark is 
 not mine merely, but belongs also to Carducci) the 
 very strong flavour of legal quibbling which distin- 
 guishes the otherwise charming Guide Guinicelli ; 
 and once in Florence, among the most subtle of all 
 subtle Tuscans, it becomes at once what it remained 
 even for Dante, saturated with metaphysics : the 
 woman is no longer paramount, she is subordinated 
 to Love himself; to that personified abstraction Amor, 
 the serious and melancholy son of Pagan philosophy 
 and Christian mysticism. The Tuscans had imported 
 from Provence and Sicily the new element of medi- 
 aeval love, of life devotion, soul absorption in loving ; 
 if they would sing, they must sing of this ; any other 
 kind of love, at a time when Italy still read and 
 relished her would-be Proven9als, Lanfranc Cicala and 
 Sordel of Mantua, would have been unfashionable and 
 unendurable. But in these Italian commonwealths, 
 as we have seen, poets are forced, nilly-willy, to be 
 platonic ; an importuning poem found in her work- 
 basket may send a Tuscan lady into a convent, or, 
 like Pia, into the Maremma ; an alba or a serena 
 interrupted by a wool-weaver of Calimara or a silk 
 spinner of Lucca, may mean that the imprudent poet 
 be found weltering in blood under some archway the 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. ^gy 
 
 next morning. The chivalric sentimentality of feu- 
 dalism must be restrained ; and little by little, under 
 the pressure of such very different social habits, 
 it grows into a veritable platonic passion. Poets must 
 sing, and in order that they sing, they must adore ; 
 so men actually begin to seek out, and adore and 
 make themselves happy and wretched about women 
 from whom they can hope only social distinctions ; 
 and this purely aesthetic passion goes on by the side, 
 nay, rather on the top, of their humdrum, conjugal 
 life or ^loosest libertinage. Petrarch's bastards were 
 born during the reign of Madonna Laura ; and that 
 they should have been, was no more a slight or 
 infidelity to her than to the other Madonna, the one 
 in heaven. Laura had a right to only ideal sentiments, 
 ideal relations ; the poet was at liberty to carry more 
 material preferences elsewhere. 
 
 But could such love as this exist, could it be 
 genuine? To my mind, indubitably. For there is, 
 in all our perceptions and desires of physical and 
 moral beauty, an element of passion which is akin to 
 love ; and there is, in all love that is not mere lust, a 
 perception of, a craving for, beauty, real or imaginary 
 which is identical with our merely assthetic per- 
 ceptions and cravings ; hence the possibility, once the 
 wish for such a passion present, of a kind of love 
 which is mainly aesthetic, which views the beloved 
 as gratifying merely to the wish for physical or spiri- 
 tual loveliness, and concentrates upon one exquisite 
 
393 EUPHORION. 
 
 reality all dreams of ideal perfection. Moreover there 
 comes, to all nobler natures, a love dawning: a 
 brightening and delicate flushing of the soul before 
 the actual appearance of the beloved one above the 
 horizon, which is as beautiful and fascinating in its 
 very clearness, pallor, and coldness, as the unearthly 
 purity of the pale amber and green and ashy rose 
 which streaks the heavens before sunrise. The love 
 of the early Tuscan poets (for we must count Gui- 
 nicelli, in virtue of his language, as a Tuscan) had 
 been restrained, by social necessities first, then by 
 habit and deliberate aesthetic choice, within the limits 
 of this dawning state ; and in this state, it had fed 
 itself off mere spiritual food, and acquired the strange 
 intensity of mere intellectual passions. We give 
 excessive weight, in our days, to spontaneity in all 
 things, apt to think that only the accidental, the un- 
 sought, can be vital ; but it is true in many things, and 
 truest in all matters of the imagination and the heart, 
 that the desire to experience any sentiment will power- 
 fully conduce to its production, and even give it a 
 strength due to the long incubation of the wish. Thus 
 the ideal love of the Tuscan poets was probably none 
 the weaker, but rather the stronger, for the desire 
 which they felt to sing such passion ; nay, rather to hear 
 it singing in themselves. The love of man and wife, 
 of bride and bridegroom, was still of the domain of 
 prose ; adulterous love forbidden ; and the tradition 
 of, the fervent wish for, the romantic passion of the 
 
MEDIMVAL LOVE. 399 
 
 troubadours consumed them as a strong artistic 
 craving. Platonic love was possible, doubly possible 
 in souls tense with poetic wants ; it became a reality 
 through the strength of the wish for it. 
 
 Nor was this all. In all imaginative passions, intel- 
 lectual motives are so much fuel ; and in this case the 
 necessity of logically explaining the bodiless passion 
 for a platonic lady, of understanding why they felt in 
 a manner so hitherto unknown to gross mankind, 
 tended greatly to increase the love of these Tuscans, 
 and to bring it in its chastity to the pitch of fervour of 
 more fleshly passions, by mingling with the aesthetic 
 emotions already in their souls the mystical theorizings 
 of transcendental metaphysics, and the half-human, 
 half-supernatural ecstasy of mediaeval religion. For 
 we must remember that Italy was a country not 
 merely of manufacturers and bankers, but of philo- 
 sophers also and of saints. 
 
 Among the Italians of the thirteenth century the 
 revival of antique literature was already in full swing; 
 while in France, Germany, and Provence there had 
 been, in lyric poetry at least, no trace of classic lore. 
 Whereas the trouv^res and troubadours had possessed 
 but the light intellectual luggage of a military aristo- 
 cracy ; and the minnesingers had, for the most part, 
 been absolutely ignorant of reading and writing 
 (Wolfram says so of himself, and Ulrich von Liechten- 
 stein relates how he carried about his lady's letter 
 for days unread until the return of his secretary) ; 
 
400 EUPHORION. 
 
 the poets of Italy, from Brunetto Latini to Petrarch, 
 were eminently scholars ; men to whom, however 
 much they might be politicians and ringleaders, like 
 Cavalcanti, Donati, and Dante, whatever existed of 
 antique learning was thoroughly well known. Such 
 men were familiar with whatever yet survived of the 
 transcendental theories of Plato and Plotinus ; and 
 they seized at once upon the mythic metaphysics of 
 an antenatal condition, of typical ideas, of the divine 
 essence of beauty, on all the mystic discussions on 
 love and on the soul, as a philosophical explanation of 
 their seemingly inexplicablepassion for an unapproach- 
 able woman. The lady upon whom the poetic fervour, 
 the mediaeval love, inherited from Provenceand France, 
 was nowexpended, and whom social reasons placed quite 
 beyond the reach of anything save the poet's soul and 
 words, was evidently beloved for the sake of that much 
 of the divine essence contained in her nature ; she was 
 loved for purely spiritual reasons, loved as a visible 
 and living embodiment of virtue and beauty, as a 
 human piece of the godhead. So far, therefore, from 
 such an attachment being absurd, as absurd it would 
 have seemed to troubadours and minnesingers, who 
 never served a lady save for what they called a rev/ard ; 
 it became, in the eyes of these platonizing Italians, 
 the triumph of the well-bred soul ; and as such, soon 
 after, a necessary complement to dignities, talents, and 
 wealth, the very highest occupation of a liberal mind. 
 Thus did their smattering of platonic and neo-platonic 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 40T 
 
 philosophy supply the Tuscan poets with a logical 
 reality for this otherwise unreal passion. 
 
 But there was something more. In this democratic 
 and philosophizing Italy, there was not the gulf which 
 separated the chivalric poets, men of the sword and 
 not of books, from the great world of religious mysti- 
 cism ; for, though the minnesingers especially were 
 extremely devout and sang many a strange love-song 
 to the Virgin ; they knew, they could know, nothing 
 of the contemplative religion of Eckhardt and his 
 disciples — humble and transcendental spirits, whose 
 words were treasured by the sedentary, dreamy towns- 
 folk of the Rhine, but would have conveyed no 
 meaning even to the poet of the Grail epic, with its 
 battles and feasts, its booted and spurred slapdash 
 morality, Wolfram von Eschenbach. In the great 
 manufacturing cities of Italy, such religious mysti- 
 cism spread as it could never spread in feudal courts ; 
 it became familiar, both in the mere passionate ser- 
 mons and songs of the wandering friars, and in the 
 subtle dialectics of the divines; above all, it became 
 familiar to the poets. Now the essence of this 
 contemplative theology of the Middle Ages, which 
 triumphantly held its own against the cut-and-dry 
 argumentation of scholastic rationalism, was love. 
 Love which assuredly meant different things to diffe- 
 rent minds ; a passionate benevolence towards man and 
 beast to godlike simpletons like Francis of Assisi ; a 
 
 mere creative and impassive activitv of the divinity to 
 27 
 
402 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 deep-seeing (so deep as to see only their own strange 
 passionate eyes and lips reflected in the dark well of 
 knowledge) and almost pantheistic thinkers like 
 Master Eckhardt; but love nevertheless, love. "Amor, 
 amore, ardo d' amore," St. Francis had sung in a wild 
 rhapsody, a sort of mystic dance, a kind of furious 
 fnalaguefia of divine love ; and that he who would 
 wish to know God, let him love — "Qui vult habere 
 notitiam Dei, amet,'' had been written by Hugo of 
 St. Victor, one of the subtlest of all the mystics. 
 "Amor oculus est," said Master Eckhardt; love, love — 
 was not love then the highest of all human faculties, 
 and must not the act of loving, of perceiving God's 
 essence in some creature which had virtue, the soul's 
 beauty, and beauty, the body's virtue, be the noblest 
 business of a noble life ? Thus argued the poets ; and 
 their argument, half-passionate, half-scholastic, mixing 
 Plato and Bonaventura, the Schools of Alexandria 
 and the Courts of Love of Provence, resulted in adding 
 all the fervid reality of philosophical and religious 
 aspiration to their clear and cold phantom of disem- 
 bodied love of woman. 
 
 Little by little therefore, together with the carnal 
 desires of Provengals and Sicilians, the Tuscan poets 
 put behind them those little coquetries of style and 
 manner, complications of metre and rhythm learned 
 and fantastic as a woman's plaited and braided hair ; 
 those metaphors and similes, like bright flowers or 
 shining golden ribbons dropped from the lady's bosom 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 403 
 
 and head and eagerly snatched by the lover, which we 
 still find, curiously transformed and scented with the 
 rosemary and thyme of country lanes, in the peasant 
 poetry of modern Tuscany. Little by little does the 
 love poetry of the Italians reject such ornaments ; and 
 clothe itself in that pale garment, pale and stately in 
 heavy folds like a nun's or friar's weeds, but pure and 
 radiant and solemn as the garment of some painted 
 angel, which we have all learned to know from the 
 "Vita Nuova." 
 
 To describe this poetry of the immediate precursors 
 and contemporaries of Dante is to the last degree 
 difficult : it can be described only by symbols, and 
 symbols can but mislead us. Dante Rossetti himself, 
 after translating with exquisite beauty the finest poems 
 of this school, showed how he had read into them his 
 own spirit, when he drew the beautiful design for the 
 frontispiece of his collection. These two lovers — the 
 youth kneeling in his cloth of silver robe, lifting his 
 long throbbing neck towards the beloved ; the lady 
 stooping down towards him, raising him up and kiss- 
 ing him ; the mingled cloud of waving hair, the four 
 tight-clasped hands, the four tightly glued lips, the 
 profile hidden by the profile, the passion and the 
 pathos, the eager, wistful faces, nay, the very splendour 
 of brocade robes and jewels, the very sweetness of 
 blooming rose spaliers ; all this is suitable to illustrate 
 this group of sonnets or that of the " House of Life ;'' 
 but it is false, false in efflorescence and luxuriance of 
 
404 EUPHORION. 
 
 passion, splendour and colour of accessory, to the 
 poetry of these early Tuscans. Imaginative their 
 poetry certainly is, and passionate ; indeed the very 
 concentration of imaginative passion ; but imagination 
 and passion unlike those of all other poets ; perhaps 
 because more rigorously reduced to their elements : 
 imagination purely of the heart, passion purely of the 
 intellect, neither of the senses : love in its most essen- 
 tial condition, but, just because an essence, purged of 
 earthly alloys, rarefied, sublimated into a cultus or a 
 philosophy. 
 
 These poems might nearly all have been written by 
 one man, were it possible for one man to vary from 
 absolute platitude to something like genius, so homo- 
 geneous is their tone : everywhere do we meet the same 
 simplicity of diction struggling with the same compli- 
 cation and subtlety of thought, the same abstract spe- 
 culation strangely mingled with most individual and 
 personal pathos. The mode of thinking and feeling, 
 the conception of all the large characteristics of love, 
 and of all its small incidents are, in this cycle of poets, 
 constantly the same ; and they are the same in the 
 "Vita Nuova;" Dante having, it would seem, invented 
 and felt nothing unknown to his immediate prede- 
 cessors and contemporaries, but merely concentrated 
 their thoughts and feelings by the greater intenseness 
 of his genius. This platonic love of Dante's days is, 
 as I have said, a passion sublimated into a philosophy 
 and a cultus. The philosophy of love engages much 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 405 
 
 of these poets' attention ; all have treated of it, but 
 Guide Cavalcanti, Dante's elder brother in poetry, is 
 love's chief theologian. He explains, as Eckhardt or 
 Bonaventura might explain the mysteries of God's 
 being and will, the nature and operation of love. 
 " Love, which enamours us of excellence, arises out 
 of pure virtue of the soul, and equals us to God," he 
 tells us ; and subtly developes his theme. This being 
 the case, nothing can be more mistaken than to sup- 
 pose, as do those of little sense, that Love is blind, 
 and goes blindly about (" Da sentir poco, e da credenza 
 vana — Si move il dir di cotal grossa gente — Ch' amor 
 fa ciecoandar per lo suo regno"). Love is omniscient, 
 since love is born of the knowledge and recognition 
 of excellence. Such love as this is the only true 
 source of happiness, since it alone raises man to the 
 level of the divinity. Cavalcanti has in him not merely 
 the subtlety but the scornfulness of a great divine. 
 His wrath against all those who worship or defend 
 a different god of Love knows no bounds. " I know 
 not what to say of him who adores the goddess born 
 of Saturn and sea-foam. His love is fire : it seems 
 sweet, but its result is bitter and evil. He may indeed 
 call himself happy ; but in such delights he mingles 
 himself with much baseness." Such is this god of 
 Love, who, when he descended into Dante's heart, 
 caused the spirit of life to tremble terribly in his 
 secret chamber, and trembling to cry, " Lo, here is a 
 god stronger than myself, who coming will rule over 
 
4o6 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 me. Ecce Deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur 
 mihi!" 
 
 The god, this chaste and formidable archangel 
 Amor, is the true subject of these poets' adoration ; 
 the woman into whom he descends by a mystic 
 miracle of beauty and of virtue becomes hencefor- 
 ward invested with somewhat of his awful radiance. 
 She is a gentle, gracious lady ; a lovable and loving 
 woman, in describing whose grey-green eyes and 
 colour as of snow tinted with pomegranate, the older 
 Tuscans would fain linger, comparing her to the new- 
 budded rose, to the morning star, to the golden summer 
 air, to the purity of snowflakes falling silently in a 
 serene sky ; but the sense of the divinity residing 
 within her becomes too strong. From her eyes dart 
 spirits who strike awe into the heart ; from her lips 
 come words which make men sigh ; on her passage 
 the poet casts down his eyes ; notions, all these, with 
 which we are familiar from the " Vita Nuova ; " but 
 which belong to Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, nay, even 
 to Guinicelli, quite as much as to Dante. The poet 
 bids his verse go forth to her, but softly ; and stand 
 before her with bended head, as before the Mother of 
 God. She is a miracle herself, a thing sent from 
 heaven, a spirit, as Dante says in that most beautiful 
 of all his sonnets, the summing up of all that the 
 poets of his circle had said of their lady — " Tanto 
 gentile e tanto onesta pare." 
 
 "She passes along the street so beautiful and 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 407 
 
 gracious," says Guinicelli, " that she humbles pride in 
 all whom she greets, and makes him of our faith if he 
 does not yet believe. And no base man can come 
 into her presence. And I will tell you another virtue 
 of her : no man can think ought of evil as long as he 
 looks upon her." " The noble mind which I feel, on 
 account of this youthful lady who has appeared, makes 
 me despise baseness and vileness," says Lapo Gianni. 
 The women who surround her are glorified in her 
 glory, glorified in their womanhood and companionship 
 with her. " The ladies around you," says Cavalcanti, 
 " are dear to me for the sake of your love ; and I pray 
 them as they are courteous, that they should do you 
 all honour." She is, indeed, scarcely a woman, and 
 something more than a saint : an avatar, an incarna- 
 tion of that Amor who is born of virtue and beauty, 
 and raises men's minds to heaven ; and when Caval- 
 canti speaks of his lady's portrait behind the blazing 
 tapers of Orsanmichele, it seems but natural that she 
 should be on an altar, in the Madonna's place. The 
 idea of a mysterious incarnation of love in the lady, 
 or of a mystic relationship between her and love, 
 returns to these poets. Lapo Gianni tells us first that 
 she is Amor's sister, then speaks of her as Amor's 
 bride ; nay, in this love theology of the thirteenth 
 century, arises the same kind of confusion as in the 
 mystic disputes of the nature of the Godhead. A 
 Sienese poet, Ugo da Massa, goes so far as to say, 
 " Amor and I are all one thing ; and we have one will 
 
4o8 EUPHORION. 
 
 and one heart ; and if I were not, Amor were not ; 
 mind you, do not think I am saying these things from 
 subtlety ('e non pensate ch' io '1 dica per arte') ; for 
 certainly it is true that I am love, and he who should 
 slay me would slay love." 
 
 Together with the knowledge of public life and of 
 scholastic theories, together with the love of occult 
 and cabalistic science, and the craft of Provengal 
 poetry, Dante received from his Florence of the 
 thirteenth century the knowledge of this new, this 
 exotic and esoteric intellectual love. And, as it is 
 the mission of genius to gather into an undying whole, 
 to model into a perfect form, the thoughts and feelings 
 and perceptions of the less highly endowed men 
 who surround it, so Dante moulded out of the love 
 passion and love philosophy of his day the "Vita 
 Nuova." Whether the story narrated in this book is 
 fact ; whether a real woman whom he called Beatrice 
 ever existed ; some of those praiseworthy persons, who 
 prowl in the charnel-house of the past, and put its 
 poor fleshless bones into the acids and sublimates of 
 their laboratory, have gravely doubted. But such 
 doubts cannot affect us. For if the story of the " Vita 
 Nuova" be a romance, and if Beatrice be a mere 
 romance heroine, the real meaning and value of the 
 book does not change in our eyes ; since, to concoct 
 such a tale, Dante must have had a number of real 
 experiences which are fully the tale's equivalent ; and 
 to conceive and create such a figure as Beatrice, and 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 409 
 
 such a passion as she inspires her poet, he must have 
 felt as a poignant reality the desire for such a lady, 
 the capacity for such a love. A tale merely of the 
 soul, and of the soul's movements and actions, this 
 " Vita Nuova ; '' so why should it matter if that which 
 could never exist save in the spirit, should have been 
 but the spirit's creation ? It is, in its very intensity, a 
 vision of love ; what if it be a vision merely conceived 
 and never realized ? Hence the futility of all those 
 who wish to destroy our faith and pleasure by saying 
 " all this never took place." Fools, can you tell what 
 did or did not take place in a poet's mind? Be this 
 as it may, the " Vita Nuova," thank heaven, exists ; 
 and, thank heaven, exists as a reality to our feelings. 
 The longed-for ideal, the perfection whose love, said 
 Cavalcanti, raises us up to God, has seemed to gather 
 itself into a human shape ; and a real being has been 
 surrounded by the halo of perfection emanated from 
 the poet's own soul. The vague visions of glory have 
 suddenly taken body in this woman, seen rarely, at a 
 distance ; the woman whom, as a child, the poet, 
 himself a child, had already looked at with the strange, 
 ideal fascination which we sometimes experience in 
 our childhood. People are apt to smile at this opening 
 of the " Vita Nuova ; '' to put aside this narrative of 
 childish love together with the pathetic little pedan- 
 tries of learned poetry and Kabbala, of the long gloses 
 to each poem, and the elaborate calculations of the 
 recurrence and combination of the number nine Tand 
 
4IO EUPHORION. 
 
 that curious little bit of encyclopaedic display about 
 the Syrian month Tismin) as so much pretty local 
 colouring or obsolete silliness. But there is nothing 
 at which to laugh in such childish fascinations ; the 
 wonderful, the perfect, is more open to us as children 
 than it is afterwards : a word, a picture, a snatch of 
 music will have for us an ineffable, mysterious meaning ; 
 and how much more so some human being, often some 
 other, more brilliant child from whose immediate 
 contact we are severed by some circumstance, perhaps 
 by our own consciousness of inferiority, which makes 
 that other appear strangely distant, above us, moving 
 in a world of glory which we scarcely hope to ap- 
 proach ; a child sometimes, or sometimes some 
 grown person, beautiful, brilliant, who sings or talks 
 or looks at us, the child, with ways which we do not 
 understand, like some fairy or goddess. No indeed, 
 there is nothing to laugh at in this, in this first 
 blossoming of that love for higher and more beautiful 
 things, which in most of us is trodden down, left to 
 wither, by our maturer selves ; nothing to make us 
 laugh ; nay, rather to make us sigh that later on we 
 see too well, see others too much on their , real level, 
 scrutinize too much ; too much, alas, for what at best 
 is but an imperfect creature. And in this state of 
 fascination does the child Dante see the child Beatrice, 
 as a strange, glorious little vision from a childish 
 sphere quite above him ; treasuring up that vision, till 
 with his growth it expands and grows more beautiful 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 411 
 
 and noble, but none the less fascinating and full of 
 awfulness. When, therefore, the grave young poet, 
 full of the yearning for Paradise (but Paradise vaguer, 
 sweeter, less metaphysic and theological than the 
 Paradise of his manhood) ; as yet but a gracious, 
 learned youth, his terrible moral muscle still un- 
 developed by struggle, the noble and delicate dreamer 
 of Giotto's fresco, with the long, thin, almost womanish 
 face, marked only by dreamy eyes and lips, wandering 
 through this young Florence of the Middle Ages — 
 when, I say, he meets after long years, the noble and 
 gentle woman, serious and cheerful and candid ; and 
 is told that she is that same child who was the queei., 
 and goddess of his childish fancies ; then the vague 
 glory with which his soul is filled expands and en- 
 wraps the beloved figure, so familiar and yet so new. 
 And the blood retreats from his veins, and he trembles ; 
 and a vague god within him, half allegory, half reality, 
 cries out to him that a new life for him has begun 
 Beatrice has become the ideal ; Beatrice, the real 
 woman, has ceased to exist ; the Beatrice of his imagi- 
 nation only remains, a piece of his own soul embodied 
 in a gracious and beautiful reality, which he follows, 
 seeks, but never tries to approach. Of the real woman 
 he asks nothing ; no word throughout the " Vita 
 Nuova " of entreaty or complaint, no shadow of desire, 
 not a syllable of those reproaches of cruelty which 
 Petrarch is for ever showering upon Laura. He 
 desires nothing of Beatrice, and Beatrice cannot act 
 
412 EUPHORION. 
 
 wrongly ; she is perfection, and perfection makes him 
 who contemplates humble at once and proud, glorifying 
 his spirit. Once, indeed, he would wish that she might 
 listen to him ; he has reason to think that he has fallen 
 in her esteem, has seemed base and uncourteous in 
 her eyes, and he would explain. But he does not wish 
 to address her ; it never occurs to him that she can 
 ever feel in any way towards him ; it is enough that 
 he feels towards her. Let her go by and smile and 
 graciously salute her friends : the sight of her grave 
 and pure regalness, nay, rather divinity, of womanhood, 
 suffices for his joy ; nay, later the consciousness comes 
 upon him that it is sufficient to know of her existence 
 and of his love even without seeing her. And, as 
 must be the case in such ideal passion, where the 
 action is wholly in the mind of the lover, he is at first 
 ashamed, afraid ; he feels a terror lest his love, if 
 known to her, should excite her scorn ; a horror lest it 
 be misunderstood and befouled by the jests of those 
 around him, even of those same gentle women to 
 whom he afterwards addresses his praise of Beatrice. 
 He is afraid of exposing to the air of reality this ideal 
 flower of passion. But the moment comes when he 
 can hide it no longer ; and, behold, the passion flower 
 of his soul opens out more gloriously in the sunlight 
 of the world. He is proud of his passion, of his 
 worship ; he feels the dignity and glory of being the 
 priest of such a love. The women all round, the 
 beautiful, courteous women, of whom, only just now, 
 
MEDIAEVAL LOVE. 413 
 
 he was so dreadfully afraid, become his friends and 
 confidants ; they are quite astonished (half in love, 
 perhaps, with the young poet) at this strange way of 
 loving ; they sympathize, admire, are in love with his 
 love for Beatrice. And to them he speaks of her 
 rather than to men, for the womanhood which they 
 share with his lady consecrates them in his eyes ; 
 and they, without jealousy towards this ideal woman, 
 though perhaps not without longing for this ideal love, 
 listen as they might listen to some new and unac- 
 countably sweet music, touched and honoured, and 
 feeling towards Dante as towards some beautiful, half- 
 mad thing. He talks of her, sings of her, and is 
 happy ; the strangest thing in this intensely real 
 narrative of real love is this complete satisfaction of 
 the passion in its own existence, this complete absence 
 of all desire or hope. But this happiness is interrupted 
 by the sudden, terrible thought that one day all this 
 must cease ; the horrible, logical necessity coming 
 straight home to him, that one day she must die — 
 " Di necessita conviene che la gentilissima Beatrice 
 alcuna volta si muoia." There is nothing truer, more 
 intensely pathetic, in all literature, than this frightful 
 pang of evil, not real, but first imagined ; this frightful 
 nightmare vision of the end coming when reality is 
 still happy. Have we not all of us at one time felt 
 the horrible shudder of that sudden perception that 
 happiness must end ; that the beloved, the living, must 
 die ; that this thing the present, which we clasp tight 
 
414 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 with our arms, which throbs against our breast, will in 
 but few moments be gone, vanished, leaving us to 
 grasp mere phantom recollections ? Compared with 
 this the blow of the actual death of Beatrice is gentle. 
 And then, the truthfulness of his narration how, with 
 yearning, empty heart, hungering after those poor lost 
 realities of happiness, after that occasional glimpse of 
 his lady, that rare catching of her voice, that blessed 
 consciousness of her existence, he little by little lets 
 himself be consoled, cradled to sleep like a child which 
 has sobbed itself out, in the sympathy, the vague love, 
 of another — the Donna della Finestra — with whom he 
 speaks of Beatrice ; and the sudden, terrified, starting 
 up and' shaking off of any such base consolation, 
 the wrath at any such mental infidelity to the dead 
 one, the indignant impatience with his own weak- 
 ness, with his baseness in not understanding that 
 it is enough that Beatrice has lived and that he has 
 loved her, in not feeling that the glory and joy of the 
 ineffaceable past is sufficient for all present and future. 
 A revolution in himself which gradually merges in 
 that grave final resolve, that sudden seeing how 
 Beatrice can be glorified by him, that solemn, quiet, 
 brief determination not to say any more of her as yet ; 
 not till he can show her transfigured in Paradise. 
 " After this sonnet there appeared unto me a marvel- 
 lous vision, in which I beheld things that made me 
 propose unto myself to speak no more of this blessed 
 one, until the time when I might more worthily treat 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 415 
 
 of her. And that this may come to pass, I strive with 
 all my endeavour, even as she truly knows it. Thus, 
 if it should please Him, through whom all things do 
 live, that my life continue for several more years, I 
 hope to say of her such things as have never been said 
 of any lady. And then may it please Him, who is the 
 lord of all courtesy, that my soul shall go forth to see 
 the glory of its lady, that is to say, of that blessed 
 Beatrice, who gloriously looks up into the face of Him, 
 qui est per omnia scecula benedictus." 
 
 Thus ends the " Vita Nuova ; " a book, to find any 
 equivalent for whose reality and completeness of 
 passion, though it is passion for a woman whom the 
 poet scarcely knows and of whom he desires nothing, 
 we must go back to the merest fleshly love of Antiquity, 
 of Sappho or Catullus ; for modern times are too hesi- 
 tating and weak. So at least it seems ; but in fact, 
 if we only think over the matter, we shall find that in 
 no earthly love can we find this reality and complete- 
 ness : it is possible only in love like Dante's. For 
 there can be no unreality in it : it is a reality of the 
 imagination, and leaves, with all its mysticism and 
 idealism, no room for falsehood. Any other kind of 
 love may be set aside, silenced, by the activity of the 
 mind ; this love of Dante's constitutes that very activity. 
 And, after reading that last page which I have above 
 transcribed, as those closing Latin words echo through 
 our mind like the benediction from an altar, we feel 
 as if we were rising from our knees in some secret 
 
416 EUPHORION. 
 
 chapel, bright with tapers and dim with incense ; among 
 a crowd kneeling like ourselves ; yet solitary, conscious 
 of only the glory we have seen and tasted, of that love 
 qui est per omnia scecula benedictus. 
 
 III. 
 
 But is it right that we should feel thus ? Is it right that 
 love, containing within itself the potentialities of so 
 many things so sadly needed in this cold real world, 
 as patience, tenderness, devotion, and loving-kindness 
 — is it right that love should thus be carried away out 
 of ordinary life and enclosed, a sacred thing for con- 
 templation, in the shrine or chapel of an imaginary 
 Beatrice ? And, on the other hand, is it right that 
 into the holy places of our soul, the places where we 
 should come face to face with the unattainable ideal 
 of our own conduct that we may strive after something 
 nobler than mere present pleasure and profit — is it 
 right that into such holy places, destined but for an 
 abstract perfection, there should be placed a mere 
 half-unknown, vaguely seen woman ? In short, is not 
 this "Vita Nuova" a mere false ideal, one of those works 
 of art which, because they are beautiful, get worshipped 
 as holy ? 
 
 This question is a grave one, and worthy to make 
 us pause. The world is full of instances of the fatal 
 waste of feelings misapplied : of human affections, 
 human sympathy and compassion, so terribly neces- 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 417 
 
 sary to man, wasted in various religious systems, 
 upon Christ and God : of religious aspirations, con- 
 templation, worship, and absorption, necessary to the 
 improvement of the soul, wasted in various artistic or 
 poetic crazes upon mere pleasant works, or pleasant 
 fancies, of man ; wastefulness of emotions, wasteful- 
 ness of time, which constitute two-thirds of mankind's 
 history and explain the vast amount of evil in past 
 and present. The present question therefore becomes. 
 is not this " Vita Nuova " merely another instance of 
 this lamentable carrying off of precious feelings in 
 channels where they result no longer in fertilization, 
 but in corruption ? The Middle Ages, especially, in 
 its religion, its philosophy, nay, in that very love of 
 which I am writing, are one succession of such acts 
 of wastefulness. This question has come to me many 
 a time, and has left me in much doubt and trouble 
 But on reflection I am prepared to answer that such 
 doubts as these may safely be cast behind us, and that 
 we may trust that instinct which, whenever we lay 
 down the " Vita Nuova," tells us that to have felt and 
 loved this book is one of those spiritual gains in our 
 life which, come what may, can never be lost entirely. 
 The " Vita Nuova " represents the most exceptional 
 of exceptional moral and intellectual conditions. 
 Dante's love for Beatrice is, in great measure, to be 
 regarded as an extraordinary and exquisite work of 
 art, produced not by the volition of man, but by the 
 
 accidental combination of circumstances. It is no 
 
 28 
 
4i8 EUPHOniON. 
 
 more suited to ordinary life than would a golden and 
 ivory goddess of Phidias be suited to be the wife of a 
 mortal man. But it may not therefore be useless ; 
 nay, it may be of the highest utility. It may serve 
 that high utilitarian mission of all art, to correct 
 the real by the ideal, to mould the thing as it is in 
 the semblance of the thing as it should be. Herein, 
 let it be remembered, consists the value, the necessity 
 of the abstract and the ideal. In the long history 
 of evolution we have now reached the stage where 
 selection is no longer in the mere hands of uncon- 
 scious nature, but of conscious or half-conscious 
 man ; who makes himself, or is made by mankind, 
 according to not merely physical necessities, but to 
 the intellectual necessity of realizing the ideal, of 
 pursuing the object, of imitating the model, before 
 him. No man will ever find the living counterpart of 
 that chryselephantine goddess of the Greeks; ivory and 
 gold, nay, marble, fashioned by an artist, are one thing ; 
 flesh is another, and flesh fashioned by mere blind 
 accident. But the man who should have beheld that 
 Phidian goddess, who should have felt her full perfec- 
 tion, would not have been as easily satisfied as any 
 other with a mere commonplace living woman ; he 
 would have sought — and seeking, would have had more 
 likelihood of finding — the woman of flesh and blood 
 who nearest approached to that ivory and gold per- 
 fection. The case is similar with the " Vita Nuova." 
 No earthly affection, no natural love of man for 
 
MEDIMVAL LOVE. 419 
 
 woman, of an entire human being, body and soul, for 
 another entire human being, can ever be the counter- 
 part of this passion for Beatrice, the passion of a mere 
 mind for a mere mental ideal. But if the old lust- 
 fattened evil of the world is to diminish rather than 
 to increase, why then every love of man for woman 
 and of woman for man should tend, to the utmost 
 possibility, to resemble that love of the " Vita Nuova." 
 For mankind has gradually separated from brute kind 
 merely by the development of those possibilities of in- 
 tellectual and moral passion which the animal has not 
 got; an animal man will never cease to be, but a man 
 he can daily more and more become, until from the 
 obscene goat-legged and goat-faced creature which we 
 commonly see, he has turned into something like certain 
 antique fauns: a beautiful creature, not noticeably a 
 beast, a beast in only the smallest portion of his nature. 
 In order that this may come to pass — and its coming 
 to pass means, let us remember, the enormous increase 
 of happiness and diminution of misery upon earth — 
 it is necessary that day by day and year by year there 
 should enter into man's feelings, emotions, and habits, 
 into his whole life, a greater proportion of that which 
 is his own, and is not shared by the animal ; that his 
 actions, preferences, the great bulk of his conscious 
 existence, should be busied with things of the soul, 
 truth, good, and beauty, and not with things of the 
 body. Hence the love of such a gradually improving 
 and humanizing man for a gradually improving 
 
420 EUPHORION. 
 
 and humanizing woman, should become, as much as 
 is possible, a connection of the higher and more 
 human, rather than of the lower and more bestial, 
 portions of their nature ; it should tend, in its reci- 
 procal stimulation, to make the man more a man, the 
 woman more a woman, to make both less of the mere 
 male and female animals that they were. In brief, love 
 should increase, instead, like that which oftenest pro- 
 fanes love's name, of diminishing, the power of aspir- 
 ation, of self-direction, of self-restraint, which may 
 exist within us. Now to tend to this is to tend towards 
 the love of the " Vita Nuova ; " to tend towards the 
 love of the "Vita Nuova" is to tend towards this. 
 Say what you will of the irresistible force of original 
 constitution, it remains certain, and all history is 
 there as witness, that mankind — that is to say, the 
 only mankind in whom lies the initiative of good, 
 mankind which can judge and select — possesses the 
 faculty of feeling and acting in accordance with its 
 standard of feeling and action ; the faculty in great 
 measure of becoming that which it thinks desirable 
 to become. Now to have perceived the even imaginary 
 existence of such a passion as that of Dante for Bea- 
 trice, must be, for all who can perceive it, the first step 
 towards attempting to bring into reality a something 
 of that passion : the real passion conceived while 
 the remembrance of that ideal passion be still in the 
 mind will bear to it a certain resemblance, even as, 
 according to the ancients, the children born of mothers 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 421 
 
 whose rooms contained some image of Apollo or 
 Adonis would have in them a reflex, however faint, 
 of that beauty in whose presence they came into 
 existence. In short, it seems to me, that as the "Vita 
 Nuova " embodies the utmost ideal of absolutely 
 spiritual love, and as to spiritualize love must long 
 remain one of the chief moral necessities of the world, 
 there exists in this book a moral force, a moral value, 
 a power in its unearthly passion and purity, which, as 
 much as anything more deliberately unselfish, more 
 self-consciously ethical, we must acknowledge and 
 honour as holy. 
 
 As the love of him who has read and felt the " Vita 
 Nuova " cannot but strive towards a purer nature, so 
 also the love of which poets sang became also nobler 
 as the influence of the strange Tuscan school of 
 platonic lyrists spread throughout literature, bringing 
 to men the knowledge of a kind of love born of that 
 idealizing and worshipping passion of the Middle 
 Ages ; but of mediaeval love chastened by the manners 
 of stern democracy and passed through the sieve of 
 Christian mysticism and pagan philosophy. Of this in- 
 fluence of the "Vita Nuova" — for the "Vita Nuova" had 
 concentrated in itself all the intensest characteristics 
 of Dante's immediate predecessors and contemporaries, 
 causing them to become useless and forgotten — of 
 this influence of the "Vita Nuova,'' there is perhaps no 
 more striking example than that of the poet who, 
 constituted by nature to be the mere continuator of 
 
422 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 the romantically gallant tradition of the troubadours, 
 became, and hence his importance and glory, the 
 mediator between Dante and the centuries which 
 followed him ; the man who gave to mankind, inca- 
 pable as yet of appreciating or enduring the spiritual 
 essence of the "Vita Nuova," that self-same essence of 
 intellectual love in an immortal dilution. I speak, of 
 course, of Petrarch. His passion is neither ideal nor 
 strong. The man is in love, or has been in love, exist- 
 ing on a borderland of loving and not loving, with the 
 beautiful woman. His elegant, refined, half-knightly, 
 half-scholarly, and altogether courtly mind is delighted 
 with her ; with her curly yellow hair, her good red 
 and white beauty (we are never even told that Dante's 
 Beatrice is beautiful, yet how much lovelier is she not 
 than this Laura, descended from all the golden-haired 
 bright-eyed ladies of the troubadours 1), with her 
 manner, her amiability, her purity and dignity in this 
 ecclesiastical Babylon called Avignon. He maintains 
 a semi-artificial love ; frequenting her house, writing 
 sonnet after sonnet, rhetorical exercises, studies from 
 the antique and the Provengal, for the most part ; he, 
 who was born to be a mere troubadour like Ventadour 
 or Folquet, becomes, through the influence of Dante, 
 the type of the poet Abate, of the poetic cavaliere 
 servente ; a good, weak man with aspirations, who, 
 failing to get the better of Laura's virtue, doubtless 
 consoles himself elsewhere, but returns to an habitual 
 contemplation of it. He is, being constitutionally a 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 423 
 
 troubadour, an Italian priest turned partly Provengal, 
 vexed at her not becoming his mistress ; then (having 
 made up his mind, which was but little set upon her), 
 quite pleased at her refusal : it turns her into a kind 
 of Beatrice, and him, poor man, heaven help him ! into 
 a kind of Dante — a Dante for the use of the world at 
 large. He goes on visiting Laura, and writing to her 
 a sonnet regularly so many times a week, and the 
 best, carefully selected, we feel distinctly persuaded, at 
 regular intervals. It is a determined cultus, a sort of 
 half-real affectation, something equivalent to lighting 
 a lamp before a very well-painted and very conspicu- 
 ous shrine. All his humanities, all his Provengal lore 
 go into these poems — written for whom ? For her ? 
 Decidedly ; for she has no reason not to read the 
 effusions of this amiable, weak priestlet ; she feels 
 nothing for him. For her ; but doubtless also to be 
 handed round in society ; a new sonnet or canzone 
 by that charming and learned man, the Abate 
 Petrarch. There is considerable emptiness in all this : 
 he praises Laura's chastity, then grows impatient, then 
 praises her again ; adores her, calls her cruel, his 
 goddess, his joy, his torment ; he does not really want 
 her, but in the vacuity of his feeling, thinks he does ; 
 calls her alternately the flat, abusive, and eulogistic 
 names which mean nothing. He plays loud and soft 
 with this absence of desire ; he fiddle faddles in 
 descriptions of her, not passionate or burning, but 
 delicately undressed : he sees her (but with chaste 
 
424 EUPHORION. 
 
 eyes) in her bath ; he envies her veil, &c. ; he neither 
 violently intellectually embraces, nor humbly bows 
 down in imagination before her ; he trifles gracefully, 
 modestly, half-familiarly, with her finger tips, with the 
 locks of her hair, and so forth. Fancy Dante abusing 
 Beatrice ; fancy Dante talking of Beatrice in her 
 bath ; the mere idea of his indignation and shame 
 makes one shameful and indignant at the thought. 
 But this perfect Laura is no Beatrice, or only a half- 
 and-half sham one. She is no ideal figure, merely a 
 figure idealized ; this is no imaginative passion, merely 
 an unreal one. Compare, for instance, the suggestion 
 of Laura's possible death with the suggestion of the 
 possible death of Beatrice. Petrarch does not love 
 sufficiently to guess what such a loss would be. Then 
 Laura does die. Here Petrarch rises. The severing 
 of the dear old habits, the absence of the sweet reality, 
 the terrible sense that all is over. Death, the great 
 poetizer and giver of love philters, all this makes him 
 love Laura as he never loved her before. The poor 
 weak creature, who cannot, like a troubadour, go seek 
 a new mistress when the old one fails him, feels 
 dreadfully alone, the world dreadfully dreary around 
 him ; he sits down and cries, and his crying is 
 genuine, making the tears come also into our eyes. 
 And Laura, as she becomes a more distant ideal, 
 becomes nobler, though noble with only a faint earthly 
 graciousness not comparable to the glory of the living 
 Beatrice. And, as he goes on, growing older and 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 425 
 
 weaker and more desolate, the thought of a glorified 
 Laura (as all are glorified, even in the eyes of the 
 weakest, by death) begins to haunt him as Dante 
 was haunted by the thought of Beatrice alive. Yet, 
 even at this very time, come doubts of the lawfulness 
 of having thus adored (or thought he had adored) a 
 mortal woman ; he does not know whether all this 
 may not have been vanity and folly ; he tries to turn 
 his thoughts away from Laura and up to God. Per- 
 haps he may be called on to account for having 
 given too much of his life to a mere earthly love 
 Then, again, Laura reappears beautified in his 
 memory, and is again tremblingly half-conjured away. 
 He is weak, and sad, and helpless, and alone ; and his 
 heart is empty ; he knows not what to think nor how 
 to feel ; he sobs, and we cry with him. Nowhere 
 could there be found a stranger contrast than this 
 nostalgic craving after the dead Laura, vacillating and 
 troubled by fear of sin and doubt of unworthiness of 
 object, with that solemn ending of the " Vita Nuova," 
 where the name of Beatrice is pronounced for the last 
 time before it be glorified in Paradise, where Dante 
 devotes his life to becoming worthy of saying " such 
 words as have never been said of any lady." The 
 ideal woman is one and unchangeable in glory, and 
 unchangeable is the passion of her lover ; but of this 
 sweet dead Laura, whose purity and beauty and 
 cruelty he had sung, without a tremor of self-un- 
 worthiness all her life, of her the poor weak Petrarch 
 
426 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 begins to doubt, of her and her worthiness of all this 
 love ; and when ? when she is dead and himself is 
 dying. 
 
 Such a man is Petrarch ; and yet, by the irresistible 
 purifying and elevating power of the " Vita Nuova," 
 this man came to write not other albas and serenas, 
 not other love-songs to be added to the love-songs of 
 Provence, but those sonnets and canzoni which for 
 four centuries taught the world, too coarse as yet to 
 receive Dante's passion at first hand, a nobler and more 
 spiritual love. After Petrarch a gradual change takes 
 place in the poetic conception of love : except in 
 learned revivalisms or in loose buffooneries, the mere 
 fleshly love of Antiquity disappears out of literature; 
 and equally so, though by a slower process of gradual 
 transformation, vanishes also the adoring, but undis- 
 guisedly adulterous love of the troubadours and min- 
 nesingers. Into the love instincts of mankind have 
 been mingled, however much diluted, some drops of 
 the more spiritual passion of Dante. The puella of 
 Antiquity, the noble dame of feudal days, is succeeded 
 in Latin countries, in Italy, and France, and Spain 
 and Portugal, by the gloriosa donna imitated from 
 Petrarch, and imitated by Petrarch from Dante ; a long 
 line of shadowy figures, veiled in the veil of Madonna 
 Laura, ladies beloved of Lorenzo and Michael Angelo, 
 of Ariosto, and Tasso, and Camoens, and Cervantes, 
 passes through the world ; nay, even the sprightly 
 mistress of Ronsard, half-bred pagan and troubadour, 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 427 
 
 has airs of dignity and mystery which make us ahnost 
 think that in this dainty coquettish French body, of 
 Marie or Hd^ne or Cassandrette, there really may be 
 an immortal soul. But with the Renaissance — that 
 movement half of mediaeval democratic progress, and 
 half of antique revivalism, and to which in reality 
 belongs not merely Petrarch, but Dante, and every 
 one of the Tuscan poets, Guinicelli, Lapo Gianni, 
 Cavalcanti, who broke with the feudal poetry of 
 Provence and Sicily — with the Renaissance, or rather 
 with its long-drawn-out end, comes the close, for the 
 moment, of the really creative activity of the Latin 
 peoples in the domain of poetry. All the things for 
 two centuries which Italy and France and Spain and 
 Portugal (which we must remember for the sake of 
 Camoens) continue to produce, are but developments 
 of parts left untouched; or refinements of extreme 
 detail, as in the case, particularly, of the French poets 
 of the sixteenth century ; but poetry receives from these 
 races nothing new or vital, no fresh ideal or fruitful 
 marriage of ideals. And here begins, uniting in itself 
 all the scattered and long-dormant powers of Northern 
 poetry, the great and unexpected action of England. 
 It had slept through the singing period of the Middle 
 Ages, and was awakened, not by Germany or Provence, 
 but by Italy : Boccaccio and Petrarch spoke, and, as 
 through dreams, England in Chaucer's voice, made 
 answer. Again, when the Renaissance had drawn to a 
 close, far on in the sixteenth century, English poetry was 
 
428 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 reawakened ; and again by Italy. This time it was 
 completely wakened, and arose and slept no more. 
 And one of the great and fruitful things achieved by 
 English poetry in this its final awakening was to give 
 to the world the new, the modern, perhaps the defini- 
 tive, the final ideal of love. England drank a deep 
 draught — how deep we see from Sidney's and Spenser's 
 sonnets — of Petrarch ; and in this pleasant dilution, 
 tasted and felttheburning essence of the "VitaNuova;" 
 for though Dante remained as the poet, the poet of 
 heaven and hell, this happy half-and-half Petrarch had 
 for full two centuries completely driven into oblivion 
 the young Dante who had loved Beatrice. For 
 England, for this magnificent and marvellous out- 
 burst of all the manifold poetic energy stored up and 
 quintupled during that long period of inertness, there 
 could however be no foreign imported ideal of love; 
 there was no possibility of a new series of spectral 
 Lauras, shadows projected by a shadow. Already, 
 long ago, at the first call of Petrarch, Chaucer, by the 
 side of the merely medisval love types — of brutish 
 lust and doglike devotion — of the Wife of Bath and of 
 Griseldis, had rough-sketched a kind of modern love, 
 the love which is to become that of Romeo and 
 Hamlet, in his story of Palemon and Arcite. Among 
 the poetic material which existed in England at the 
 close of the sixteenth century was the old, long- 
 neglected, domestic love, quiet, undemonstrative, es- 
 sentially unsinging, of the early Northern (as indeed 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 429 
 
 also of the Greek and Hindoo) epics ; a domestic love 
 which, in a social condition more closely resembling 
 our own than any other, even than that of the Italian 
 democracies, which had preceded it, among a people 
 who permitted a woman to choose her own husband, 
 and forbade a man wooing another man's wife, had 
 already, in ballads and folk poetry, begun a faint 
 twitter of song. To this love of the man and the woman 
 who hope to marry, strong and tender, but still (as 
 Coleridge remarked of several of the lesser Elizabethan 
 playwrights) most outspokenly carnal, was united by 
 the pure spirit of Spenser, by the unerring genius of 
 Shakespeare, that vivifying drop of burning, spiritual 
 love taken from out of the " Vita Nuova," which had 
 floated, like some sovereign essential oil, on the top 
 of Petrarch's rose-water. Henceforward the world 
 possesses a new kind of love : the love of Romeo, of 
 Hamlet, of Bassanio, of Viola, and of Juliet ; the love 
 of the love poems of Shelley, of Tennyson, of Brown- 
 ing and Browning's wife. A love whose blindness, 
 exaggeration of passion, all that might have made it 
 foolish and impracticable, leads no longer to folly and 
 sin, but to an intenser activity of mankind's imagination 
 of the good and beautiful, to a momentary realization 
 in our fancy of all our vague dreams of perfection ; a 
 love which, though it may cool down imperceptibly 
 and pale in its intenseness, like the sunrise fires into 
 a serene sky, has left some glory round the head of 
 the wife, some glory in the heart of the husband, has 
 
430 E UP HO RIO N. 
 
 been, however fleeting, a vision of beauty which has 
 made beauty more real. And all this owing to the cre- 
 ation, the storing up, the purification by the Platonic 
 poets of Tuscany, of that strange and seemingly so 
 artificial and unreal thing, mediaeval love ; the very 
 forms and themes of whose poetry, the serena and 
 the alba, which had been indignantly put aside by th? 
 early Italian lyrists, being unconsciously revived, and 
 purified and consecrated in the two loveliest love poems 
 of Elizabethan poetry : the serena, the evening song 
 of impatient expectation, in Spenser's Epithalamium ; 
 the alba, the dawn song of hurried parting, in the 
 balcony scene of " Romeo and Juliet." 
 
 Let us recapitulate. The feudal Middle Ages gave 
 to mankind a more refined and spiritual love, a love 
 all chivalry, fidelity, and adoration, but a love steeped 
 in the poison of adultery ; and to save the pure and 
 noble portions of this medieval love became the 
 mission of the Tuscan poets of that strange school of 
 Platonic love which in its very loveliness may some- 
 times seem so unnatural and sterile. For, by reducing 
 this mediaeval love to a mere intellectual passion, 
 seeking in woman merely a self-made embodiment 
 of cravings after perfection, they cleansed away that 
 deep stain of adultery ; they quadrupled the intensity 
 of the ideal element ; they distilled the very essential 
 spirit of poetic passion, of which but a few drops, 
 even as diluted by Petrarch, precipitated, when 
 mingled with the earthly passion of future poets, to 
 
MEDIEVAL LOVE. 431 
 
 the bottom, no longer to be seen or tasted, all baser 
 ingredients. 
 
 And, while the poems of minnesingers and trouba- 
 dours have ceased to appeal to us, and remain merely 
 for their charm of verse and of graceful conceit; the 
 poetry written by the Italia.nsof the thirteenth century 
 for women, whose love was but an imaginative fervour, 
 remains concentrated in the "Vita Nuova;" and will 
 remain for all time the sovereign purifier to which the 
 world must have recourse whenever that precipitate of 
 baser instincts, which thickened like slime the love 
 poetry of Antiquity, shall rise once more and sully 
 the purity of the love poetry of to-day. 
 
EPILOGUE. 
 
 29 
 
EPILOGUE. 
 
 More than a year has elapsed since the moment 
 when, fancying that this series of studies must be 
 well-nigh complete, I attempted to explain in an 
 introductory chapter what the nature of this book of 
 mine is, or would fain be. I had hoped that each of 
 these studies would complete its companions ; and 
 that, without need for explicit explanation, my whole 
 idea would have become more plain to others than it 
 was at that time even to myself But instead, it has 
 become obvious that the more carefully I had sought 
 to reduce each question to unity, the more that 
 question subdivided and connected itself with other 
 questions ; and that, with the solution of each separate 
 problem, had arisen a new set of problems which 
 infinitely complicated the main lessons to be deduced 
 from a study of that many-sided civilization to which, 
 remembering the brilliant and mysterious offspring of 
 Faustus and Helena, I have given the name of 
 
436 EUPHORION. 
 
 Euphorion. Hence, as it seems, the necessity for a 
 few further words of explanation. 
 
 In those introductory pages written some fifteen 
 months ago, I tried to bring home to the reader a 
 sense which has haunted me throughout the writing 
 of this volume ; namely, that instead of having delibe- 
 rately made up my mind to study the Renaissance, 
 as one makes up one's mind to visit Greece or 
 Egypt or the Holy Land ; I have, on the contrary, 
 quite accidentally and unconsciously, found myself 
 wandering about in spirit among the monuments of 
 this particular historic region, even as I might wander 
 about in the streets of Siena where I wrote last year, 
 of Florence whence I write at present ; wandering 
 about among these things, and little by little feeling 
 a particular interest in one, then in another, according 
 as each happened to catch my fancy or to recall some 
 already known thing. Now these, which for want of 
 a better word I have just called monuments, and just 
 now, less clearly, but also less foolishly, merely things 
 — these things were in reality not merely individual 
 and really existing buildings, books, pictures, or statues, 
 individual and really registered men, women, and 
 events ; they were the mental conceptions which I had 
 extracted out of these realities ; the intellectual types 
 made up (as the mediaeval symbols of justice are 
 made up of the visible paraphernalia, robe, scales and 
 sword, for judging and weighing and punishing) of 
 the impressions left on the mind by all those buildings 
 
EPILOGUE. 437 
 
 or books, or pictures, or statues, or men, women, and 
 events. They were not the iniquities of this particular 
 despot nor the scandalous sayings of that particular 
 humanist, but the general moral chaos of the Italian 
 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ; not the poem of 
 Pulci, of Boiardo, of Ariosto in especial, but a vast 
 imaginary poem made up of them all ; not the medi- 
 aeval saints of Angelico and the pagan demi-gods of 
 Michael Angelo, but the two tremendous abstractions : 
 the spirit of Mediaevalism in art, and the spirit of 
 Antiquity ; the interest in the distressed soul, and the 
 interest in the flourishing body. And, as my thoughts 
 have gone back to Antiquity and onwards to our own 
 times, their starting-point has nevertheless been the 
 Tuscan art of the fifteenth century, their nucleus 
 some notes on busts by Benedetto da Maiano and 
 portraits by Raphael.. 
 
 My dramatis personcz have been modes of feeling 
 and forms of art. I have tried to explain the life and 
 character, not of any man or woman, but of the moral 
 scepticism of Italy, of the tragic spirit of our Eliza- 
 bethan dramatists ; I have tried to write the biography 
 of the romance poetry of the Middle Ages, of the 
 realism of the great portrait painters and sculptors of 
 the Renaissance. But these, my dramatis personce, 
 are, let me repeat it, abstractions : they exist only in 
 my mind and in the minds of those who think like 
 myself. Hence, like all abstractions, they represent 
 the essence of a question, but not its completeness, its 
 
438 EUPHORION. 
 
 many-sidedness as we may see it in reality. Hence 
 it is that I have frequently passed over exceptions to 
 the rule which I was stating, because the explanation 
 of these exceptions would have involved the formu- 
 lating of a number of apparently irrelevant propo- 
 sitions ; so that any one who please may accuse me 
 of inexactness ; and, to give an instance, cover the 
 margins of my essay on Mediaeval Love with a whole 
 list of virtuous love stories of the Middle Ages ; or 
 else ferret out of Raynouard and Von der Hagen a 
 dozen pages of mediaeval poems in praise of rustic 
 life. These objections will be perfectly correct, and 
 (so far as my knowledge permitted me) I might have 
 puzzled the reader with them myself ; but it remains 
 none the less certain that, in the main, mediaeval love 
 was not virtuous, and mediaeval peasantry not admired 
 by poets ; and none the less certain, I think, also, that 
 in describing the characteristics and origin of an 
 abstract thing, such as mediaeval love, or mediaeval 
 feeling towards the country and country folk, it was 
 my business to state the rule and let alone the 
 exceptions. 
 
 There is another matter which gives me far greater 
 concern. In creating and dealing with an abstraction, 
 one is frequently forced, if I may use the expression, 
 to cut a subject in two, to bring one of its sides into 
 full light and leave the other in darkness ; nay, to 
 speak harshly of one side of an art or of a man with- 
 out being able to speak admiringly of another side. 
 
EPILOGUE. 439 
 
 This one-sidedness, this apparent injustice of judg- 
 ment, has in some cases been remedied by the fact 
 that I have treated in one study those things which I 
 was forced to omit in another study ; as, in two sepa- 
 rate essays, I have pointed out first the extreme in- 
 feriority of Renaissance sculpture to the sculpture of 
 Antiquity with regard to absolute beauty of form ; and 
 then the immeasurable superiorityof Renaissance over 
 antique sculpture in the matter of that beauty and 
 interest dependent upon mere arrangement and hand- 
 ling, wherein lies the beauty-creating power of realistic 
 schools. But most often I have shown one side, not 
 merely of an artist or an art, but of my own feeling> 
 without showing the other ; and in one case this in- 
 evitable one-sidedness has weighed upon me almost 
 like personal guilt, and has almost made me postpone 
 the publication of this book to the Greek Kalends, in 
 hopes of being able to explain and to atone. I am 
 alluding to Fra Angelico. I spoke of him in a study 
 of the progress of mere beautiful form, the naked 
 human form moreover, in the art of the Renaissance ; 
 I looked at his work with my mind full of the un- 
 approachable superiority of antique form ; I judged 
 and condemned the artist with reference to that superb 
 movement towards nature and form and bodily beauty 
 which was the universal movement of the fifteenth 
 century; I lost patience with this saint because he 
 would not turn pagan ; I pushed aside, because he did 
 not seek for a classic Olympus, his exquisite dreams 
 
440 EUPHORION. 
 
 of a mediseval Paradise. I had taken partj as its 
 chronicler, with the art which seeks mere plastic per- 
 fection, the art to which Angelico said, "Retro me 
 Sathana." It was my intention to close even this 
 volume with a study of the poetical conception of 
 early Renaissance painting, of that strange kind of 
 painting in which a thing but imperfect in itself, a 
 mere symbol of lovely ideas, brings home to our mind, 
 with a rush of associations, a sense of beauty and 
 wonder greater perhaps than any which we receive 
 from the sober reality of perfect form. Again, there 
 are the German masters — the great engravers, Kra- 
 nach, Altdorfer, Aldegrever, especially ; of whom, for 
 their absolute pleasure in ugly women, for their filthy 
 delight in horrors, I have said ah immense amount of 
 ill ; and of whom, for their wonderful intuition of 
 dramatic situation, their instinct of the poetry of 
 common things, and their magnificently imaginative 
 rendering of landscape, I hope some day to say an 
 equal amount of good. 
 
 I have spoken of the lesson which may be derived 
 from studies even as humble as these studies of mine ; 
 since, in my opinion, we cannot treat history as a mere 
 art — though history alone can gives us now-a-days 
 tragedy which has ceased to exist on our stage, and 
 wonder which has ceased to exist in our poetry — we 
 cannot seek in it mere selfish enjoyment of imagina- 
 tion and emotion, without doing our soul the great 
 injury of cheating it of some of those great indigna- 
 
EPILOGUE. 441 
 
 tions, some of those great lessons which make it 
 stronger and more supple in the practical affairs of 
 life. Each of these studies of mine, brings its own 
 lesson, artistic or ethical, important or unimportant ; 
 its lesson of seeking certainty in our moral opinions, 
 beauty in all and whatever our forms of art, spirituality 
 in our love. But besides these I seem to perceive 
 another deduction, an historical fact with a practical 
 application ; to see it as the result not merely perhaps 
 of the studies of which this book is the fruit, but of 
 those further studies, of the subtler sides of Mediaeval 
 and Renaissance life and art which at present occupy 
 my mind and may some day add another series 
 of essays to this : a lesson still vague to myself, but 
 which, satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily, I shall never- 
 theless attempt to explain ; if indeed it requires to be 
 brought home to the reader. 
 
 Of the few forms of feeling and imagination which 
 I have treated — things so different from one another 
 as the feeling for nature and the chivalric poem, as 
 modern art, with its idealism and realisrp, and modern 
 love — of these forms, emotional and artistic, which 
 Antiquity did not know, or knew but little, the 
 reader may have observed that I have almost in- 
 variably traced the origin deep into that fruitful 
 cosmopolitan chaos, due to the mingling of all that 
 was still unused of the remains of Antiquity with 
 all that was untouched of the intellectual and moral 
 riches of the barbarous nations, to which we give 
 
442 EUPHORION. 
 
 the name of Middle Ages ; and that I have, as in- 
 variably, followed the development of these precious 
 forms, and their definitive efflorescence and fruit- 
 bearing, into that particular country where certain 
 mediaeval conditions had ceased to exist, namely Italy. 
 In other words, it has seemed to me that the things 
 which I have studied were originally produced during 
 the Middle Ages, and consequently in the mediaeval 
 countries, France, Germany, Provence ; but did not 
 attain maturity except in that portion of the Middle 
 Ages which is mediaeval no longer, but already more 
 than half modern, the Renaissance, which began in 
 Italy not with the establishment of despotisms and 
 the coming of Greek humanists, but with the indepen- 
 dence of the free towns and with the revival of Roman 
 tradition. 
 
 Why so ? Because, it appears to me, after watch- 
 ing the lines of my thought converging to this point, 
 because, with a few exceptions, the Middle Ages were 
 rich in great beginnings (indeed a good half of all 
 that makes up our present civilization seems to issue 
 from them) : but they were poor in complete achieve- 
 ments ; full of the seeds of modern institutions, arts, 
 thoughts, and feelings, they yet show us but rarely 
 the complete growth of any one of them : a fruitful 
 Nile flood, but which must cease to drown and to 
 wash away, which must subside before the germs 
 that it has brought can shoot forth and mature. 
 The sense of this comes home to me most powerfully 
 
EPILOGUE. i,i,i 
 
 whenever I think of mediaeval poetry and mediaeval 
 painting. 
 
 The songs of the troubadours and minnesingers, 
 what are they to our feelings? They are pleasant, 
 even occasionally beautiful, but they are empty, 
 lamentably empty, charming arrangements of words ; 
 poetry which fills our mind or touches our heart 
 comes only with the Tuscan lyrists of the thirteenth 
 century. The same applies to mediaeval narrative- 
 verse : it is, with one or two exceptions or half ex- 
 ceptions, such as "The Chanson de Roland" and 
 Gottfried's "Tristan und Isolde," decidedly weari- 
 some ; a thing to study, but scarcely a thing to 
 delight in. I do not mean to say that the old legends 
 of Wales and Scandinavia, subsequently embodied by 
 the French and German poets of the Middle Ages, 
 are without imaginative or emotional interest ; nothing 
 can be further from my thoughts. The Nibelung 
 story possesses, both in the Norse and in the Middle 
 High German version, a tragic fascination ; and a 
 quaint fairy-tale interest, every now and then rising 
 to the charm of a Decameronian novella, is possessed 
 by many of the Keltic tales, whether briefly told in 
 the Mabinogion or lengthily detailed by Chrestien de 
 Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach. But all this 
 is the interest of the mere story, and you would 
 enjoy it almost as much if that story were related not 
 by a poet but by a peasant ; it is the fascination of 
 the mere theme, with the added fascination of our 
 
444 EUPHORION. 
 
 own unconscious filling up and colouring of details. 
 And the poem itself, whence we extract this theme, 
 remains, for the most part, uninteresting. The figures 
 are vague, almost shapeless and colourless ; they have 
 no well-understood mental and moral anatomy, so 
 that when they speak and act the writer seems to 
 have no clear conception of the motives or tempers 
 which make them do so ; even as in a child's pictures, 
 the horses gallop, the men run, the houses stand, but 
 without any indication of the muscles which move 
 the horse, of the muscles which hold up the man, of 
 the solid ground upon which is built, nay rather, 
 into which is planted, the house. Hatred of Hagen, 
 devotion of Riidger, passionate piety of Parzival — all 
 these are things of which we do not particularly see 
 the how or why ; we do not follow the reasons, in 
 event or character, which make these men sacrifice 
 themselves or others, weep, storm, and so forth ; nay, 
 even when these reasons are clear from the circum- 
 stances, we are not shown the action of the mechanism, 
 we do not see how Brunhilt is wroth, how Chriemhilt 
 is revengeful, how Herzeloid is devoted to Parzival. 
 There is, in the vast majority of this mediaeval poetry, 
 no clear conception of the construction and functions 
 of people's character, and hence no conception either 
 of those actions and reactions of various moral organs 
 which, after all, are at the bottom of the events related. 
 Herein lies the difference between the forms of the 
 Middle Ages and those of Antiquity ; for how per- 
 
EPILOGUE. 44S 
 
 fectly felt, understood, is not every feeling and every 
 action of the Homeric heroes, how perfectly indicated ! 
 We can see the manner and reason of the conflict 
 of Achilles and Agamemnon, of the behaviour of the 
 returned Odysseus, as clearly as we see the manner 
 and reason of the movements of the fighting Centaurs 
 and Lapiths, or the Amazons ; nay, even the minute 
 mood of comparatively unimportant figures, as Helen, 
 Briseis, and Nausicaa, is indicated in its moral anatomy 
 and attitude as distinctly as is the manner in which 
 the maidens of the Parthenon frieze slowly restrain 
 their steps, the boys curb their steeds, or the old men 
 balance their oil jars. Nothing of this in medieval 
 literature, except perhaps in " Flamenca " and " Tris- 
 tan," where the motive of action, mere imaginative 
 desire, is all-permeating and explains everything. 
 These people clearly had no interest, no perception, 
 connected with character : a valorous woman, a 
 chivalrous knight, an insolent steward, a jealous 
 husband, a faithful retainer ; things recognized only 
 in outline, made to speak and act only according to 
 a fixed tradition, without knowledge of the internal 
 mechanism of motive; these sufficed. Hence it is 
 that mediaeval poetry is always like mediaeval paint- 
 ing (for painting continued to be mediaeval with 
 Giotto's pupils long after poetry had ceased to be 
 medizeval with Dante and his school), where the 
 Virgin sits and holds the child without body where- 
 with to sit or arms wherewith to hold ; where angels 
 
446 EUPHORION. 
 
 flutter forward and kneel in conventional greeting, with 
 obviously no bended knees beneath their robes, nay, 
 with knees, waist, armpits, all anywhere ; where men 
 ride upon horses without flat to their back ; where 
 processions of the blessed come forth, guided by 
 fiddling seraphs, vague, faint faces, sweet or grand, 
 heads which might wave like pieces of cut-out paper 
 upon their necks, arms and legs here and there, not 
 clearly belonging to any one ; creatures marching, 
 soaring, flying, singing, fiddling, without a bone or a 
 muscle wherewith to do it all. And meanwhile, in this 
 mediaeval poetry, as in this mediaeval painting, there 
 are yards and yards of elaborate preciousness : all the 
 embossed velvets, all the white-and-gold-shot brocades, 
 all the silks and satins, and jewel-embroidered stuffs 
 of the universe cast stiffly about these phantom men 
 and women, these phantom horses and horsemen. It 
 is not until we turn to Italy, and to the Northern 
 man, Chaucer, entirely under Italian influence, that 
 we obtain an approach to the antique clearness of 
 perception and comprehension ; that we obtain not 
 only in Dante something akin to the muscularities 
 of Signorelli and Michael Angelo ; but in Boccaccio 
 and Chaucer, in Cavalca and Petrarch, the equivalent 
 of the well-understood movement, the well-indicated 
 situation of the simple, realistic or poetic, sketches of 
 Filippino and Botticelli. 
 
 This, you will say, is a mere impression ; it is no 
 explanation, still less such an explanation as may 
 
EPILOGUE. 447 
 
 afford a lesson. Not so. This strange inconclusive- 
 ness in all mediaeval things, till the moment comes 
 when they cease to be mediaeval ; this richness in 
 germs and poverty in mature fruit, cannot be without 
 its reason. And this reason, to my mind, lies in one 
 word, the most terrible word of any, since it means 
 suffering and hopelessness ; a word which has haunted 
 my mind ever since I have looked into mediaeval 
 things : the word Wastefulness. Wastefulness ; the 
 frightful characteristic of times at once so rich and 
 so poor, the explanation of the long starvation and 
 sickness that mankind, that all mankind's concerns 
 — art, poetry, science, life — endured while the very 
 things which would have fed and revived and nurtured, 
 existed close at hand, and in profusion. Wastefulness, 
 in this great period of confusion, of the most precious 
 things that we possess : time, thought, and feeling 
 refused to the realities of the world, and lavished on 
 the figments of the imagination. Why this vagueness, 
 this imperfection in all mediaeval representations of 
 life? Because even as men's eyes were withdrawn, 
 by the temporal institutions of those days, from the 
 sight of the fields and meadows which were left to 
 the blind and dumb thing called serf; so also the 
 thoughts of mankind, its sympathy and intentions, 
 were withdrawn from the mere earthly souls, the 
 mere earthly wrongs and woes of men by the great 
 self-organized institution of mediaeval religion. Pity 
 of the body of Christ held in bondage by the Infidel ; 
 love of God ; study of the unknowable things of 
 
448 EUPHORION. 
 
 Heaven : such are the noblest employments of the 
 medieval soul ; how much of pity, of love, may 
 remain for man ; how much of study for the know- 
 able ? To Wastefulness like this — to misapplication 
 of mind ending almost in palsy — must we ascribe, I 
 think, the strange sterility of such mediaeval art as 
 deals not merely with pattern, but with the reality 
 of man's body and soul. And we might be thankful, 
 if, during our wanderings among mediaeval things, 
 we had seen the starving of only art and artistic 
 instincts ; but the soul of man has lain starving also ; 
 starving for the knowledge which was sought only of 
 Divine things, starving for the love which was given 
 only to God. 
 
 The explanation, therefore, and its lesson, may thus 
 be summed up in the one word Wastefulness. And 
 the fruitfulness of the Renaissance, all that it has 
 given to us of art, of thought, of feeling (for the " Vita 
 Nuova " is its fruit), is due, as it seems to me, to the 
 fact that the Renaissance is simply the condition of 
 civilization when, thanks to the civil liberty and the 
 spiritual liberty inherited from Rome and inherited 
 from Greece, man's energies of thought and feeling 
 were withdrawn from the unknowable to the know- 
 able, from Heaven to Earth ; and were devoted to 
 the developing of those marvellous new things which 
 Antiquity had not known, and which had lain neg 
 lected and wasted during the Middle Ages. 
 
 FhOKENCE, January, 1884. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 30 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 I HAVK seen the pictures and statues and towns which I have 
 described, and I have read the books of which I attempt to give 
 an impression ; but here my original research, if such it may be 
 called, comes to an end. I have trusted only to myself for my 
 impressions ; but I have taken from others everything that may 
 be called historical fact, as distinguished from the history of this 
 or that form of thought or of art which I have tried to elaborate. 
 My references are therefore only to standard historical works, 
 and to such editions of poets and prose writers as have come 
 into my hands. How much I am endebted to the genius of 
 Michelet ; nay, rather, how much I am, however unimportant, 
 the thing made by him, every one will see and judge. With 
 regard to positive information I must express my great obliga- 
 tions to the works of Jacob Burckhardt, of Prof. Villari, and of 
 Mr. J. A. Symonds in everything that concerns the pohtical 
 history and social condition of the Renaissance. Mr. Symonds' 
 name I Have placed last, although this is by no means the order 
 of importance in which the three writers appear in my mind, 
 because vanity compels me to state that I have deprived myself 
 of the pleasure and profit of reading his volumes on Italiac 
 
452 EUPHORION. 
 
 literature, from a fear that finding myself doubtless forestalled 
 by him in various appreciations, I might deprive my essays of 
 what I feel to be their principal merit, namely, the spontaneity 
 and wholeness of personal impression. With regard to philo- 
 logical lore, I may refer, among a number of other works, 
 to M. Gaston Paris' work on the Cycle of Charlemagne, M. 
 de la Villemarqu^'s companion volume on Keltic romances, and 
 Professor Rajna's " Fonti dell' Ariosto." My knowledge of trouba- 
 dours, trouvferes, and minnesingers is obtained mainly from the 
 great collections of Raynouard, Wackemagel, Matzner, Bartsch, 
 and Von der Hagen, and from Bartsch's and Simrock's editions 
 and versions of Gottfried von Strassburg, Hartmann von Aue, 
 and Wolfram von Eschenbach. " Flamenca " I have read in 
 Professor Paul Meyer's beautiful edition, text and translation ; 
 " Aucassin et Nicolette," in an edition published, if I remember 
 rightly, by Janet ; and also in a very happy translation con- 
 tained in Delvau's huge collection of " Romans de Chevalerie," 
 which contains, unfortunately sometimes garbled, as many of 
 the prose stories of the Carolingian and Amadis cycle as I, at 
 all events, could endure to read. For the early Italian poets, 
 excepting Carducci's " Cino da Pistoia," my references are the 
 same as those in Rossetti's " Dante and his Cycle," especially the 
 " Rime Antiche " and the " Poeti del Primo Secolo." Professor 
 d'Ancona's pleasant volume has greatly helped me in the history 
 of the transformation of the courtly poetry of the early Middle 
 Ages into the folk poetry of Tuscany. I owe a good deal also, 
 with regard to this same essay " The Outdoor Poetry," to Ros- 
 koffs famous " Geschichte des Teufels," and to Signer Novati's 
 recently published " Carmina Medii jEvi." The Italian no- 
 vellieri, Bandello, Cinthio, and their set, I have used in the 
 Florentine editions of 1820 or 1825 ; Masuccio edited by De 
 Sanctis. For the essay on the Italian Renaissance on the 
 Elizabethan Stage, I have had recourse, chiefly, to the fifteenth 
 century chronicles in the " Archivio Storico Italiano," and to 
 
APPENDIX. 453 
 
 Dyce's Webster, Hartley Coleridge's Massinger and Ford, 
 Churton Collins' Cyril Tourneur, and J. O. Halliwell's 
 Marston. 
 
 The essays on art have naturally profited by the now inevitable 
 Crowe and Cavalcaselle ; but in this part of my work, while 
 I have relied very little on books, I have received more than 
 the equivalent of the information to be obtained from any writers 
 in the suggestions and explanations of my friend Mr. T. Nelson 
 MacLean, who has made it possible for a mere creature of pens 
 and ink to follow the differences of technique of the sculptors 
 and medallists of the fifteenth century ; a word of thanks also, 
 for various such suggestions as can come only from a painter, 
 to my old friend Mr. John S. Sargent, of Paris. 
 
 I must conclude these acknowledgments by thanking the 
 Editors of the Contetn^orary, British Quarterly, and National 
 Reviews, and of the Cornhill Magazine, for permission to re- 
 publish such of the essays or fragments of essays as have 
 already appeared in those periodicals. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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 ASHORTHISTORYOFTHE NETHER- 
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 Oratory. The following list of speakers will give some idea of the 
 extensive scope of these three volumes. 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 VOL. I. Sir John Eliot.— John Pym.— Lord Chatham.— Lord 
 
 Mansfield.— Edmund Burke. VOL. IL William Pitt.-Charles 
 
 James Fct,— Sir James Mackintosh, -Lord Erskine. VOL. 
 
 in. George Canning. — Lord Macaulay. — Richard Cobden. — 
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 REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN 
 
 ORATIONS, to Illustrate American Political 
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 tion, these orations, arranged chronologically, and carefully 
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 Life of the United States from the Colonial period to the present 
 time. 
 *' By way of conclusion, we venture once more to strongly recommend 
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 and will help them, to better understand a great and friendly nation." — 
 Sntjirday Reviczu. 
 
 '* A study of some of the orations will repay anybody who can admire 
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 THE ART OF WAR IN THE MIDDLE 
 
 AGES, A.D. 378-1515. Being the Lothian Prize 
 Essay for 1884. By C. W. C. OMAN, B.A., Fellow 
 of All Souls College, Oxford. With Maps and 
 Plans. Crown Bvo., cloth o 3 6 
 
My. T. Fisher Unwin^ 26, Paternoster Square, 
 
 A Useful Bridal Gift. 
 HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH 
 
 MARRIED. Being a Handbook to Marriage. 
 By a Graduate in the University of Matrimony. 
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 Fine edition of the above vi'ork, bound in orna- 
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 Under the quaint title of one of Skelton's Sermons, " How to be 
 Happy Though Married," the author has much to say regarding 
 ail aspects of the married state. The number of quotations, anecdotes 
 and good things it contains give it, moreover, a distinct biblio- 
 graphical interest, and make it a useful compendium of the very 
 best that has been said and written on the subject by poets, 
 preachers, statesmen, and, in fact, all sorts and conditions of men. 
 It should thus be a useful companion for the honeymoon, and is 
 welt adapted for presentation to those about to marry. 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 CiiM'. I. How to be happy though 
 married. 
 II. To be or not to be — married. 
 
 III. Marriage- made men. 
 
 IV. Choice of a wife. 
 V. Choice of a husband, 
 
 VI. On making the best of a bad 
 matrimonial bargain. 
 VII. Marriage considered as a 
 discipline of character, 
 VIII. Being married. 
 IX. Honeymooning. 
 X. Marriage vows, 
 XT. "Drive gently over the stones!" 
 XII. Furnishmg. 
 XIII. Married people's money, 
 XIV. Management of servants. 
 
 Chap. XV. Preparation for parenthood. 
 XVI. "What is the use of a 
 child ? " 
 
 XVII, The education of parents. 
 XVIII. Wanted !— mothers. 
 XIX. " Nursing Fathers '' 
 XX. Politeness at home. 
 XXI. Sunshine. 
 XXII, They had a few words. 
 XXTIX, Pulling together. 
 XXIV. Nets and cages. 
 
 XXV. Husbands have duties too, 
 XXVI. The health of the family. 
 XXVII. Love surviving marriage. 
 XXVIII. "He will not separate us, 
 we have been so happy," 
 
 ROLL OF GOLDEN THOUGHTS 
 
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 v.— The Lawyer's Story : The Blue Lady of Minsterly. VI.— 
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 THE IDEAL OF ALEXANDER THE 
 
 GREAT, AND ITS REALIZATION. Being the 
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 Grammar School, Crown Svo ... o 
 
 THE NEW GODIVA, AND OTHER 
 
 STUDIES IN SOCIAL QUESTIONS. Second 
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 CONTENTS. 
 Introduction. The Sanction of Pureness. Puissance Oblige. 
 New Godlva. Western Harem. Zola in England. 
 
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 'l in other respects) might meet. It is hoped that the publication of 
 
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 A SMALLER BIBLIA PAUPERUM, 
 
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 HEROIC TALES. Retold from Firdusi the 
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 ARMINIUS VAMBERY: His Life and 
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 and 14 Illustrations. Fifth and Popular Edition. 
 Square Imperial i6mo., cloth extra ... ... o 6 
 
 "A most fascinating work, full of interesting and curious 
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 " We can follow M, Vamb^ry's footsteps in Asia with pride 
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 ethnography and the languages of the East." — Academy. 
 
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 Boys' Edition. 
 
 ARMINIUS VAMBKRY : His Life and 
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 Portrait and Seventeen Illustrations. Crown 8vo. 
 
 This new edition wa? prepared by M. Vamb^ry at the suggestion 
 of several of his English friends and critics during his late visit to 
 this country, that the story of his life was one well adapted to 
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 throughout, eliminating all political and other matter that would 
 possess but little interest for boys. A new Introductory Chapter is 
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 CENTRAL ASIAN QUESTIONS: Essays 
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 FRANCE AND TONGKING: A Narrative of 
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 THE TRUE STORY OF THE FRENCH 
 
 DISPUTE IN MADAGASCAR. By Captain 
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 Malagasy," &c. With a Chapter by F.W. Chesson, 
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 Madame Villari's New Book for Children. 
 
 WHEN I WAS A CHILD ; or, Left Behind. 
 By Linda Villari, Author of ''On Tuscan Hills 
 and Venetian Waters," " Camilla's Girlhood," &c. 
 Illustrated. Square 8vo., cloth o 4 6 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 Chap. I. The Old Home.— II. The Move.— III. Tears and 
 Rejoicings. — IV. Left Behind. — V. Past and Present. — VI. Wan- 
 dleton. — VII. News from China and Dick. — VIII. New Faces, 
 Friends, and Pranks. — IX. The Treasures in the Garret. X. In 
 the Shadow of Death.— XI. A Terrible Blow.— XII. With Uncle 
 Josh.— XIII. At School. — XIV. Defiance. — XV. New Ex- 
 periences. — XVI. Sunshine at Last ! 
 
 An Artistic Gift-Book. 
 ON TUSCAN HILLS AND VENE- 
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 " In the Golden Shell," &c. With Ten Illustrations 
 by Mrs. Arthur Lemon. Square Imp. i6mo. ... o 7 6 
 ' ' Her style is easy and pleasant, and ever and again her remarks 
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 " Ne.xt to the privilege of visiting these localities, this book is 
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 FAIRY TALES FROM BRENTANO. 
 
 Told in English by Kate Freiligrath Kroeker. 
 Pictured by F. Carruthers Gould. Twenty-two 
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 "The extravagance of invention displayed, in his tales will 
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New and Recent Books. 
 
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 4th Edition, Sheep, imitation of Original Binding o ; u 
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Mr. T. Fisher Unwin, 26, Paternoster Sqtcare. 
 
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Mr. T. Fisher Unwin, 26, Paternoster Square. 
 
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 THE CHRIST OF HISTORY. An Argu- 
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 THE QUESTION OF QUESTIONS: 
 
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 PAYING THE PASTOR, Unscriptural and 
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 Lord Lawrence. 
 
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New and Recent Boohs. 
 
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 Sir James Outram. Bishop Selwyn. 
 
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 Sir James Simpson. Thos. Davidson. 
 
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Mr. T. Fisher Unwtn, 26, Paternoster Square. 
 
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 GUDRUN, BEOWULF, and ROLAND. 
 
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