Miscellaneous Studies; a series of essays (2024)

WALTER HORATIO PATER

London: 1910. (The Library Edition.)

NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:

Notes: The 1910 Library Edition employs footnotes, a style inconvenientin an electronic edition. I have therefore placed an asteriskimmediately after each of Pater's footnotes and a + sign after my ownnotes, and have listed each chapter's notes at that chapter's end.

Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy, Ihave transferred original pagination to brackets. A bracketed numeralsuch as [22] indicates that the material immediately following thenumber marks the beginning of the relevant page. I have preservedparagraph structure except for first-line indentation.

Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an e-textdoes not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.

Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliteratedPater's Greek quotations. If there is a need for the original Greek,it can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, aVictorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Paterand many other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.

WALTER HORATIO PATER

CONTENTS

C. Shadwell's Preface—Publication Chronology: 1-7
Prosper Mérimée: 11-37
Raphael: 38-61
Pascal: 62-89
Art Notes in North Italy: 90-108
Notre Dame D'Amiens: 109-125
Vézelay: 126-141
Apollo in Picardy: 142-171
The Child in the House: 172-196
Emerald Uthwart: 197-246
Diaphaneité: 247-254

CHARLES L. SHADWELL'S PREFACE

[1] The volume of Greek Studies, issued early in the present year,dealt with Mr. Pater's contributions to the study of Greek art,mythology, and poetry. The present volume has no such unifyingprinciple. Some of the papers would naturally find their placealongside of those collected in Imaginary Portraits, or inAppreciations, or in the Studies in the Renaissance. And there is nodoubt, in the case of several of them, that Mr. Pater, if he had lived,would have subjected them to careful revision before allowing them toreappear in a permanent form. The task, which he left unexecuted,cannot now be taken up by any other hand. But it is hoped thatstudents of his writings will be glad to possess, in a collected shape,what has hitherto only been accessible in the scattered volumes ofmagazines. It is with some hesitation that the paper on Diaphaneitè,the last in this volume, has been added, as the only specimen known to[2] be preserved of those early essays of Mr. Pater's, by which hisliterary gifts were first made known to the small circle of his Oxfordfriends.

Subjoined is a brief chronological list of his published writings. Itwill be observed how considerable a period, 1880 to 1885, was given upto the composition of Marius the Epicurean, the most highly finished ofall his works, and the expression of his deepest thought.

August, 1895.

A CHRONOLOGY OF PATER'S WORKS, 1866-1895

(Adapted from a compilation by Charles L. Shadwell in the 1895Macmillan edition of Miscellaneous Studies.)

1866.

COLERIDGE. Appeared in Westminster Review, January, 1866. Reprinted1889 in Appreciations.

1867.

WINCKELMANN. Appeared in Westminster Review, January, 1867. Reprinted1873 in Studies in the Renaissance.

1868.

*AESTHETIC POETRY. Written in 1868. First published 1889 inAppreciations. (Not included in the 1910 Macmillan Library Edition,but published separately at Project Gutenberg andwww.ajdrake.com/etexts.)

1869.

NOTES ON LEONARDO DA VINCI. Appeared in Fortnightly Review inNovember, 1869. Reprinted 1873 in Studies in the Renaissance.

1870.

SANDRO BOTTICELLI. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in August, 1870,entitled "A Fragment on Sandro Botticelli." Reprinted 1873 in Studiesin the Renaissance.

1871.

PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in October, 1871.Reprinted 1873 in Studies in the Renaissance.

POETRY OF MICHELANGELO. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in November,1871. Reprinted 1873 in Studies in the Renaissance.

1873.

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE. Published 1873 byMacmillan. Contents:

Aucassin and Nicolette. Entitled in second and later editions, "TwoEarly French Stories."

Pico della Mirandola. See 1871.

Sandro Botticelli. See 1870.

Luca della Robbia.

Poetry of Michelangelo. See 1871.

Leonardo da Vinci. See 1869.

Joachim du Bellay.

Winckelmann. See 1867.

Conclusion.

1874.

WORDSWORTH. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in April, 1874. Reprinted1889 in Appreciations.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in November, 1874.Reprinted 1889 in Appreciations.

1875.

DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE. Written as two lectures, and delivered in 1875at the Birmingham and Midland Institute. Appeared in FortnightlyReview in January and February, 1876. Reprinted 1895 in Greek Studies.

1876.

ROMANTICISM. Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in November, 1876.Reprinted 1889 in Appreciations under the title "Postscript."

A STUDY OF DIONYSUS. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in December, 1876.Reprinted 1895 in Greek Studies.

1877.

THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in October,1877. Reprinted 1888 in third edition of The Renaissance.

THE RENAISSANCE: STUDIES IN ART AND POETRY. Second edition.Macmillan. Contents:

Two Early French Stories.
Pico della Mirandola.
Sandro Botticelli.
Luca della Robbia.
The Poetry of Michelangelo.
Leonardo da Vinci.
Joachim du Bellay.
Winckelmann.

1878.

THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE. Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in August,1878, under the heading, "Imaginary Portrait. The Child in the House."Reprinted 1895 in Miscellaneous Studies.

CHARLES LAMB. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in October, 1878.Reprinted 1889 in Appreciations.

LOVE'S LABOURS LOST. Written in 1878. Appeared in Macmillan'sMagazine in December, 1885. Reprinted 1889 in Appreciations.

THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES. Written in 1878. Appeared in Macmillan'sMagazine in May, 1889. Reprinted in Tyrrell's edition of the Bacchaein 1892. Reprinted in 1895 in Greek Studies.

1880.

THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE. Appeared in Fortnightly Review inFebruary and March, 1880. Reprinted 1895 in Greek Studies.

THE MARBLES OF AEGINA. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in April, 1880.Reprinted 1895 in Greek Studies.

1883.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. Written in 1883. Published 1889 inAppreciations.

1885.

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. Published in 1885 by Macmillan. Two volumes.

A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS. Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine inOctober, 1885. Reprinted 1887 in Imaginary Portraits.

1886.

FEUILLET'S "LA MORTE." Written in 1886. Published 1890 in secondedition of Appreciations.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE. Written in 1886. Published 1889 in Appreciations.

SEBASTIAN VAN STORCK. Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in March, 1886.Reprinted 1887 in Imaginary Portraits.

DENYS L'AUXERROIS. Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in October, 1886.Reprinted 1887 in Imaginary Portraits.

1887.

DUKE CARL OF ROSENMOLD. Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in May, 1887.Reprinted the same year in Imaginary Portraits.

IMAGINARY PORTRAITS. Published 1887 by Macmillan. Contents:

A Prince of Court Painters. See 1885.
Denys l'Auxerrois. See 1886.
Sebastian van Storck. See 1886.
Duke Carl of Rosenmold. See above.

1888.

GASTON DE LATOUR. Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine as under: viz.

Chapter I in June.
Chapter II in July.
Chapter III in August.
Chapter IV in September.
Chapter V in October.

STYLE. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in December, 1888. Reprinted1889 in Appreciations.

THE RENAISSANCE. Third Edition. Macmillan. Contents:

Two Early French Stories.
Pico della Mirandola.
Sandro Botticelli.
Luca della Robbia.
The Poetry of Michelangelo.
Leonardo da Vinci.
The School of Giorgione. See 1877.
Joachim du Bellay.
Winckelmann.
Conclusion.

1889.

HIPPOLYTUS VEILED. Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in August, 1889.Reprinted 1895 in Greek Studies.

*GIORDANO BRUNO. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in August, 1889. (Notincluded in the 1910 Macmillan Library Edition, but publishedseparately online at Project Gutenberg and www.ajdrake.com/etexts.)

APPRECIATIONS, WITH AN ESSAY ON STYLE. Published 1889 by Macmillan.Contents:

Style. See 1888.

Wordsworth. See 1874.

Coleridge. See 1866.

Charles Lamb. See 1878.

Sir Thomas Browne. See 1886.

Love's Labours Lost. See 1878.

Measure for Measure. See 1874.

Shakespeare's English Kings.

*Aesthetic Poetry. See 1868.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. See 1883.

Postscript. See under "Romanticism," 1876.

1890.

ART NOTES IN NORTHERN ITALY. Appeared in New Review in November, 1890.Reprinted 1895 in Miscellaneous Studies.

PROSPER MÉRIMÉE. Delivered as a lecture at Oxford in November, 1890.Appeared in Fortnightly Review in December, 1890. Reprinted 1895 inMiscellaneous Studies.

APPRECIATIONS. Second edition. Macmillan. Contents as in firstedition of 1889, but omitting Aesthetic Poetry and including a paper onFeuillet's "La Morte" (See 1886).

1892.

THE GENIUS OF PLATO. Appeared in Contemporary Review in February,1892. Reprinted 1893 as Chapter VI of Plato and Platonism.

A CHAPTER ON PLATO. Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in May, 1892.Reprinted 1893 as Chapter I of Plato and Platonism.

LACEDAEMON. Appeared in Contemporary Review in June, 1892. Reprinted1893 as Chapter VIII of Plato and Platonism.

EMERALD UTHWART. Appeared in New Review in June and July, 1892.Reprinted 1895 in Miscellaneous Studies.

RAPHAEL. Delivered as a lecture at Oxford in August, 1892. Appearedin Fortnightly Review in October, 1892. Reprinted 1895 inMiscellaneous Studies.

1893.

APOLLO IN PICARDY. Appeared in Harper's Magazine in November, 1893.Reprinted 1895 in Miscellaneous Studies.

PLATO AND PLATONISM. Published 1893 by Macmillan. Included, asChapters 1, 6, and 8, papers which had already appeared in Magazines in1892. Contents:

1. Plato and the Doctrine of Motion.
2. Plato and the Doctrine of Rest.
3. Plato and the Doctrine of Number.
4. Plato and Socrates.
5. Plato and the Sophists.
6. The Genius of Plato.
7. The Doctrine of Plato—
I. The Theory of Ideas.
II. Dialectic.
8. Lacedaemon.
9. The Republic.
10. Plato's Aesthetics.

1894.

THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN. Appeared in Contemporary Review inFebruary, 1894. Reprinted 1895 in Greek Studies.

SOME GREAT CHURCHES IN FRANCE. 1) NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS; 2) VÉZELAY.Appeared in Nineteenth Century in March and June, 1894. Reprinted 1895in Miscellaneous Studies as two separate essays.

PASCAL. Written for delivery as a lecture at Oxford in July, 1894.Appeared in Contemporary Review in December, 1894. Reprinted 1895 inMiscellaneous Studies.

1895.

GREEK STUDIES. Published 1895 by Macmillan. Contents:

A Study of Dionysus. See 1876.
The Bacchanals of Euripides. See 1878.
The Myth of Demeter and Persephone. See 1875.
Hippolytus Veiled. See 1889.
The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture. See 1880:
1) The Heroic Age of Greek Art.
2) The Age of Graven Images.
The Marbles of Aegina. See 1880.
The Age of Athletic Prizemen. See 1894.

PROSPER MÉRIMÉE*

FOR one born in eighteen hundred and three much was recently becomeincredible that had at least warmed the imagination even of thesceptical eighteenth century. Napoleon, sealing the tomb of theRevolution, had foreclosed many a problem, extinguished many a hope, inthe sphere of practice. And the mental parallel was drawn by Heine.In the mental world too a great outlook had lately been cut off. AfterKant's criticism of the mind, its pretensions to pass beyond the limitsof individual experience seemed as dead as those of old French royalty.And Kant did but furnish its innermost theoretic force to a moregeneral criticism, which had withdrawn from every department of action,underlying principles once thought eternal. A time of disillusionfollowed. The typical personality of the day was Obermann, the verygenius of ennui, a Frenchman disabused even of patriotism, who hashardly strength enough to die.

[12] More energetic souls, however, would recover themselves, and findsome way of making the best of a changed world. Art: the passions,above all, the ecstasy and sorrow of love: a purely empirical knowledgeof nature and man: these still remained, at least for pastime, in aworld of which it was no longer proposed to calculate the remoterissues:—art, passion, science, however, in a somewhat novel attitudetowards the practical interests of life. The désillusionné, who hadfound in Kant's negations the last word concerning an unseen world, andis living, on the morrow of the Revolution, under a monarchy made outof hand, might seem cut off from certain ancient natural hopes, andwill demand, from what is to interest him at all, something in the wayof artificial stimulus. He has lost that sense of large proportion inthings, that all-embracing prospect of life as a whole (from end to endof time and space, it had seemed), the utmost expanse of which wasafforded from a cathedral tower of the Middle Age: by the church of thethirteenth century, that is to say, with its consequent aptitude forthe co-ordination of human effort. Deprived of that exhilarating yetpacific outlook, imprisoned now in the narrow cell of its ownsubjective experience, the action of a powerful nature will be intense,but exclusive and peculiar. It will come to art, or science, to theexperience of life itself, not as to portions of human nature's dailyfood, but as to [13] something that must be, by the circ*mstances ofthe case, exceptional; almost as men turn in despair to gambling ornarcotics, and in a little while the narcotic, the game of chance orskill, is valued for its own sake. The vocation of the artist, of thestudent of life or books, will be realised with something—say! offanaticism, as an end in itself, unrelated, unassociated. The sciencehe turns to will be a science of crudest fact; the passion extravagant,a passionate love of passion, varied through all the exotic phases ofFrench fiction as inaugurated by Balzac; the art exaggerated, in matteror form, or both, as in Hugo or Baudelaire. The development of theseconditions is the mental story of the nineteenth century, especially asexemplified in France.

In no century would Prosper Mérimée have been a theologian ormetaphysician. But that sense of negation, of theoretic insecurity,was in the air, and conspiring with what was of like tendency inhimself made of him a central type of disillusion. In him the passiveennui of Obermann became a satiric, aggressive, almost angry convictionof the littleness of the world around; it was as if man's fatallimitations constituted a kind of stupidity in him, what the Frenchcall bêtise. Gossiping friends, indeed, linked what was constitutionalin him and in the age with an incident of his earliest years.Corrected for some childish fault, in passionate distress, he overhearsa half-pitying laugh at his expense, and has determined, [14] in amoment, never again to give credit—to be for ever on his guard,especially against his own instinctive movements. Quite unreserved,certainly, he never was again. Almost everywhere he could detect thehollow ring of fundamental nothingness under the apparent surface ofthings. Irony surely, habitual irony, would be the proper complementthereto, on his part. In his infallible self-possession, you mighteven fancy him a mere man of the world, with a special aptitude formatters of fact. Though indifferent in politics, he rises to social,to political eminence; but all the while he is feeding all hisscholarly curiosity, his imagination, the very eye, with the, to himever delightful, relieving, reassuring spectacle, of thosestraightforward forces in human nature, which are also matters of fact.There is the formula of Mérimée! the enthusiastic amateur of rude,crude, naked force in men and women wherever it could be found; himselfcarrying ever, as a mask, the conventional attire of the modernworld—carrying it with an infinite, contemptuous grace, as if that,too, were an all-sufficient end in itself. With a natural gift forwords, for expression, it will be his literary function to draw backthe veil of time from the true greatness of old Roman character; theveil of modern habit from the primitive energy of the creatures of hisfancy, as the Lettres à une Inconnue discovered to general gaze, afterhis death, a certain depth of [15] passionate force which had surprisedhim in himself. And how forcible will be their outlines in an otherwiseinsignificant world! Fundamental belief gone, in almost all of us, atleast some relics of it remain—queries, echoes, reactions,after-thoughts; and they help to make an atmosphere, a mentalatmosphere, hazy perhaps, yet with many secrets of soothing light andshade, associating more definite objects to each other by a perspectivepleasant to the inward eye against a hopefully receding background ofremoter and ever remoter possibilities. Not so with Mérimée! For himthe fundamental criticism has nothing more than it can do; and thereare no half-lights. The last traces of hypothesis, of supposition, areevaporated. Sylla, the false Demetrius, Carmen, Colomba, thatimpassioned self within himself, have no atmosphere. Painfullydistinct in outline, inevitable to sight, unrelieved, there they stand,like solitary mountain forms on some hard, perfectly transparent day.What Mérimée gets around his singularly sculpturesque creations isneither more nor less than empty space.

So disparate are his writings that at first sight you might fancy themonly the random efforts of a man of pleasure or affairs, who, turningto this or that for the relief of a vacant hour, discovers to hissurprise a workable literary gift, of whose scope, however, he is notprecisely aware. His sixteen volumes nevertheless range themselves inthree compact groups. There are his letters [16] —those Lettres à uneInconnue, and his letters to the librarian Panizzi, revealing him insomewhat close contact with political intrigue. But in this age ofnovelists, it is as a writer of novels, and of fiction in the form ofhighly descriptive drama, that he will count for most:—Colomba, forinstance, by its intellectual depth of motive, its firmly conceivedstructure, by the faultlessness of its execution, vindicating thefunction of the novel as no tawdry light literature, but in very deed afine art. The Chronique du Règne de Charles IX., an unusuallysuccessful specimen of historical romance, links his imaginative workto the third group of Mérimée's writings, his historical essays. Oneresource of the disabused soul of our century, as we saw, would be theempirical study of facts, the empirical science of nature and man,surviving all dead metaphysical philosophies. Mérimée, perhaps, mayhave had in him the making of a master of such science, disinterested,patient, exact: scalpel in hand, we may fancy, he would have penetratedfar. But quite certainly he had something of genius for the exactstudy of history, for the pursuit of exact truth, with a keenness ofscent as if that alone existed, in some special area of historic fact,to be determined by his own peculiar mental preferences. Power heretoo again,—the crude power of men and women which mocks, while itmakes its use of, average human nature: it was the magic function ofhistory to put one in living [17] contact with that. To weigh thepurely physiognomic import of the memoir, of the pamphlet saved bychance, the letter, the anecdote, the very gossip by which one cameface to face with energetic personalities: there lay the true businessof the historic student, not in that pretended theoretic interpretationof events by their mechanic causes, with which he dupes others if notinvariably himself. In the great hero of the Social War, in Sylla,studied, indeed, through his environment, but only so far as that wasin dynamic contact with himself, you saw, without any manner of doubt,on one side, the solitary height of human genius; on the other, thoughon the seemingly so heroic stage of antique Roman story, the whollyinexpressive level of the humanity of every day, the spectacle of man'seternal bêtise. Fascinated, like a veritable son of the old paganRenaissance, by the grandeur, the concentration, the satiric hardnessof ancient Roman character, it is to Russia nevertheless that he mostreadily turns—youthful Russia, whose native force, still unbelittledby our western civilisation, seemed to have in it the promise of a moredignified civilisation to come. It was as if old Rome itself were hereagain; as, occasionally, a new quarry is laid open of what was thoughtlong since exhausted, ancient marble, cipollino or verde antique.Mérimée, indeed, was not the first to discern the fitness forimaginative service of the career of "the false Demetrius," pretended[18] son of Ivan the Terrible; but he alone seeks its utmost force in acalm, matter-of-fact carefully ascertained presentment of the nakedevents. Yes! In the last years of the Valois, when its fiercepassions seemed to be bursting France to pieces, you might have seen,far away beyond the rude Polish dominion of which one of those Valoisprinces had become king, a display more effective still of exceptionalcourage and cunning, of horror in circ*mstance, of bêtise, of course,of bêtise and a slavish capacity of being duped, in average mankind:all that under a mask of solemn Muscovite court-ceremonial. AndMérimée's style, simple and unconcerned, but with the eye ever on itsobject, lends itself perfectly to such purpose—to an almost phlegmaticdiscovery of the facts, in all their crude natural colouring, as if hebut held up to view, as a piece of evidence, some harshly dyed orientalcarpet from the sumptuous floor of the Kremlin, on which blood hadfallen.

A lover of ancient Rome, its great character and incident, Mériméevalued, as if it had been personal property of his, every extant relicof it in the art that had been most expressive of itsgenius—architecture. In that grandiose art of building, the mostnational, the most tenaciously rooted of all the arts in the stableconditions of life, there were historic documents hardly less clearlylegible than the manuscript chronicle. By the mouth of those statelyRomanesque [19] churches, scattered in so many strongly characterisedvarieties over the soil of France, above all in the hot, half-pagansouth, the people of empire still protested, as he understood, againstwhat must seem a smaller race. The Gothic enthusiasm indeed wasalready born, and he shared it—felt intelligently the fascination ofthe Pointed Style, but only as a further transformation of old Romanstructure; the round arch is for him still the great architecturalform, la forme noble, because it was to be seen in the monuments ofantiquity. Romanesque, Gothic, the manner of the Renaissance, of Lewisthe Fourteenth:—they were all, as in a written record, in the oldabbey church of Saint-Savin, of which Mérimée was instructed to draw upa report. Again, it was as if to his concentrated attention throughmany months that deserted sanctuary of Benedict were the only thing onearth. Its beauties, its peculiarities, its odd military features, itsfaded mural paintings, are no merely picturesque matter for the pencilhe could use so well, but the lively record of a human society. Withwhat appetite! with all the animation of George Sand's Mauprat, hetells the story of romantic violence having its way there, defiant oflaw, so late as the year 1611; of the family of robber nobles perched,as abbots in commendam, in those sacred places. That grey, pensive oldchurch in the little valley of Poitou, was for a time like Santa Mariadel Fiore to [20] Michelangelo, the mistress of his affections—of apractical affection; for the result of his elaborate report was theGovernment grant which saved the place from ruin. In architecture,certainly, he had what for that day was nothing less than intuition—anintuitive sense, above all, of its logic, of the necessity which drawsinto one all minor changes, as elements in a reasonable development.And his care for it, his curiosity about it, were symptomatic of hisown genius. Structure, proportion, design, a sort of architecturalcoherency: that was the aim of his method in the art of literature, inthat form of it, especially, which he will live by, in fiction.

As historian and archaeologist, as a man of erudition turned artist, heis well seen in the Chronique du Règne de Charles IX., by which we passnaturally from Mérimée's critical or scientific work to the products ofhis imagination. What economy in the use of a large antiquarianknowledge! what an instinct amid a hundred details, for the detail thatcarries physiognomy in it, that really tells! And again what outline,what absolute clarity of outline! For the historian of that puzzlingage which centres in the "Eve of Saint Bartholomew," outward eventsthemselves seem obscured by the vagueness of motive of the actors inthem. But Mérimée, disposing of them as an artist, not in love withhalf-lights, compels events and actors alike to the clearness he [21]desired; takes his side without hesitation; and makes his hero aHuguenot of pure blood, allowing its charm, in that charming youth,even to Huguenot piety. And as for the incidents—however freely itmay be undermined by historic doubt, all reaches a perfectly firmsurface, at least for the eye of the reader. The Chronicle of Charlesthe Ninth is like a series of masterly drawings in illustration of aperiod—the period in which two other masters of French fiction havefound their opportunity, mainly by the development of its actualhistoric characters. Those characters—Catherine de Medicis and therest—Mérimée, with significant irony and self-assertion, sets aside,preferring to think of them as essentially commonplace. For him theinterest lies in the creatures of his own will, who carry in them,however, so lightly! a learning equal to Balzac's, greater than that ofDumas. He knows with like completeness the mere fashions of thetime—how courtier and soldier dressed themselves, and the largemovements of the desperate game which fate or chance was playing withthose pretty pieces. Comparing that favourite century of the FrenchRenaissance with our own, he notes a decadence of the more energeticpassions in the interest of general tranquillity, and perhaps (onlyperhaps!) of general happiness. "Assassination," he observes, as ifwith regret, "is no longer a part of our manners." In fact, the duel,and the whole [22] morality of the duel, which does but enforce acertain regularity on assassination, what has been well called lesentiment du fer, the sentiment of deadly steel, had then thedisposition of refined existence. It was, indeed, very different, andis, in Mérimée's romance. In his gallant hero, Bernard de Mergy, allthe promptings of the lad's virile goodness are in natural collusionwith that sentiment du fer. Amid his ingenuous blushes, his prayers,and plentiful tears between-while, it is a part of his very sex. Withhis delightful, fresh-blown air, he is for ever tossing the sheath fromthe sword, but always as if into bright natural sunshine. A winsome,yet withal serious and even piteous figure, he conveys hispleasantness, in spite of its gloomy theme, into Mérimée's one quitecheerful book.

Cheerful, because, after all, the gloomy passions it presents are butthe accidents of a particular age, and not like the mental conditionsin which Mérimée was most apt to look for the spectacle of human power,allied to madness or disease in the individual. For him, at least, itwas the office of fiction to carry one into a different if not a betterworld than that actually around us; and if the Chronicle of Charles theNinth provided an escape from the tame circ*mstances of contemporarylife into an impassioned past, Colomba is a measure of the resourcesfor mental alteration which may be found even in the modern age. Therewas a corner of [23] the French Empire, in the manners of whichassassination still had a large part.

"The beauty of Corsica," says Mérimée, "is grave and sad. The aspectof the capital does but augment the impression caused by the solitudethat surrounds it. There is no movement in the streets. You hearthere none of the laughter, the singing, the loud talking, common inthe towns of Italy. Sometimes, under the shadow of a tree on thepromenade, a dozen armed peasants will be playing cards, or looking onat the game. The Corsican is naturally silent. Those who walk thepavement are all strangers: the islanders stand at their doors: everyone seems to be on the watch, like a falcon on its nest. All aroundthe gulf there is but an expanse of tanglework; beyond it, bleachedmountains. Not a habitation! Only, here and there, on the heightsabout the town, certain white constructions detach themselves from thebackground of green. They are funeral chapels or family tombs."

Crude in colour, sombre, taciturn, Corsica, as Mérimée here describesit, is like the national passion of the Corsican—that morbid personalpride, usurping the place even of grief for the dead, which centuriesof traditional violence had concentrated into an all-absorbing passionfor bloodshed, for bloody revenges, in collusion with the naturalwildness, and the wild social condition of the island still unaffectedeven by the finer [24] ethics of the duel. The supremacy of thatpassion is well indicated by the cry, put into the mouth of a young manin the presence of the corpse of his father deceased in the course ofnature—a young man meant to be commonplace. "Ah! Would thou hadstdied malamorte—by violence! We might have avenged thee!"

In Colomba, Mérimée's best known creation, it is united to a singularlywholesome type of personal beauty, a natural grace of manner which isirresistible, a cunning intellect patiently diverting everycirc*mstance to its design; and presents itself as a kind of genius,allied to fatal disease of mind. The interest of Mérimée's book isthat it allows us to watch the action of this malignant power onColomba's brother, Orso della Robbia, as it discovers, rouses,concentrates to the leaping-point, in the somewhat weakly diffusednature of the youth, the dormant elements of a dark humour akin to herown. Two years after his father's murder, presumably at theinstigation of his ancestral enemies, the young lieutenant is returninghome in the company of two humorously conventional English people,himself now half Parisianised, with an immense natural cheerfulness,and willing to believe an account of the crime which relieves thosehated Barricini of all complicity in its guilt. But from the first,Colomba, with "voice soft and musical," is at his side, gathering everyaccident and echo and circ*mstance, the very lightest circ*mstance,[25] into the chain of necessity which draws him to the action everyone at home expects of him as the head of his race. He is not unaware.Her very silence on the matter speaks so plainly. "You are formingme!" he admits. "Well! 'Hot shot, or cold steel!'—you see I have notforgotten my Corsican." More and more, as he goes on his way with her,he finds himself accessible to the damning thoughts he has so longcombated. In horror, he tries to disperse them by the memory of hiscomrades in the regiment, the drawing-rooms of Paris, the English ladywho has promised to be his bride, and will shortly visit him in thehumble manoir of his ancestors. From his first step among them thevillagers of Pietranera, divided already into two rival camps, arewatching him in suspense—Pietranera, perched among those deep forestswhere the stifled sense of violent death is everywhere. Colomba placesin his hands the little chest which contains the father's shirt coveredwith great spots of blood. "Behold the lead that struck him!" and shelaid on the shirt two rusted bullets. "Orso! you will avenge him!" Sheembraces him with a kind of madness, kisses wildly the bullets and theshirt, leaves him with the terrible relics already exerting theirmystic power upon him. It is as if in the nineteenth century a girl,amid Christian habits, had gone back to that primitive old paganversion of the story of the Grail, which [26] identifies it not withthe Most Precious Blood, but only with the blood of a murdered relationcrying for vengeance. Awake at last in his old chamber at Pietranera,the house of the Barricini at the other end of the square, with itsrival tower and rudely carved escutcheons, stares him in the face. Hisancestral enemy is there, an aged man now, but with two well-grownsons, like two stupid dumb animals, whose innocent blood will soon beon his so oddly lighted conscience. At times, his better hope seemedto lie in picking a quarrel and killing at least in fair fight, one ofthese two stupid dumb animals; with rude ill-suppressed laughter oneday, as they overhear Colomba's violent utterances at a funeral feast,for she is a renowned improvisatrice. "Your father is an old man," hefinds himself saying, "I could crush with my hands. 'Tis for you I amdestined, for you and your brother!" And if it is by course of naturethat the old man dies not long after the murder of these sons(self-provoked after all), dies a fugitive at Pisa, as it happens, byan odd accident, in the presence of Colomba, no violent death by Orso'sown hand could have been more to her mind. In that last hard page ofMérimée's story, mere dramatic propriety itself for a moment seems toplead for the forgiveness, which from Joseph and his brethren to thepresent day, as we know, has been as winning in story as in actuallife. Such dramatic propriety, however, was by no means [27] inMérimée's way. "What I must have is the hand that fired the shot," shehad sung, "the eye that guided it; aye! and the mind moreover—themind, which had conceived the deed!" And now, it is in idiotic terror,a fugitive from Orso's vengeance, that the last of the Barricini isdying.

Exaggerated art! you think. But it was precisely such exaggerated art,intense, unrelieved, an art of fierce colours, that is needed by thosewho are seeking in art, as I said of Mérimée, a kind of artificialstimulus. And if his style is still impeccably correct, cold-blooded,impersonal, as impersonal as that of Scott himself, it does but conducethe better to his one exclusive aim. It is like the polish of thestiletto Colomba carried always under her mantle, or the beauty of thefire-arms, that beauty coming of nice adaptation to purpose, which sheunderstood so well—a task characteristic also of Mérimée himself, asort of fanatic joy in the perfect pistol-shot, at its height in thesingular story he has translated from the Russian of Pouchkine. Thoseraw colours he preferred; Spanish, Oriental, African, perhaps, irritantcertainly to cisalpine eyes, he undoubtedly attained the colouring youassociate with sun-stroke, only possible under a sun in which deadthings rot quickly.

Pity and terror, we know, go to the making of the essential tragicsense. In Mérimée, certainly, we have all its terror, but without the[28] pity. Saint-Clair, the consent of his mistress barely attained atlast, rushes madly on self-destruction, that he may die with the tasteof his great love fresh on his lips. All the grotesque accidents ofviolent death he records with visual exactness, and no pains to relievethem; the ironic indifference, for instance, with which, on thescaffold or the battle-field, a man will seem to grin foolishly at theugly rents through which his life has passed. Seldom or never has themere pen of a writer taken us so close to the cannon's mouth as in theTaking of the Redoubt, while Matteo Falcone—twenty-five shortpages—is perhaps the cruellest story in the world.

Colomba, that strange, fanatic being, who has a code of action, ofself-respect, a conscience, all to herself, who with all her virginalcharm only does not make you hate her, is, in truth, the type of a sortof humanity Mérimée found it pleasant to dream of—a humanity as alienas the animals, with whose moral affinities to man his imaginative workis often directly concerned. Were they so alien, after all? Werethere not survivals of the old wild creatures in the gentlest, thepolitest of us? Stories that told of sudden freaks of gentle, politenatures, straight back, not into Paradise, were always welcome to men'sfancies; and that could only be because they found a psychologic truthin them. With much success, with a credibility insured by his literarytact, Mérimée tried his own hand at such stories: unfrocked the [29]bear in the amorous young Lithuanian noble, the wolf in the revoltingpeasant of the Middle Age. There were survivals surely in himself, inthat stealthy presentment of his favourite themes, in his own art. Youseem to find your hand on a serpent, in reading him.

In such survivals, indeed, you see the operation of his favouritemotive, the sense of wild power, under a sort of mask, or assumedhabit, realised as the very genius of nature itself; and that interest,with some superstitions closely allied to it, the belief in thevampire, for instance, is evidenced especially in certain pretendedIllyrian compositions—prose translations, the reader was tounderstand, of more or less ancient popular ballads; La Guzla, hecalled the volume, The Lyre, as we might say; only that the instrumentof the Illyrian minstrel had but one string. Artistic deception, atrick of which there is something in the historic romance as such, in abook like his own Chronicle of Charles the Ninth, was always welcome toMérimée; it was part of the machinery of his rooted habit ofintellectual reserve. A master of irony also, in Madame Lucrezia heseems to wish to expose his own method cynically; to explain hisart—how he takes you in—as a clever, confident conjuror might do. Soproperly were the readers of La Guzla taken in that he followed up hissuccess in that line by the Theatre of Clara Gazul, purporting to befrom a rare Spanish original, the work [30] of a nun, who, under tame,conventual reading, had felt the touch of mundane, of physicalpassions; had become a dramatic poet, and herself a powerful actress.It may dawn on you in reading her that Mérimée was a kind of Webster,but with the superficial mildness of our nineteenth century. At thebottom of the true drama there is ever, logically at least, the ballad:the ballad dealing in a kind of short-hand (or, say! in grand, simple,universal outlines) with those passions, crimes, mistakes, which have akind of fatality in them, a kind of necessity to come to the surface ofthe human mind, if not to the surface of our experience, as in the caseof some frankly supernatural incidents which Mérimée re-handled.Whether human love or hatred has had most to do in shaping theuniversal fancy that the dead come back, I cannot say. Certainly thatold ballad literature has instances in plenty, in which the voice, thehand, the brief visit from the grave, is a natural response to the cryof the human creature. That ghosts should return, as they do so oftenin Mérimée's fiction, is but a sort of natural justice. Only, inMérimée's prose ballads, in those admirable, short, ballad-likestories, where every word tells, of which he was a master, almost theinventor, they are a kind of half-material ghosts—a vampire tribe—andnever come to do people good; congruously with the mental constitutionof the writer, which, alike in fact and fiction, [31] could hardly havehorror enough—theme after theme. Mérimée himself emphasises thisalmost constant motive of his fiction when he adds to one of hisvolumes of short stories some letters on a matter of fact—a Spanishbull-fight, in which those old Romans, he regretted, might seem,decadently, to have survived. It is as if you saw it. In truth,Mérimée was the unconscious parent of much we may think of dubioussignificance in later French literature. It is as if there werenothing to tell of in this world but various forms of hatred, and alove that is like lunacy; and the only other world, a world ofmaliciously active, hideous, dead bodies.

Mérimée, a literary artist, was not a man who used two words where onewould do better, and he shines especially in those brief compositionswhich, like a minute intaglio, reveal at a glance his wonderful facultyof design and proportion in the treatment of his work, in which thereis not a touch but counts. That is an art of which there are fewexamples in English; our somewhat diffuse, or slipshod, literarylanguage hardly lending itself to the concentration of thought andexpression, which are of the essence of such writing. It is otherwisein French, and if you wish to know what art of that kind can come to,read Mérimée's little romances; best of all, perhaps, La Vénus d'Illeand Arsène Guillot. The former is a modern version of the beautifulold story of the Ring given to Venus, given to her, in [32] this case,by a somewhat sordid creature of the nineteenth century, whom she lookson with more than disdain. The strange outline of the Canigou, one ofthe most imposing outlying heights of the Pyrenees, down the mysteriousslopes of which the traveller has made his way towards nightfall intothe great plain of Toulouse, forms an impressive background, congruouswith the many relics of irrepressible old paganism there, but in entirecontrast to the bourgeois comfort of the place where his journey is toend, the abode of an aged antiquary, loud and bright just now with thecelebration of a vulgar worldly marriage. In the midst of thiswell-being, prosaic in spite of the neighbourhood, in spite of thepretty old wedding customs, morsels of that local colour in whichMérimée delights, the old pagan powers are supposed to revealthemselves once more (malignantly, of course), in the person of amagnificent bronze statue of Venus recently unearthed in theantiquary's garden. On her finger, by ill-luck, the coarse youngbridegroom on the morning of his marriage places for a moment thebridal ring only too effectually (the bronze hand closes, like a wilfulliving one, upon it), and dies, you are to understand, in her angrymetallic embraces on his marriage night. From the first, indeed, shehad seemed bent on crushing out men's degenerate bodies and souls,though the supernatural horror of the tale is adroitly made credible bya certain vagueness in the [33] events, which covers a quite naturalaccount of the bridegroom's mysterious death.

The intellectual charm of literary work so thoroughly designed asMérimée's depends in part on the sense as you read, hastily perhaps,perhaps in need of patience, that you are dealing with a composition,the full secret of which is only to be attained in the last paragraph,that with the last word in mind you will retrace your steps, more thanonce (it may be) noting then the minuter structure, also the natural orwrought flowers by the way. Nowhere is such method better illustratedthan by another of Mérimée's quintessential pieces, Arsène Guillotandhere for once with a conclusion ethically acceptable also. Mériméeloved surprises in human nature, but it is not often that he surprisesus by tenderness or generosity of character, as another master ofFrench fiction, M. Octave Feuillet, is apt to do; and the simple pathosof Arsène Guillot gives it a unique place in Mérimée's writings. Itmay be said, indeed, that only an essentially pitiful nature could havetold the exquisitely cruel story of Matteo Falcone precisely as Mériméehas told it; and those who knew him testify abundantly to his owncapacity for generous friendship. He was no more wanting than othersin those natural sympathies (sending tears to the eyes at the sight ofsuffering age or childhood) which happily are no extraordinarycomponent in men's natures. It was, perhaps, no fitting return for a[34] friendship of over thirty years to publish posthumously thoseLettres à une Inconnue, which reveal that reserved, sensitive,self-centred nature, a little pusillanimously in the power, at thedisposition of another. For just there lies the interest, thepsychological interest, of those letters. An amateur of power, of thespectacle of power and force, followed minutely but without sensibilityon his part, with a kind of cynic pride rather for the mainspring ofhis method, both of thought and expression, you find him here taken bysurprise at last, and somewhat humbled, by an unsuspected force ofaffection in himself. His correspondent, unknown but for these lettersexcept just by name, figures in them as, in truth, a being only toomuch like himself, seen from one side; reflects his taciturnity, histouchiness, his incredulity except for self-torment. Agitated,dissatisfied, he is wrestling in her with himself, his own difficultqualities. He demands from her a freedom, a frankness, he would havebeen the last to grant. It is by first thoughts, of course, that whatis forcible and effective in human nature, the force, therefore, ofcarnal love, discovers itself; and for her first thoughts Mérimée isalways pleading, but always complaining that he gets only her secondthoughts; the thoughts, that is, of a reserved, self-limiting nature,well under the yoke of convention, like his own. Strange conjunction!At the beginning of the correspondence he seems to have been [35]seeking only a fine intellectual companionship; the lady, perhaps,looking for something warmer. Towards such companionship that likenessto himself in her might have been helpful, but was not enough of acomplement to his own nature to be anything but an obstruction in love;and it is to that, little by little, that his humour turns. He—theMegalopsychus, as Aristotle defines him—acquires all the lover'shumble habits: himself displays all the tricks of love, itscasuistries, its exigency, its superstitions, aye! even itsvulgarities; involves with the significance of his own genius the merehazards and inconsequence of a perhaps average nature; but too late inthe day—the years. After the attractions and repulsions of half alifetime, they are but friends, and might forget to be that, but forhis death, clearly presaged in his last weak, touching letter, just twohours before. There, too, had been the blind and naked force of natureand circ*mstance, surprising him in the uncontrollable movements of hisown so carefully guarded heart.

The intimacy, the effusion, the so freely exposed personality of thoseletters does but emphasise the fact that impersonality was, in literaryart, Mérimée's central aim. Personality versus impersonality inart:—how much or how little of one's self one may put into one's work:whether anything at all of it: whether one can put there anythingelse:—is clearly a far-reaching and complex question. Serviceable as[36] the basis of a precautionary maxim towards the conduct of ourwork, self-effacement, or impersonality, in literary or artisticcreation, is, perhaps, after all, as little possible as a strictrealism. "It has always been my rule to put nothing of myself into myworks," says another great master of French prose, Gustave Flaubert;but, luckily as we may think, he often failed in thus effacing himself,as he too was aware. "It has always been my rule to put nothing ofmyself into my works" (to be disinterested in his literary creations,so to speak), "yet I have put much of myself into them": and where hefailed Mérimée succeeded. There they stand—Carmen, Colomba, the"False" Demetrius—as detached from him as from each other, with nomore filial likeness to their maker than if they were the work ofanother person. And to his method of conception, Mérimée'smuch-praised literary style, his method of expression, is strictlyconformable—impersonal in its beauty, the perfection of nobody'sstyle—thus vindicating anew by its very impersonality that much worn,but not untrue saying, that the style is the man:—a man, impassible,unfamiliar, impeccable, veiling a deep sense of what is forcible, nay,terrible, in things, under the sort of personal pride that makes a mana nice observer of all that is most conventional. Essentially unlikeother people, he is always fastidiously in the fashion—an expert inall the little, half- [37] contemptuous elegances of which it iscapable. Mérimée's superb self-effacement, his impersonality, isitself but an effective personal trait, and, transferred to art,becomes a markedly peculiar quality of literary beauty. For, in truth,this creature of disillusion who had no care for half-lights, and, likehis creations, had no atmosphere about him, gifted as he was with puremind, with the quality which secures flawless literary structure, had,on the other hand, nothing of what we call soul in literature:—hence,also, that singular harshness in his ideal, as if, in theologicallanguage, he were incapable of grace. He has none of thosesubjectivities, colourings, peculiarities of mental refraction, whichnecessitate varieties of style—could we spare such?—and render theperfections of it no merely negative qualities. There are masters ofFrench prose whose art has begun where the art of Mérimée leaves off.

NOTES

11. *A lecture delivered at the Taylor Institution, Oxford, and at theLondon Institution. Published in the Fortnightly Review, Dec. 1890,and now reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.

RAPHAEL*

[38] By his immense productiveness, by the even perfection of what heproduced, its fitness to its own day, its hold on posterity, in thesuavity of his life, some would add in the "opportunity" of his earlydeath, Raphael may seem a signal instance of the luckiness, of the goodfortune, of genius. Yet, if we follow the actual growth of his powers,within their proper framework, the age of the Renaissance—an age ofwhich we may say, summarily, that it enjoyed itself, and found perhapsits chief enjoyment in the attitude of the scholar, in the enthusiasticacquisition of knowledge for its own sake:—if we thus view Raphael andhis works in their environment we shall find even his seeminglymechanical good fortune hardly distinguishable from his own patientdisposal of the means at hand. Facile master as he may seem, as indeedhe is, he is also one of the world's typical scholars, with [39] Plato,and Cicero, and Virgil, and Milton. The formula of his genius, if wemust have one, is this: genius by accumulation; the transformation ofmeek scholarship into genius—triumphant power of genius.

Urbino, where this prince of the Renaissance was born in 1483, yearalso of the birth of Luther, leader of the other great movement of thatage, the Reformation—Urbino, under its dukes of the house ofMontefeltro, had wherewithal just then to make a boy of native artisticfaculty from the first a willing learner. The gloomy old fortress ofthe feudal masters of the town had been replaced, in those later yearsof the Quattro-cento, by a consummate monument of Quattro-cento taste,a museum of ancient and modern art, the owners of which lived there,gallantly at home, amid the choicer flowers of living humanity. Theducal palace was, in fact, become nothing less than a school ofambitious youth in all the accomplishments alike of war and peace.Raphael's connexion with it seems to have become intimate, and from thefirst its influence must have overflowed so small a place. In the caseof the lucky Raphael, for once, the actual conditions of early life hadbeen suitable, propitious, accordant to what one's imagination wouldhave required for the childhood of the man. He was born amid the arthe was, not to transform, but to perfect, by a thousand reverentialretouchings. In no palace, however, but [40] in a modest abode, stillshown, containing the workshop of his father, Giovanni Santi. Buthere, too, though in frugal form, art, the arts, were present. A storeof artistic objects was, or had recently been, made there, and nowespecially, for fitting patrons, religious pictures in the old Umbrianmanner. In quiet nooks of the Apennines Giovanni's works remain; andthere is one of them, worth study, in spite of what critics say of itscrudity, in the National Gallery. Concede its immaturity, at least,though an immaturity visibly susceptible of a delicate grace, it winsyou nevertheless to return again and again, and ponder, by a sincereexpression of sorrow, profound, yet resigned, be the cause what it may,among all the many causes of sorrow inherent in the ideal of maternity,human or divine. But if you keep in mind when looking at it the factsof Raphael's childhood, you will recognise in his father's picture, notthe anticipated sorrow of the "Mater Dolorosa" over the dead son, butthe grief of a simple household over the mother herself taken earlyfrom it. That may have been the first picture the eyes of the world'sgreat painter of Madonnas rested on; and if he stood diligently beforeit to copy, and so copying, quite unconsciously, and with no disloyaltyto his original, refined, improved, substituted,—substituted himself,in fact, his finer self—he had already struck the persistent note ofhis career. As with his age, it is [41] his vocation, ardent worker ashe is, to enjoy himself—to enjoy himself amiably, and to find hischief enjoyment in the attitude of a scholar. And one by one, oneafter another, his masters, the very greatest of them, go to school tohim.

It was so especially with the artist of whom Raphael first becamecertainly a learner—Perugino. Giovanni Santi had died in Raphael'schildhood, too early to have been in any direct sense his teacher. Thelad, however, from one and another, had learned much, when, with hisshare of the patrimony in hand, enough to keep him, but not to tempthim from scholarly ways, he came to Perugia, hoping still further toimprove himself. He was in his eighteenth year, and how he looked justthen you may see in a drawing of his own in the University Galleries,of somewhat stronger mould than less genuine likenesses may lead you toexpect. There is something of a fighter in the way in which the nosesprings from the brow between the wide-set, meditative eyes. Astrenuous lad! capable of plodding, if you dare apply that word tolabour so impassioned as his—to any labour whatever done at Perugia,centre of the dreamiest Apennine scenery. Its various elements (onehardly knows whether one is thinking of Italian nature or of Raphael'sart in recounting them), the richly-planted lowlands, the sensitivemountain lines in flight one beyond the other into clear distance, thecool yet glowing atmosphere, [42] the romantic morsels of architecture,which lend to the entire scene I know not what expression of reposefulantiquity, arrange themselves here as for set purpose of pictorialeffect, and have gone with little change into his painted backgrounds.In the midst of it, on titanic old Roman and Etruscan foundations, thelater Gothic town had piled itself along the lines of a gigantic landof rock, stretched out from the last slope of the Apennines into theplain. Between its fingers steep dark lanes wind down into the olivegardens; on the finger-tips military and monastic builders had perchedtheir towns. A place as fantastic in its attractiveness as the humanlife which then surged up and down in it in contrast to the peacefulscene around. The Baglioni who ruled there had brought certaintendencies of that age to a typical completeness of expression, veilingcrime—crime, it might seem, for its own sake, a whole octave offantastic crime—not merely under brilliant fashions and comelypersons, but under fashions and persons, an outward presentment of lifeand of themselves, which had a kind of immaculate grace and discretionabout them, as if Raphael himself had already brought his unerring giftof selection to bear upon it all for motives of art. With life inthose streets of Perugia, as with nature, with the work of his masters,with the mere exercises of his fellow-students, his hand rearranges,refines, renews, as if by simple contact; [43] but it is met herehalf-way in its renewing office by some special aptitude for such gracein the subject itself. Seemingly innocent, full of natural gaiety,eternally youthful, those seven and more deadly sins, embodied andattired in just the jaunty dress then worn, enter now and afterwards asspectators, or assistants, into many a sacred foreground and backgroundamong the friends and kinsmen of the Holy Family, among the veryangels, gazing, conversing, standing firmly and unashamed. During hisapprenticeship at Perugia Raphael visited and left his work in moremodest places round about, along those seductive mountain or lowlandroads, and copied for one of them Perugino's "Marriage of the Virgin"significantly, did it by many degrees better, with a very novel effectof motion everywhere, and with that grace which natural motion evokes,introducing for a temple in the background a lovely bit of his friendBramante's sort of architecture, the true Renaissance or perfectedQuattro-cento architecture. He goes on building a whole lordly newcity of the like as he paints to the end of his life. The subject, wemay note, as we leave Perugia in Raphael's company, had been suggestedby the famous mystic treasure of its cathedral church, the marriagering of the Blessed Virgin herself.

Raphael's copy had been made for the little old Apennine town of Cittàdi Castello; and another place he visits at this time is still more[44] effective in the development of his genius. About his twentiethyear he comes to Siena—that other rocky Titan's hand, just lifted outof the surface of the plain. It is the most grandiose place he has yetseen; it has not forgotten that it was once the rival of Florence; andhere the patient scholar passes under an influence of somewhat largerscope than Perugino's. Perugino's pictures are for the most partreligious contemplations, painted and made visible, to accompany theaction of divine service—a visible pattern to priests, attendants,worshippers, of what the course of their invisible thoughts should beat those holy functions. Learning in the workshop of Perugino toproduce the like—such works as the Ansidei Madonna—to produce themvery much better than his master, Raphael was already become a freemanof the most strictly religious school of Italian art, the so devoutUmbrian soul finding there its purest expression, still untroubled bythe naturalism, the intellectualism, the antique paganism, then astirin the artistic soul everywhere else in Italy. The lovely work ofPerugino, very lovely at its best, of the early Raphael also, is infact "conservative," and at various points slightly behind its day,though not unpleasantly. In Perugino's allegoric frescoes of theCambio, the Hall of the Money-changers, for instance, under the mysticrule of the Planets in person, pagan personages take their place indeedside by side with the figures of the New [45] Testament, but are noRomans or Greeks, neither are the Jews Jews, nor is any one of them,warrior, sage, king, precisely of Perugino's own time and place, butstill contemplations only, after the manner of the personages in hischurch-work; or, say, dreams—monastic dreams—thin, do-nothingcreatures, conjured from sky and cloud. Perugino clearly never brokethrough the meditative circle of the Middle Age.

Now Raphael, on the other hand, in his final period at Rome, exhibits awonderful narrative power in painting; and the secret of thatpower—the power of developing a story in a picture, or series ofpictures—may be traced back from him to Pinturicchio, as that painterworked on those vast, well-lighted walls of the cathedral library atSiena, at the great series of frescoes illustrative of the life of PopePius the Second. It had been a brilliant personal history, in contactnow and again with certain remarkable public events—a career religiousyet mundane, you scarcely know which, so natural is the blending oflights, of interest in it. How unlike the Peruginesque conception oflife in its almost perverse other-worldliness, which Raphael now leavesbehind him, but, like a true scholar, will not forget. Pinturicchiothen had invited his remarkable young friend hither, "to assist him byhis counsels," who, however, pupil-wise, after his habit also learnsmuch as he thus assists. He stands depicted there in person in thescene [46] of the canonisation of Saint Catherine; and though hisactual share in the work is not to be defined, connoisseurs have felthis intellectual presence, not at one place only, in touches at oncefiner and more forcible than were usual in the steady-going, somewhatTeutonic, Pinturicchio, Raphael's elder by thirty years. The meekscholar you see again, with his tentative sketches and suggestions, hadmore than learned his lesson; through all its changes that flexibleintelligence loses nothing; does but add continually to its store.Henceforward Raphael will be able to tell a story in a picture, better,with a truer economy, with surer judgment, more naturally and easilythan any one else.

And here at Siena, of all Italian towns perhaps most deeply impressedwith medieval character—an impress it still retains—grotesque,parti-coloured—parti-coloured, so to speak, in its genius—Satanic,yet devout of humour, as depicted in its old chronicles, and beautifulwithal, dignified; it is here that Raphael becomes for the first timeaware of that old pagan world, which had already come to be so much forthe art-schools of Italy. There were points, as we saw, at which theschool of Perugia was behind its day. Amid those intensely Gothicsurroundings in the cathedral library where Pinturicchio worked, stood,as it remained till recently, unashamed there, a marble group of thethree Graces—an average Roman work in [47] effect—the sort of thingwe are used to. That, perhaps, is the only reason why for our part,except with an effort, we find it conventional or even tame. For theyouthful Raphael, on the other hand, at that moment, antiquity, as with"the dew of herbs," seemed therein "to awake and sing" out of the dust,in all its sincerity, its cheerfulness and natural charm. He hasturned it into a picture; has helped to make his original only toofamiliar, perhaps, placing the three sisters against his own favourite,so unclassic, Umbrian background indeed, but with no trace of thePeruginesque ascetic, Gothic meagreness in themselves; emphasisingrather, with a hearty acceptance, the nude, the flesh; making thelimbs, in fact, a little heavy. It was but one gleam he had caughtjust there in medieval Siena of that large pagan world he was, not solong afterwards, more completely than others to make his own. And whensomewhat later he painted the exquisite, still Peruginesque, Apollo andMarsyas, semi-medieval habits again asserted themselves withdelightfully blent effects. It might almost pass for a parable—thatlittle picture in the Louvre—of the contention between classic art andthe romantic, superseded in the person of Marsyas, a homely, quaintlypoetical young monk, surely! Only, Apollo himself also is clearly ofthe same brotherhood; has a touch, in truth, of Heine's fancied Apollo"in exile," who, Christianity now triumphing, has served as [48] ahired shepherd, or hidden himself under the cowl in a cloister; andRaphael, as if at work on choir-book or missal, still appliessymbolical gilding for natural sunlight. It is as if he wished toproclaim amid newer lights—this scholar who never forgot a lesson—hisloyal pupilage to Perugino, and retained still something of medievalstiffness, of the monastic thoughts also, that were born and lingeredin places like Borgo San Sepolcro or Città di Castello. Chef-d'oeuvre!you might exclaim, of the peculiar, tremulous, half-convinced, monkishtreatment of that after all damnable pagan world. And our owngeneration certainly, with kindred tastes, loving or wishing to lovepagan art as sincerely as did the people of the Renaissance, andmedieval art as well, would accept, of course, of work conceived inthat so seductively mixed manner, ten per cent of even Raphael's later,purely classical presentments.

That picture was suggested by a fine old intaglio in the Mediceancollection at Florence, was painted, therefore, after Raphael's comingthither, and therefore also a survival with him of a style limited,immature, literally provincial; for in the phase on which he had nowentered he is under the influence of style in its most fully determinedsense, of what might be called the thorough-bass of the pictorial art,of a fully realised intellectual system in regard to its processes,well tested by experiment, upon a survey [49] of all the conditions andvarious applications of it—of style as understood by Da Vinci, then atwork in Florence. Raphael's sojourn there extends from histwenty-first to his twenty-fifth year. He came with flatteringrecommendations from the Court of Urbino; was admitted as an equal bythe masters of his craft, being already in demand for work, then andever since duly prized; was, in fact, already famous, though he aloneis unaware—is in his own opinion still but a learner, and as a learneryields himself meekly, systematically to influence; would learn fromFrancia, whom he visits at Bologna; from the earlier naturalistic worksof Masolino and Masaccio; from the solemn prophetic work of thevenerable dominican, Bartolommeo, disciple of Savonarola. And he hasalready habitually this strange effect, not only on the whole body ofhis juniors, but on those whose manner had been long since formed; theylose something of themselves by contact with him, as if they went toschool again.

Bartolommeo, Da Vinci, were masters certainly of what we call "theideal" in art. Yet for Raphael, so loyal hitherto to the traditions ofUmbrian art, to its heavy weight of hieratic tradition, dealing stillsomewhat conventionally with a limited, non-natural matter—for Raphaelto come from Siena, Perugia, Urbino, to sharp-witted, practical,masterful Florence was in immediate effect a transition from reverie to[50] realities—to a world of facts. Those masters of the ideal werefor him, in the first instance, masters also of realism, as we say.Henceforth, to the end, he will be the analyst, the faithful reporter,in his work, of what he sees. He will realise the function of style asexemplified in the practice of Da Vinci, face to face with the world ofnature and man as they are; selecting from, asserting one's self in atranscript of its veritable data; like drawing to like there, inobedience to the master's preference for the embodiment of the creativeform within him. Portrait-art had been nowhere in the school ofPerugino, but it was the triumph of the school of Florence. And here afaithful analyst of what he sees, yet lifting it withal, unconsciously,inevitably, recomposing, glorifying, Raphael too becomes, of course, apainter of portraits. We may foresee them already in masterly series,from Maddalena Doni, a kind of younger, more virginal sister of LaGioconda, to cardinals and popes—to that most sensitive of allportraits, the "Violin-player," if it be really his. But then, on theother hand, the influence of such portraiture will be felt also in hisinventive work, in a certain reality there, a certain convincingloyalty to experience and observation. In his most elevated religiouswork he will still keep, for security at least, close to nature, andthe truth of nature. His modelling of the visible surface is lovelybecause he understands, can see the hidden causes [51] of momentaryaction in the face, the hands—how men and animals are really made andkept alive. Set side by side, then, with that portrait of MaddalenaDoni, as forming together a measure of what he has learned at Florence,the "Madonna del Gran Duca," which still remains there. Call it onrevision, and without hesitation, the loveliest of his Madonnas,perhaps of all Madonnas; and let it stand as representative of as manyas fifty or sixty types of that subject, onwards to the SixtineMadonna, in all the triumphancy of his later days at Rome. Observe theveritable atmosphere about it, the grand composition of the drapery,the magic relief, the sweetness and dignity of the human hands andfaces, the noble tenderness of Mary's gesture, the unity of the thingwith itself, the faultless exclusion of all that does not belong to itsmain purpose; it is like a single, simple axiomatic thought. Notewithal the novelty of its effect on the mind, and you will see thatthis master of style (that's a consummate example of what is meant bystyle) has been still a willing scholar in the hands of Da Vinci. Butthen, with what ease also, and simplicity, and a sort of naturalsuccess not his!

It was in his twenty-fifth year that Raphael came to the city of thepopes, Michelangelo being already in high favour there. For theremaining years of his life he paces the same streets with that grimartist, who was so great a [52] contrast with himself, and for thefirst time his attitude towards a gift different from his own is notthat of a scholar, but that of a rival. If he did not become thescholar of Michelangelo, it would be difficult, on the other hand, totrace anywhere in Michelangelo's work the counter influence usual withthose who had influenced him. It was as if he desired to add to thestrength of Michelangelo that sweetness which at first sight seems tobe wanting there. Ex forti dulcedo: and in the study of Michelangelocertainly it is enjoyable to detect, if we may, sweet savours amid thewonderful strength, the strangeness and potency of what he pours forthfor us: with Raphael, conversely, something of a relief to find in thesuavity of that so softly moving, tuneful existence, an assertion ofstrength. There was the promise of it, as you remember, in his verylook as he saw himself at eighteen; and you know that the lesson, theprophecy of those holy women and children he has made his own, is that"the meek shall possess." So, when we see him at Rome at last, in thatatmosphere of greatness, of the strong, he too is found putting forthstrength, adding that element in due proportion to the mere sweetnessand charm of his genius; yet a sort of strength, after all, stillcongruous with the line of development that genius has hitherto taken,the special strength of the scholar and his proper reward, a purelycerebral strength [53] the strength, the power of an immenseunderstanding.

Now the life of Raphael at Rome seems as we read of it hasty andperplexed, full of undertakings, of vast works not always to becompleted, of almost impossible demands on his industry, in a world ofbreathless competition, amid a great company of spectators, for greatrewards. You seem to lose him, feel he may have lost himself, in themultiplicity of his engagements; might fancy that, wealthy, variouslydecorated, a courtier, cardinal in petto, he was "serving tables."But, you know, he was forcing into this brief space of years (he diedat thirty-seven) more than the natural business of the larger part of along life; and one way of getting some kind of clearness into it, is todistinguish the various divergent outlooks or applications, and groupthe results of that immense intelligence, that still untroubled,flawlessly operating, completely informed understanding, that purelycerebral power, acting through his executive, inventive or creativegifts, through the eye and the hand with its command of visible colourand form. In that way you may follow him along many various roads tillbrain and eye and hand suddenly fail in the very midst of hiswork—along many various roads, but you can follow him along each ofthem distinctly.

At the end of one of them is the Galatea, and in quite a different formof industry, the datum [54] for the beginnings of a great literary workof pure erudition. Coming to the capital of Christendom, he comes alsofor the first time under the full influence of the antique world, paganart, pagan life, and is henceforth an enthusiastic archaeologist. Onhis first coming to Rome a papal bull had authorised him to inspect allancient marbles, inscriptions, and the like, with a view to theiradaptation in new buildings then proposed. A consequent closeacquaintance with antiquity, with the very touch of it, blossomedliterally in his brain, and, under his facile hand, in artisticcreations, of which the Galatea is indeed the consummation. But thefrescoes of the Farnese palace, with a hundred minor designs, findtheir place along that line of his artistic activity; they do notexhaust his knowledge of antiquity, his interest in and control of it.The mere fragments of it that still cling to his memory would havecomposed, had he lived longer, a monumental illustrated survey of themonuments of ancient Rome.

To revive something of the proportionable spirit at least of antiquebuilding in the architecture of the present, came naturally to Raphaelas the son of his age; and at the end of another of those roads ofdiverse activity stands Saint Peter's, though unfinished. What a proofa*gain of that immense intelligence, by which, as I said, the element ofstrength supplemented the element of mere sweetness and charm in his[55] work, that at the age of thirty, known hitherto only as a painter,at the dying request of the venerable Bramante himself, he should havebeen chosen to succeed him as the director of that vast enterprise!And if little in the great church, as we see it, is directly due tohim, yet we must not forget that his work in the Vatican also waspartly that of an architect. In the Loggie, or open galleries of theVatican, the last and most delicate effects of Quattro-cento taste comefrom his hand, in that peculiar arabesque decoration which goes by hisname.

Saint Peter's, as you know, had an indirect connexion with the Teutonicreformation. When Leo X. pushed so far the sale of indulgences to theoverthrow of Luther's Catholicism, it was done after all for the notentirely selfish purpose of providing funds to build the metropolitanchurch of Christendom with the assistance of Raphael; and yet, uponanother of those diverse outways of his so versatile intelligence, atthe close of which we behold his unfinished picture of theTransfiguration, what has been called Raphael's Bible finds itsplace—that series of biblical scenes in the Loggie of the Vatican.And here, while he has shown that he could do something ofMichelangelo's work a little more soothingly than he, this gracefulRoman Catholic rivals also what is perhaps best in the work of the rudeGerman reformer—of Luther, who came to Rome about this very [56] time,to find nothing admirable there. Place along with them the Cartoons,and observe that in this phase of his artistic labour, as Lutherprinted his vernacular German version of the Scriptures, so Raphael ispopularising them for an even larger world; he brings the simple, totheir great delight, face to face with the Bible as it is, in all itsvariety of incident, after they had so long had to content themselveswith but fragments of it, as presented in the symbolism and in thebrief lections of the Liturgy:—Biblia Pauperum, in a hundred forms ofreproduction, though designed for popes and princes.

But then, for the wise, at the end of yet another of those divergentways, glows his painted philosophy in the Parnassus and the School ofAthens, with their numerous accessories. In the execution of thoseworks, of course, his antiquarian knowledge stood him in good stead;and here, above all, is the pledge of his immense understanding, atwork on its own natural ground on a purely intellectual deposit, theapprehension, the transmission to others of complex and difficultideas. We have here, in fact, the sort of intelligence to be found inLessing, in Herder, in Hegel, in those who, by the instrumentality ofan organised philosophic system, have comprehended in one view orvision what poetry has been, or what Greek philosophy, as great complexdynamic facts in the world. But then, with the artist of the sixteenthcentury, [57] this synoptic intellectual power worked in perfectidentity with the pictorial imagination and a magic hand. By him largetheoretic conceptions are addressed, so to speak, to the intelligenceof the eye. There had been efforts at such abstract or theoreticpainting before, or say rather, leagues behind him. Modern efforts,again, we know, and not in Germany alone, to do the like for thatlarger survey of such matters which belongs to the philosophy of ourown century; but for one or many reasons they have seemed only to provethe incapacity of philosophy to be expressed in terms of art. They haveseemed, in short, so far, not fit to be seen literally—those ideas ofculture, religion, and the like. Yet Plato, as you know, supposed akind of visible loveliness about ideas. Well! in Raphael, paintedideas, painted and visible philosophy, are for once as beautiful asPlato thought they must be, if one truly apprehended them. For note,above all, that with all his wealth of antiquarian knowledge in detail,and with a perfect technique, it is after all the beauty, the grace ofpoetry, of pagan philosophy, of religious faith that he thus records.

Of religious faith also. The Disputa, in which, under the form of acouncil representative of all ages, he embodies the idea of theology,divinarum rerum notitia, as constantly resident in the Catholic Church,ranks with the "Parnassus" and the "School of Athens," if it does notrather [58] close another of his long lines of intellectual travail—aseries of compositions, partly symbolic, partly historical, in whichthe "Deliverance of St. Peter from Prison," the "Expulsion of theHuns," and the "Coronation of Charlemagne," find their places; and bywhich, painting in the great official chambers of the Vatican, Raphaelasserts, interprets the power and charm of the Catholic ideal asrealised in history. A scholar, a student of the visible world, of thenatural man, yet even more ardently of the books, the art, the life ofthe old pagan world, the age of the Renaissance, through all its variedactivity, had, in spite of the weakened hold of Catholicism on thecritical intellect, been still under its influence, the glow of it, asa religious ideal, and in the presence of Raphael you cannot think it amere after-glow. Independently, that is, of less or more evidence forit, the whole creed of the Middle Age, as a scheme of the world as itshould be, as we should be glad to find it, was still welcome to theheart, the imagination. Now, in Raphael, all the various conditions ofthat age discover themselves as characteristics of a vivid personalgenius, which may be said therefore to be conterminous with the geniusof the Renaissance itself. For him, then, in the breadth of hisimmense cosmopolitan intelligence, for Raphael, who had done in partthe work of Luther also, the Catholic Church—through all its phases,as reflected in its visible local centre, [59] the papacy—is alivestill as of old, one and continuous, and still true to itself. Ah!what is local and visible, as you know, counts for so much with theartistic temper!

Old friends, or old foes with but new faces, events repeatingthemselves, as his large, clear, synoptic vision can detect, theinvading King of France, Louis XII., appears as Attila: Leo X. as LeoI.: and he thinks of, he sees, at one and the same moment, thecoronation of Charlemagne and the interview of Pope Leo with FrancisI., as a dutiful son of the Church: of the deliverance of Leo X. fromprison, and the deliverance of St. Peter.

I have abstained from anything like description of Raphael's picturesin speaking of him and his work, have aimed rather at preparing you tolook at his work for yourselves, by a sketch of his life, and thereinespecially, as most appropriate to this place, of Raphael as a scholar.And now if, in closing, I commend one of his pictures in particular toyour imagination or memory,, your purpose to see it, or see it again,it will not be the Transfiguration nor the Sixtine Madonna, nor eventhe "Madonna del Gran Duca," but the picture we have in London—theAnsidei, or Blenheim, Madonna. I find there, at first sight, withsomething of the pleasure one has in a proposition of Euclid, a senseof the power of the understanding, in the economy with which he hasreduced his material to the [60] simplest terms, has disentangled anddetached its various elements. He is painting in Florence, but forPerugia, and sends it a specimen of its own old art—Mary and the babeenthroned, with St. Nicolas and the Baptist in attendance on eitherside. The kind of thing people there had already seen so many times,but done better, in a sense not to be measured by degrees, with awholly original freedom and life and grace, though he perhaps isunaware, done better as a whole, because better in every minuteparticular, than ever before. The scrupulous scholar, agedtwenty-three, is now indeed a master; but still goes carefully. Note,therefore, how much mere exclusion counts for in the positive effect ofhis work. There is a saying that the true artist is known best by whathe omits. Yes, because the whole question of good taste is involvedprecisely in such jealous omission. Note this, for instance, in thefamiliar Apennine background, with its blue hills and brown towns,faultless, for once—for once only—and observe, in the Umbrianpictures around, how often such background is marred by grotesque,natural, or architectural detail, by incongruous or childish incident.In this cool, pearl-grey, quiet place, where colour tells fordouble—the jewelled cope, the painted book in the hand of Mary, thechaplet of red coral—one is reminded that among all classical writersRaphael's preference was for the faultless Virgil. How orderly, howdivinely [61] clean and sweet the flesh, the vesture, the floor, theearth and sky! Ah, say rather the hand, the method of the painter!There is an unmistakeable pledge of strength, of movement and animationin the cast of the Baptist's countenance, but reserved, repressed.Strange, Raphael has given him a staff of transparent crystal. Keepthen to that picture as the embodied formula of Raphael's genius. Amidall he has here already achieved, full, we may think, of the quietassurance of what is to come, his attitude is still that of thescholar; he seems still to be saying, before all things, from first tolast, "I am utterly purposed that I will not offend."

NOTES

38. *A lecture delivered to the University Extension Students, Oxford,2 August, 1892. Published in the Fortnightly Review, Oct. 1892, andnow reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.

PASCAL*

[62] ABOUT the middle of the seventeenth century, two opposite views ofa question, upon which neither Scripture, nor Council, nor Pope, hadspoken with authority—the question as to the amount of freedom left toman by the overpowering work of divine grace upon him—had seemedlikely for a moment to divide the Roman Church into two rival sects.In the diocese of Paris, however, the controversy narrowed itself intoa mere personal quarrel between the Jesuit Fathers and the religiouscommunity of Port-Royal, and might have been forgotten but for theintervention of a new writer in whom French literature made more than anew step. It became at once, as if by a new creation, what it hasremained—a pattern of absolutely unencumbered expressiveness.

In 1656 Pascal, then thirty-three years old, under the form of "Lettersto a Provincial by one of his Friends," put forth a series of [63]pamphlets in which all that was vulnerable in the Jesuit Fathers waslaid bare to the profit of their opponents. At the moment the quarrelturned on the proposed censure of Antoine Arnauld by the Sorbonne, bythe University of Paris as a religious body. Pascal, intimate, likemany another fine intellect of the day, with the Port-Royalists, wasArnauld's friend, and it belonged to the ardour of his genius, at leastas he was then, to be a very active friend. He took up the pen asother chivalrous gentlemen of the day took up the sword, and showedhimself a master of the art of fence therewith. His delicate exerciseof himself with that weapon was nothing less than a revelation to allthe world of the capabilities, the true genius of the French languagein prose.

Those who think of Pascal in his final sanctity, his detachment of soulfrom all but the greatest matters, may be surprised, when they turn tothe "Letters," to find him treating questions, as serious for thefriends he was defending as for their adversaries, ironically, with abut half-veiled disdain for them, or an affected humility at beingunskilled in them and no theologian. He does not allow us to forgetthat he is, after all, a layman; while he introduces us, almostavowedly, into a world of unmeaning terms, and unreal distinctions andsuppositions that can never be verified. The world in general, indeed,se paye des paroles. That saying belongs to Pascal, and [64] he usesit with reference to the Jesuits and their favourite expression of"sufficient grace." In the earliest "Letters" he creates in us afeeling that, however orthodox one's intention, it is scarcely possibleto speak of the matters then so abundantly discussed by religiouspeople without heresy at some unguarded point. The suspectedproposition of Arnauld, it is admitted by one of his foes, "would beCatholic in the mouth of any one but M. Arnauld." "The truth," as itlay between Arnauld and his opponents, is a thing so delicate that"pour peu qu'on s'en retire, on tombe dans l'erreur; mais cette erreurest si déliée, que, pour peu qu'on s'en éloigne, on se trouve dans lavérité."

Some, indeed, may find in the very delicacy, the curiosity, with whichsuch distinctions are drawn, by Pascal's friends as well as by theirfoes, only the impertinence, the profanities, of the theologian byprofession, all too intimate in laying down the law of the things hedeals with—the things "which eye hath not seen" pressing into thesecrets of God's sublime commerce with men, in which, it may be, Hediffers with every single human soul, by forms of thought adapted fromthe poorest sort of men's dealings with each other, from the trader, orthe attorney. Pascal notes too the "impious buffooneries" of hisopponents. The good Fathers, perhaps, only meant them to promotegeniality of temper in the debate. But of such failures—failures oftaste, of respect towards one's [65] own point of view—the world isever unamiably aware; and in the "Letters" there is much to move theself-complacent smile of the worldling, as Pascal describes hisexperiences, while he went from one authority to another to find outwhat was really meant by the distinction between grace "sufficient,"grace "efficacious," grace "active," grace "victorious." He heard, forinstance, that all men have sufficient grace to do God's will; but itis not always prochain, not always at hand, at the moment of temptationto do otherwise. So far, then, Pascal's charges are those which mayseem to lie ready to hand against all who study theology, a loosenessof thought and language, that would pass nowhere else, in making whatare professedly very fine distinctions; the insincerity with whichterms are carefully chosen to cover opposite meanings; the fatuity withwhich opposite meanings revolve into one another, in the strangevacuous atmosphere generated by professional divines.

Up to this point, you see, Pascal is the countryman of Rabelais andMontaigne, smiling with the fine malice of the one, laughing outrightwith the gaiety of the other, all the world joining in the laugh—well,at the silliness of the clergy, who seem indeed not to know their ownbusiness. It is we, the laity, he would urge, who are serious, anddisinterested, because sincerely interested, in these greatquestionings. Jalousie de métier, the reader may suspect, hassomething to do with [66] the Professional leaders on both sides of thecontroversy; but at the actual turn controversy took just then, it wasagainst the Jesuit Fathers that Pascal's charges came home in fullforce. And their sin is above all that sin, unpardonable with men ofthe world sans peur et sans reproche, of a lack of self-respect, sinsagainst pride, if the paradox may be allowed, all the undignifiedfaults, in a word, of essentially little people when they interfere ingreat matters—faults promoted in the direction of the consciences ofwomen and children, weak concessions to weak people who want to besaved in some easy way quite other than Pascal's high, fine, chivalrousway of gaining salvation, an incapacity to say what one thinks with theglove thrown down. He supposes a Jansenist to turn upon his opponentwho uses the term "sufficient" grace, while really meaning, as healleges, insufficient, with the words:—"Your explanation would beodious to men of the world. They speak more sincerely than you onmatters of far less importance than this." With the world, Pascal, inthe "Provincial Letters," had immediate success. "All the world," weread in his friend's supposed reply to the second "Letter," "sees them;all the world understands them. Men of the world find them agreeable,and even women intelligible." A century later Voltaire found them veryagreeable. The spirit in which Pascal deals with his opponents, hisirony, may remind us of the "Apology" of [67] Socrates; the style whichsecured them immediate access to people who, as a rule, find thesubjects there treated hopelessly dry, reminds us of the "Apologia" ofNewman.

The essence of all good style, whatever its accidents may be, isexpressiveness. It is mastered in proportion to the justice, thenicety with which words balance or match their meaning, and theirwriter succeeds in saying what he wills, grave or gay, severe orflorid, simple or complex. Pascal was a master of style because, ashis sister tells us, recording his earliest years, he had a wonderfulnatural facility à dire ce qu'il voulait en la manière qu'il voulait.

Facit indignatio versus. The indignation which caused Pascal to writethe "Letters" was of a supercilious kind, and what he willed to say inthem led to the development of all those qualities that are summed upin the French term l'esprit. Voltaire declared that the best comediesof Molière n'ont pas plus de sel que les premières lettres. "Vosmaximes," Pascal assures the Jesuit Fathers, "ont je ne sais quoi dedivertissant, qui réjouit toujours le monde," and they lose nothing ofthat character in his handling of them, so much so that it was clearfrom the first that the world in general would never ask whether Pascalhad been quite fair to his opponents: "N'êtes-vous donc pas ridicules,mes Pères? Qu'on satisfait au précepte d'ouïr la messe en entendantquatre quarts de messe à la fois de différents prêtres!" When [68] youhave the like of that it is impossible not to laugh, parce que rien n'yporte davantage qu'une disproportion surprenante entre ce qu'on attendet ce qu'on voit.

He has "salt" also, of another kind. He drives straight at theJesuits, for instance, rather than at those who do but copy them,because, as he tells us: Les choses valent toujours mieux dans leursource. What equity of expression, how brief, how untranslateable! Andthe "Letters" abound in such things.

But to his comparison of Pascal with Molière, Voltaire added thatBossuet n'a rien de plus sublime que les dernières. And in truth themore serious note of the impassioned servant of religion whose lipshave been touched with altar-fire, whose seriousness came to be likesome incurable malady, a visitation of God, as people used to say, ispresently struck when, in the natural course of his argument, histhoughts are carried, from a mere passage of arms between one man orone class of men and another, deep down to those awful encounters ofthe individual soul with itself which are formulated in the eternalproblem of predestination.

In their doctrine of "sufficient grace" the Jesuits had presented aview of the conflict of good and evil in the soul, which is honourableto God and encouraging to man, and which has catholicity on its face.All to whom entrance into the Church, through its formal ministries,[69] lies open are truly called of God, while beyond it stretches theocean of "His uncovenanted mercies." That is a doctrine for the many,for those whose position in the religious life is mediocrity, who sofar as themselves or others can discern have nothing about them ofeternal or necessary or irresistible reprobation, or of the eternalcondition opposite to that.

The so-called Jansenist doctrine, on the other hand, of [ ]+ butirresistible grace was the appropriate view of the Port-Royalists,high-pitched, eager souls as they were, and of their friend Pascalhimself, however much in his turn he might refine upon it. Whether ornot, as a matter of fact, upon which, as distinct from matters offaith, an infallible pope can be mistaken, the dreary old Dutch bishopJansenius had really taught Jansenism, the Port-Royalists had found inhis "Augustinus" an incentive to devotion, and were avowedly hisadherents. In that somewhat gloomy, that too deeply impressed, thatfanatical age, they were the Calvinists of the Roman Catholic Church,maintaining, emphasising in it a view, a tradition, really constant init from St. Augustin, from St. Paul himself. It is a merit of Pascal,his literary merit, to have given a very fine-toned expression to thatdoctrine, though mainly in the way of a criticism of its opponents, toone side or aspect of an eternal controversy, eternally suspended, asrepresenting two opposite aspects of experience [70] itself. Calvinand Arminius, Jansen and Molina sum up, in fact, respectively, like therespective adherents of the freedom or of the necessity of the humanwill, in the more general question of moral philosophy, two opposed,two counter trains of phenomena actually observable by us in humanaction, too large and complex a matter, as it is, to be embodied orsummed up in any one single proposition or idea.

There are moments of one's own life, aspects of the life of others, ofwhich the conclusion that the will is free seems to be the only—is thenatural or reasonable—account. Yet those very moments on reflexion,on second thoughts, present themselves again, as but links in a chain,in an all-embracing network of chains. In all education we assume, insome inexplicable combination, at once the freedom and the necessity ofthe subject of it. And who on a survey of life from outside wouldwillingly lose the dramatic contrasts, the alternating interests, forwhich the opposed ideas of freedom and necessity are our respectivepoints of view? How significant become the details we might otherwisepass by almost unobserved, but to which we are put on the alert by theabstract query whether a man be indeed a freeman or a slave, as wewatch from aside his devious course, his struggles, his final tragedyor triumph. So much value at least there may be in problems insolublein themselves, such as that great controversy of Pascal's day [71]between Jesuit and Jansenist. And here again who would forego, in thespectacle of the religious history of the human soul, the aspects, thedetails which the doctrines of universal and particular gracerespectively embody? The Jesuit doctrine of sufficient grace iscertainly, to use the familiar expression, a very pleasant doctrineconducive to the due feeding of the whole flock of Christ, as being, asassuming them to be, what they really are, at the worst, God's sillysheep. It has something in it congruous with the rising of thephysical sun on the evil and on the good, while the wheat and the taresgrow naturally, peacefully together. But how pleasant also theopposite doctrine, how true, how truly descriptive of certaindistinguished, magnifical, or elect souls, vessels of election, éprisdes hauteurs, as we see them pass across the world's stage, as if ledon by a kind of thirst for God! Its necessary counterpart, of course,we may find, at least dramatically true of some; we can name them inhistory, perhaps from our own experience; souls of whom it seems but anobvious story to tell that they seemed to be in love with eternaldeath, to have borne on them from the first signs of reprobation. Ofcertain quite visibly elect souls, at all events, the theory ofirresistible grace might seem the almost necessary explanation. Mostreasonable, most natural, most truly is it descriptive of Pascalhimself.

[72] So far, indeed, up to the year 1656, Pascal's annus mirabilis, theyear of the "Letters," the world had been allowed to see only one sideof him. Early in life he had achieved brilliant overtures in theabstract sciences, and, inheriting much of the quality of a finegentleman, he figures, with his trenchant manner, never at a loss, as aquite secular person, stirred on occasion to take part in a religiousdebate. But it is after the grand fashion of the mundane quarrels ofthat day, the age of the sentiment of personal honour, in which it wasso natural for the good-natured Jesuits, stirring all Pascal's satiricpower, to excuse as well as they could the act de tuer pour un simplemédisance. The Church was still an estate of the realm with all theobligations of the noblesse, and it was still something worse than badtaste, it was dangerous to express religious doubts. About theCatholic religion, as he conceived it, Pascal displays the assuredattitude of an ancient Crusader. He has the full courage of hisopinions, and by his elegant easy gallantry in speaking for it he givesto religion then and now a kind of dignity it had lost with othercontroversialists in the eyes of the world. There is abundant gaietyalso in the "Letters." He quotes from Tertullian to the effect thatc'est proprement à la vérité qu'il appartient de rire parce qu'elle estgaie, et de se jouer de ses ennemis parce qu'elle est assurée de savictoire. For he could find quotations to his purpose from reconditewriters, [73] though he was not a man of erudition; like a man of theworld again, he read little, but that absorbingly, was the master oftwo authors, Epictetus and Montaigne, and, as appeared afterwards, ofthe Scriptures in the Vulgate.

So far, his imposing carriage of himself intellectually might lead usto suspect that the forced humilities of his later years are indirectlya discovery of what seems one leading quality of the natural man inhim, a pride that could be quite fierce on occasion. And, like anotherrich young man whom Jesus loved, he lacked nothing to make the worldalso love and confide in, as it already flattered, him. He turned fromit, decided to live a single life. Was it the mere oddity of genius?Or its last fine dainty touch of difference from ordinary people andtheir motives? Or that sanctity of which, in some cases, the worlditself instinctively feels the distinction, though it shrinks from thetrue explanation of it? Certainly, all things considered, on themorrow of the "Letters," Blaise Pascal, at the age of thirty-three, hada brilliant worldly future before him, had he cared duly to wait upon,to serve it. To develop the already considerable position of hisfamily among the gentry of Auvergne would have been to follow the wayof his time, in which so many noble names had been founded onprofessional talents. Increasingly, however, from early youth, he hadbeen the subject of a malady so hopeless [74] and inexplicable that inthat superstitious age some fancied it the result of a malign spell ininfancy. Gradually, the world almost loses sight of him, hears atlast, some time after it had looked for that event, that he had died,of course very piously, among those sombre people, his friends andrelations of Port-Royal, with whom he had taken refuge, and seemedalready to have been buried alive. And in the year 1670, not tilleight years after his death, the "Pensées" appeared—"Pensées de M.Pascal sur la Religion et sur quelques autres sujets"—or rather aselection from those "Thoughts" by the Port-Royalists, still in fear ofconsequences to the struggling Jansenist party, anxious to presentPascal's doctrine as far as possible in conformity with the Jesuitsense, as also to divert the vaguer parts of it more entirely intotheir own. The incomparable words were altered, the order changed orlost, the thoughts themselves omitted or retrenched. Written in shortintervals of relief from suffering, they were contributions to a largeand methodical work—"Pensées de M. Pascal sur la Religion et surquelques autres sujets"—on a good many things besides, as the readerfinds, on many of the great things of this world which seemed to him tocome in contact or competition with religion. In the true version ofthe "Thoughts," edited at last by Faugère, in 1844, from Pascal's ownMSS., in the National Library, they group themselves into certaindefinite trains [75] of speculation and study. But it is still,nevertheless, as isolated thoughts, as inspirations, so to call them,penetrating what seemed hopelessly dark, summarising what seemedhopelessly confused, sticking fast in men's memories, floating lightly,or going far, that they have left so deep a mark in literature. Foragain the manner, also, their style precisely becomes them. The meritsof Pascal's style, indeed, as of the French language itself, still isto say beaucoup de choses en peu de mots; and the brevity, thediscerning edge, the impassioned concentration of the language are hereone with the ardent immediate apprehensions of his spirit.

One of the literary merits of the "Provincial Letters" is that they arereally like letters; they are essentially a conversation by writingwith other persons. What we have in the "Thoughts" is the conversationof the writer with himself, with himself and with God, or ratherconcerning Him, for He is, in Pascal's favourite phrase from theVulgate, Deus absconditus, He who never directly shows Himself. Chosesde coeur the "Thoughts" are, indeed those of an individual, though theyseem to have determined the very outlines of a great subject for allother persons. In Pascal, at the summit of the Puy de Dôme in hisnative Auvergne, experimenting on the weight of the invisible air,proving it to be ever all around by its effects, we are presented withone of the more pleasing [76] aspects of his earlier, more wholesome,open-air life. In the great work of which the "Thoughts" are the firsthead, Pascal conceived himself to be doing something of the same kindin the spiritual order by a demonstration of this other invisible worldall around us, with its really ponderable forces, its movement, itsattractions and repulsions, the world of grace, unseen, but, as hethinks, the one only hypothesis that can explain the experienced,admitted facts. Whether or not he was fixing permanently in the"Pensées" the outlines, the principles, of a great system of assent, ofconviction, for acceptance by the intellect, he was certainly fixingthese with all the imaginative depth and sufficiency of Shakespearehimself, the fancied opposites, the attitudes, the necessary forms ofpathos,+ of a great tragedy in the heart, the soul, the essential humantragedy, as typical and central in its expression here, as Hamlet—whatthe soul passes, and must pass, through, aux abois with nothingness,or with those offended mysterious powers that may really occupy it—orwhen confronted with the thought of what are called the "four lastthings" it yields this way or that. What might have passed with allits fiery ways for an esprit de secte et de cabale is now revealed amidthe disputes not of a single generation but of eternal ones, by thelight of a phenomenal storm of blinding and blasting inspirations.

[77] Observe, he is not a sceptic converted, a returned infidel, but isseen there as if at the very centre of a perpetually maintained tragiccrisis holding the faith steadfastly, but amid the well-poised pointsof essential doubt all around him and it. It is no mere calmsupersession of a state of doubt by a state of faith; the doubts neverdie, they are only just kept down in a perpetual agonia. Everywhere inthe "Letters" he had seemed so great a master—a master ofhimself—never at a loss, taking the conflict so lightly, with so lighta heart: in the great Atlantean travail of the "Thoughts" his feetsometimes "are almost gone." In his soul's agony, theologicalabstractions seem to become personal powers. It was as if just belowthe surface of the green undulations, the stately woods, of his ownstrange country of Auvergne, the volcanic fires had suddenly discoveredthemselves anew. In truth into his typical diagnosis, as it may seem,of the tragedy of the human soul, there have passed not merely thepersonal feelings, the temperament of an individual, but his maladyalso, a physical malady. Great genius, we know, has the power ofelevating, transmuting, serving itself by the accidental conditionsabout it, however unpromising—poverty, and the like. It was certainlyso with Pascal's long-continued physical sufferings. That aigreur,which is part of the native colour of Pascal's genius, is reinforced inthe [78] "Pensées" by insupportable languor, alternating withsupportable pain, as he died little by little through the eight yearsof their composition. They are essentially the utterance of a soulmalade—a soul of great genius, whose malady became a new quality ofthat genius, perfecting it thus, by its very defect, as a type on theintellectual stage, and thereby guiding, reassuring sympathetically,manning by a sense of good company that large class of persons who aremalade in the same way. "La maladie est l'état naturel des Chrétiens,"says Pascal himself. And we concede that every one of us more or lessis ailing thus, as another has told us that life itself is a disease ofthe spirit.

From Port-Royal also came, about the year 1670, a painful book, the"Life of Pascal," a portrait painted slowly from the life or livingdeath, but with an almost exclusive preference for traits expressive ofdisease. The post-mortem examination of Pascal's brain revealed, weare now told, the secret, not merely of that long prostration, thosesudden passing torments, but of something analogous to them in Pascal'sgenius and work. Well! the light cast indirectly on the literary workof Pascal by Mme. Périer's "Life" is of a similar kind. It is averitable chapter in morbid pathology, though it may have truly abeauty for experts, the beauty which belongs to all refined cases evenof cerebral disturbance. That he should [79] have sought relief fromhis singular wretchedness, in that sombre company, is like the secondstroke of tragedy upon him. At moments Pascal becomes almost asectarian, and seems to pass out of the genial broad heaven of theCatholic Church. He had lent himself in those last years to a kind ofpieties which do not make a winning picture, which always have aboutthem, even when they show themselves in men physically strong,something of the small compass of the sick-chamber. His medieval ororiental self-tortures, all the painful efforts at absolute detachment,a perverse asceticism taking all there still was to spare from thedenuded and suffering body, might well, you may think, have died withhim, but are here recorded, chiefly by way of showing the world, theJesuits, that the Jansenists, too, had a saint quite after their mind.

But though, at first sight, you may find a pettiness in those minutepieties, they have their signification as a testimony to the wholenessof Pascal's assent, the entirety of his submission, his immensesincerity, the heroic grandeur of his achieved faith. The seventeenthcentury presents survivals of the gloomy mental habits of the MiddleAge, but for the most part of a somewhat theatrical kind, imitations ofFrancis and Dominic or of their earlier imitators. In Pascal they areoriginal, and have all their seriousness. Que je n'en sois [80] jamaisséparé—pas séparé éternellement, he repeats, or makes that strangesort of MS. amulet, of which his sister tells us, repeat for him. Castme not away from Thy presence; and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.It is table rase he is trying to make of himself, that He might reignthere absolutely alone, who, however, as he was bound to think, hadmade and blest all those things he declined to accept. Deeper anddeeper, then, he retreated into the renuncient life. He could not, hadhe wished, deprive himself of that his greatest gift—literally a gifthe might have thought it not to be buried but accounted for—the giftof le beau dire, of writing beautifully. "Il avoit renoncé depuislongtemps aux sciences purement humains." To him who had known them sowell, and as if by intuition, those abstract and perdurable forms ofservice might well have seemed a part of "the Lord's doing, marvellousin our eyes," as his favourite Psalm cxix., the psalm des petitesheures, the cxviii. of the Vulgate, says.* These, too, he counts nowas but a variety of le néant and vanity of things. He no longerrecords, therefore, the mathematical aperçus that may visit him; and inhis scruples, his suspicions of' visible beauty, he interests us asprecisely an inversion of what is called the aesthetic life.

[81] Yet his faith, as in the days of the Middle Age, had beensupported, rewarded, by what he believed to be visible miracle amongthe strange lights and shades of that retired place. Pascal's niece,the daughter of Madame Périer, a girl ten years of age, suffered from adisease of the eyes pronounced to be incurable. The disease was apeculiarly distressing one, the sort of affliction which, falling on ayoung child, may lead one to question the presence of divine justice inthe world, makes one long that miracles were possible. Well! Pascal,for one, believed that on occasion that profound aspiration had beenfollowed up by the power desired. A thorn from the crown of Jesus, aswas believed, had been lately brought to the Port-Royal du Faubourg S.Jacques in Paris, and was one day applied devoutly to the eye of thesuffering child. What followed was an immediate and complete cure,fully attested by experts. Ah! Thou hast given him his heart'sdesire: and hast not denied him the request of his lips. Pascal, andthe young girl herself, faithfully to the end of a long life, believedthe circ*mstances to have been miraculous. Otherwise, we do not seethat Pascal was ever permitted to enjoy (so to speak) the religion forwhich he had exchanged so much; that the sense of acceptance, ofassurance, had come to him; that for him the Spouse had ever penetratedthe veil of the ordinary routine of the means of grace; [82] nothingthat corresponded as a matter of clear personal intercourse of the verysenses to the greatness of his surrender—who had emptied himself ofall other things. Besides, there was some not wholly-explained delayin his reception, in those his last days, of the Sacrament. It wasbrought to him just in time—"Voici celui que vous avez tantdésiré!"—the ministrant says to the dying man. Pascal was then agedthirty-nine—an age you may remember fancifully noted as fatal togenius.

Pascal's "Thoughts," then, we shall not rightly measure but as theoutcome, the utterance, of a soul diseased, a soul permanently ill atease. We find in their constant tension something of insomnia, of thatsleeplessness which can never be a quite healthful condition of mind ina human body. Sometimes they are cries, cries of obscure pain ratherthan thoughts—those great fine sayings which seem to betray by theirdepth of sound the vast unseen hollow places of nature, of humanity,just beneath one's feet or at one's side. Reading them, so modern stillare those thoughts, so rich and various in suggestion, that one seemsto witness the mental seed-sowing of the next two centuries, andperhaps more, as to those matters with which he concerns himself.Intuitions of a religious genius, they may well be taken also as thefinal considerations of the natural man, as a religious inquirer ondoubt and faith, and their place in [83] things. Listen now to some ofthese "Thoughts" taken at random: taken at first for their brevity.Peu de chose nous console, parce que peu de chose nous afflige. Parl'espace l'univers me comprend et m'engloutit comme un point: par lapensée je le comprends. Things like these put us en route with Pascal.Toutes les bonnes maximes sont dans le monde: on ne manque que de lesappliquer. The great ascetic was always hard on amusem*nts, on merepastimes: Le divertissem*nt nous amuse, one and all of us, et nous faitarriver insensiblement à la mort. Nous perdons encore la vie avecjoie, pourvu qu'on en parle. On ne peut faire une bonne physionomie(in a portrait) qu'en accordant toutes nos contrariétés. L'homme n'estqu'un roseau, le plus foible de la nature, mais c'est un roseaupensant. Il ne faut pas que l'univers entier s'arme pour l'écraser.Une vapeur, une goutte d'eau, suffit pour le tuer. Mais quandl'univers l'écraseroit, l'homme seroit encore plus noble que se qui letue, parce qu'il sait qu'il meurt, et l'avantage que l'univers a surlui, l'univers n'en sait rien. It is not thought by which that excels,but the convincing force of imagination which sublimates its verytriteness. Toute notre dignité consiste donc en la pensée.

There, then, you have at random the sort of stuff of which the"Pensees" are made. Let me now briefly indicate, also by quotationagain, some of the main leading tendencies in them. La chose la plusimportante à toute la vie c'est la [84] choix du métier: le hasard endispose. There we recognise the manner of thought of Montaigne. Nowone of the leading interests in the study of Pascal is to trace theinfluence upon him of the typical sceptic of the preceding century.Pascal's "Thoughts" we shall never understand unless we realise theunder-texture in them of Montaigne's very phrases, the fascination the"Essays" had for Pascal in his capacity of one of the children oflight, as giving a veritable compte rendu of the Satanic course of thisworld since the Fall, set forth with all the persuasiveness, the powerand charm, all the gifts of Satan, the veritable light on things he hasat his disposal.

Pascal re-echoes Montaigne then in asserting the paradoxical characterof man and his experience. The old headings under which thePort-Royalist editors grouped the "Thoughts" recall the titles ofMontaigne's "Essays"—"Of the Disproportion of Man," and the like. Asstrongly as Montaigne he delights in asserting the relative, local,ephemeral and merely provisional character of our ideas of law, vice,virtue, happiness, and so forth. Comme la mode fait l'agrément aussifait-elle la justice. La justice et la vérité sont deux pointes sisubtiles, que nos instruments sont trop mousses pour y toucherexactement. Bien suivant la seule raison n'est juste de soi: toutbranle avec le temps. Sometimes he strikes the express accent ofMontaigne: Ceux qui sont dans un vaisseau croient que ceux qui sont[85] au bord fuient. Le langage est pareil de tous côtés. Il fautavoir un point fixe pour en juger. Le port juge ceux qui sont dans unvaisseau, mais où prendrons-nous un port dans la morale? At times heseems to forget that he himself and Montaigne are after all not of thesame flock, as his mind grazes in those pleasant places. Qu'il (man)se regarde comme égaré dans ce canton détourné de la nature, et de cepetit cachot où il se trouve logé, qu'il apprenne the earth, etsoi-même à son juste prix. Il ffre, mais elle est ployable à toussens; et ainsi il n'y en a point. Un même sens change selon lesparoles qui l'expriment. He has touches even of what he calls themalignity, the malign irony of Montaigne. Rien que la médiocrité n'estbon, he says,—épris des hauteurs, as he so conspicuously was—C'estsortir de l'humanité que de sortir du milieu; la grandeur de l'âmehumaine consiste à savoir s'y tenir. Rien ne fortifie plus lepyrrhonisme—that is ever his word for scepticism—que ce qu'il y en aqui ne sont pas pyrrhoniens: si tous étaient ils auraient tort. You mayeven credit him, like Montaigne, with a somewhat Satanic intimacy withthe ways, the cruel ways, the weakness, lâcheté, of the human heart, sothat, as he says of Montaigne, himself too might be a pernicious studyfor those who have a native tendency to corruption.

The paradoxical condition of the world, the natural inconsistency ofman, his strange [86] blending of meanness with ancient greatness, thecaprices of his status here, of his power and attainments, in the issueof his existence—that is what the study of Montaigne had enforced onPascal as the sincere compte rendu of experience. But then he passesat a tangent from the circle of the great sceptic's apprehension. Thatprospect of man and the world, undulant, capricious, inconsistent,contemptible, lâche, full of contradiction, with a soul of evil inthings good, irreducible to law, upon which, after all, Montaigne looksout with a complacency so entire, fills Pascal with terror. It is theworld on the morrow of a great catastrophe, the casual forces of whichhave by no means spent themselves. Yes! this world we see, of which weare a part, with its thousand dislocations, is precisely what we mightexpect as resultant from the Fall of Man, with consequences in fullworking still. It presents the appropriate aspect of a lost world,though with beams of redeeming grace about it, those, too, distributedsomewhat capriciously to chosen people and elect souls, who, after all,can have but an ill time of it here. Under the tragic éclairs ofdivine wrath essentially implacable, the gentle, pleasantly undulating,sunny, earthly prospect of poor loveable humanity which opens out forone in Montaigne's "Essays," becomes for Pascal a scene of harshprecipices, of threatening heights and depths—the depths of his ownnothingness. Vanity: nothingness: these [87] are his catchwords: Noussommes incapables et du vrai et du bien; nous sommes tous condamnés.Ce qui y paraît (i.e., what we see in the world) ne marque ni uneexclusion totale ni une présence manifeste de divinité, mais laprésence d'un Dieu qui se cache: (Deus absconditus, that is a recurrentfavourite thought of his) tout porte ce caractère. In this world ofabysmal dilemmas, he is ready to push all things to their extremes.All or nothing; for him real morality will be nothing short ofsanctity. En Jésus Christ toutes les contradictions sont accordées.Yet what difficulties again in the religion of Christ! Nulle autrereligion n'a proposé de se haïr. La seule religion contraire à lanature, contraire au sens commun, est la seule qui ait toujours été.

Multitudes in every generation have felt at least the aesthetic charmof the rites of the Catholic Church. For Pascal, on the other hand, acertain weariness, a certain puerility, a certain unprofitableness inthem is but an extra trial of faith. He seems to have little sense ofthe beauty of holiness. And for his sombre, trenchant, precipitousphilosophy there could be no middle terms; irresistible election,irresistible reprobation; only sometimes extremes meet, and again itmay be the trial of faith that the justified seem as loveless andunlovely as the reprobate. Abêtissez-vous! A nature, you may think,that would magnify things to the utmost, nurse, expand them beyondtheir natural bounds by his [88] reflex action upon them. Thusrevelation is to be received on evidence, indeed, but an evidenceconclusive only on a presupposition or series of presuppositions,evidence that is supplemented by an act of imagination, or by the graceof faith, shall we say? At any rate, the fact is, that the genius ofthe great reasoner, of this great master of the abstract and deductivesciences, turned theologian, carrying the methods of thought thereformed into the things of faith, was after all of the imaginativeorder. Now hear what he says of imagination: Cette faculté trompeuse,qui semble nous être donnée exprès pour nous induire à une erreurnécessaire. That has a sort of necessity in it. What he says hasagain the air of Montaigne, and he says much of the same kind: Cettesuperbe puissance ennemie de la raison, combien toutes les richesses dela terre sont insuffisantes sans son consentement. The imagination hasthe disposition of all things: Elle fait la beauté, la justice, et lebonheur, qui est le tout du monde. L'imagination dispose de tout. Andwhat we have here to note is its extraordinary power in himself.Strong in him as the reasoning faculty, so to speak, it administeredthe reasoning faculty in him à son grbut he was unaware of it, thatpower d'autant plus fourbe qu'elle ne l'est pas toujours. Hidden underthe apparent rigidity of his favourite studies, imagination, even inthem, played a large part. Physics, mathematics were with him largelymatters of intuition, anticipation, [89] precocious discovery, shortcuts, superb guessing. It was the inventive element in his work andhis way of putting things that surprised those best able to judge. Hemight have discovered the mathematical sciences for himself, it isalleged, had his father, as he once had a mind to do, withheld him frominstruction in them.

About the time when he was bidding adieu to the world, Pascal had anaccident. As he drove round a corner on the Seine side to cross thebridge at Neuilly, the horses were precipitated down the bank into thewater. Pascal escaped, but with a nervous shock, a certainhallucination, from which he never recovered. As he walked or sat hewas apt to perceive a yawning depth beside him; would set stick orchair there to reassure himself. We are now told, indeed, that thatcirc*mstance has been greatly exaggerated. But how true to Pascal'stemper, as revealed in his work, that alarmed precipitous character init! Intellectually the abyss was evermore at his side. Nous avons, heobserves, un autre principe d'erreur, les maladies. Now in him theimagination itself was like a physical malady, troubling, disturbing,or in active collusion with it....

NOTES

62. *Published in the Contemporary Review, Feb. 1895, and now reprintedby the kind permission of the proprietors.

76. +Transliteration: pathos.

80. *The words here cited are, however, from Psalm cxviii., the cxvii.of the Vulgate, and not from Pascal's favourite Psalm. (C.L.S.)+C.L.S. stands for Charles Shadwell, editor of the original volume.

ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY*

[90] TITIAN, as we see him in what some have thought his noblest work,the large altar-piece, dated 1522, his forty-fifth year, of SS. Nazaroe Celso, at Brescia, is certainly a religious—a great, religiouspainter. The famous Gabriel of the Annunciation, aflight, in all theeffortless energy of an angel indeed, and Sebastian, adapted, it wassaid, from an ancient statue, yet as novel in design as if Titian hadbeen the first to handle that so familiar figure in old religiousart—may represent for us a vast and varied amount of work—in which heexpands to their utmost artistic compass the earlier religious dreamsof Mantegna and the Bellini, affording sufficient proof how sacredthemes could rouse his imagination, and all his manual skill, to heroicefforts. But he is also the painter of the Venus of the Tribune andthe Triumph of Bacchus; and such frank acceptance of the voluptuouspaganism of the Renaissance, the motive of a large proportion of hiswork, [91] might make us think that religion, grandly dramatic as washis conception of it, can have been for him only one of many pictorialattitudes. There are however painters of that date who, while theirwork is great enough to be connected (perhaps groundlessly) withTitian's personal influence, or directly attributed to his hand,possess at least this psychological interest, that about theirreligiousness there can be no question. Their work is to be looked formainly in and about the two sub-alpine towns of Brescia and Bergamo; inthe former of which it becomes definable as a school—the school ofMoretto, in whom the perfected art of the later Renaissance is to beseen in union with a catholicism as convinced, towards the middle ofthe sixteenth century, as that of Giotto or Angelico.

Moretto of Brescia, for instance, is one of the few painters who havefully understood the artistic opportunities of the subject of SaintPaul, for whom, for the most part, art has found only the conventionaltrappings of a Roman soldier (a soldier, as being in charge of thoseprisoners to Damascus), or a somewhat commonplace old age. Morettoalso makes him a nobly accoutred soldier—the rim of the helmet, thrownbackward in his fall to the earth, rings the head already with a faintcircle of glory—but a soldier still in possession of all thoseresources of unspoiled youth which he is ready to offer in a [92]moment to the truth that has just dawned visibly upon him. Theterrified horse, very grandly designed, leaps high against the suddenlydarkened sky above the distant horizon of Damascus, with all Moretto'speculiar understanding of the power of black and white. But what signsthe picture inalienably as Moretto's own is the thought of the sainthimself, at the moment of his recovery from the stroke of Heaven. Thepure, pale, beardless face, in noble profile, might have had for itsimmediate model some military monk of a later age, yet it breathes allthe joy and confidence of the Apostle who knows in a single flash oftime that he has found the veritable captain of his soul. It is indeedthe Paul whose genius of conviction has so greatly moved the minds ofmen—the soldier who, bringing his prisoners "bound to Damascus," isbecome the soldier of Jesus Christ.

Moretto's picture has found its place (in a dark recess, alas!) in theChurch of Santa Maria presso San Celso, in the suburbs of Milan, hardby the site of the old Roman cemetery, where Ambrose, at a moment whenin one of his many conflicts a "sign" was needed, found the bodies ofNazarus and Celsus, youthful patrician martyrs in the reign of Nero,overflowing now with miraculous powers, their blood still fresh uponthem—conspersa recenti sanguine. The body of Saint Nazarus he removedinto the city: that of Saint Celsus remained within the littlesanctuary [93] which still bears his name, and beside which, in thefifteenth century, arose the glorious Church of the Madonna, withspacious atrium after the Ambrosian manner, a façade richly sculpturedin the style of the Renaissance, and sumptuously adorned within.Behind the massive silver tabernacle of the altar of the miraculouspicture which gave its origin to this splendid building, the rarevisitor, peeping as into some sacred bird-nest, detects one of theloveliest works of Luini, a small, but exquisitely finished "HolyFamily." Among the fine pictures around are works by two other verynotable religious painters of the cinque-cento. Both alike, Ferrariand Borgognone, may seem to have introduced into fiery Italianlatitudes a certain northern temperature, and somewhat twilight,French, or Flemish, or German, thoughts. Ferrari, coming from theneighbourhood of Varallo, after work at Vercelli and Novara, returnsthither to labour, as both sculptor and painter, in the "stations" ofthe Sacro Monte, at a form of religious art which would seem to havesome natural kinship with the temper of a mountain people. It is as ifthe living actors in the "Passion Play" of Oberammergau had beentransformed into almost illusive groups in painted terra-cotta. Thescenes of the Last Supper, of the Martyrdom of the Innocents, of theRaising of Jairus' daughter, for instance, are certainly touching inthe naïve piety of their life-sized realism. But Gaudenzio Ferrari hadmany [94] helpmates at the Sacro Monte; and his lovelier work is in theFranciscan Church at the foot of the hill, and in those two, trulyItalian, far-off towns of the Lombard plain. Even in his great,many-storied fresco in the Franciscan Church at Varallo there aretraces of a somewhat barbaric hankering after solid form; the armour ofthe Roman soldiers, for example, is raised and gilt. It is as if thisserious soul, going back to his mountain home, had lapsed again intomountain "grotesque," with touches also, in truth, of a peculiarlynorthern poetry—a mystic poetry, which now and again, in histreatment, for instance, of angel forms and faces, reminds one ofBlake. There is something of it certainly in the little white spectralsoul of the penitent thief making its escape from the dishonoured bodyalong the beam of his cross.

The contrast is a vigorous one when, in the space of a few hours, thetraveller finds himself at Vercelli, half-stifled in its thick pressingcrop of pumpkins and mulberry trees. The expression of the prophetoccurs to him: "A lodge in a garden of cucumbers." Garden of cucumbersand half-tropical flowers, it has invaded the quiet open spaces of thetown. Search through them, through the almost cloistral streets, forthe Church of the Umiliati; and there, amid the soft garden-shadows ofthe choir, you may find the sentiment of the neighbourhood expressedwith great refinement in what is perhaps [95] the masterpiece ofFerrari, "Our Lady of the Fruit-garden," as we might say—attended bytwelve life-sized saints and the monkish donors of the picture. Theremarkable proportions of the tall panel, up which the green-stuff isclimbing thickly above the mitres and sacred garniture of those sacredpersonages, lend themselves harmoniously to the gigantic stature ofSaint Christopher in the foreground as the patron saint of the church.With the savour of this picture in his memory, the visitor will lookeagerly in some half-dozen neighbouring churches and desertedconventual places for certain other works from Ferrari's hand; and so,leaving the place under the influence of his delicate religious ideal,may seem to have been listening to much exquisite church-music there,violins and the like, on that perfectly silent afternoon—such music ashe may still really hear on Sundays at the neighbouring town of Novara,famed for it from of old. Here, again, the art of Gaudenzio Ferrarireigns. Gaudenzio! It is the name of the saintly prelate on whom hispencil was many times employed, First Bishop of Novara, and patron ofthe magnificent basilica hard by which still covers his body, whoseearthly presence in cope and mitre Ferrari has commemorated in thealtar-piece of the "Marriage of St. Catherine," with its refinedrichness of colour, like a bank of real flowers blooming there, andlike nothing else around it in the [96] vast duomo of old Romanarchitecture, now heavily masked in modern stucco. The solemnmountains, under the closer shadow of which his genius put on anorthern hue, are far away, telling at Novara only as the grandlytheatrical background to an entirely lowland life. And here, as atVercelli so at Novara, Ferrari is not less graciously Italian thanLuini himself.

If the name of Luini's master, Borgognone, is no proof of northernextraction, a northern temper is nevertheless a marked element of hisgenius—something of the patience, especially, of the masters of Dijonor Bruges, nowhere more clearly than in the two groups of male andfemale heads in the National Gallery, family groups, painted in theattitude of worship, with a lowly religious sincerity which may remindus of the contemporary work of M. Legros. Like those northern masters,he accepts piously, but can refine, what "has no comeliness." And yetperhaps no painter has so adequately presented that purely personalbeauty (for which, indeed, even profane painters for the most part haveseemed to care very little) as Borgognone in the two deacons, Stephenand Laurence, who, in one of the altar-pieces of the Certosa, assist atthe throne of Syrus, ancient, sainted, First Bishop of Pavia—statelyyouths in quite imperial dalmatics of black and gold. An indefatigableworker at many forms of religious art, here and elsewhere, assisting atlast in the [97] carving and inlaying of the rich marble façade of theCertosa, the rich carved and inlaid wood-work of Santa Maria atBergamo, he is seen perhaps at his best, certainly in his mostsignificantly religious mood, in the Church of the Incoronata at Lodi,especially in one picture there, the "Presentation of Christ in theTemple." The experienced visitor knows what to expect in the sacristiesof the great Italian churches; the smaller, choicer works of Luini,say, of Della Robbia or Mino of Fiesole, the superb ambries and drawersand presses of old oak or cedar, the still untouched morsel offresco—like sacred priestly thoughts visibly lingering there in thehalf-light. Well! the little octagonal Church of the Incoronata islike one of these sacristies. The work of Bramante—you see it, as itis so rarely one's luck to do, with its furniture and internaldecoration complete and unchanged, the coloured pavement, the colouringwhich covers the walls, the elegant little organ of Domenico da Lucca(1507), the altar-screens with their dainty rows of brass cherubs. InBorgognone's picture of the "Presentation," there the place is,essentially as we see it to-day. The ceremony, invested with all thesentiment of a Christian sacrament, takes place in this very church,this "Temple" of the Incoronata where you are standing, reflected onthe dimly glorious wall, as in a mirror. Borgognone in his picture has[98] but added in long legend, letter by letter, on the fascia belowthe cupola, the Song of Simeon.

The Incoronata however is, after all, the monument less of AmbrogioBorgognone than of the gifted Piazza family:—Callisto, himself born atLodi, his father, his uncle, his brothers, his son Fulvio, workingthere in three generations, under marked religious influence, and withso much power and grace that, quite gratuitously, portions of theirwork have been attributed to the master-hand of Titian, in someimaginary visit here to these painters, who were in truth the disciplesof another—Romanino of Brescia. At Lodi, the lustre of ScipionePiazza is lost in that of Callisto, his elder brother; but he mightworthily be included in a list of painters memorable for a singlepicture, such pictures as the solemn Madonna of Pierino del Vaga, inthe Duomo of Pisa, or the Holy Family of Pellegrino Piola, in theGoldsmiths' Street at Genoa. A single picture, a single figure in apicture, signed and dated, over the altar of Saint Clement, in theChurch of San Spirito, at Bergamo, might preserve the fame of ScipionePiazza, who did not live to be old. The figure is that of the youthfulClement of Rome himself, "who had seen the blessed Apostles," writingat the dictation of Saint Paul. For a moment he looks away from theletters of the book with all the wistful intelligence of a boy softlytouched already by the radiancy of the [99] celestial Wisdom. "Herways are ways of pleasantness!" That is the lesson this winsome,docile, spotless creature—ingenui vultus puer ingenuiquepudoris—younger brother or cousin of Borgognone's noble deacons at theCertosa—seems put there to teach us. And in this church, indeed, asit happens, Scipione's work is side by side with work of his.

It is here, in fact, at Bergamo and at Brescia, that the late survivalof a really convinced religious spirit becomes a striking fact in thehistory of Italian art. Vercelli and Novara, though famous for theirmountain neighbourhood, enjoy but a distant and occasional view ofMonte Rosa and its companions; and even then those awful stairways totracts of airy sunlight may seem hardly real. But the beauty of thetwin sub-alpine towns further eastward is shaped by the circ*mstancethat mountain and plain meet almost in their streets, very effectivelyfor all purposes of the picturesque. Brescia, immediately below the"Falcon of Lombardy" (so they called its masterful fortress on the lastledge of the Piè di Monte), to which you may now ascend by gentleturfed paths, to watch the purple mystery of evening mount graduallyfrom the great plain up the mountain-walls close at hand, is as levelas a church pavement, home-like, with a kind of easy walking from pointto point about it, rare in Italian towns—a town full of walledgardens, giving even to [100] its smaller habitations the retirement oftheir more sumptuous neighbours, and a certain English air. You maypeep into them, pacing its broad streets, from the blaze of which youare glad to escape into the dim and sometimes gloomy churches, thetwilight sacristies, rich with carved and coloured woodwork. The artof Romanino still lights up one of the darkest of those churches withthe altar-piece which is perhaps his most expressive and noblest work.The veritable blue sky itself seems to be breaking into thedark-cornered, low-vaulted, Gothic sanctuary of the Barefoot Brethren,around the Virgin and Child, the bowed, adoring figures of Bonaventura,Saint Francis, Saint Antony, the youthful majesty of Saint Louis, tokeep for ever in memory—not the King of France however, in spite ofthe fleurs-de-lys on his cope of azure, but Louis, Bishop of Toulouse.A Rubens in Italy! you may think, if you care to rove from thedelightful fact before you after vague supposititiousalliances—something between Titian and Rubens! Certainly, Romanino'sbold, contrasted colouring anticipates something of the northernfreshness of Rubens. But while the peculiarity of the work of Rubensis a sense of momentary transition, as if the colours were even nowmelting in it, Romanino's canvas bears rather the steady glory of broadItalian noonday; while he is distinguished also for a remarkableclearness of [101] design, which has perhaps something to do, iscertainly congruous with, a markedly religious sentiment, like that ofAngelico or Perugino, lingering still in the soul of this Brescianpainter towards the middle of the sixteenth century.

Romanino and Moretto, the two great masters of Brescia in successivegenerations, both alike inspired above all else by the majesty, themajestic beauty, of religion—its persons, its events, everycirc*mstance that belongs to it—are to be seen in friendly rivalry,though with ten years' difference of age between them, in the Church ofSan Giovanni Evangelista; Romanino approaching there, as near as hemight, in a certain candle-lighted scene, to that harmony in black,white, and grey preferred by the younger painter. Before this or thatexample of Moretto's work, in that admirably composed picture of SaintPaul's Conversion, for instance, you might think of him as but a verynoble designer in grisaille. A more detailed study would convince youthat, whatever its component elements, there is a very complex tonewhich almost exclusively belongs to him; the "Saint Ursula" finally,that he is a great, though very peculiar colourist—a lord of colourwho, while he knows the colour resources that may lie even in black andwhite, has really included every delicate hue whatever in that faded"silver grey," which yet lingers in one's memory as their final effect.For some admirers indeed he is definable [102] as a kind of reallysanctified Titian. It must be admitted, however, that whereas Titiansometimes lost a little of himself in the greatness of his designs, orcommitted their execution, in part, to others, Moretto, in his work, isalways all there—thorough, steady, even, in his workmanship. That,again, was a result of his late-surviving religious conscience. Andhere, as in other instances, the supposed influence of the greatermaster is only a supposition. As a matter of fact, at least in hisearlier life, Moretto made no visit to Venice; developed his genius athome, under such conditions for development as were afforded by theexample of the earlier masters of Brescia itself; left his work thereabundantly, and almost there alone, as the thoroughly representativeproduct of a charming place. In the little Church of San Clemente heis still "at home" to his lovers; an intimately religious artist, fullof cheerfulness, of joy. Upon the airy galleries of his greataltar-piece, the angels dance against the sky above the Mother and theChild; Saint Clement, patron of the church, being attendant inpontifical white, with Dominic, Catherine, the Magdalen, and good,big-faced Saint Florian in complete armour, benign and strong. Heknows many a saint not in the Roman breviary. Was there a singlesweet-sounding name without its martyr patron? Lucia, Agnes, Agatha,Barbara, Cecilia—holy women, dignified, high-bred, intelligent—[103]have an altar of their own; and here, as in that festal highaltar-piece, the spectator may note yet another artistic alliance,something of the pale effulgence of Correggio—an approach, at least,to that peculiar treatment of light and shade, and a pre-occupationwith certain tricks therein of nature itself, by which Correggiotouches Rembrandt on the one hand, Da Vinci on the other. Here, inMoretto's work, you may think that manner more delightful, perhapsbecause more refined, than in Correggio himself. Those pensive,tarnished, silver side-lights, like mere reflexions of naturalsunshine, may be noticed indeed in many another painter of that day, inLanini, for instance, at the National Gallery. In his "Nativity" atthe Brera, Procaccini of Verona almost anticipates Correggio's HeiligeNacht. It is, in truth, the first step in the decomposition of light,a touch of decadence, of sunset, along the whole horizon ofNorth-Italian art. It is, however, as the painter of the white-stoledUrsula and her companions that the great master of Brescia is mostlikely to remain in the memory of the visitor; with this fact, aboveall, clearly impressed on it, that Moretto had attained fullintelligence of all the pictorial powers of white. In the clearness,the cleanliness, the hieratic distinction, of this earnest anddeeply-felt composition, there is something "pre-Raphaelite"; as alsoin a certain liturgical formality in the grouping of the virgins—the[104] looks, "all one way," of the closely-ranged faces; while in thelong folds of the drapery we may see something of the severe grace ofearly Tuscan sculpture—something of severity in the long, thin,emphatic shadows. For the light is high, as with the level lights ofearly morning, the air of which ruffles the banners borne by Ursula inher two hands, her virgin companions laying their hands also upon thetall staves, as if taking share, with a good will, in herself-dedication, with all the hazard of battle. They bring us,appropriately, close to the grave of this manly yet so virginalpainter, born in the year 1500, dead at forty-seven.

Of Moretto and Romanino, whose works thus light up, or refine, the darkchurches of Brescia and its neighbourhood, Romanino is scarcely to beseen beyond it. The National Gallery, however, is rich in Moretto'swork, with two of his rare poetic portraits; and if the largealtar-picture would hardly tell his secret to one who had not studiedhim at Brescia, in those who already know him it will awake many areminiscence of his art at its best. The three white mitres, forinstance, grandly painted towards the centre of the picture, at thefeet of Saint Bernardino of Siena—the three bishoprics refused by thatlowly saint—may remind one of the great white mitre which, in thegenial picture of Saint Nicholas, in the Miracoli at Brescia, one ofthe children, who as delightfully+ [105] unconventional acolytesaccompany their beloved patron into the presence of the Madonna,carries along so willingly, laughing almost, with pleasure and pride,at his part in so great a function. In the altar-piece at the NationalGallery those white mitres form the key-note from which the pale,cloistral splendours of the whole picture radiate. You see what awealth of enjoyable colour Moretto, for one, can bring out of monkishhabits in themselves sad enough, and receive a new lesson in theartistic value of reserve.

Rarer still (the single work of Romanino, it is said, to be seen out ofItaly) is the elaborate composition in five parts on the opposite sideof the doorway. Painted for the high-altar of one of the many churchesof Brescia, it seems to have passed into secular hands about a centuryago. Alessandro, patron of the church, one of the many youthfulpatrician converts Italy reveres from the ranks of the Roman army,stands there on one side, with ample crimson banner superbly furledabout his lustrous black armour, and on the other—Saint Jerome,Romanino's own namesake—neither more nor less than the familiar,self-tormenting anchorite; for few painters (Bellini, to some degree,in his picture of the saint's study) have perceived the rare pictorialopportunities of Jerome; Jerome with the true cradle of the Lord, firstof Christian antiquaries, author of the fragrant Vulgate version of the[106] Scriptures. Alessandro and Jerome support the Mother and theChild in the central place. But the loveliest subjects of this finegroup of compositions are in the corners above, half-length, life-sizedfigures—Gaudioso, Bishop of Brescia, above Saint Jerome; aboveAlessandro, Saint Filippo Benizzi, meek founder of the Order ofServites to which that church at Brescia belonged, with his lily, andin the right hand a book; and what a book! It was another verydifferent painter, Giuseppe Caletti, of Cremona, who, for the truth andbeauty of his drawing of them, gained the title of the "Painter ofBooks." But if you wish to see what can be made of the leaves, thevellum cover, of a book, observe that in Saint Philip's hand.—Thewriter? the contents? you ask: What may they be? and whence did itcome?—out of embalmed sacristy, or antique coffin of some earlyBrescian martyr, or, through that bright space of blue Italian sky,from the hands of an angel, like his Annunciation lily, or the bookreceived in the Apocalypse by John the Divine? It is one of those oldsaints, Gaudioso (at home in every church in Brescia), who looks outwith full face from the opposite corner of the altar-piece, from abackground which, though it might be the new heaven over a new earth,is in truth only the proper, breathable air of Italy. As we see himhere, Saint Gaudioso is one of the more exquisite treasures of ourNational Gallery. It was thus that at the magic [107] touch ofRomanino's art the dim, early, hunted-down Brescian church of theprimitive centuries, crushed into the dust, it might seem, was "broughtto her king," out of those old dark crypts, "in raiment ofneedle-work"—the delicate, richly folded, pontifical white vestments,the mitre and staff and gloves, and rich jewelled cope, blue or green.The face, of remarkable beauty after a type which all feel though it isactually rare in art, is probably a portrait of some distinguishedchurchman of Romanino's own day; a second Gaudioso, perhaps, settingthat later Brescian church to rights after the terrible Frenchoccupation in the painter's own time, as his saintly predecessor, theGaudioso of the earlier century here commemorated, had done after theinvasion of the Goths. The eloquent eyes are open upon some gloriousvision. "He hath made us kings and priests!" they seem to say for him,as the clean, sensitive lips might do so eloquently. Beauty andHoliness had "kissed each other," as in Borgognone's imperial deaconsat the Certosa. At the Renaissance the world might seem to have partedthem again. But here certainly, once more, Catholicism and theRenaissance, religion and culture, holiness and beauty, might seemreconciled, by one who had conceived neither after any feeble way, in agifted person. Here at least, by the skill of Romanino's hand, theobscure martyr of the crypts shines as a [108] saint of the laterRenaissance, with a sanctity of which the elegant world itself wouldhardly escape the fascination, and which reminds one how the greatApostle Saint Paul has made courtesy part of the content of the Divinecharity itself. A Rubens in Italy!—so Romanino has been called. Inthis gracious presence we might think that, like Rubens also, he hadbeen a courtier.

NOTES

90. *Published in the New Review, Nov. 1890, and now reprinted by thekind permission of the proprietors.

NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS*

[109] THE greatest and purest of Gothic churches, Notre-Dame d'Amiens,illustrates, by its fine qualities, a characteristic secular movementof the beginning of the thirteenth century. Philosophic writers ofFrench history have explained how, in that and in the two precedingcenturies, a great number of the more important towns in eastern andnorthern France rose against the feudal establishment, and developedseverally the local and municipal life of the commune. To guaranteetheir independence therein they obtained charters from their formalsuperiors. The Charter of Amiens served as the model for many othercommunes. Notre-Dame d'Amiens is the church of a commune. In thatcentury of Saint Francis, of Saint Louis, they were still religious.But over against monastic interests, as identified with a centralauthority—king, emperor, or pope—they pushed forward the local, and,so to call it, secular authority of their [110] bishops, the flower ofthe "secular clergy" in all its mundane astuteness, ready enough tomake their way as the natural Protectors of such townships. The peopleof Amiens, for instance, under a powerful episcopal patron, investedtheir civic pride in a vast cathedral, outrivalling neighbours, asbeing in effect their parochial church, and promoted there the new,revolutionary, Gothic manner, at the expense of the derivative andtraditional, Roman or Romanesque, style, the imperial style, of thegreat monastic churches. Nay, those grand and beautiful people'schurches of the thirteenth century, churches pre-eminently of "OurLady," concurred also with certain novel humanistic movements ofreligion itself at that period, above all with the expansion of what isreassuring and popular in the worship of Mary, as a tender andaccessible, though almost irresistible, intercessor with her severe andawful Son.

Hence the splendour, the space, the novelty, of the great Frenchcathedrals in the first Pointed style, monuments for the most part ofthe artistic genius of laymen, significant pre-eminently of that Queenof Gothic churches at Amiens. In most cases those early Pointedchurches are entangled, here or there, by the constructions of the oldround-arched style, the heavy, Norman or other, Romanesque chapel oraisle, side by side, though in strong contrast with, the soaring newGothic of nave or transept. But of that older [111] manner of theround arch, the plein-cintre, Amiens has nowhere, or almost nowhere, atrace. The Pointed style, fully pronounced, but in all the purity ofits first period, found here its completest expression. And whilethose venerable, Romanesque, profoundly characteristic, monasticchurches, the gregarious product of long centuries, are for the mostpart anonymous, as if to illustrate from the first a certain personaltendency which came in with the Gothic manner, we know the name of thearchitect under whom, in the year A.D. 1220, the building of the churchof Amiens began—a layman, Robert de Luzarches.

Light and space—floods of light, space for a vast congregation, forall the people of Amiens, for their movements, with something like theheight and width of heaven itself enclosed above them to breathein;—you see at a glance that this is what the ingenuity of the Pointedmethod of building has here secured. For breadth, for the easy flow ofa processional torrent, there is nothing like the "ambulatory," theaisle of the choir and transepts. And the entire area is on one level.There are here no flights of steps upward, as at Canterbury, nodescending to dark crypts, as in so many Italian churches—a few low,broad steps to gain the choir, two or three to the high altar. To alarge extent the old pavement remains, though almost worn-out by thefootsteps of centuries. Priceless, though not composed of preciousmaterial, it gains its effect [112] by ingenuity and variety in thepatterning, zig-zags, chequers, mazes, prevailing respectively, inwhite and grey, in great square, alternate spaces—the original floorof a medieval church for once untouched. The massive square bases ofthe pillars of a Romanesque church, harshly angular, obstruct,sometimes cruelly, the standing, the movements, of a multitude ofpersons. To carry such a multitude conveniently round them is thematter-of-fact motive of the gradual chiselling away, the softening ofthe angles, the graceful compassing, of the Gothic base, till in ourown Perpendicular period it all but disappears. You may study thattendency appropriately in the one church of Amiens; for such in effectNotre-Dame has always been. That circ*mstance is illustrated by thegreat font, the oldest thing here, an oblong trough, perhaps an ancientsaintly coffin, with four quaint prophetic figures at the angles,carved from a single block of stone. To it, as to the baptistery of anItalian town, not so long since all the babes of Amiens used to comefor christening.

Strange as it may seem, in this "queen" of Gothic churches, l'égliseogivale par excellence, there is nothing of mystery in the vision,which yet surprises, over and over again, the eye of the visitor whoenters at the western doorway. From the flagstone at one's foot to thedistant keystone of the chevet, noblest of its species— [113]reminding you of how many largely graceful things, sails of a ship inthe wind, and the like!—at one view the whole is visible,intelligible;—the integrity of the first design; how later additionsaffixed themselves thereto; how the rich ornament gathered upon it; theincreasing richness of the choir; its glazed triforium; the realms oflight which expand in the chapels beyond; the astonishing boldness ofthe vault, the astonishing lightness of what keeps it above one; theunity, yet the variety of perspective. There is no mystery here, andindeed no repose. Like the age which projected it, like the impulsivecommunal movement which was here its motive, the Pointed style atAmiens is full of excitement. Go, for repose, to classic work, withthe simple vertical law of pressure downwards, or to its Lombard,Rhenish, or Norman derivatives. Here, rather, you are consciousrestlessly of that sustained equilibrium of oblique pressure on allsides, which is the essence of the hazardous Gothic construction, aconstruction of which the "flying buttress" is the most significantfeature. Across the clear glass of the great windows of the triforiumyou see it, feel it, at its Atlas-work audaciously. "A pleasant thingit is to behold the sun" those first Gothic builders would seem to havesaid to themselves; and at Amiens, for instance, the walls havedisappeared; the entire building is composed of its windows. Those whobuilt it [114] might have had for their one and only purpose to encloseas large a space as possible with the given material.

No; the peculiar Gothic buttress, with its double, triple, fourfoldflights, while it makes such marvels possible, securing light and spaceand graceful effect, relieving the pillars within of their massiveness,is not a restful architectural feature. Consolidation of matternaturally on the move, security for settlement in a very complex systemof construction—that is avowedly a part of the Gothic situation, theGothic problem. With the genius which contended, though not alwaysquite successfully, with this difficult problem, came also novelaesthetic effect, a whole volume of delightful aesthetic effects. Forthe mere melody of Greek architecture, for the sense as it were ofmusic in the opposition of successive sounds, you got harmony, thericher music generated by opposition of sounds in one and the samemoment; and were gainers. And then, in contrast with the classicmanner, and the Romanesque survivals from it, the vast complexity ofthe Gothic style seemed, as if consciously, to correspond to therichness, the expressiveness, the thousandfold influence of theCatholic religion, in the thirteenth century still in natural movementin every direction. The later Gothic of the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies tended to conceal, as it now took for granted, the structuraluse of the buttress, for [115] example; seemed to turn it into a mereoccasion for ornament, not always pleasantly:—while the ornament wasout of place, the structure failed. Such falsity is far enough awayfrom what at Amiens is really of the thirteenth century. In thispre-eminently "secular" church, the execution, in all the defiance ofits method, is direct, frank, clearly apparent, with the result notonly of reassuring the intelligence, but of keeping one's curiosityalso continually on the alert, as we linger in these restless aisles.

The integrity of the edifice, together with its volume of light, hasindeed been diminished by the addition of a range of chapels, beyondthe proper limits of the aisles, north and south. Not a part of theoriginal design, these chapels were formed for private uses in thefourteenth century, by the device of walling in and vaulting the openspaces between the great buttresses of the nave. Under the broad butsubdued sunshine which falls through range upon range of windows,reflected from white wall and roof and gallery, soothing to the eye,while it allows you to see the delicate carved work in all itsrefinement of touch, it is only as an after-thought, an artificialafter-thought, that you regret the lost stained glass, or the vanishedmural colour, if such to any large extent there ever were. The beststained glass is often that stained by weather, by centuries ofweather, [116] and we may well be grateful for the amazing cheerfulnessof the interior of Amiens, as we actually find it. Windows of therichest remain, indeed, in the apsidal chapels; and the rose-windows ofthe transepts are known, from the prevailing tones of their stainedglass, as Fire and Water, the western rose symbolising in like mannerEarth and Air, as respectively green and blue. But there is no reasonto suppose that the interior was ever so darkened as to prevent one'sseeing, really and clearly, the dainty ornament, which from the firstabounded here; the floriated architectural detail; the broad band offlowers and foliage, thick and deep and purely sculptured, above thearches of nave and choir and transepts, and wreathing itselfcontinuously round the embedded piers which support the roof; with thewoodwork, the illuminated metal, the magnificent tombs, the jewellers'work in the chapels. One precious, early thirteenth-century window ofgrisaille remains, exquisite in itself, interesting as evidence of thesort of decoration which originally filled the larger number of thewindows. Grisaille, with its lace-work of transparent grey, set hereand there with a ruby, a sapphire, a gemmed medallion, interrupts theclear light on things hardly more than the plain glass, of which indeedsuch windows are mainly composed. The finely designed frames of ironfor the support of the glass, in the windows from which even [117] thisdecoration is gone, still remain, to the delight of those who areknowing in the matter.

Very ancient light, this seems, at any rate, as if it had been lyingimprisoned thus for long centuries; were in fact the light over whichthe great vault originally closed, now become almost substance ofthought, one might fancy,—a mental object or medium. We are remindedthat after all we must of necessity look on the great churches of theMiddle Age with other eyes than those who built or first worshipped inthem; that there is something verily worth having, and a justequivalent for something else lost, in the mere effect of time, andthat the salt of all aesthetic study is in the question,—What,precisely what, is this to me? You and I, perhaps, should not caremuch for the mural colouring of a medieval church, could we see it asit was; might think it crude, and in the way. What little remains of itat Amiens has parted, indeed, in the course of ages, with itsshrillness and its coarse grain. And in this matter certainly, in viewof Gothic polychrome, our difference from the people of the thirteenthcentury is radical. We have, as it was very unlikely they should have,a curiosity, a very pleasurable curiosity, in the mere working of thestone they built with, and in the minute facts of their construction,which their colouring, and the layer of plaster it involved, disguisedor hid. We may think that in architecture stone is the most beautiful[118] of all things. Modern hands have replaced the colour on some ofthe tombs here—the effigies, the tabernacles above—skilfully as maybe, and have but deprived them of their dignity. Medieval colouring,in fact, must have improved steadily, as it decayed, almost till therecame to be no question of colour at all. In architecture, close as itis to men's lives and their history, the visible result of time is alarge factor in the realised aesthetic value, and what a true architectwill in due measure always trust to. A false restoration onlyfrustrates the proper ripening of his work.

If we may credit our modern eyes, then, those old, very secularbuilders aimed at, they achieved, an immense cheerfulness in theirgreat church, with a purpose which still pursued them into theirminuter decoration. The conventional vegetation of the Romanesque, itsblendings of human or animal with vegetable form, in cornice orcapital, have given way here, in the first Pointed style, to apleasanter, because more natural, mode of fancy; to veritable forms ofvegetable life, flower or leaf, from meadow and woodside, though stillindeed with a certain survival of the grotesque in a confusion of theleaf with the flower, which the subsequent Decorated period will whollypurge away in its perfect garden-borders. It was not with monasticartists and artisans that the sheds and workshops around AmiensCathedral were filled, [119] as it rose from its foundations throughfifty years; and those lay schools of art, with their communisticsentiment, to which in the thirteenth century the great episcopalbuilders must needs resort, would in the natural course of things tendtowards naturalism. The subordinate arts also were no longer at themonastic stage, borrowing inspiration exclusively from the experiencesof the cloister, but belonged to guilds of laymen—smiths, painters,sculptors. The great confederation of the "city," the commune,subdivided itself into confederations of citizens. In the naturalobjects of the first Pointed style there is the freshness as of natureitself, seen and felt for the first time; as if, in contrast, thoseolder cloistral workmen had but fed their imagination in anembarrassed, imprisoned, and really decadent manner, or merereminiscence of, or prescriptions about, things visible.

Congruous again with the popularity of the builders of Amiens, of theirmotives, is the wealth, the freedom and abundance, of popular, almostsecular, teaching, here afforded, in the carving especially, within andwithout; an open Bible, in place of later legend, as at monasticVézelay,—the Bible treated as a book about men and women, and otherpersons equally real, but blent with lessons, with the liveliestobservations, on the lives of men as they were then and now, what theydo, and how they do it, or did it then, and on the doings of nature[120] which so greatly influence what man does; together with certainimpressive metaphysical and moral ideas, a sort of popular scholasticphilosophy, or as if it were the virtues and vices Aristotle defines,or the characters of Theophrastus, translated into stone. Above all,it is to be observed that as a result of this spirit, this "free"spirit, in it, art has at last become personal. The artist, as such,appears at Amiens, as elsewhere, in the thirteenth century; and, bymaking his personal way of conception and execution prevail there,renders his own work vivid and organic, and apt to catch the interestof other people. He is no longer a Byzantine, but a Greek—anunconscious Greek. Proof of this is in the famous Beau-Dieu of Amiens,as they call that benign, almost classically proportioned figure, onthe central pillar of the great west doorway; though in fact neitherthat, nor anything else on the west front of Amiens, is quite the bestwork here. For that we must look rather to the sculpture of the portalof the south transept, called, from a certain image there, Portail dela Vierge dorée, gilded at the expense of some unknown devout person atthe beginning of the last century. A presentation of the mystic, thedelicately miraculous, story of Saint Honoré, eighth Bishop of Amiens,and his companions, with its voices, its intuitions, and celestialintimations, it has evoked a correspondent method of work at once [121]naïve and nicely expressive. The rose, or roue, above it, carries onthe outer rim seventeen personages, ascending and descending—anotherpiece of popular philosophy—the wheel of fortune, or of human life.

And they were great brass-founders, surely, who at that early daymodelled and cast the tombs of the Bishops Evrard and Geoffrey, vastplates of massive black bronze in half-relief, like abstract thoughtsof those grand old prelatic persons. The tomb of Evrard, who laid thefoundations (qui fundamenta hujus basilicae locavit), is not quite asit was. Formerly it was sunk in the pavement, while the tomb of BishopGeoffrey opposite (it was he closed in the mighty vault of the nave:hanc basilicam culmen usque perduxit), itself vaulted-over the space ofthe grave beneath. The supreme excellence of those original workmen,the journeymen of Robert de Luzarches and his successor, would seemindeed to have inspired others, who have been at their best here, downto the days of Louis the Fourteenth. It prompted, we may think, a highlevel of execution, through many revolutions of taste in such matters;in the marvellous furniture of the choir, for instance, like a wholewood, say a thicket of old hawthorn, with its curved topmost branchesspared, slowly transformed by the labour of a whole family of artists,during fourteen years, into the stalls, in number one hundred and ten,with nearly four [122] thousand figures. Yet they are but on a levelwith the Flamboyant carved and coloured enclosures of the choir, withthe histories of John the Baptist, whose face-bones are here preserved,and of Saint Firmin—popular saint, who protects the houses of Amiensfrom fire. Even the screens of forged iron around the sanctuary, workof the seventeenth century, appear actually to soar, in their way, inconcert with the airy Gothic structure; to let the daylight pass as itwill; to have come, they too, from smiths, odd as it may seem at justthat time, with some touch of inspiration in them. In the beginning ofthe fifteenth century they had reared against a certain bald space ofwall, between the great portal and the western "rose," an organ, alofty, many-chambered, veritable house of church-music, rich in azureand gold, finished above at a later day, not incongruously, in thequaint, pretty manner of Henri-Deux. And those who are interested inthe curiosities of ritual, of the old provincial Gallican "uses," willbe surprised to find one where they might least have expected it. Thereserved Eucharist still hangs suspended in a pyx, formed like a dove,in the midst of that lamentable "glory" of the eighteenth century inthe central bay of the sanctuary, all the poor, gaudy, gilt raysconverging towards it. There are days in the year in which the greatchurch is still literally filled with reverent worshippers, and if youcome late to service you push the [123] doors in vain against theclosely serried shoulders of the good people of Amiens, one and all inblack for church-holiday attire. Then, one and all, they intone theTantum ergo (did it ever sound so in the Middle Ages?) as theEucharist, after a long procession, rises once more into itsresting-place.

If the Greeks, as at least one of them says, really believed therecould be no true beauty without bigness, that thought certainly is mostspecious in regard to architecture; and the thirteenth-century churchof Amiens is one of the three or four largest buildings in the world,out of all proportion to any Greek building, both in that and in themultitude of its external sculpture. The chapels of the nave areembellished without by a double range of single figures, or groups,commemorative of the persons, the mysteries, to which they arerespectively dedicated—the gigantic form of Christopher, the Mysteryof the Annunciation.

The builders of the church seem to have projected no very noticeabletowers; though it is conventional to regret their absence, especiallywith visitors from England, where indeed cathedral and other towers areapt to be good, and really make their mark. Robert de Luzarches andhis successors aimed rather at the domical outline, with its centralpoint at the centre of the church, in the spire or flèche. The existingspire is a wonderful mass of carpentry [124] of the beginning of thesixteenth century, at which time the lead that carefully wraps everypart of it was heavily gilt. The great western towers are lost in thewest front, the grandest, perhaps the earliest, example of itsspecies—three profound, sculptured portals; a double gallery above,the upper gallery carrying colossal images of twenty-two kings of theHouse of Judah, ancestors of Our Lady; then the great rose; above itthe ringers' gallery, half masking the gable of the nave, and unitingat their top-most storeys the twin, but not exactly equal or similar,towers, oddly oblong in plan, as if never intended to carry pyramids orspires. They overlook an immense distance in those flat, peat-digging,black and green regions, with rather cheerless rivers, and are thecentre of an architectural region wider still—of a group to whichSoissons, far beyond the woods of Compiègne, belongs, with St. Quentin,and, towards the west, a too ambitious rival, Beauvais, which has stoodhowever—what we now see of it—for six centuries.

It is a spare, rather sad world at most times that Notre-Dame d'Amiensthus broods over; a country with little else to be proud of; the sortof world, in fact, which makes the range of conceptions embodied inthese cliffs of quarried and carved stone all the more welcome as ahopeful complement to the meagreness of most people's presentexistence, and its apparent ending in a [125] sparely built coffinunder the flinty soil, and grey, driving sea-winds. In Notre-Dame,therefore, and her sisters, there is not only a common method ofconstruction, a single definable type, different from that of otherFrench latitudes, but a correspondent common sentiment also; somethingwhich speaks, amid an immense achievement just here of what isbeautiful and great, of the necessity of an immense effort in thenatural course of things, of what you may see quaintly designed in oneof those hieroglyphic carvings—radix de terra sitienti: "a root out ofa dry ground."

NOTES

109. *Published in the Nineteenth Century, March 1894, and nowreprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.

VÉZELAY*

[126] As you discern the long unbroken line of its roof, low-pitchedfor France, above the cottages and willow-shaded streams of the place,you might think the abbey church of Pontigny, the largest Cistercianchurch now remaining, only a great farm-building. On a nearer viewthere is something unpretending, something pleasantly English, in theplain grey walls, pierced with long "lancet" windows, as if theyoverlooked the lowlands of Essex, or the meadows of Kent or Berkshire,the sort of country from which came those saintly exiles of our racewho made the cloisters of Pontigny famous, and one of whom, SaintEdmund of Abingdon, Saint-Edme, still lies enshrined here. The countrywhich the sons of Saint Bernard choose for their abode is in fact but apatch of scanty pasture-land in the midst of a heady wine-district.Like its majestic Cluniac rivals, the church has its western portico,elegant in structure but of comparatively humble [127] proportions,under a plain roof of tiles, pent-wise. Within, a heavy coat ofwhite-wash seems befitting to the simple forms of the "Transition," orquite earliest "Pointed," style, to its remarkable continence ofspirit, its uniformity, and cleanness of build. The long prospect ofnave and choir ends, however, with a sort of graceful smallness, in achevet of seven closely packed, narrow bays. It is like a nun'schurch, or like a nun's coif.

The church of Pontigny, representative generally of the churches of theCistercian order, including some of the loveliest early English ones,was in truth significant of a reaction, a reaction against monasticismitself, as it had come to be in the order of Cluny, the genius of whichfound its proper expression in the imperious, but half-barbaric,splendours of the richest form of the Romanesque, the monastic stylepre-eminently, as we may still see it at La Charité-sur-Loire, atSaint-Benoît, above all, on the hill of Vézelay. Saint Bernard, whohad lent his immense influence to the order of Cîteaux by way of amonastic reform, though he had a genius for hymns and was in other waysan eminent religious poet, and though he gave new life to the expiringromance of the crusades, was, as regards the visible world, much of aPuritan. Was it he who, wrapt in thought upon the world unseen, walkedalong the shores of Lake Leman without observing it?—the eternal snowshe might have taken for the walls of the New Jerusalem; the blue waveshe [128] might have fancied its pavement of sapphire. In the churches,the worship, of his new order he required simplicity, and evenseverity, being fortunate in finding so winsome an exponent of thatprinciple as the early Gothic of Pontigny, or of the first Cistercianchurch, now destroyed, at Cîteaux itself. Strangely enough, whileBernard's own temper of mind was a survival from the past (we see thisin his contest with Abelard), hierarchic, reactionary, suspicious ofnovelty, the architectural style of his preference was largely ofsecular origin. It had a large share in that inventive and innovatinggenius, that expansion of the natural human soul, to which the art, theliterature, the religious movements of the thirteenth century inFrance, as in Italy, where it ends with Dante, bear witness.

In particular, Bernard had protested against the sculpture, rich andfantastic, but gloomy, it might be indecent, developed more abundantlythan anywhere else in the churches of Burgundy, and especially in thoseof the Cluniac order. "What is the use," he asks, "of those grotesquemonsters in painting and sculpture?" and almost certainly he had inmind the marvellous carved work at Vézelay, whither doubtless he cameoften—for example on Good Friday, 1146, to preach, as we know, thesecond crusade in the presence of Louis the Seventh. He too might havewept at the sight of the doomed multitude (one in ten, it is said,returned from the Holy [129] Land), as its enthusiasm, under the charmof his fiery eloquence, rose to the height of his purpose. Even theaisles of Vézelay were not sufficient for the multitude of his hearers,and he preached to them in the open air, from a rock still pointed outon the hillside. Armies indeed have been encamped many times on theslopes and meadows of the valley of the Cure, now to all seeming soimpregnably tranquil. The Cluniac order even then had already declinedfrom its first intention; and that decline became especially visible inthe Abbey of Vézelay itself not long after Bernard's day. Its majesticimmoveable church was complete by the middle of the twelfth century.And there it still stands in spite of many a threat, while theconventual buildings around it have disappeared; and the institution itrepresented—secularised at its own request at the Reformation—haddwindled almost to nothing at all, till in the last century the lastAbbot built himself, in place of the old Gothic lodging below thosesolemn walls, a sort of Château Gaillard, a dainty abode in the mannerof Louis Quinze—swept away that too at the Revolution—where the greatoaks now flourish, with the rooks and squirrels.

Yet the order of Cluny, in its time, in that dark period of theeleventh and twelfth centuries, had deserved well of those to whomreligion, and art, and social order are precious. The Cluniacs had infact represented monasticism in the most [130] legitimate form of itsactivity; and, if the church of Vézelay was not quite the grandest oftheir churches, it is certainly the grandest of them which remains. Itis also typical in character. As Notre-Dame d'Amiens is pre-eminentlythe church of the city, of a commune, so the Madeleine of Vézelay istypically the church of a monastery.

The monastic style proper, then, in its peculiar power and influence,was Romanesque, and with the Cluniac order; and here perhaps betterthan anywhere else we may understand what it really came to, what wasits effect on the spirits, the imagination.

As at Pontigny, the Cistercians, for the most part, built theirchurches in lowly valleys, according to the intention of their founder.The representative church of the Cluniacs, on the other hand, lies amidthe closely piled houses of the little town, which it protected andcould punish, on a steep hill-top, like a long massive chest there,heavy above you, as you climb slowly the winding road, the oldunchanged pathway of Saint Bernard. In days gone by it threatened thesurrounding neighbourhood with four boldly built towers; had then alsoa spire at the crossing; and must have been at that time like a moremagnificent version of the buildings which still crown the hill ofLaon. Externally, the proportions, the squareness, of the nave (westand east, the vast narthex or porch, and the [131] Gothic choir, riseabove its roof-line), remind one of another great Romanesque church athome—of the nave of Winchester, out of which Wykeham carved his richlypanelled Perpendicular interior.

At Vézelay however, the Romanesque, the Romanesque of Burgundy, alikein the first conception of the whole structure, and in the actuallocking together of its big stones, its masses of almost unbrokenmasonry, its inertia, figures as of more imperial character, and nearerto the Romans of old, than its feebler kindred in England or Normandy.We seem to have before us here a Romanesque architecture, studied, notfrom Roman basilicas or Roman temples, but from the arenas, thecolossal gateways, the triumphal arches, of the people of empire, suchas remain even now, not in the South of France only. The simple"flying," or rather leaning and almost couchant, buttresses, quadrantsof a circle, might be parts of a Roman aqueduct. In contrast to thelightsome Gothic manner of the last quarter of the twelfth century (aswe shall presently find it here too, like an escape for the eye, forthe temper, out of some grim underworld into genial daylight), theCluniac church might seem a still active instrument of the iron tyrannyof Rome, of its tyranny over the animal spirits. As the ghost ofancient Rome still lingers "over the grave thereof," in the papacy, thehierarchy, so is it with the material structures [132] also, theCluniac and other Romanesque churches, which most emphatically expressthe hierarchical, the papal system. There is something about thischurch of Vézelay, in the long-sustained patience of which it tells,that brings to mind the labour of slaves, whose occasional Fescenninelicence and fresh memories of a barbaric life also find expression, nowand again, in the strange sculpture of the place. Yet here for once,around a great French church, there is the kindly repose of English"precincts," and the country which this monastic acropolis overlookssouthwards is a very pleasant one, as we emerge from the shadowsof—yes! of that peculiarly sad place—a country all the pleasanter byreason of the toil upon it, performed, or exacted from others, by themonks, through long centuries; Le Morvan, with its distant blue hillsand broken foreground, the vineyards, the patches of woodland, theroads winding into their cool shadows; though in truth thefortress-like outline of the monastic church and the sombre hue of itsmaterial lend themselves most readily to the effects of a stormy sky.

By a door, which in the great days opened from a magnificent cloister,you enter what might seem itself but the ambulatory of a cloister,superbly vaulted and long and regular, and built of huge stones of ametallic colour. It is the southern aisle of the nave, a nave of tenbays, the grandest Romanesque interior in France, [133] perhaps in theworld. In its mortified light the very soul of monasticism, Roman andhalf-military, as the completest outcome of a religion of threats,seems to descend upon one. Monasticism is indeed the product of manyvarious tendencies of the religious soul, one or another of which mayvery properly connect itself with the Pointed style, as we saw in thoselightsome aisles of Pontigny, so expressive of the purity, the lowlysweetness, of the soul of Bernard. But it is here at Vézelay, in thisiron place, that monasticism in its central, its historically mostsignificant purpose, presents itself as most completely at home. Thereis no triforium. The monotonous cloistral length of wall above thelong-drawn series of stately round arches, is unbroken save by a plainsmall window in each bay, placed as high as possible just below thecornice, as a mere after-thought, you might fancy. Those windows wereprobably unglazed, and closed only with wooden shutters as occasionrequired. Furnished with the stained glass of the period, they wouldhave left the place almost in darkness, giving doubtless full effect tothe monkish candle-light in any case needful here. An almost perfectcradle-roof, tunnel-like from end to end of the long central aisle,adds by its simplicity of form to the magnificent unity of effect. Thebearing-arches, which span it from bay to bay, being parti-coloured,with voussures of alternate white and a kind of grey or green, [134]being also somewhat flat at the keystone, and literally eccentric,have, at least for English eyes, something of a Saracenic or otherOriental character. Again, it is as if the architects—theengineers—who worked here, had seen things undreamt of by otherRomanesque builders, the builders in England and Normandy.

Here then, scarcely relieving the almost savage character of the work,abundant on tympanum and doorway without, above all on the immensecapitals of the nave within, is the sculpture which offended Bernard.A sumptuous band of it, a carved guipure of singular boldness, passescontinuously round the arches, and along the cornices from bay to bay,and with the large bossy tendency of the ornament throughout may beregarded as typical of Burgundian richness. Of sculptured capitals, tolike, or to dislike with Saint Bernard, there are nearly a hundred,unwearied in variety, unique in the energy of their conception, full ofwild promise in their coarse execution, cruel, you might say, in therealisation of human form and features. Irresistibly they rivetattention.

The subjects are for the most part Scriptural, chosen apparently asbeing apt for strongly satiric treatment, the suicide of Judas, thefall of Goliath. The legend of Saint Benedict, naturally at home in aBenedictine church, presented the sculptor with a series of forciblegrotesques ready-made. Some monkish story, [135] half moral, halffacetious, perhaps a little coarse, like that of Sainte Eugénie, fromtime to time makes variety; or an example of the punishment of thewicked by men or by devils, who play a large, and to themselvesthoroughly enjoyable and merry, part here. The sculptor would seem tohave witnessed the punishment of the blasphemer; how adroitly theexecutioner planted knee on the culprit's bosom, as he lay on theground, and out came the sinful tongue, to meet the iron pincers. Theminds of those who worked thus seem to have been almost insanelypreoccupied just then with the human countenance, but by no meansexclusively in its pleasantness or dignity. Bold, crude, original,their work indicates delight in the power of reproducing fact,curiosity in it, but little or no sense of beauty. The humanitytherefore here presented, as in the Cluniac sculpture generally, iswholly unconventional. M. Viollet-le-Duc thinks he can trace in itindividual types still actually existing in the peasantry of Le Morvan.Man and morality, however, disappearing at intervals, the acanthinecapitals have a kind of later Venetian beauty about them, as theVenetian birds also, the conventional peaco*cks, or birds wholly offantasy, amid the long fantastic foliage. There are still however notrue flowers of the field here. There is pity, it must be confessed, onthe other hand, and the delicacy, the beauty, which that always brings[136] with it, where Jephtha peeps at the dead daughter's face, liftingtimidly the great leaves that cover it; in the hanging body of Absalom;in the child carried away by the eagle, his long frock twisted in thewind as he goes. The parents run out in dismay, and the devil grins,not because it is the punishment of the child or of them; but becausehe is the author of all mischief everywhere, as the monkish carverconceived—so far wholesomely.

We must remember that any sculpture less emphatic would have beenineffective, because practically invisible, in this sombre place. Butat the west end there is an escape for the eye, for the soul, towardsthe unhindered, natural, afternoon sun; not however into the outer andopen air, but through an arcade of three bold round arches, high abovethe great closed western doors, into a somewhat broader and loftierplace than this, a reservoir of light, a veritable camera lucida. Thelight is that which lies below the vault and within the tribunes of thefamous narthex (as they say), the vast fore-church or vestibule, intowhich the nave is prolonged. A remarkable feature of many Cluniacchurches, the great western porch, on a scale which is approached inEngland only at Peterborough, is found also in some of the churches ofthe Cistercians. It is characteristic, in fact, rather of Burgundythan of either of those religious orders especially.

[137] At Pontigny itself, for instance, there is a good one; and a veryearly one at Paray-le-Monial. Saint-Père-sous-Vézelay, daughter of thegreat church, in the vale below, has a late Gothic example; Semur also,with fantastic lodges above it. The cathedral of Autun, a secularchurch in rivalry of the "religious," presents, by way of such westernporch or vestibule, two entire bays of the nave, unglazed, with thevast western arch open to the air; the west front, with its richportals, being thrown back into the depths of the great fore-churchthus produced.

The narthex of Vézelay, the largest of these singular structures, isglazed, and closed towards the west by what is now the façade. It isitself in fact a great church, a nave of three magnificent bays, and ofthree aisles, with a spacious triforium. With their fantasticsculpture, sheltered thus from accident and weather, in all itsoriginal freshness, the great portals of the primitive façade serve nowfor doorways, as a second, solemn, door of entrance, to the churchproper within. The very structure of the place, and its relation tothe main edifice, indicate that it was for use on occasion, when, atcertain great feasts, that of the Magdalen especially, to whom thechurch of Vézelay is dedicated, the monastery was swollen withpilgrims, too poor, too numerous, to be lodged in the town, come hitherto worship before the [138] relics of the friend of Jesus, enshrined ina low-vaulted crypt, the floor of which is the natural rocky surface ofthe hill-top. It may be that the pilgrims were permitted to lie forthe night, not only on the pavement, but (if so favoured) in the highand dry chamber formed by the spacious triforium over the north aisle,awaiting an early Mass. The primitive west front, then, had become buta wall of partition; and above its central portal, where the roundarched west windows had been, ran now a kind of broad, arcaded tribune,in full view of the entire length of the church. In the midst of itstood an altar; and here perhaps, the priest who officiated beingvisible to the whole assembled multitude east and west, the early Masswas said.

The great vestibule was finished about forty years after the completionof the nave, towards the middle of the twelfth century. And here, inthe great pier-arches, and in the eastern bay of the vault, still withthe large masonry, the large, flat, unmoulded surfaces, and amid thefantastic carvings of the Romanesque building about it, the Pointedstyle, determined yet discreet, makes itself felt—makes itself felt byappearing, if not for the first time, yet for the first time in theorganic or systematic development of French architecture. Not in theunambitious façade of Saint-Denis, nor in the austere aisles of Sens,but at Vézelay, in this grandiose fabric, so worthy of the event,Viollet-le-Duc would [139] fain see the birthplace of the Pointedstyle. Here at last, with no sense of contrast, but by way ofveritable "transition," and as if by its own matured strength, theround arch breaks into the double curve, les arcs brisés, with awonderful access of grace. And the imaginative effect is forthwithenlarged. Beyond, far beyond, what is actually presented to the eye inthat peculiar curvature, its mysterious grace, and by the stateliness,the elevation of the ogival method of vaulting, the imagination isstirred to present one with what belongs properly to it alone. Themasonry, though large, is nicely fitted; a large light is admittedthrough the now fully pronounced Gothic windows towards the west. AtAmiens we found the Gothic spirit, reigning there exclusively, to be arestless one. At Vézelay, where it breathes for the first time amidthe heavy masses of the old imperial style, it breathes the very geniusof monastic repose. And then, whereas at Amiens, and still more atBeauvais, at Saint-Quentin, you wonder how these monuments of the pastcan have endured so long, in strictly monastic Vézelay you have a senseof freshness, such as, in spite of their ruin, we perceive in thebuildings of Greece. We enjoy here not so much, as at Amiens, thesentiment of antiquity, but that of eternal duration.

But let me place you once more where we stood for a while, on enteringby the doorway [140] in the midst of the long southern aisle. Crossthe aisle, and gather now in one view the perspective of the whole.Away on the left hand the eye is drawn upward to the tranquil light ofthe vaults of the fore-church, seeming doubtless the more spaciousbecause partly concealed from us by the wall of partition below. Buton the right hand, towards the east, as if with the set purpose of astriking architectural contrast, an instruction as to the place of thisor that manner in the architectural series, the long, tunnel-like,military work of the Romanesque nave opens wide into the exhilaratingdaylight of choir and transepts, in the sort of Gothic Bernard wouldhave welcomed, with a vault rising now high above the roof-line of thebody of the church, sicut lilium excelsum. The simple flowers, theflora, of the early Pointed style, which could never have looked athome as an element in the half-savage decoration of the nave, seem tobe growing here upon the sheaves of slender, reedy pillars, as ifnaturally in the carved stone. Even here indeed, Roman, or Romanesque,taste still lingers proudly in the monolith columns of the chevet.Externally, we may note with what dexterity the Gothic choir has beeninserted into its place, below and within the great buttresses of theearlier Romanesque one.

Visitors to the great church of Assisi have sometimes found a kind ofparable in the threefold [141] ascent from the dark crypt where thebody of Saint Francis lies, through the gloomy "lower" church, into theheight and breadth, the physical and symbolic "illumination," of thechurch above. At Vézelay that kind of contrast suggests itself in oneview; the hopeful, but transitory, glory upon which one enters; thelong, darksome, central avenue; the "open vision" into which itconducts us. As a symbol of resurrection, its choir is a fittingdiadem to the church of the Magdalen, whose remains the monks meant itto cover.

And yet, after all, notwithstanding this assertion of the superiority(are we so to call it?) of the new Gothic way, perhaps by the veryforce of contrast, the Madeleine of Vézelay is still pre-eminently aRomanesque, and thereby the typically monastic, church. In spite ofrestoration even, as we linger here, the impression of the monasticMiddle Age, of a very exclusive monasticism, that has verily turned itsback upon common life, jealously closed inward upon itself, is asingularly weighty one; the more so because, as the peasant said whenasked the way to an old sanctuary that had fallen to the occupation offarm-labourers, and was now deserted even by them: Maintenant il n'y apersonne là.

NOTES

126. *Published in the Nineteenth Century, June 1894, and now reprintedby the kind permission of the proprietors.

APOLLO IN PICARDY*

[142] "CONSECUTIVE upon Apollo in all his solar fervour andeffulgence," says a writer of Teutonic proclivities, "we may discerneven among the Greeks themselves, elusively, as would be natural withsuch a being, almost like a mock sun amid the mists, the northern orultra-northern sun-god. In hints and fragments the lexicographers andothers have told us something of this Hyperborean Apollo, fancies abouthim which evidence some knowledge of the Land of the Midnight Sun, ofthe sun's ways among the Laplanders, of a hoary summer breathing verysoftly on the violet beds, or say, the London-pride and crab-apples,provided for those meagre people, somewhere amid the remoteness oftheir icy seas. In such wise Apollo had already anticipated his sadfortunes in the Middle Age as a god definitely in exile, driven northof the Alps, and even here ever in flight before the summer. Summerindeed he leaves now to the management of [143] others, finding his wayfrom France and Germany to still paler countries, yet making or takingwith him always a certain seductive summer-in-winter, though also witha divine or titanic regret, a titanic revolt in his heart, andconsequent inversion at times of his old beneficent and properly solardoings. For his favours, his fallacious good-humour, which has intruth a touch of malign magic about it, he makes men pay sometimes aterrible price, and is in fact a devil!"

Devilry, devil's work:—traces of such you might fancy were to be foundin a certain manuscript volume taken from an old monastic library inFrance at the Revolution. It presented a strange example of a cold andvery reasonable spirit disturbed suddenly, thrown off its balance, asby a violent beam, a blaze of new light, revealing, as it glanced hereand there, a hundred truths unguessed at before, yet a curse, as itturned out, to its receiver, in dividing hopelessly against itself thewell-ordered kingdom of his thought. Twelfth volume of a dry enoughtreatise on mathematics, applied, still with no relaxation of strictmethod, to astronomy and music, it should have concluded that work, andtherewith the second period of the life of its author, by drawing tighttogether the threads of a long and intricate argument. In effecthowever, it began, or, in perturbed manner, and as [144] with throes ofchildbirth, seemed the preparation for, an argument of an entirely newand disparate species, such as would demand a new period of life also,if it might be, for its due expansion.

But with what confusion, what baffling inequalities! How afflicting tothe mind's eye! It was a veritable "solar storm"—this illumination,which had burst at the last moment upon the strenuous, self-possessed,much-honoured monastic student, as he sat down peacefully to write thelast formal chapters of his work ere he betook himself to itswell-earned practical reward as superior, with lordship and mitre andring, of the abbey whose music and calendar his mathematical knowledgehad qualified him to reform. The very shape of Volume Twelve, piecedtogether of quite irregularly formed pages, was a solecism. It couldnever be bound. In truth, the man himself, and what passed with him inone particular space of time, had invaded a matter, which is nothing ifnot entirely abstract and impersonal. Indirectly the volume was therecord of an episode, an interlude, an interpolated page of life. Andwhereas in the earlier volumes you found by way of illustration no morethan the simplest indispensable diagrams, the scribe's hand had strayedhere into mazy borders, long spaces of hieroglyph, and as it wereveritable pictures of the theoretic elements of his subject. Softwintry auroras seemed to play behind whole pages of crabbed textualwriting, line and figure [145] bending, breathing, flaming, in, tolovely "arrangements" that were like music made visible; till writingand writer changed suddenly, "to one thing constant never," after theknown manner of madmen in such work. Finally, the whole matter brokeoff with an unfinished word, as a later hand testified, adding the dateof the author's death, "deliquio animi."

He had been brought to the monastery as a little child; was bred there;had never yet left it, busy and satisfied through youth and earlymanhood; was grown almost as necessary a part of the community as thestones of its material abode, as a pillar of the great tower heascended to watch the movement of the stars. The structure of afortified medieval town barred in those who belonged to it veryeffectively. High monastic walls intrenched the monk still further.From the summit of the tower you looked straight down into the deepnarrow streets, upon the houses (in one of which Prior Saint-Jean wasborn) climbing as high as they dared for breathing space within thatnarrow compass. But you saw also the green breadth of Normandy andPicardy, this way and that; felt on your face the free air of a stillwider realm beyond what was seen. The reviving scent of it, the meresight of the flowers brought thence, of the country produce at theconvent gate, stirred the ordinary monkish soul with desires, sometimeswith efforts, to be sent on duty there. Prior [146] Saint-Jean, on theother hand, shuddered at the view, at the thoughts it suggested to him;thoughts of unhallowed wild places, where the old heathen hadworshipped "stocks and stones," and where their wickedness might stillsurvive them in something worse than mischievous tricks of nature, suchas you might read of in Ovid, whose verses, however, he for his parthad never so much as touched with a finger. He gave thanks rather,that his vocation to the abstract sciences had kept him far apart fromthe whole crew of miscreant poets—Abode of demons.

Thither nevertheless he was now to depart, sent to the Grange orObedience of Notre-Dame De-Pratis by the aged Abbot (about to resign inhis favour) for the benefit of his body's health, a little impaired atlast by long intellectual effort, yet so invaluable to the community.But let him beware! whispered his dearest friend, who shared thosestrange misgivings, let him "take heed to his ways" when he was come tothat place. "The mere contact of one's feet with its soil might changeone." And that same night, disturbed perhaps by thoughts of the comingjourney with which his brain was full, Prior Saint-Jean himself dreamedvividly, as he had been little used to do. He saw the very place inwhich he lay (he knew it! his little inner cell, the brown doors, thewhite breadth of wall, the black crucifix upon it) alight, alight [147]softly; and looking, as he fancied, from the window, saw also a lowcirclet of soundless flame, waving, licking daintily up the black sky,but harmless, beautiful, closing in upon that round dark space in themidst, which was the earth. He seemed to feel upon his shoulder justthen the touch of his friend beside him. "It is hell-fire!" he said.

The Prior took with him a very youthful though devotedcompanion—Hyacinthus, the pet of the community. They laughedadmiringly at the rebellious masses of his black hair, with blue in thedepths of it, like the wings of the swallow, which refused to conformto the monkish pattern. It only grew twofold, crown upon crown, afterthe half-yearly shaving. And he was as neat and serviceable as he wasdelightful to be with. Prior Saint-Jean, then, and the boy startedbefore daybreak for the long journey; onwards, till darkness, a softtwilight rather, was around them again. How unlike a winter night itseemed, the further they went through the endless, lonely, turf-growntracts, and along the edge of a valley, at length—vallis monachorum,monksvale—taken aback by its sudden steepness and depth, as of animmense oval cup sunken in the grassy upland, over which a golden moonnow shone broadly. Ah! there it was at last, the white Grange, thewhite gable of the chapel apart amid a few scattered white gravestones,the white flocks crouched about on the hoar-frost, [148] like the whiteclouds, packed somewhat heavily on the horizon, and nacrés as theclouds of June, with their own light and heat in them, in theirhollows, you might fancy.

From the very first, the atmosphere, the light, the influence ofthings, seemed different from what they knew; and how distant alreadythe dark buildings of their home! Was there the breath of survivingsummer blossom on the air? Now and then came a gentle, comfortablebleating from the folds, and themselves slept soundly at last in thegreat open upper chamber of the Grange; were awakened by the sound ofthunder. Strange, in the late November night! It had parted, however,with its torrid fierceness; modulated by distance, seemed to break awayinto musical notes. And the lightning lingered along with it, butglancing softly; was in truth an aurora, such as persisted month aftermonth on the northern sky as they sojourned here. Like Prospero'senchanted island, the whole place was "full of noises." The wind itmight have been, passing over metallic strings, but that they wereaudible even when the night was breathless.

So like veritable music, however, were they on that first night that,upon reflexion, the Prior climbed softly the winding stair down whichthey appeared to flow, to the great solar among the beams of the roof,where the farm produce lay stored. A flood of moonlight now fellthrough the unshuttered dormer-windows; and, [149] under the glow of alamp hanging from the low rafters, Prior Saint-Jean seemed to belooking for the first time on the human form, on the old Adam freshfrom his Maker's hand. A servant of the house, or farm-labourer,perhaps!—fallen asleep there by chance on the fleeces heaped likegolden stuff high in all the corners of the place. A serf! But whatunserflike ease, how lordly, or godlike rather, in the posture! Couldone fancy a single curve bettered in the rich, warm, white limbs; inthe haughty features of the face, with the golden hair, tied in amystic knot, fallen down across the inspired brow? And yet what gentlesweetness also in the natural movement of the bosom, the throat, thelips, of the sleeper! Could that be diabolical, and really spottedwith unseen evil, which was so spotless to the eye? The rude sandalsof the monastic serf lay beside him apart, and all around was of theroughest, excepting only two strange objects lying within reach (evenin their own renowned treasury Prior Saint-Jean had not seen the likeof them), a harp, or some such instrument, of silver-gilt once, but thegold had mostly passed from it, and a bow, fashioned somehow of thesame precious substance. The very form of these things filled his mindwith inexplicable misgivings. He repeated a befitting collect, andtrod softly away.

It was in truth but a rude place to which they were come. But, afterlife in the [150] monastery, the severe discipline of which the Priorhimself had done much to restore, there was luxury in the free,self-chosen hours, the irregular fare, in doing pretty much as onepleased, in the sweet novelties of the country; to the boy Hyacinthespecially, who forgot himself, or rather found his true self for thefirst time. Girding up his heavy frock, which he laid aside erelongaltogether to go in his coarse linen smock only, he seemed a monasticnovice no longer; yet, in his natural gladness, was found morecompanionable than ever by his senior, surprised, delighted, for hispart, at the fresh springing of his brain, the spring of his footstepsover the close greensward, as if smoothed by the art of man. Cause ofhis renewed health, or concurrent with its effects, the air here mighthave been that of a veritable paradise, still unspoiled. "Could therebe unnatural magic," he asked himself again, "any secret evil, lurkingin these tranquil vale-sides, in their sweet low pastures, in the beltof scattered woodland above them, in the rills of pure water whichlisped from the open down beyond?" Making what was really a boy'sexperience, he had a wholly boyish delight in his holiday, andcertainly did not reflect how much we beget for ourselves in what wesee and feel, nor how far a certain diffused music in the very breathof the place was the creation of his own ear or brain.

[151] That strange enigmatic owner of the harp and the bow, whom he hadfound sleeping so divinely, actually waited on them the next morningwith all obsequiousness, stirred the great fire of peat, adjusted dulytheir monkish attire, laid their meal. It seemed an odd thing to beserved thus, like St. Jerome by the lion, as if by some imperiouslybeautiful wild animal tamed. You hesitated to permit, were a littleafraid of, his services. Their silent tonsured porter himself,contrast grim enough to any creature of that kind, had been so farseduced as to permit him to sleep there in the Grange, as he loved todo, instead of in ruder, rougher quarters; and, coaxed into oddgarrulity on this one matter, told the new-comers the little he knew,with much also that he only suspected, about him; among other things,as to the origin of those precious objects, which might have belongedto some sanctuary or noble house, found thus in the possession of amere labourer, who is no Frenchman, but a pagan, or gipsy, white as helooks, from far south or east, and who works or plays furtively, bynight for the most part, returning to sleep awhile before daybreak.The other herdsmen of the valley are bond-servants, but he a hirelingat will, though coming regularly at a certain season. He has come thusfor any number of years past, though seemingly never grown older (asthe speaker reflects), singing his way meagrely from farm to farm, tothe sound of [152] his harp. His name?—It was scarcely a name at all,in the diffident syllables he uttered in answer to that question, onfirst coming there; but of names known to them it came nearest to amalignant one in Scripture, Apollyon. Apollyon had a just discernibletonsure, but probably no right to it.

Well skilled in architecture, Prior Saint-Jean was set, by way of aholiday task, to superintend the completion of the great monastic barnthen in building. The visitor admires it still; perhaps supposes it,with its noble aisle, though set north and south, to be a desecratedchurch. If he be an expert in such matters, he will remark a sort ofclassical harmony in its broad, very simple proportions, with a certainsuppression of Gothic emphasis, more especially in that peculiarlyGothic feature, the buttresses, scarcely marking the unbroken,windowless walls, which rise very straight, taking the sun placidly.The silver-grey stone, cut, if it came from this neighbourhood at all,from some now forgotten quarry, has the fine, close-grained texture ofantique marble. The great northern gable is almost a classic pediment.The horizontal lines of plinth and ridge and cornice are kept unbroken,the roof of sea-grey slates being pitched less angularly than is usualin this rainy clime. A welcome contrast, the Prior thought it, to thesort of architectural nightmare he came from. He found the structurealready more than half- [153] way up, the low squat pillars ready fortheir capitals.

Yes! it must have so happened often in the Middle Age, as you feelconvinced, in looking sometimes at medieval building. Style must havechanged under the very hands of men who were no wilful innovators.Thus it was here, in the later work of Prior Saint-Jean, allunconsciously. The mysterious harper sat there always, at the topmostpoint achieved; played, idly enough it might seem, on his preciousinstrument, but kept in fact the hard taxed workmen literally in tune,working for once with a ready will, and, so to speak, with reallyinventive hands—working expeditiously, in this favourable weather,till far into the night, as they joined unbidden in a chorus, whichhushed, or rather turned to music, the noise of their chipping. It washardly noise at all, even in the night-time. Now and again BrotherApollyon descended nimbly to surprise them, at an opportune moment, bythe display of an immense strength. A great cheer exploded suddenly,as single-handed he heaved a massive stone into its place. He seemedto have no sense of weight: "Put there by the devil!" the modernvillager assures you.

With a change then, not so much of style as of temper, of management,in the application of acknowledged rules, Prior Saint-Jean shapingonly, adapting, simplifying, partly with a view [154] to economy, notthe heavy stones only, but the heavy manner of using them, turnedlight. With no pronounced ornamentation, it is as if in the upperstory ponderous root and stem blossomed gracefully, blossomed incornice and capital and pliant arch-line, as vigorous as they weregraceful, and rose on high quickly. Almost suddenly tie-beam andrafter knit themselves together into the stone, and the dark, dry,roomy place was closed in securely to this day. Mere audible music,certainly, had counted for something in the operations of an art, heldat its best (as we know) to be a sort of music made visible. That idlesinger, one might fancy, by an art beyond art, had attracted beams andstones into their fit places. And there, sure enough, he still sits,as a final decorative touch, by way of apex on the gable which looksnorthward, though much weather-worn, and with an ugly gap between theshoulder and the fingers on the harp,* as if, literally, he had cut offhis right hand and put it from him:—King David, or an angel? guessesthe careless tourist. The space below has been lettered. After alittle puzzling you recognise there the relics of a familiar verse froma Latin psalm Nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum,+ and the rest:inscribed as well as may be in Greek characters. Prior Saint-Jeancaused it to be so inscribed, absurdly, during his last days there.

[155] And is not the human body, too, a building, with architecturallaws, a structure, tending by the very forces which primarily held ittogether to drop asunder in time? Not in vain, it seemed, had PriorSaint-Jean come to this mystic place for the improvement of his body'shealth. Thenceforth that fleshly tabernacle had housed him, had housedhis cunning, overwrought and excitable soul, ever the better day byday, and he began to feel his bodily health to be a positive quality orforce, the presence near him of that singular being having surelysomething to do with this result. He and his fascinations, his music,himself, might at least be taken for an embodiment of all those genialinfluences of earth and sky, and the easy ways of living here, whichmade him turn, with less of an effort than he had known for many yearspast, to his daily tasks, and sink so regularly, so immediately, towholesome rest on returning from them. It was as if Brother Apollyonhimself abhorred the spectacle of distress, and mainly for his ownsatisfaction charmed away other people's maladies. The mere touch ofthat ice-cold hand, laid on the feverish brow, when the Prior lapsedfrom time to time into his former troubles, certainly calmed therespiration of a troubled sleeper. Was there magic in it, not whollynatural? The hand might have been a dead one. But then, was itsurprising, after all, that the [156] methods of curing men's maladies,as being in very deed the fruit of sin, should have something strangeand unlooked-for about them, like some of those Old Testament healingsand purifications which the Prior's biblical lore suggested to him?Yet Brother Apollyon, if their surly Janitor, in his less kindlymoments, spoke truly, himself greatly needed purification, being notonly a thief, but a homicide in hiding from the law. Nay, once, on hisannual return from southern or eastern lands, he had been observed onhis way along the streets of the great town literally scattering theseeds of disease till his serpent-skin bag was empty. And within sevendays the "black death" was there, reaping its thousands. As a wise mandeclared, he who can best cure disease can also most cunningly engenderit.

In short, these creatures of rule, these "regulars," the Prior and hiscompanion, were come in contact for the first time in their lives withthe power of untutored natural impulse, of natural inspiration. The boyexperienced it immediately in the games which suited his years, butwhich he had never so much as seen before; as his superior was toundergo its influence by-and-by in serious study. By night chiefly, inits long, continuous twilights, Hyacinth became really a boy at last,with immense gaiety; eyes, hands and feet awake, expanding, as he racedhis comrade over the [157] turf, with the conical Druidic stone for agoal, or wrestled lithely enough with him, though as with a rock; or,taking the silver bow in hand for a moment, transfixed a mark, next abird, on the bough, on the wing, shedding blood for the first time,with a boy's delight, a boy's remorse. Friend Apollyon seemed able todraw the wild animals too, to share their sport, yet not altogetherkindly. Tired, surfeited, he destroys them when his game with them isat an end; breaks the toy; deftly snaps asunder the fragile back.Though all alike would come at his call, or the sound of his harp, hehad his preferences; and warred in the night-time, as if on principle,against the creatures of the day. The small furry thing he piercedwith his arrow fled to him nevertheless caressingly, with broken limb,to die palpitating in his hand. In this wonderful season, themigratory birds, from Norway, from Britain beyond the seas, came thereas usual on the north wind, with sudden tumult of wings; but went thatyear no further, and by Christmas-time had built their nests, fillingthat belt of woodland around the vale with the chatter of theirbusiness and love quarrels. In turn they drew after them strangers noone here had ever known before; the like of which Hyacinth, who knewhis bestiary, had never seen even in a picture. The wild-cat, thewild-swan—the boy peeped on these wonders as they floated over thevale, or [158] glided with unwonted confidence over its turf, under themoonlight, or that frequent continuous aurora which was not the dawn.Even the modest rivulets of the hill-side felt that influence, and"lisped" no longer, but babbled as they leapt, like mountain streams,exposing their rocky bed. Were they angry, as they ran red sometimeswith blood-drops from the stricken bird caught there by rock or bough,as it fell with rent breast among the waves?

But say, think, what you might against him, the pagan outlaw was worthhis hire as a herdsman; seemingly loved his sheep; was an "affectionateshepherd"; cured their diseases; brought them easily to the birth, andif they strayed afar would bring them back tenderly upon his shoulders.Monastic persons would have seen that image many times before. Yet ifApollyon looked like the great carved figure over the low doorway oftheir place of penitence at home, that could be but an accident, orperhaps a deceit; so closely akin to those soulless creatures did hestill seem to the wondering Prior,—immersed in, or actually a part of,that irredeemable natural world he had dreaded so greatly ere he camehither. And was he after all making terms with it now, in theseductive person of this mysterious being—man or demon—suspected ofmurder; who has an air of unfathomable evil about him as from a distantbut ineffaceable past, and a sort of heathen [159] understanding withthe dark realm of matter; who is bringing the simple people, the womenand lovesick lads, back to those caves and cromlechs and blasted trees,resorts of old godless secret-telling? And still he has all his ownway with beasts and man, with the Prior himself, much as all alikedistrust him.

Most conspicuous in the little group of buildings, a feudal tower ofgoodly white stone, cylindrical and smoothly polished without to hinderthe ascent of creeping things, and snugly plastered within to resistthe damp, was the pigeon-house—a veritable feudal tower, a veritablefeudal plaisance of birds, which the common people dared not so much asruffle. About a thousand of them were housed there, each in its littlechamber, encouraged to grow plump, and to breed, in perfectself-content. From perch to perch of the great axle-tree in thecentre, monastic feet might climb, gentle monastic hands pass round toevery tiny compartment in turn. The arms of the monastery were carvedon the keystone of the doorway, and the tower finished in a conicalroof, with becoming aerial gaillardise, with pretty dormer-windows forthe inmates to pass in and out, little balconies for brooding in thesun, little awnings to protect them from rough breezes, and a greatweather-vane, on which the birds crowded for the chance of a ride. Ifthe peasants of that day, whose small fields they plundered, noting allthis, perhaps [160] envied the birds dumbly, for the brethren, on theother hand, it was a constant delight to watch the featheredbrotherhood, which supplied likewise their daintiest fare. Who then,what hawk, or wild-cat, or other savage beast, had ravaged it sowantonly, so very cruelly destroyed the bright creatures in a singlenight—broken backs, rent away limbs, pierced the wings? And what wasthat object there below? The silver harp surely, lying broken likewiseon the sanded floor, soaking in the pale milky blood and torn plumage.

Apollyon sobbed and wept audibly as he went about his ordinary doingsnext day, for once fully, though very sadly, awake in it; and towardsevening, when the villagers came to the Prior to confess themselves,the Feast of the Nativity being now at hand, he too came along withthem in his place meekly, like any other penitent, touched the lustralwater devoutly, knew all the ways, seemed to desire absolution fromsome guilt of blood heavier than the slaughter of beast or bird. ThePrior and his attendant, on their side, are reminded that by this timethey have wellnigh forgotten the monastic duties still incumbent uponthem, especially in that matter of the "Offices." On the vigil of thefeast, however, Brother Apollyon himself summoned the devout toMidnight Mass with the great bell, which had hung silent for ageneration, wedged in immoveably by a beam of [161] the cradle fallenout of its place. With an immense effort of strength he relieved it,hitched the bell back upon its wheel; the thick rust cracked on thehinges, and the strokes tolled forth betimes, with a hundred querulous,quaint creatures, bats and owls, circling stupidly in the waves ofsound, but allowed to settle back again undisturbedly into their beds.

People and priest, the Prior, vested as well as might be, with Hyacinthas "server," come in due course, all alike amazed to find that frozenneglected place, with its low-browed vault and narrow windows, alight,and as if warmed with flowers from a summer more radiant far than thatof France, with ilex and laurel—gilt laurel—by way of holly and box.Prior Saint-Jean felt that he had never really seen flowers before.Somewhat later they and the like of them seemed to have grown into andover his brain; to have degraded the scientific and abstract outlinesof things into a tangle of useless ornament. Whence were theyprocured? From what height, or hellish depth perhaps? Apollyon, whoentered the chapel just then, as if quite naturally, though with ableating lamb in his bosom ("dropped" thus early in that wonderfulseason) by way of an offering, took his place at the altar's very foot,and drawing forth his harp, now restrung, at the right moment, turnedto real silvery music the hoarse Gloria in Excelsis of those rudeworshippers, still [162] shrinking from him, while they listened in alittle circle, as he stood there in his outlandish attire of skinsstrangely spotted and striped. With that however the Mass broke offunconsummated. The Prior felt obliged to desist from the sacredoffice, and had left the altar hurriedly.

But Brother Apollyon put his strange attire aside next day, and in amuch-worn monk's frock, drawn forth from a dark corner, came with them,still like a Penitent, when they turned once more to their neglectedstudies somewhat sadly. See them then, after a collect for "Light"repeated by Hyacinth, skull-cap in hand, seated at their desks in thelittle scriptorium, panelled off from their living-room on the firstfloor, while the Prior makes an effort to recover the last thought ofhis long-suspended work, in the execution of which the boy is to assistwith his skilful pen. The great glazed windows remain open; admit, asif already on the soft air of spring, what seems like a stream offlowery odours, the entire moonlit scene, with the thorn bushes on thevale-side prematurely bursting into blossom, and the sound of birds andflocks emphasising the deep silence of the night.

Apollyon then, as if by habit, as he had shared all their occupationsof late, had taken his seat beside them, meekly enough, at first withthe manner of a mere suppliant for the [163] crumbs of their highstudies. But, straightway again, he surprises by more than racingforward incredibly on the road to facts, and from facts to luminousdoctrine; Prior Saint-Jean himself, in comparison, seeming to lagincompetently behind. He can but wonder at this strange scholar'sknowledge of a distant past, evidenced in his familiarity (it was as ifhe might once have spoken them) with the dead languages in which theirtext-books are written. There was more surely than the utmost merelynatural acuteness in his guesses as to the words intended by thosecrabbed contractions, of their meaning, in his sense of allusions andthe like. An ineffaceable memory it might rather seem of the entireworld of which those languages had been the living speech, once morevividly awake under the Prior's cross-questioning, and now more thansupplementing his own laborious search.

And at last something of the same kind happens with himself. Had he,on his way hither from the convent, passed unwittingly through someriver or rivulet of Lethe, that had carried away from him all his socarefully accumulated intellectual baggage of fact and theory? Thehard and abstract laws, or theory of the laws, of music, of the stars,of mechanical structure, in hard and abstract formulae, adding to theabstract austerity of the man, seemed to have deserted him; to berevived in him again [164] however, at the contact of thisextraordinary pupil or fellow-inquirer, though in a very differentguise or attitude towards himself, as matters no longer to be reasonedupon and understood, but to be seen rather, to be looked at and heard.Did not he see the angle of the earth's axis with the ecliptic, thedeflexions of the stars from their proper orbits with fatal resultshere below, and the earth—wicked, unscriptural truth!—moving roundthe sun, and those flashes of the eternal and unorbed light such asbring water, flowers, living things, out of the rocks, the dust? Thesinging of the planets: he could hear it, and might in time effect itsnotation. Having seen and heard, he might erelong speak also, trulyand with authority, on such matters. Could one but arrest it for one'sself, for final transference to others, on the written or printedpage—this beam of insight, or of inspiration!

Alas! one result of its coming was that it encouraged delay. If he sethand to the page, the firm halo, here a moment since, was gone, hadflitted capriciously to the wall; passed next through the window, tothe wall of the garden; was dancing back in another moment upon theinnermost walls of one's own miserable brain, to swell there—thatastounding white light!—rising steadily in the cup, the mentalreceptacle, till it overflowed, and he lay faint and drowning in it. Orhe rose above it, as above a great liquid surface, and hung giddilyover it—light, [165] simple, and absolute—ere he fell. Or there wasa battle between light and darkness around him, with no way of escapefrom the baffling strokes, the lightning flashes; flashes of blindnessone might rather call them. In truth, the intuitions of the night (forthey worked still, or tried to work, by night) became the sicklynightmares of the day, in which Prior Saint-Jean slept, or tried tosleep, or lay sometimes in a trance without food for many hours, fromwhich he would spring up suddenly to crowd, against time, as much as hecould into his book with pen or brush; winged flowers, or stars withhuman limbs and faces, still intruding themselves, or mere notes oflight and darkness from the actual horizon. There it all is still inthe faded gold and colours of the ancient volume—"Prior Saint-Jean'sfolly":—till on a sudden the hand collapses, as he becomes aware ofthat real, prosaic, broad daylight lying harsh upon the page, makinghis delicately toned auroras seem but a patch of grey, and himself fora moment, with a sigh of disgust, of self-reproach, to be his oldunimpassioned monastic self once more.

The boy, for his part, was grown at last full of misgiving. He pondershow he may get the Prior away, or escape by himself, find his way backto the convent and report his master's condition, his strange loss ofmemory for names and the like, his illusions about himself and [166]others. And he is more than ever distrustful now of his late belovedplaymate, who quietly obstructs any movement of the kind, and hasundertaken, at the Prior's entreaty, to draw down the moon from thesky, for some shameful price, known to the magicians of that day.

Yet Apollyon, at all events, would still play as gaily as ever onoccasion. Hitherto they had played as young animals do; withoutplaythings namely, applying hand or foot only to their games. But ithappened about this time that a grave was dug, a grave of unusualdepth, to be ready, in that fiery plaguesome weather, the first heat ofveritable summer come suddenly, for the body of an ancient villagerthen at the point of death. In the drowsy afternoon Hyacinth awakesApollyon, to see the strange thing he has found at the grave-side,among the gravel and yellow bones cast up there. He had wrested itwith difficulty from the hands of the half-crippled gravedigger, ateighty still excitable by the mere touch of metal.

The like of it had indeed been found before, within living memory, inthis place of immemorial use as a graveyard—"Devil's penny-pieces"people called them. Five such lay hidden already in a dark corner ofthe chapel, to keep them from superstitious employment. To-day theycame out of hiding at last. Apollyon knew the use of the thing at aglance; had put an expert hand to it forthwith; poises the [167]discus; sets it wheeling. How easily it spins round under one's arm,in the groove of the bent fingers, slips thence smoothly like a knifeflung from its sheath, as if for a course of perpetual motion!Splendescit eundo: it seems to burn as it goes. It is heavier manytimes than it looks, and sharp-edged. By night they have scoured andpolished the corroded surfaces. Apollyon promises Hyacinth and himselfrare sport in the cool of the evening—an evening however, as it turnedout, not less breathless than the day.

In the great heat Apollyon had flung aside, as if for ever, the lastsorry remnant of his workman's attire, and challenged the boy to do thesame. On the moonlit turf there, crouching, right foot foremost, andwith face turned backwards to the disk in his right hand, his wholebody, in that moment of rest, full of the circular motion he is aboutto commit to it, he seemed—beautiful pale spectre—to shine fromwithin with a light of his own, like that of the glow-worm in thethicket, or the dead and rotten roots of the old trees. And as if theyhad a proper motion of their own in them, the disks, the quoits, ran,amid the delighted shouts and laughter of the boy, as he follows,scarcely less swift, to score the points of their contact with thegrass. Again and again they recommence, forgetful of the hours; whilethe death-bell cries out harshly for the grave's occupant, and [168]the corpse itself is borne along stealthily not far from them, and,unnoticed by either, the entire aspect of things has changed. Underthe overcast sky it is in darkness they are playing, by guess and touchchiefly; and suddenly an icy blast of wind has lifted the roof from theold chapel, the trees are moaning in wild circular motion, and theirdevil's penny-piece, when Apollyon throws it for the last time, isitself but a twirling leaf in the wind, till it sinks edgewise, sawingthrough the boy's face, uplifted in the dark to trace it, crushing inthe tender skull upon the brain.

His shout of laughter is turned in an instant to a cry of pain, ofreproach; and in that which echoed it—an immense cry, as from the veryheart of ancient tragedy, over the Picard wolds—it was as if thathalf-extinguished deity, its proper immensity, its old greatness andpower, were restored for a moment. The villagers in their bedswondered. It was like the sound of some natural catastrophe.

The storm which followed was still in possession, still movingtearfully among the poplar groves, though it had spent its heat andthunder. The last drops of the blood of Hyacinth still trickledthrough the thick masses of dark hair, where the tonsure had been. Anabundant rain, mingling with the copious purple stream, had colouredthe grass all around where the corpse lay, stealing afar in tinychannels.

[169] So it was, when Apollyon, reduced in the morning light to hissmaller self, came with the other people of the Grange to gaze, toenquire, and found the Prior already there, speechless. Clearly thiswas no lightning stroke; and Apollyon straightway conceives certainvery human fears that, coming upon those antecedent suspicions ofhimself, the boy's death may be thought the result of intention on hispart. He proposes to bury the body at once, with no delay forreligious rites, in that still uncovered grave, the bearers having fledfrom it in the tempest.

And next day, fulfilling his annual custom, he went his way northward,without a word of farewell to Prior Saint-Jean, whom he leaves in factunder suspicion of murder. From the profound slumber which hadfollowed the excitements of yesterday, the Prior awoke amid the soundof voices, the voices of the peasants singing no Christian song,certainly, but a song which Apollyon himself had taught them, todismiss him on his journey. For, strange or not as it might be, theyloved him, perhaps in spite of themselves; would certainly protect himat any risk. Prior Saint-Jean arose, and looked forth—with wonder. Abrief spell of sunshine amid the rain had clothed the vale with amarvel of blue flowers, if it were not rather with remnants of the bluesky itself, fallen among the woods there. But there too, in the littlecourtyard, [170] the officers of justice are already in waiting to takehim, on the charge of having caused the death of his young server byviolence, in a fit of mania, induced by dissolute living in thatsolitary place. One hitherto so prosperous in life would, of course,have his enemies.

The monastic authorities, however, claim him from the secular power, tocorrect his offence in their own way, and with friendly interpretationof the facts. Madness, however wicked, being still madness, Prior, nowsimple Brother, Saint-Jean, is detained in a sufficiently cheerfulapartment, in a region of the atmosphere likely to restore lost wits,whence indeed he can still see the country—vallis monachorum. The onedesire which from time to time fitfully rouses him again to animationfor a few moments is to return thither. Here then he remains in peace,ostensibly for the completion of his great work. He never again setpen to it, consistent and clear now on nothing save that longing to beonce more at the Grange, that he may get well, or die and be well so.He is like the damned spirit, think some of the brethren, saying "Iwill return to the house whence I came out." Gazing thither daily formany hours, he would mistake mere blue distance, when that was visible,for blue flowers, for hyacinths, and wept at the sight; though blue, ashe observed, was the colour of Holy Mary's gown on the illuminatedpage, the colour of hope, of merciful [171] omnipresent deity. Thenecessary permission came with difficulty, just too late. BrotherSaint-Jean died, standing upright with an effort to gaze forth oncemore, amid the preparations for his departure.

NOTES

142. *Published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Nov. 1893, and nowreprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.

154. *Or sundial, as some maintain, though turned from the south.

154. +Latin Vulgate (ed. Saint Jerome) Psalm 126, verse 1: "canticumgraduum Salomonis nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum in vanumlaboraverunt qui aedificant eam nisi Dominus custodierit civitatemfrustra vigilavit qui custodit." King James Bible's translation: "Whenthe Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them thatdream."

THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE*

[172] As Florian Deleal walked, one hot afternoon, he overtook by thewayside a poor aged man, and, as he seemed weary with the road, helpedhim on with the burden which he carried, a certain distance. And as theman told his story, it chanced that he named the place, a little placein the neighbourhood of a great city, where Florian had passed hisearliest years, but which he had never since seen, and, the story told,went forward on his journey comforted. And that night, like a rewardfor his pity, a dream of that place came to Florian, a dream which didfor him the office of the finer sort of memory, bringing its object tomind with a great clearness, yet, as sometimes happens in dreams,raised a little above itself, and above ordinary retrospect. The trueaspect of the place, especially of the house there in which he hadlived as a child, the fashion of its doors, its hearths, its windows,the very scent upon the air of it, was with him in sleep for a season;only, with tints more musically blent on wall [173] and floor, and somefiner light and shadow running in and out along its curves and angles,and with all its little carvings daintier. He awoke with a sigh at thethought of almost thirty years which lay between him and that place,yet with a flutter of pleasure still within him at the fair light, asif it were a smile, upon it. And it happened that this accident of hisdream was just the thing needed for the beginning of a certain designhe then had in view, the noting, namely, of some things in the story ofhis spirit—in that process of brain-building by which we are, each oneof us, what we are. With the image of the place so clear andfavourable upon him, he fell to thinking of himself therein, and howhis thoughts had grown up to him. In that half-spiritualised house hecould watch the better, over again, the gradual expansion of the soulwhich had come to be there—of which indeed, through the law whichmakes the material objects about them so large an element in children'slives, it had actually become a part; inward and outward being woventhrough and through each other into one inextricable texture—half,tint and trace and accident of homely colour and form, from the woodand the bricks; half, mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knowshow far. In the house and garden of his dream he saw a child moving,and could divide the main streams at least of the winds that had playedon [174] him, and study so the first stage in that mental journey.

The old house, as when Florian talked of it afterwards he always calledit, (as all children do, who can recollect a change of home, soonenough but not too soon to mark a period in their lives) really was anold house; and an element of French descent in its inmates—descentfrom Watteau, the old court-painter, one of whose gallant pieces stillhung in one of the rooms—might explain, together with some otherthings, a noticeable trimness and comely whiteness about everythingthere—the curtains, the couches, the paint on the walls with which thelight and shadow played so delicately; might explain also the toleranceof the great poplar in the garden, a tree most often despised byEnglish people, but which French people love, having observed a certainfresh way its leaves have of dealing with the wind, making it sound, innever so slight a stirring of the air, like running water.

The old-fashioned, low wainscoting went round the rooms, and up thestaircase with carved balusters and shadowy angles, landing half-way upat a broad window, with a swallow's nest below the sill, and theblossom of an old pear-tree showing across it in late April, againstthe blue, below which the perfumed juice of the find of fallen fruit inautumn was so fresh. At the next turning came the closet which held onits deep shelves the best china. Little angel [175] faces and reedyflutings stood out round the fireplace of the children's room. And onthe top of the house, above the large attic, where the white mice ranin the twilight—an infinite, unexplored wonderland of childishtreasures, glass beads, empty scent-bottles still sweet, thrum ofcoloured silks, among its lumber—a flat space of roof, railed round,gave a view of the neighbouring steeples; for the house, as I said,stood near a great city, which sent up heavenwards, over the twistingweather-vanes, not seldom, its beds of rolling cloud and smoke, touchedwith storm or sunshine. But the child of whom I am writing did nothate the fog because of the crimson lights which fell from it sometimesupon the chimneys, and the whites which gleamed through its openings,on summer mornings, on turret or pavement. For it is false to supposethat a child's sense of beauty is dependent on any choiceness orspecial fineness, in the objects which present themselves to it, thoughthis indeed comes to be the rule with most of us in later life;earlier, in some degree, we see inwardly; and the child finds foritself, and with unstinted delight, a difference for the sense, inthose whites and reds through the smoke on very homely buildings, andin the gold of the dandelions at the road-side, just beyond the houses,where not a handful of earth is virgin and untouched, in the lack ofbetter ministries to its desire of beauty.

[176] This house then stood not far beyond the gloom and rumours of thetown, among high garden-wall, bright all summer-time with Golden-rod,and brown-and-golden Wall-flower—Flos Parietis, as the children'sLatin-reading father taught them to call it, while he was with them.Tracing back the threads of his complex spiritual habit, as he was usedin after years to do, Florian found that he owed to the place manytones of sentiment afterwards customary with him, certain inward lightsunder which things most naturally presented themselves to him. Thecoming and going of travellers to the town along the way, the shadow ofthe streets, the sudden breath of the neighbouring gardens, thesingular brightness of bright weather there, its singular darknesseswhich linked themselves in his mind to certain engraved illustrationsin the old big Bible at home, the coolness of the dark, cavernous shopsround the great church, with its giddy winding stair up to the pigeonsand the bells—a citadel of peace in the heart of the trouble—all thisacted on his childish fancy, so that ever afterwards the like aspectsand incidents never failed to throw him into a well-recognisedimaginative mood, seeming actually to have become a part of the textureof his mind. Also, Florian could trace home to this point a pervadingpreference in himself for a kind of comeliness and dignity, an urbanityliterally, in modes of life, which he connected with the pale [177]people of towns, and which made him susceptible to a kind of exquisitesatisfaction in the trimness and well-considered grace of certainthings and persons he afterwards met with, here and there, in his waythrough the world.

So the child of whom I am writing lived on there quietly; thingswithout thus ministering to him, as he sat daily at the window with thebirdcage hanging below it, and his mother taught him to read, wonderingat the ease with which he learned, and at the quickness of his memory.The perfume of the little flowers of the lime-tree fell through the airupon them like rain; while time seemed to move ever more slowly to themurmur of the bees in it, till it almost stood still on Juneafternoons. How insignificant, at the moment, seem the influences ofthe sensible things which are tossed and fall and lie about us, so, orso, in the environment of early childhood. How indelibly, as weafterwards discover, they affect us; with what capricious attractionsand associations they figure themselves on the white paper, the smoothwax, of our ingenuous souls, as "with lead in the rock for ever,"giving form and feature, and as it were assigned house-room in ourmemory, to early experiences of feeling and thought, which abide withus ever afterwards, thus, and not otherwise. The realities andpassions, the rumours of the greater world without, steal in upon us,each by its own special little passage-way, through the wall of custom[178] about us; and never afterwards quite detach themselves from thisor that accident, or trick, in the mode of their first entrance to us.Our susceptibilities, the discovery of our powers, manifoldexperiences—our various experiences of the coming and going of bodilypain, for instance—belong to this or the other well-remembered placein the material habitation—that little white room with the windowacross which the heavy blossoms could beat so peevishly in the wind,with just that particular catch or throb, such a sense of teasing init, on gusty mornings; and the early habitation thus gradually becomesa sort of material shrine or sanctuary of sentiment; a system ofvisible symbolism interweaves itself through all our thoughts andpassions; and irresistibly, little shapes, voices, accidents—the angleat which the sun in the morning fell on the pillow—become parts of thegreat chain wherewith we are bound.

Thus far, for Florian, what all this had determined was a peculiarlystrong sense of home—so forcible a motive with all of us—prompting tous our customary love of the earth, and the larger part of our fear ofdeath, that revulsion we have from it, as from something strange,untried, unfriendly; though life-long imprisonment, they tell you, andfinal banishment from home is a thing bitterer still; the lookingforward to but a short space, a mere childish goûter and dessert of it,before the end, being so great a resource of [179] effort to pilgrimsand wayfarers, and the soldier in distant quarters, and lending, inlack of that, some power of solace to the thought of sleep in the homechurchyard, at least—dead cheek by dead cheek, and with the rainsoaking in upon one from above.

So powerful is this instinct, and yet accidents like those I have beenspeaking of so mechanically determine it; its essence being indeed theearly familiar, as constituting our ideal, or typical conception, ofrest and security. Out of so many possible conditions, just this foryou and that for me, brings ever the unmistakeable realisation of thedelightful chez soi; this for the Englishman, for me and you, with theclosely-drawn white curtain and the shaded lamp; that, quite other, forthe wandering Arab, who folds his tent every morning, and makes hissleeping-place among haunted ruins, or in old tombs.

With Florian then the sense of home became singularly intense, his goodfortune being that the special character of his home was in itself soessentially home-like. As after many wanderings I have come to fancythat some parts of Surrey and Kent are, for Englishmen, the truelandscape, true home-counties, by right, partly, of a certain earthywarmth in the yellow of the sand below their gorse-bushes, and of acertain grey-blue mist after rain, in the hollows of the hills there,welcome to fatigued eyes, and never seen farther south; so I think thatthe sort of [180] house I have described, with precisely thoseproportions of red-brick and green, and with a just perceptiblemonotony in the subdued order of it, for its distinguishing note, isfor Englishmen at least typically home-life. And so for Florian thatgeneral human instinct was reinforced by this special home-likeness inthe place his wandering soul had happened to light on, as, in thesecond degree, its body and earthly tabernacle; the sense of harmonybetween his soul and its physical environment became, for a time atleast, like perfectly played music, and the life led there singularlytranquil and filled with a curious sense of self-possession. The loveof security, of an habitually undisputed standing-ground orsleeping-place, came to count for much in the generation and correctingof his thoughts, and afterwards as a salutary principle of restraint inall his wanderings of spirit. The wistful yearning towards home, inabsence from it, as the shadows of evening deepened, and he followed inthought what was doing there from hour to hour, interpreted to him muchof a yearning and regret he experienced afterwards, towards he knew notwhat, out of strange ways of feeling and thought in which, from time totime, his spirit found itself alone; and in the tears shed in suchabsences there seemed always to be some soul-subduing foretaste of whathis last tears might be.

And the sense of security could hardly have [181] been deeper, thequiet of the child's soul being one with the quiet of its home, a place"inclosed" and "sealed." But upon this assured place, upon the child'sassured soul which resembled it, there came floating in from the largerworld without, as at windows left ajar unknowingly, or over the highgarden walls, two streams of impressions, the sentiments of beauty andpain—recognitions of the visible, tangible, audible loveliness ofthings, as a very real and somewhat tyrannous element in them—and ofthe sorrow of the world, of grown people and children and animals, as athing not to be put by in them. From this point he could trace twopredominant processes of mental change in him—the growth of an almostdiseased sensibility to the spectacle of suffering, and, parallel withthis, the rapid growth of a certain capacity of fascination by brightcolour and choice form—the sweet curvings, for instance, of the lipsof those who seemed to him comely persons, modulated in such delicateunison to the things they said or sang,—marking early the activity inhim of a more than customary sensuousness, "the lust of the eye," asthe Preacher says, which might lead him, one day, how far! Could hehave foreseen the weariness of the way! In music sometimes the twosorts of impressions came together, and he would weep, to the surpriseof older people. Tears of joy too the child knew, also to olderpeople's surprise; real tears, once, of relief from long-strung, [182]childish expectation, when he found returned at evening, with new rosesin her cheeks, the little sister who had been to a place where therewas a wood, and brought back for him a treasure of fallen acorns, andblack crow's feathers, and his peace at finding her again near himmingled all night with some intimate sense of the distant forest, therumour of its breezes, with the glossy blackbirds aslant and thebranches lifted in them, and of the perfect nicety of the little cupsthat fell. So those two elementary apprehensions of the tenderness andof the colour in things grew apace in him, and were seen by himafterwards to send their roots back into the beginnings of life.

Let me note first some of the occasions of his recognition of theelement of pain in things—incidents, now and again, which seemedsuddenly to awake in him the whole force of that sentiment which Goethehas called the Weltschmerz, and in which the concentrated sorrow of theworld seemed suddenly to lie heavy upon him. A book lay in an oldbook-case, of which he cared to remember one picture—a woman sitting,with hands bound behind her, the dress, the cap, the hair, folded witha simplicity which touched him strangely, as if not by her own hands,but with some ambiguous care at the hands of others—Queen MarieAntoinette, on her way to execution—we all remember David's drawing,meant merely to make her ridiculous. The face [183] that had been sohigh had learned to be mute and resistless; but out of its veryresistlessness, seemed now to call on men to have pity, and forbear;and he took note of that, as he closed the book, as a thing to look atagain, if he should at any time find himself tempted to be cruel.Again, he would never quite forget the appeal in the small sister'sface, in the garden under the lilacs, terrified at a spider lighted onher sleeve. He could trace back to the look then noted a certain mercyhe conceived always for people in fear, even of little things, whichseemed to make him, though but for a moment, capable of almost anysacrifice of himself. Impressible, susceptible persons, indeed, who hadhad their sorrows, lived about him; and this sensibility was due inpart to the tacit influence of their presence, enforcing upon himhabitually the fact that there are those who pass their days, as amatter of course, in a sort of "going quietly." Most poignantly of allhe could recall, in unfading minutest circ*mstance, the cry on thestair, sounding bitterly through the house, and struck into his soulfor ever, of an aged woman, his father's sister, come now to announcehis death in distant India; how it seemed to make the aged woman like achild again; and, he knew not why, but this fancy was full of pity tohim. There were the little sorrows of the dumb animals too—of thewhite angora, with a dark tail like an ermine's, and a face like a[184] flower, who fell into a lingering sickness, and became quitedelicately human in its valetudinarianism, and came to have a hundreddifferent expressions of voice—how it grew worse and worse, till itbegan to feel the light too much for it, and at last, after one wildmorning of pain, the little soul flickered away from the body, quiteworn to death already, and now but feebly retaining it.

So he wanted another pet; and as there were starlings about the place,which could be taught to speak, one of them was caught, and he meant totreat it kindly; but in the night its young ones could be heard cryingafter it, and the responsive cry of the mother-bird towards them; andat last, with the first light, though not till after some debate withhimself, he went down and opened the cage, and saw a sharp bound of theprisoner up to her nestlings; and therewith came the sense ofremorse,—that he too was become an accomplice in moving, to the limitof his small power, the springs and handles of that great machine inthings, constructed so ingeniously to play pain-fugues on the delicatenerve-work of living creatures.

I have remarked how, in the process of our brain-building, as the houseof thought in which we live gets itself together, like some airybird's-nest of floating thistle-down and chance straws, compact atlast, little accidents have their consequence; and thus it happenedthat, as he [185] walked one evening, a garden gate, usually closed,stood open; and lo! within, a great red hawthorn in full flower,embossing heavily the bleached and twisted trunk and branches, so agedthat there were but few green leaves thereon—a plumage of tender,crimson fire out of the heart of the dry wood. The perfume of the treehad now and again reached him, in the currents of the wind, over thewall, and he had wondered what might be behind it, and was now allowedto fill his arms with the flowers—flowers enough for all the oldblue-china pots along the chimney-piece, making fête in the children'sroom. Was it some periodic moment in the expansion of soul within him,or mere trick of heat in the heavily-laden summer air?

But the beauty of the thing struck home to him feverishly; and indreams all night he loitered along a magic roadway of crimson flowers,which seemed to open ruddily in thick, fresh masses about his feet, andfill softly all the little hollows in the banks on either side. Alwaysafterwards, summer by summer, as the flowers came on, the blossom ofthe red hawthorn still seemed to him absolutely the reddest of allthings; and the goodly crimson, still alive in the works of oldVenetian masters or old Flemish tapestries, called out always from afarthe recollection of the flame in those perishing little petals, as itpulsed gradually out of them, kept long in the drawers of an oldcabinet.

[186] Also then, for the first time, he seemed to experience apassionateness in his relation to fair outward objects, an inexplicableexcitement in their presence, which disturbed him, and from which hehalf longed to be free. A touch of regret or desire mingled all nightwith the remembered presence of the red flowers, and their perfume inthe darkness about him; and the longing for some undivined, entirepossession of them was the beginning of a revelation to him, growingever clearer, with the coming of the gracious summer guise of fieldsand trees and persons in each succeeding year, of a certain, at timesseemingly exclusive, predominance in his interests, of beautifulphysical things, a kind of tyranny of the senses over him.

In later years he came upon philosophies which occupied him much in theestimate of the proportion of the sensuous and the ideal elements inhuman knowledge, the relative parts they bear in it; and, in hisintellectual scheme, was led to assign very little to the abstractthought, and much to its sensible vehicle or occasion. Suchmetaphysical speculation did but reinforce what was instinctive in hisway of receiving the world, and for him, everywhere, that sensiblevehicle or occasion became, perhaps only too surely, the necessaryconcomitant of any perception of things, real enough to be of anyweight or reckoning, in his house of thought. There were times when hecould think of the [187] necessity he was under of associating allthoughts to touch and sight, as a sympathetic link between himself andactual, feeling, living objects; a protest in favour of real men andwomen against mere grey, unreal abstractions; and he rememberedgratefully how the Christian religion, hardly less than the religion ofthe ancient Greeks, translating so much of its spiritual verity intothings that may be seen, condescends in part to sanction thisinfirmity, if so it be, of our human existence, wherein the world ofsense is so much with us, and welcomed this thought as a kind of keeperand sentinel over his soul therein. But certainly, he came more andmore to be unable to care for, or think of soul but as in an actualbody, or of any world but that wherein are water and trees, and wheremen and women look, so or so, and press actual hands. It was the trickeven his pity learned, fastening those who suffered in anywise to hisaffections by a kind of sensible attachments. He would think ofJulian, fallen into incurable sickness, as spoiled in the sweet blossomof his skin like pale amber, and his honey-like hair; of Cecil, earlydead, as cut off from the lilies, from golden summer days, from women'svoices; and then what comforted him a little was the thought of theturning of the child's flesh to violets in the turf above him. Andthinking of the very poor, it was not the things which most men caremost for that he yearned to give them; [188] but fairer roses, perhaps,and power to taste quite as they will, at their ease and nottask-burdened, a certain desirable, clear light in the new morning,through which sometimes he had noticed them, quite unconscious of it,on their way to their early toil.

So he yielded himself to these things, to be played upon by them like amusical instrument, and began to note with deepening watchfulness, butalways with some puzzled, unutterable longing in his enjoyment, thephases of the seasons and of the growing or waning day, down even tothe shadowy changes wrought on bare wall or ceiling—the light cast upfrom the snow, bringing out their darkest angles; the brown light inthe cloud, which meant rain; that almost too austere clearness, in theprotracted light of the lengthening day, before warm weather began, asif it lingered but to make a severer workday, with the school-booksopened earlier and later; that beam of June sunshine, at last, as helay awake before the time, a way of gold-dust across the darkness; allthe humming, the freshness, the perfume of the garden seemed to lieupon it—and coming in one afternoon in September, along the red gravelwalk, to look for a basket of yellow crab-apples left in the cool, oldparlour, he remembered it the more, and how the colours struck uponhim, because a wasp on one bitten apple stung him, and he felt thepassion of [189] sudden, severe pain. For this too brought its curiousreflexions; and, in relief from it, he would wonder over it—how it hadthen been with him—puzzled at the depth of the charm or spell overhim, which lay, for a little while at least, in the mere absence ofpain; once, especially, when an older boy taught him to make flowers ofsealing-wax, and he had burnt his hand badly at the lighted taper, andbeen unable to sleep. He remembered that also afterwards, as a sort oftypical thing—a white vision of heat about him, clinging closely,through the languid scent of the ointments put upon the place to makeit well.

Also, as he felt this pressure upon him of the sensible world, then, asoften afterwards, there would come another sort of curious questioninghow the last impressions of eye and ear might happen to him, how theywould find him—the scent of the last flower, the soft yellowness ofthe last morning, the last recognition of some object of affection,hand or voice; it could not be but that the latest look of the eyes,before their final closing, would be strangely vivid; one would go withthe hot tears, the cry, the touch of the wistful bystander, impressedhow deeply on one! or would it be, perhaps, a mere frail retiring ofall things, great or little, away from one, into a level distance?

For with this desire of physical beauty mingled itself early the fearof death—the fear of death [190] intensified by the desire of beauty.Hitherto he had never gazed upon dead faces, as sometimes, afterwards,at the Morgue in Paris, or in that fair cemetery at Munich, where allthe dead must go and lie in state before burial, behind glass windows,among the flowers and incense and holy candles—the aged clergy withtheir sacred ornaments, the young men in their dancing-shoes andspotless white linen—after which visits, those waxen, resistless faceswould always live with him for many days, making the broadest sunshinesickly. The child had heard indeed of the death of his father, andhow, in the Indian station, a fever had taken him, so that though notin action he had yet died as a soldier; and hearing of the"resurrection of the just," he could think of him as still abroad inthe world, somehow, for his protection—a grand, though perhaps ratherterrible figure, in beautiful soldier's things, like the figure in thepicture of Joshua's Vision in the Bible—and of that, round which themourners moved so softly, and afterwards with such solemn singing, asbut a worn-out garment left at a deserted lodging. So it was, until ona summer day he walked with his mother through a fair churchyard. In abright dress he rambled among the graves, in the gay weather, and socame, in one corner, upon an open grave for a child—a dark space onthe brilliant grass—the black mould lying heaped up round it, weighingdown the little jewelled [191] branches of the dwarf rose-bushes inflower. And therewith came, full-grown, never wholly to leave him,with the certainty that even children do sometimes die, the physicalhorror of death, with its wholly selfish recoil from the association oflower forms of life, and the suffocating weight above. No benign,grave figure in beautiful soldier's things any longer abroad in theworld for his protection! only a few poor, piteous bones; and abovethem, possibly, a certain sort of figure he hoped not to see. Forsitting one day in the garden below an open window, he heard peopletalking, and could not but listen, how, in a sleepless hour, a sickwoman had seen one of the dead sitting beside her, come to call herhence; and from the broken talk evolved with much clearness the notionthat not all those dead people had really departed to the churchyard,nor were quite so motionless as they looked, but led a secret,half-fugitive life in their old homes, quite free by night, thoughsometimes visible in the day, dodging from room to room, with no greatgoodwill towards those who shared the place with them. All night thefigure sat beside him in the reveries of his broken sleep, and was notquite gone in the morning—an odd, irreconcileable new member of thehousehold, making the sweet familiar chambers unfriendly and suspect byits uncertain presence. He could have hated the dead he had pitied so,for being [192] thus. Afterwards he came to think of those poor,home-returning ghosts, which all men have fancied to themselves—therevenants—pathetically, as crying, or beating with vain hands at thedoors, as the wind came, their cries distinguishable in it as a wilderinner note. But, always making death more unfamiliar still, that oldexperience would ever, from time to time, return to him; even in theliving he sometimes caught its likeness; at any time or place, in amoment, the faint atmosphere of the chamber of death would be breathedaround him, and the image with the bound chin, the quaint smile, thestraight, stiff feet, shed itself across the air upon the brightcarpet, amid the gayest company, or happiest communing with himself.

To most children the sombre questionings to which impressions likethese attach themselves, if they come at all, are actually suggested byreligious books, which therefore they often regard with much secretdistaste, and dismiss, as far as possible, from their habitual thoughtsas a too depressing element in life. To Florian such impressions,these misgivings as to the ultimate tendency of the years, of therelationship between life and death, had been suggested spontaneouslyin the natural course of his mental growth by a strong innate sense forthe soberer tones in things, further strengthened by actualcirc*mstances; and religious sentiment, that [193] system of biblicalideas in which he had been brought up, presented itself to him as athing that might soften and dignify, and light up as with a "livelyhope," a melancholy already deeply settled in him. So he yieldedhimself easily to religious impressions, and with a kind of mysticalappetite for sacred things; the more as they came to him through asaintly person who loved him tenderly, and believed that this earlypre-occupation with them already marked the child out for a saint. Hebegan to love, for their own sakes, church lights, holy days, all thatbelonged to the comely order of the sanctuary, the secrets of its whitelinen, and holy vessels, and fonts of pure water; and its hieraticpurity and simplicity became the type of something he desired always tohave about him in actual life. He pored over the pictures in religiousbooks, and knew by heart the exact mode in which the wrestling angelgrasped Jacob, how Jacob looked in his mysterious sleep, how the bellsand pomegranates were attached to the hem of Aaron's vestment, soundingsweetly as he glided over the turf of the holy place. His way ofconceiving religion came then to be in effect what it ever afterwardsremained—a sacred history indeed, but still more a sacred ideal, atranscendent version or representation, under intenser and moreexpressive light and shade, of human life and its familiar orexceptional incidents, birth, death, marriage, [194] youth, age, tears,joy, rest, sleep, waking—a mirror, towards which men might turn awaytheir eyes from vanity and dullness, and see themselves therein asangels, with their daily meat and drink, even, become a kind of sacredtransaction—a complementary strain or burden, applied to our every-dayexistence, whereby the stray snatches of music in it re-set themselves,and fall into the scheme of some higher and more consistent harmony. Aplace adumbrated itself in his thoughts, wherein those sacredpersonalities, which are at once the reflex and the pattern of ournobler phases of life, housed themselves; and this region in hisintellectual scheme all subsequent experience did but tend stillfurther to realise and define. Some ideal, hieratic persons he wouldalways need to occupy it and keep a warmth there. And he could hardlyunderstand those who felt no such need at all, finding themselves quitehappy without such heavenly companionship, and sacred double of theirlife, beside them.

Thus a constant substitution of the typical for the actual took placein his thoughts. Angels might be met by the way, under English elm orbeech-tree; mere messengers seemed like angels, bound on celestialerrands; a deep mysticity brooded over real meetings and partings;marriages were made in heaven; and deaths also, with hands of angelsthereupon, to bear soul and body quietly asunder, each to its [195]appointed rest. All the acts and accidents of daily life borrowed asacred colour and significance; the very colours of things becamethemselves weighty with meanings like the sacred stuffs of Moses'tabernacle, full of penitence or peace. Sentiment, congruous in thefirst instance only with those divine transactions, the deep, effusiveunction of the House of Bethany, was assumed as the due attitude forthe reception of our every-day existence; and for a time he walkedthrough the world in a sustained, not unpleasurable awe, generated bythe habitual recognition, beside every circ*mstance and event of life,of its celestial correspondent.

Sensibility—the desire of physical beauty—a strange biblical awe,which made any reference to the unseen act on him like solemnmusic—these qualities the child took away with him, when, at about theage of twelve years, he left the old house, and was taken to live inanother place. He had never left home before, and, anticipating muchfrom this change, had long dreamed over it, jealously counting the daystill the time fixed for departure should come; had been a littlecareless about others even, in his strong desire for it—when Lewisfell sick, for instance, and they must wait still two days longer. Atlast the morning came, very fine; and all things—the very pavementwith its dust, at the roadside—seemed to have a white, pearl-likelustre in them. They were to travel by a [196] favourite road on whichhe had often walked a certain distance, and on one of those twoprisoner days, when Lewis was sick, had walked farther than everbefore, in his great desire to reach the new place. They had startedand gone a little way when a pet bird was found to have been leftbehind, and must even now—so it presented itself to him—have alreadyall the appealing fierceness and wild self-pity at heart of one left byothers to perish of hunger in a closed house; and he returned to fetchit, himself in hardly less stormy distress. But as he passed in searchof it from room to room, lying so pale, with a look of meekness intheir denudation, and at last through that little, stripped white room,the aspect of the place touched him like the face of one dead; and aclinging back towards it came over him, so intense that he knew itwould last long, and spoiling all his pleasure in the realisation of athing so eagerly anticipated. And so, with the bird found, but himselfin an agony of home-sickness, thus capriciously sprung up within him,he was driven quickly away, far into the rural distance, so fondlyspeculated on, of that favourite country-road.

NOTES

172. *Published in Macmillan's Magazine, Aug. 1878.

EMERALD UTHWART*

[197] WE smile at epitaphs—at those recent enough to be read easily;smile, for the most part, at what for the most part is an unreal andoften vulgar branch of literature; yet a wide one, with its flowershere or there, such as make us regret now and again not to havegathered more carefully in our wanderings a fair average of the like.Their very simplicity, of course, may set one's thoughts in motion tofill up the scanty tale, and those of the young at least are almostalways worth while. At Siena, for instance, in the great Dominicanchurch, even with the impassioned work of Sodoma at hand, you maylinger in a certain dimly lit chapel to spell out the black-lettermemorials of the German students who died here—aetatis flore!—at theUniversity, famous early in the last century; young nobles chiefly, farfrom the Rhine, from Nuremberg, or Leipsic. Note one in particular!Loving parents and elder brother meant to record [198] carefully thevery days of the lad's poor life—annos, menses, dies; sent the order,doubtless, from the distant old castle in the Fatherland, but not quiteexplicitly; the spaces for the numbers remain still unfilled; and theynever came to see. After two centuries the omission is not to berectified; and the young man's memorial has perhaps its propriety as itstands, with those unnumbered, or numberless, days. "Full ofaffections," observed, once upon a time, a great lover of boys andyoung men, speaking to a large company of them:—"full of affections,full of powers, full of occupation, how naturally might the youngerpart of us especially (more naturally than the older) receive thetidings that there are things to be loved and things to be done whichshall never pass away. We feel strong, we feel active, we feel full oflife; and these feelings do not altogether deceive us, for we shalllive for ever. We see a long prospect before us, for which it is worthwhile to work, even with much labour; for we are as yet young, and thepast portion of our lives is but small in comparison of that whichprobably remains to us. It is most true! The past years of our lifeare absolutely beyond proportion small in comparison with those whichcertainly remain to us."

In a very different neighbourhood, here at home, in a remote Sussexchurchyard, you may read that Emerald Uthwart was born on such a [199]day, "at Chase Lodge, in this parish; and died there," on a day in theyear 18—, aged twenty-six. Think, thereupon, of the years of a veryEnglish existence passed without a lost week in that bloomy Englishplace, amid its English lawns and flower-beds, its oldish brick andraftered plaster; you may see it still, not far off, on a clearing ofthe wooded hill-side sloping gradually to the sea. But you thinkwrong. Emerald Uthwart, in almost unbroken absence from his home,longed greatly for it, but left it early and came back there only todie, in disgrace, as he conceived; of which it was he died there,finding the sense of the place all around him at last, like blessed oilin one's wounds.

How they shook their musk from them!—those gardens, among which theyoungest son, but not the youngest child, grew up, little consideredtill he returned there in those last years. The rippling note of thebirds he distinguished so acutely seemed a part of this tree-lessplace, open freely to sun and air, such as rose and carnation loved, inthe midst of the old disafforested chase. Brothers and sisters, allalike were gardeners, methodically intimate with their flowers. Youneed words compact rather of perfume than of colour to describe them,in nice annual order; terms for perfume, as immediate and definite asred, purple, and yellow. Flowers there were which seemed to yieldtheir sweetest in the faint sea-salt, when the loosening wind [200] wasstrong from the south-west; some which found their way slowly towardsthe neighbourhood of the old oaks and beech-trees. Others consortedmost freely with the wall-fruit, or seemed made for pot-pourri tosweeten the old black mahogany furniture. The sweet-pea stacks lovedthe broad path through the kitchen garden; the old-fashioned gardenazalea was the making of a nosegay, with its honey which clung to one'sfinger. There were flowers all the sweeter for a battle with the rain;a flower like aromatic medicine; another like summer lingering intowinter; it ripened as fruit does; and another was like August, his ownbirthday time, dropped into March.

The very mould here, rich old black gardener's earth, was flower-seed;and beyond, the fields, one after another, through the white gatesbreaking the well-grown hedge-rows, were hardly less garden-like;little velvety fields, little with the true sweet English littleness ofour little island, our land of vignettes. Here all was little; thevery church where they went to pray, to sit, the ancient Uthwartssleeping all around outside under the windows, deposited there asquietly as fallen trees on their native soil, and almost unrecorded, asthere had been almost nothing to record; where however, Sunday afterSunday, Emerald Uthwart reads, wondering, the solitary memorial of onesoldierly member of his race, who had,—well! who had not died here[201] at home, in his bed. How wretched! how fine! how inconceivablygreat and difficult!—not for him! And yet, amid all its littleness,how large his sense of liberty in the place he, the cadet doomed toleave it—his birth-place, where he is also so early to die—had lovedbetter than any one of them! Enjoying hitherto all the freedom of thealmost grown-up brothers, the unrepressed noise, the unchecked hours,the old rooms, all their own way, he is literally without theconsciousness of rule. Only, when the long irresponsible day is over,amid the dew, the odours, of summer twilight, they roll theircricket-field against to-morrow's game. So it had always been with theUthwarts; they never went to school. In the great attic he has chosenfor himself Emerald awakes;—it was a rule, sanitary, almost medical,never to rouse the children—rises to play betimes; or, if he choose,with window flung open to the roses, the sea, turns to sleep again,deliberately, deliciously, under the fine old blankets.

A rather sensuous boy! you may suppose, amid the wholesome, naturalself-indulgence of a very English home. His days began there: itclosed again, after an interval of the larger number of them,indulgently, mercifully, round his end. For awhile he became itscentre, old habits changing, the old furniture rearranged about him,for the first time in many generations, though he left it now withsomething like [202] resentment in his heart, as if thrust harshlyaway, sent ablactatus a matre; made an effort thereon to snap the lastthread which bound him to it. Yet it would come back upon himsometimes, amid so different a scene, as through a suddenly openeddoor, or a rent in the wall, with softer thoughts of hispeople,—there, or not there,—and a sudden, dutiful effort on his partto rekindle wasting affection.

The youngest of four sons, but not the youngest of the family!—youconceive the sort of negligence that creeps over even the kindestmaternities, in such case; unless, perhaps, sickness, or the sort ofmisfortune, making the last first for the affectionate, that broughtEmerald back at length to die contentedly, interferes with the way ofnature. Little by little he comes to understand that, while thebrothers are indulged with lessons at home, are some of them free evenof these and placed already in the world, where, however, there remainsno place for him, he is to go to school, chiefly for the convenience ofothers—they are going to be much away from home!—that now for thefirst time, as he says to himself, an old-English Uthwart is to passunder the yoke. The tutor in the house, meantime, aware of somefascination in the lad, teaches him, at his own irregularly chosenhours, more carefully than the others; exerts all his gifts for thepurpose, winning him on almost insensibly to youthful proficiency inthose difficult rudiments.

[203] See him as he stands, seemingly rooted in the spot where he hascome to flower! He departs, however, a few days before the departureof the rest—some to foreign parts, the brothers, who shut up the oldplace, to town. For a moment, he makes an effort to figure to himselfthose coming absences as but exceptional intervals in his life here; hewill count the days, going more quickly so; find his pleasure inwatching the sands fall, as even the sands of time at school must. Infact, he was scarcely ever to lie at ease here again, till he came totake his final leave of it, lying at his length so. In brief holidayshe rejoins his people, anywhere, anyhow, in a sort of hurry andmakeshift:—Flos Parietis! thus carelessly plucked forth. EmeraldUthwart was born on such a day "at Chase Lodge, in this parish, anddied there."

See him then as he stands! counting now the hours that remain, on theeve of that first emigration, and look away next at the other place,which through centuries has been forming to receive him; from thosegarden-beds, now at their richest, but where all is so winsomelylittle, to that place of "great matters," great stones, great memoriesout of reach. Why! the Uthwarts had scarcely had more memories thantheir woods, noiselessly deciduous; or their prehistoric, entirelyunprogressive, unrecording forefathers, in or before the days of theDruids. Centuries of almost "still" life—of birth, death, [204] andthe rest, as merely natural processes—had made them and their homewhat we find them. Centuries of conscious endeavour, on the otherhand, had builded, shaped, and coloured the place, a small cell, whichEmerald Uthwart was now to occupy; a place such as our mostcharacteristic English education has rightly tended to "find itself ahouse" in—a place full, for those who came within its influence, of awill of its own. Here everything, one's very games, have gone by ruleonwards from the dim old monastic days, and the Benedictine school fornovices with the wholesome severities which have descended to our owntime. Like its customs,—there's a book in the cathedral archives withthe names, for centuries Past, of the "scholars" who have missed churchat the proper times for going there—like its customs, well-worn yetwell-preserved, time-stained, time-engrained, time-mellowed, thevenerable Norman or English stones of this austere, beautifullyproportioned place look like marble, to which Emerald's softly nurturedbeing, his careless wild-growth must now adapt itself, though somewhatpainfully recoiling from contact with what seems so hard also, andbright, and cold. From his native world of soft garden touches,carnation and rose (they had been everywhere in those last weeks),where every one did just what he liked, he was passed now to this worldof grey stone; and here it was always the decisive word [205] ofcommand. That old warrior Uthwart's record in the church at home, sofine, yet so wretched, so unspeakably great and difficult! seemedwritten here everywhere around him, as he stood feeling himself fitonly to be taught, to be drilled into, his small compartment; in everymovement of his companions, with their quaint confining little clothgowns; in the keen, clear, well-authorised dominancy of some, theinstant submission of others. In fact, by one of our wise Englishcompromises, we still teach our so modern boys the Classics; a lessonin attention and patience, at the least. Nay! by a double compromise,with delightful physiognomic results sometimes, we teach them theirpagan Latin and Greek under the shadow of medieval church-towers, amidthe haunts, the traditions, and with something of the discipline, ofmonasticism; for which, as is noticeable, the English have never whollylost an early inclination. The French and others have swept theirscholastic houses empty of it, with pedantic fidelity to theirtheories. English pedants may succeed in doing the like. But theresult of our older method has had its value so far, at least, say! forthe careful aesthetic observer. It is of such diagonal influences,through complication of influence, that expression comes, in life, inour culture, in the very faces of men and boys—of these boys. Nothingcould better harmonise present with past than the sight of them justhere, as they [206] shout at their games, or recite their lessons,over-arched by the work of medieval priors, or pass to church meekly,into the seats occupied by the young monks before them.

If summer comes reluctantly to our English shores, it is also apt tolinger with us;—its flora of red and gold leaves on the brancheswellnigh to Christmas; the hot days that surprise you, and persist,though heralded by white mornings, hinting that it is but the year'sindulgence so to deal with us. To the fanciful, such days may seemmost at home in the places where England has thus preferred to locatethe somewhat pensive education of its more favoured youth. As Uthwartpasses through the old ecclesiastical city, upon which any more moderntouch, modern door or window, seems a thing out of place throughnegligence, the diluted sunlight itself seems driven along with asparing trace of gilded vane or red tile in it, under the wholesomeactive wind from the East coast. The long, finely weathered, leadenroof, and the great square tower, gravely magnificent, emphatic fromthe first view of it over the grey down above the hop-gardens, thegently-watered meadows, dwarf now everything beside; have the bignessof nature's work, seated up there so steadily amid the winds, as rainand fog and heat pass by. More and more persistently, as he proceeds,in the "Green Court" at last, they occupy the outlook. He is shown thenarrow [207] cubicle in which he is to sleep; and there it still is,with nothing else, in the window-pane, as he lies;—"our tower," the"Angel Steeple," noblest of its kind. Here, from morning to night,everything seems challenged to follow the upward lead of its long,bold, "perpendicular" lines. The very place one is in, its stone-work,its empty spaces, invade you; invade all who belong to them, as Uthwartbelongs, yielding wholly from the first; seem to question youmasterfully as to your purpose in being here at all, amid the greatmemories of the past, of this school;—challenge you, so to speak, tomake moral philosophy one of your acquirements, if you can, and tosystematise your vagrant self; which however will in any case be heresystematised for you. In Uthwart, then, is the plain tablet, for theinfluences of place to inscribe. Say if you will, that he is under thepower of an "embodied ideal," somewhat repellent, but which he cannotdespise. He sits in the schoolroom—ancient, transformed chapel of thepilgrims; sits in the sober white and brown place, at the heavy olddesks, carved this way and that, crowded as an old churchyard withforgotten names, side by side with sympathetic or antipatheticcompetitors, as it may chance. In a delightful, exactly measured,quarter of an hour's rest, they come about him, seem to wish to befriends at once, good and bad alike, dull and clever; wonder a littleat the name, and [208] the owner. A family name—he explains,good-humouredly; tries to tell some story no one could ever rememberprecisely of the ancestor from whom it came, the one story of theUthwarts; is spared; nay! petulantly forbidden to proceed. But the namesticks the faster. Nicknames mark, for the most part, popularity.Emerald! so every one called Uthwart, but shortened to Aldy. Theydisperse; flock out into the court; acquaint him hastily with thecuriosities of the Precincts, the "dark entry," the rich heraldries ofthe blackened and mouldering cloister, the ruined overgrown spaceswhere the old monastery stood, the stones of which furnished materialfor the rambling prebends houses, now "antediluvian" in their turn; areready also to climb the scaffold-poles always to be found somewhereabout the great church, or dive along the odd, secret passages of theold builders, with quite learned explanations (being proud of, andtherefore painstaking about, the place) of architectural periods, ofGothic "late" and "early," layer upon layer, down to round-arched"Norman," like the famous staircase of their school.

The reader comprehends that Uthwart was come where the genius loci wasa strong one, with a claim to mould all who enter it to a perfect,uninquiring, willing or unwilling, conformity to itself. On Saturdayhalf-holidays the scholars are taken to church in their surplices,across the [209] court, under the lime-trees; emerge at last up thedark winding passages into the melodious, mellow-lighted space, alwaysthree days behind the temperature outside, so thick are the walls;—howwarm and nice! how cool and nice! The choir, to which they glide inorder to their places below the clergy, seems conspicuously cold andsad. But the empty chapels lying beyond it all about into the distanceare a trap on sunny mornings for the clouds of yellow effulgence. TheAngel Steeple is a lantern within, and sheds down a flood of the likejust beyond the gates. You can peep up into it where you sit, if youdare to gaze about you. If at home there had been nothing great, here,to boyish sense, one seems diminished to nothing at all, amid the grandwaves, wave upon wave, of patiently-wrought stone; the daring height,the daring severity, of the innumerable, long, upward, ruled lines,rigidly bent just at last, in due place, into the reserved grace of theperfect Gothic arch; the peculiar daylight which seemed to come fromfurther than the light outside. Next morning they are here again. Incontrast to those irregularly broken hours at home, the passive lengthof things impresses Uthwart now. It develops patience—that tale ofhours, the long chanted English service; our English manner ofeducation is a development of patience, of decorous and mannerlypatience. "It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in [210] hisyouth: he putteth his mouth in the dust, he keepeth silence, because hehath borne it upon him."—They have this for an anthem; sung however towonderfully cheerful and sprightly music, as if one liked the thought.

The aim of a veritable community, says Plato, is not that this or thatmember of it should be disproportionately at ease, but that the wholeshould flourish; though indeed such general welfare might come roundagain to the loyal unit therein, and rest with him, as a privilege ofhis individual being after all. The social type he preferred, as weknow, was conservative Sparta and its youth; whose unsparing disciplinehad doubtless something to do with the fact that it was the handsomestand best-formed in all Greece. A school is not made for one. It wouldmisrepresent Uthwart's wholly unconscious humility to say that he feltthe beauty of the askêsis+ (we need that Greek word) to which he notmerely finds himself subject, but as under a fascination submissivelyyields himself, although another might have been aware of the charm ofit, half ethic, half physical, as visibly effective in him. Itspeculiarity would have lain in the expression of a stress upon him andhis customary daily existence, beyond what any definitely proposedissue of it, at least for the moment, explained. Something of that isinvolved in the very idea of a classical education, at least for suchas he; in its seeming indirectness [211] or lack of purpose, amid somuch difficulty, as contrasted with forms of education more obviouslyuseful or practical. He found himself in a system of fixed rules, amidwhich, it might be, some of his own tendencies and inclinations woulddie out of him through disuse. The confident word of command, theinstantaneous obedience expected, the enforced silence, the very gamesthat go by rule, a sort of hardness natural to wholesome English youthswhen they come together, but here de rigueur as a point of goodmanners;—he accepts all these without hesitation; the early hoursalso, naturally distasteful to him, which gave to actual morning, toall that had passed in it, when in more self-conscious mood he lookedback on the morning of life, a preponderance, a disproportionate placethere, adding greatly to the effect of its dreamy distance from him atthis later time;—an ideal quality, he might have said, had he everused such words as that.

Uthwart duly passes his examination; and, in their own chapel in thetransept of the choir, lighted up late for evening prayer after thelong day of trial, is received to the full privileges of a Scholar withthe accustomed Latin words:—Introitum tuum et exitum tuum custodiatDominus! He takes them, not to heart, but rather to mind, as few, ifthey so much as heard them, were wont to do; ponders them for a while.They seem scarcely meant for him—words like those! [212] increasehowever his sense of responsibility to the place, of which he is nowmore exclusively than before a part—that he belongs to it, its greatmemories, great dim purposes; deepen the consciousness he had on firstcoming hither of a demand in the world about him, whereof the verystones are emphatic, to which no average human creature could besufficient; of reproof, reproaches, of this or that in himself.

It was reported, there was a funny belief, at school, that Aldy Uthwarthad no feeling and was incapable of tears. They never came to himcertainly, when, at nights for the most part, the very touch of home,so soft, yet so indifferent to him, reached him, with a sudden opulentrush of garden perfumes; came at the rattling of the window-pane in thewind, with anything that expressed distance from the bare white wallsaround him here. He thrust it from him brusquely, being of a practicalturn, and, though somewhat sensuous, wholly without sentimentality.There is something however in the lad's soldier-like, impassibleself-command, in his sustained expression of a certain indifference tothings, which awakes suddenly all the sentiment, the poetry, latenthitherto in another—James Stokes, the prefect, his immediate superior;awakes for the first time into ample flower something of genius in aseemingly plodding scholar, and therewith also something of thewaywardness popularly thought to belong to [213] genius. Preceptores,condiscipuli, alike, marvel at a sort of delicacy coming into thehabits, the person, of that tall, bashful, broad-shouldered, veryKentish, lad; so unaffectedly nevertheless, that it is understood afterall to be but the smartness properly significant of change to earlymanhood, like the down on his lip. Wistful anticipations of manhoodare in fact aroused in him, thoughts of the future; his ambition takeseffective outline. The well-worn, perhaps conventional, beauties oftheir "dead" Greek and Latin books, associated directly now with theliving companion beside him, really shine for him at last with theirpristine freshness; seem more than to fulfil their claim upon thepatience, the attention, of modern youth. He notices as never beforeminute points of meaning in Homer, in Virgil; points out thus, forinstance, to his junior, one day in the sunshine, how the Greeks had aspecial word for the Fate which accompanied one who would come to aviolent end. The common Destinies of men, Moirai,+ Moerae—theyaccompanied all men indifferently. But Kêr,+ the extraordinaryDestiny, one's Doom, had a scent for distant blood-shedding; and, to bein at a sanguinary death, one of their number came forth to the verycradle, followed persistently all the way, over the waves, throughpowder and shot, through the rose-gardens;—where not? Looking back,one might trace the red footsteps all along, side by [214] side.(Emerald Uthwart, you remember, was to "die there," of lingeringsickness, in disgrace, as he fancied, while the word glory came to besoftly whispered of them and of their end.) Classic felicities, thechoice expressions, with which James Stokes has so patiently stored hismemory, furnish now a dainty embroidery upon every act, every change intime or place, of their daily life in common. He finds the Greek orthe Latin model of their antique friendship or tries to find it, in thebooks they read together. None fits exactly. It is of military glorythey are really thinking, amid those ecclesiastical surroundings, wherehowever surplices and uniforms are often mingled together; how theywill lie, in costly glory, costly to them, side by side, (as they workand walk and play now, side by side) in the cathedral aisle, with atattered flag perhaps above them, and under a single epitaph, like thatof those two older scholars, Ensigns, Signiferi, in their respectiveregiments, in hac ecclesiâ pueri instituti,+ with the sapphic stanza inimitation of the Horace they had learned here, written by their oldmaster.

Horace!—he was, had been always, the idol of their school; to know himby heart, to translate him into effective English idiom, have an aptphrase of his instinctively on one's lips for every occasion. That boysshould be made to spout him under penalties, would have seemeddoubtless to that sensitive, vain, winsome poet, [215] even more thanto grim Juvenal, quite the sorriest of fates; might have seemed not sobad however, could he, from the "ashes" so persistently in histhoughts, have peeped on these English boys, row upon row, with blackor golden heads, repeating him in the fresh morning, and observed howwell for once the thing was done; how well he was understood by EnglishJames Stokes, feeling the old "fire" really "quick" still, under theinfluence which now in truth quickened, enlivened, everything aroundhim. The old heathen's way of looking at things, his melodiousexpression of it, blends, or contrasts itself oddly with the everydaydetail, with the very stones, the Gothic stones, of a world he couldhardly have conceived, its medieval surroundings, their half-clericallife here. Yet not so inconsistently after all! The builders of theseaisles and cloisters had known and valued as much of him as they couldcome by in their own un-instructed time; had built up theirintellectual edifice more than they were aware of from fragments ofpagan thought, as, quite consciously, they constructed their churchesof old Roman bricks and pillars, or frank imitations of them. One'sday, then, began with him, for all alike, Sundays of courseexcepted,—with an Ode, learned over-night by the prudent, who,observing how readily the words which send us to sleep cling to thebrain and seem an inherent part of it next morning, kept him under[216] their pillows. Prefects, without a book, heard the repetition ofthe Juniors, must be able to correct their blunders. Odes and Epodes,thus acquired, were a score of days and weeks; alcaic and sapphicverses like a bead-roll for counting off the time that intervenedbefore the holidays. Time—that tardy servant of youthfulappetite—brought them soon enough to the point where they desired invain "to see one of" those days, erased now so willingly; andsentimental James Stokes has already a sense that this "pause 'twixtcup and lip" of life is really worth pausing over, worthdeliberation:—all this poetry, yes! poetry, surely, of their alternatework and play; light and shade, call it! Had it been, after all, alife in itself less commonplace than theirs—that life, the trivialdetails of which their Horace had touched so daintily, gilded with realgold words?

Regular, submissive, dutiful to play also, Aldy meantime enjoys histriumphs in the Green Court; loves best however to run a paper-chaseafar over the marshes, till you come in sight, or within scent, of thesea, in the autumn twilight; and his dutifulness to games at least hadits full reward. A wonderful hit of his at cricket was longremembered; right over the lime-trees on to the cathedral roof, was it?or over the roof, and onward into space, circling there independently,minutely, as Sidus Cantiorum? A comic poem on it in Latin, and apretty one in English, [217] were penned by James Stokes, still not soserious but that he forgets time altogether one day, in a manner theconverse of exemplary in a prefect, whereupon Uthwart, his companion asusual, manages to take all the blame, and the due penalty next morning.Stokes accepted the sacrifice the more readily, believing—he too—thatAldy was "incapable of pain." What surprised those who were in thesecret was that, when it was over, he rose, and facing thehead-master—could it be insolence? or was it the sense ofuntruthfulness in his friendly action, or sense of the universalpeccancy of all boys and men?—said submissively: "And now, sir, that Ihave taken my punishment, I hope you will forgive my fault."

Submissiveness!—It had the force of genius with Emerald Uthwart. Inthat very matter he had but yielded to a senior against his owninclination. What he felt in Horace was the sense, original, active,personal, of "things too high for me!", the sense, not reallyunpleasing to him, of an unattainable height here too, in this royalfelicity of utterance, this literary art, the minute cares of which hadbeen really designed for the minute carefulness of a disciple such asthis—all attention. Well! the sense of authority, of a largeintellectual authority over us, impressed anew day after day, of someimpenetrable glory round "the masters of those who know," is, ofcourse, one of the effects we [218] look for from a classicaleducation:—that, and a full estimate of the preponderating value ofthe manner of the doing of it in the thing done; which again, foringenuous youth, is an encouragement of good manners on its part:—"Ibehave myself orderly." Just at those points, scholarship attainssomething of a religious colour. And in that place, religion,religious system, its claim to overpower one, presented itself in a wayof which even the least serious by nature could not be unaware. Theirgreat church, its customs and traditions, formed an element in thatesprit de corps into which the boyish mind throws itself so readily.Afterwards, in very different scenes, the sentiment of that place wouldcome back upon him, as if resentfully, by contrast with the consciousor unconscious profanities of others, crushed out about himstraightway, by the shadow of awe, the minatory flash, felt around hisunopened lips, in the glance, the changed manner. Not to be "occupiedwith great matters" recommends in heavenly places, as we know, thesouls of some. Yet there were a few to whom it seemed unfortunate thatreligion whose flag Uthwart would have borne in hands so pure, touchedhim from first to last, and till his eyes were finally closed on thisworld, only, again, as a thing immeasurable, surely not meant for thelike of him; its high claims, to which no one could be equal; itsreproaches. He would scarcely have proposed to "enter into" [219] suchmatters; was constitutionally shy of them. His submissiveness, you see,was a kind of genius; made him therefore, of course, unlike thosearound him; was a secret; a thing, you might say, "which no oneknoweth, saving he that receiveth it."

Thus repressible, self-restrained, always concurring with theinfluence, the claim upon him, the rebuke, of others, in the bustle ofschool life he did not count even with those who knew him best, withthose who taught him, for the intellectual capacity he really had. Inevery generation of schoolboys there are a few who find out, almost forthemselves, the beauty and power of good literature, even in theliterature they must read perforce; and this, in turn, is but thehandsel of a beauty and power still active in the actual world, shouldthey have the good fortune, or rather, acquire the skill, to deal withit properly. It has something of the stir and unction—thisintellectual awaking with a leap—of the coming of love. So it waswith Uthwart about his seventeenth year. He felt it, felt theintellectual passion, like the pressure outward of wings within him—hêpterou dynamis,+ says Plato, in the Phaedrus; but again, as some dowith everyday love, withheld, restrained himself; the status of afreeman in the world of intellect can hardly be for him. The sense ofintellectual ambition, ambitious thoughts such as sweeten the toil ofsome of those about him, [220] coming to him once in a way, he isfrankly recommended to put them aside, and acquiesces; puts them fromhim once for all, as he could do with besetting thoughts and feelings,his preferences, (as he had put aside soft thoughts of home as adisobedience to rule) and with a countenance more good-humoured thanever, an absolute placidity. It is fit he should be treated sparinglyin this matter of intellectual enjoyment. He is made to understandthat there is at least a score of others as good scholars as he. Hewill have of course all the pains, but must not expect the prizes, ofhis work; of his loyal, incessant, cheerful industry.

But only see him as he goes. It is as if he left music, delightfullythrobbing music, or flowers, behind him, as he passes, careless ofthem, unconsciously, through the world, the school, the precincts, theold city. Strangers' eyes, resting on him by chance, are deterred fora while, even among the rich sights of the venerable place, as he walksout and in, in his prim gown and purple-tasselled cap; goes in, withthe stream of sunlight, through the black shadows of the moulderingGothic gateway, like youth's very self, eternal, immemorial, eternallyrenewed, about those immemorially ancient stones. "Young Apollo!"people say—people who have pigeon-holes for their impressions,watching the slim, trim figure with the exercise books. His very dressseems touched [221] with Hellenic fitness to the healthy youthful form."Golden-haired, scholar Apollo!" they repeat, foolishly, ignorantly.He was better; was more like a real portrait of a real young Greek,like Tryphon, Son of Eutychos, for instance, (as friends remembered himwith regret, as you may see him still on his tombstone in the BritishMuseum) alive among the paler physical and intellectual lights ofmodern England, under the old monastic stonework of the Middle Age.That theatrical old Greek god never took the expressiveness, the linesof delicate meaning, such as were come into the face of the Englishlad, the physiognomy of his race; ennobled now, as if by the writing,the signature, there, of a grave intelligence, by grave information anda subdued will, though without a touch of melancholy in this "best ofplayfellows." A musical composer's notes, we know, are not themselvestill the fit executant comes, who can put all they may be into them.The somewhat unmeaningly handsome facial type of the Uthwarts, mouldedto a mere animal or physical perfection through wholesome centuries, isbreathed on now, informed, by the touches, traces, complex influencesfrom past and present a thousandfold, crossing each other in this latecentury, and yet at unity in the simple law of the system to which heis now subject. Coming thus upon an otherwise vigorous and healthynature, an untainted [222] physique, and limited by it, those combiningmental influences leave the firm unconscious simplicity of the boyishnature still unperplexed. The sisters, their friends, when he comesrarely upon them in foreign places, are proud of the schoolboy'scompany—to walk at his side; the brothers, when he sees them for aday, more considerate than of old. Everywhere he leaves behind him anodd regret for his presence, as he in turn wonders sometimes at thedeference paid to one so unimportant as himself by those he meets byaccident perhaps; at the ease, for example, with which he attains tothe social privileges denied to others.

They tell him, he knows it already, he would "do for the army." "Yes!that would suit you," people observe at once, when he tells them what"he is to be"—undoubtedly suit him, that dainty, military, veryEnglish kind of pride, in seeming precisely what one is, neither morenor less. And the first mention of Uthwart's purpose defines also thevague outlooks of James Stokes, who will be a soldier too. Uniforms,their scarlet and white and blue, spruce leather and steel, and goldlace, enlivening the old oak stalls at service time—uniforms andsurplices were always close together here, where a military garrisonhad been established in the suburbs for centuries past, and there werealways sons of its officers in the school. If you stole out of anevening, it was like a stage scene— [223] nay! like the Middle Age,itself, with this multitude of soldiers mingling in the crowd whichfilled the unchanged, gabled streets. A military tradition had beencontinuous, from the days of crusading knights who lay humbly on theirbacks in the "Warriors' Chapel" to the time of the civil wars, when acertain heroic youth of eighteen was brought to rest there, onward toDutch and American wars, and to Harry, and Geoffrey, and another Jamesalso, in hac ecclesiâ pueri instituti. It was not so long since one ofthem sat on those very benches in the sixth form; had come back andentered the school, in full uniform, to say good-bye! Then the"colours" of his regiment had been brought, to be deposited by Dean andCanons in the cathedral; and a few weeks later they had passed,scholars and the rest in long procession, to deposit Ensign—himselfthere under his flag, or what remained of it, a sorry, tattered fringe,along the staff he had borne out of the battle at the cost of his life,as a little tablet explained. There were others in similar terms.Alas! for that extraordinary, peculiarly-named, Destiny, or Doom,appointed to walk side by side with one or another, aware from thefirst, but never warning him, till the random or well-considered shotcomes.

Meantime however, the University, with work in preparation thereto,fills up the thoughts, the hours, of these would-be soldiers, of James[224] Stokes, and therefore of Emerald Uthwart, through the longsummer-time, till the Green Court is fragrant with lime-blossom, andspeech-day comes, on which, after their flower-service and sermon froman old comrade, Emerald surprises masters and companions by the finequality of a recitation; still more when "Scholar Stokes" and he arefound bracketed together as "Victors" of the school, who will proceedtogether to Oxford. His speech in the Chapter-house was from thatplace in Homer, where the soul of the lad Elpenor, killed by accident,entreats Ulysses for due burial rites. "Fix my oar over my grave," hesays, "the oar I rowed with when I lived, when I went with mycompanions." And in effect what surprised, charmed the hearers was thescruple with which those naturally graceful lips dealt with every word,every syllable, put upon them. He seemed to be thinking only of hisauthor, except for just so much of self-consciousness as was involvedin the fact that he seemed also to be speaking a little against hiswill; like a monk, it might be said, who sings in choir with a reallyfine voice, but at the bidding of his superior, and counting the notesall the while till his task be done, because his whole nature revoltsfrom so much as the bare opportunity for personal display. It was hisduty to speak on the occasion. They had always been great inspeech-making, in theatricals, from before [225] the days when thePuritans destroyed the Dean's "Great Hall" because "the King's Scholarshad profaned it by acting plays there"; and that peculiar note oraccent, as being conspicuously free from the egotism which vulgarisesmost of us, seemed to befit the person of Emerald, impressing wearylisteners pleasantly as a novelty in that kind. Singular!—The words,because seemingly forced from him, had been worth hearing. The cheers,the "Kentish Fire," of their companions might have broken down thecrumbling black arches of the old cloister, or roused the dead underfoot, as the "Victors" came out of the Chapter-house side by side; sideby side also out of that delightful period of their life at school, toproceed in due course to the University.

They left it precipitately, after brief residence there, takingadvantage of a sudden outbreak of war to join the army at once,regretted—James Stokes for his high academic promise, Uthwart for aquality, or group of qualities, not strictly to be defined. He seemed,in short, to harmonise by their combination in himself all the variousqualities proper to a large and varied community of youths of nineteenor twenty, to which, when actually present there, he was felt from hourto hour to be indispensable. In fact school habits and standards hadsurvived in a world not so different from that of school for those whoare faithful to its type. When he looked back upon [226] it a littlelater, college seemed to him, seemed indeed at the time, had heventured to admit it, a strange prolongation of boyhood, in itsprovisional character, the narrow limitation of its duties andresponsibility, the very divisions of one's day, the routine of playand work, its formal, perhaps pedantic rules. The veritable plungefrom youth into manhood came when one passed finally through those oldGothic gates, from a somewhat dreamy or problematic preparation for it,into the world of peremptory facts. A college, like a school, is notmade for one; and as Uthwart sat there, still but a scholar, stillreading with care the books prescribed for him by others—Greek andLatin books—the contrast between his own position and that of themajority of his coevals already at the business of life impresseditself sometimes with an odd sense of unreality in the place aroundhim. Yet the schoolboy's sensitive awe for the great things of theintellectual world had but matured itself, and was at its height hereamid this larger competition, which left him more than ever to find indoing his best submissively the sole reward of so doing. He needs nowin fact less repression than encouragement not to be a "passman," as hemay if he likes, acquiescing in a lowly measure of culture whichcertainly will not manufacture Miltons, nor turn serge into silk,broom-blossom into verbenas, but only, perhaps not so faultily, leaveEmerald Uthwart and the like of him [227] essentially what they are."He holds his book in a peculiar way," notes in manuscript one of histutors; "holds on to it with both hands; clings as if from below, justas his tough little mind clings to the sense of the Greek words he canEnglish so closely, precisely." Again, as at school, he had put hisneck under the yoke; though he has now also much reading quite at hisown choice; by preference, when he can come by such, about the placewhere he finds himself, about the earlier youthful occupants, if itmight be, of his own quaint rooms on the second floor just below theroof; of what he can see from his windows in the old black fronteastwards, with its inestimable patina of ancient smoke and weather andnatural decay (when you look close the very stone is a composite ofminute dead bodies) relieving heads like his so effectively on summermornings. On summer nights the scent of the hay, the wild-flowers,comes across the narrow fringe of town to right and left; seems to comefrom beyond the Oxford meadows, with sensitive, half-repellent thoughtsfrom the gardens at home. He looks down upon the green square with theslim, quaint, black, young figures that cross it on the way to chapelon yellow Sunday mornings, or upwards to the dome, the spire; can watchthem closely in freakish moonlight, or flickering softly by anoccasional bonfire in the quadrangle behind him. Yet how hard, howforbidding sometimes, under [228] a late stormy sky, the scheme ofblack, white, and grey, to which the group of ancient buildings couldattune itself. And what he reads most readily is of the military lifethat intruded itself so oddly, during the Civil War, into thesehalf-monastic places, till the timid old academic world scarcely knewitself. He treasures then every incident which connects a soldier'scoat with any still recognisable object, wall, or tree, or garden-walk;that walk, for instance, under Merton garden where young ColonelWindebank was shot for a traitor. His body lies in Saint MaryMagdalen's churchyard. Unassociated to such incident, the merebeauties of the place counted at the moment for less than inretrospect. It was almost retrospect even now, with an anticipation ofregret, in rare moments of solitude perhaps, when the oars splashed farup the narrow streamlets through the fields on May evenings among thefritillaries—does the reader know them? that strange remnant just hereof a richer extinct flora—dry flowers, though with a drop of dubioushoney in each. Snakes' heads, the rude call them, for their shape,scale-marked too, and in colour like rusted blood, as if they grew fromsome forgotten battle-field, the bodies, the rotten armour—yetdelicate, beautiful, waving proudly. In truth the memory of Oxford madealmost everything he saw after it seem vulgar. But he feels alsonevertheless, characteristically, that such local pride (fastus heterms it) is proper [229] only for those whose occupations are whollycongruous with it; for the gifted, the freemen who can enter into thegenius, who possess the liberty, of the place; that it has a reproachin it for the outsider, which comes home to him.

Here again then as he passes through the world, so delightfully toothers, they tell him, as if weighing him, his very self, against hismerely scholastic capacity and effects, that he would "do for thearmy"; which he is now wholly glad to hear, for from first to last,through all his successes there, the army had still been scholarStokes' choice, and he had no difficulty, as the reader sees, inkeeping Uthwart also faithful to first intentions. Their names werealready entered for commissions; but the war breaking out afresh,information reaches them suddenly one morning that they may join theirregiment forthwith. Bidding good-bye therefore, gladly, hastily, theyset out with as little delay as possible for Flanders; and passing theold school by their nearest road thither, stay for an hour, find anexcuse for coming into the hall in uniform, with which it must beconfessed they seem thoroughly satisfied—Uthwart quite perversely atease in the stiff make of his scarlet jacket with black facings—and sopass onward on their way to Dover, Dunkirk, they scarcely know whitherfinally, among the featureless villages, the long monotonous lines ofthe windmills, the poplars, blurred with cold fogs, but marking the[230] roads through the snow which covers the endless plain, till theycome in sight at last of the army in motion, like machines moving—howlittle it looked on that endless plain!—pass on their rapid way tofame, to unpurchased promotion, as a matter of course to responsibilityalso, till, their fortune turning upon them, they miscarry in thelatter fatally. They joined in fact a distinguished regiment in agallant army, immediately after a victory in those Flemish regions;shared its encouragement as fully as if they had had a share in itsperils; the high character of the young officers consolidating itselfeasily, pleasantly for them, till the hour of an act of thoughtlessbravery, almost the sole irregular or undisciplined act of Uthwart'slife, he still following his senior—criminal however to the militaryconscience, under the actual circ*mstances, and in an enemy's country.The faulty thing was done, certainly, with a scrupulous, acharacteristic completeness on their part; and with their prizeactually in hand, an old weather-beaten flag such as hung in thecathedral aisle at school, they bethought them for the first time ofits price, with misgivings now in rapid growth, as they return to theirposts as nearly as may be, for the division has been ordered forward intheir brief absence, to find themselves under arrest, with that damningproof of heroism, of guilt, in their possession, relinquished howeveralong with the swords they will never handle [231] again—toys,idolised toys of our later youth, we weep at the thought of them asnever to be handled again!—as they enter the prison to await summarytrial next day on the charge of wantonly deserting their posts while inposition of high trust in time of war.

The full details of what had happened could have been told only by oneor other of themselves; by Uthwart best, in the somewhat matter-of-factand prosaic journal he had managed to keep from the first, noting therethe incidents of each successive day, as if in anticipation of itspossible service by way of pièce justificative, should such becomenecessary, attesting hour by hour their single-hearted devotion tosoldierly duty. Had a draughtsman equally truthful or equally"realistic," as we say, accompanied them and made a like use of hispencil, he might have been mistaken at home for an artist aiming at"effect," by skilful "arrangements" to tickle people's interest in thespectacle of war—the sudden ruin of a village street, the heap ofbleeding horses in the half-ploughed field, the gaping bridges, hand orface of the dead peeping from a hastily made grave at the roadside,smoke-stained rents in cottage-walls, ignoble ruin everywhere—ignoblebut for its frank expression.

But you find in Uthwart's journal, side by side with those uglypatches, very precise and unadorned records of their common gallantry,the more effective indeed for their simplicity; [232] and not ofgallantry only, but of the long-sustained patience also, the essentialmonotony of military life, even on a campaign. Peril, good-luck,promotion, the grotesque hardships which leave them smart as ever, (asif, so others observe, dust and mire wouldn't hold on them, so "spickand span" they were, more especially on days of any exceptional risk oreffort) the great confidence reposed in them at last; all is noted,till, with a little quiet pride, he records a gun-shot wound whichkeeps him a month alone in hospital wearily; and at last, its hasty butseemingly complete healing.

Following, leading, resting sometimes perforce, amid gun-shots,putrefying wounds, green corpses, they never lacked good spirits, anymore than the birds warbling perennially afresh, as they will, oversuch gangrened places, or the grass which so soon covers them. And atlength fortune, their misfortune, perversely determined that heroismshould take the form of patience under the walls of an unimportantfrontier town, with old Vauban fortifications seemingly made only forappearance' sake, like the work in the trenches—gardener's work! roundabout the walls they are called upon to superintend day after day. Itwas like a calm at sea, delaying one's passage, one's purpose in beingon board at all, a dead calm, yet with an awful feeling of tension,intolerable at last for those who were still all athirst for action.How dumb and [233] stupid the place seemed, in its useless defiance ofconquerors, anxious, for reasons not indeed apparent, but which theywere undoubtedly within their rights in holding to, not to blow it atonce into the air—the steeple, the perky weatherco*ck—to James Stokesin particular, always eloquent in action, longing for heroic effort,and ready to pay its price, maddened now by the palpable imposture infront of him morning after morning, as he demonstrates conclusively toUthwart, seduced at last from the clearer sense of duty and discipline,not by the demonstrated ease, but rather by the apparent difficulty ofwhat Stokes proposes to do. They might have been deterred by recentexample. Colonel —, who, as every one knew, had actually gained avictory by disobeying orders, had not been suffered to remain in thearmy of which he was an ornament. It was easy in fact for both, thoughit seemed the heroic thing, to dash through the calm with delightfulsense of active powers renewed; to pass into the beleaguered town witha handful of men, and no loss, after a manner the feasibility of whichStokes had explained acutely but in vain at headquarters. He proved itto Uthwart at all events, and a few others. Delightful heroism!delightful self-indulgence! It was delayed for a moment by orders tomove forward at last, with hopes checked almost immediately after by acountermand, bringing them right round their [234] stupid dumb enemy tothe same wearisome position once again, to the trenches and the rest,but with their thirst for action only stimulated the more. How greatthe disappointment! encouraging a certain laxity of discipline that hadprevailed about them of late. They take advantage however of a vaguephrase in their instructions; determine in haste to proceed on theirplan as carefully, as sparingly of the lives of others as may be;detach a small company, hazarding thereby an algebraically certainscheme at headquarters of victory or secure retreat, which embraced theentire country in its calculations; detach themselves; finally passinto the place, and out again with their prize, themselves secure.Themselves only could have told the details—the intensely pleasant,the glorious sense of movement renewed once more; of defiance, just foronce, of a seemingly stupid control; their dismay at finding theircompany led forward by others, their own posts deserted, their handfulof men—nowhere!

In an ordinary trial at law, the motives, every detail of so irregularan act might have been weighed, changing the colour of it. Theirgeneral character would have told in their favour, but actually toldagainst them now; they had but won an exceptional trust to betray it.Martial courts exist not for consideration, but for vivid exemplaryeffect and prompt punishment. "There is a kind of tribunal incidental[235] to service in the field," writes another diarist, who may tell inhis own words what remains to be told. "This court," he says, "mayconsist of three staff-officers only, but has the power of sentencingto death. On the —st two young officers of the —th regiment, in whomit appears unusual confidence had been placed, were brought before thiscourt, on the charge of desertion and wantonly exposing their companyto danger. They were found guilty, and the proper penalty death, to beinflicted next morning before the regiment marches. The delinquentswere understood to have appealed to a general court-martial;desperately at last, to 'the judgment of their country'; but were heldto have no locus standi whatever for an appeal under the actualcirc*mstances. As a civilian I cannot but doubt the justice, whatevermay be thought of the expediency, of such a summary process in regardto the capital penalty. The regiment to which the culprits belonged,with some others, was quartered for the night in the faubourg of Saint—, recently under blockade by a portion of our forces. I was awoke atdaybreak by the sound of marching. The morning was a particularlyclear one, though, as the sun was not yet risen, it looked grey and sadalong the empty street, up which a party of grey soldiers were passingwith steady pace. I knew for what purpose.

"The whole of the force in garrison here [236] had already marched tothe place of execution, the immense courtyard of a monastery,surrounded irregularly by ancient buildings like those of somecathedral precincts I have seen in England. Here the soldiers thenformed three sides of a great square, a grave having been dug on thefourth side. Shortly afterwards the funeral procession came up. Firstcame the band of the —th, playing the Dead March; next the firingparty, consisting of twelve non-commissioned officers; then thecoffins, followed immediately by the unfortunate prisoners, accompaniedby a chaplain. Slowly and sadly did the mournful procession approach,when it passed through three sides of the square, the troops havingbeen previously faced inwards, and then halted opposite to the grave.The proceedings of the court-martial were then read; and the elderprisoner having been blindfolded was ordered to kneel down on hiscoffin, which had been placed close to the grave, the firing partytaking up a position exactly opposite at a few yards' distance. Thepoor fellow's face was deadly pale, but he had marched his last marchas steadily as ever I saw a man step, and bore himself throughout mostbravely, though an oddly mixed expression passed over his countenancewhen he was directed to remove himself from the side of his companion,shaking his hand first. At this moment there was hardly a dry eye, andseveral young soldiers fainted, numberless as must be [237] the scenesof horror which even they have witnessed during these last months. Atlength the chaplain, who had remained praying with the prisoner,quietly withdrew, and at a given signal, but without word of command,the muskets were levelled, a volley was fired, and the body of theunfortunate man sprang up, falling again on his back. One shot hadpurposely been reserved; and as the presiding officer thought he wasnot quite dead a musket was placed close to his head and fired. Allwas now over; but the troops having been formed into columns weremarched close by the body as it lay on the ground, after which it wasplaced in one of the coffins and buried.

"I had almost forgotten his companion, the younger and more fortunateprisoner, though I could scarcely tell, as I looked at him, whether hisfate was really preferable in leaving his own rough coffin unoccupiedbehind him there. Lieutenant (I think Edward) Uthwart, as being theyounger of the two offenders, 'by the mercy of the court' had hissentence commuted to dismissal from the army with disgrace. Acolour-sergeant then advanced with the former officer's sword, aremarkably fine one, which he thereupon snapped in sunder over theprisoner's head as he knelt. After this the prisoner's regimental coatwas handed forward and put upon him, the epaulettes and buttons beingthen torn off and flung to a distance. This part of [238] suchsentences is almost invariably spared; but, I suppose throughunavoidable haste, was on the present occasion somewhat rudely carriedout. I shall never forget the expression of this man's countenance,though I have seen many sad things in the course of my profession. Hehad the sort of good looks which always rivet attention, and in mostminds friendly interest; and now, amid all his pain and bewilderment,bore a look of humility and submission as he underwent thoseextraordinary details of his punishment, which touched me very oddlywith a sort of desire (I cannot otherwise express it) to share his lot,to be actually in his place for a moment. Yet, alas! —no! say ratherThank Heaven! the nearest approach to that look I have seen has been onthe face of those whom I have known from circ*mstances to be almostincapable at the time of any feeling whatever. I would have offeredhim pecuniary aid, supposing he needed it, but it was impossible. Iwent on with the regiment, leaving the poor wretch to shift forhimself, Heaven knows how, the state of the country being what it is.He might join the enemy!"

What money Uthwart had about him had in fact passed that morning intothe hands of his guards. To tell what followed would be to accompanyhim on a roundabout and really aimless journey, the details of which hecould never afterwards recall. See him lingering for morsels [239] offood at some shattered farmstead, or assisted by others almost aswretched as himself, sometimes without his asking. In his wornmilitary dress he seems a part of the ruin under which he creeps for anight's rest as darkness comes on. He actually came round again to thescene of his disgrace, of the execution; looked in vain for the precisespot where he had knelt; then, almost envying him who lay there, forthe unmarked grave; passed over it perhaps unrecognised for some changein that terrible place, or rather in himself; wept then as never beforein his life; dragged himself on once more, till suddenly the wholecountry seems to move under the rumour, the very thunder, of "thecrowning victory," as he is made to understand. Falling in with thetide of its heroes returning to English shores, his vagrant footstepsare at last directed homewards. He finds himself one afternoon at thegate, turning out of the quiet Sussex road, through the fields forwhose safety he had fought with so much of undeniable gallantry andapproval.

On that July afternoon the gardens, the woods, mounted in flawlesssweetness all round him as he stood, to meet the circle of a flawlesssky. Not a cloud; not a motion on the grass! At the first he hadintended to return home no more; and it had been a proof of his greatdejection that he sent at last, as best he could, for money. They knewhis fate already [240] by report, and were touched naturally when thathad followed on the record of his honours. Had it been possible theywould have set forth at any risk to meet, to seek him; were waiting nowfor the weary one to come to the gate, ready with their oil and wine,to speak metaphorically, and from this time forth underwent his charmto the utmost—the charm of an exquisite character, felt in some way tobe inseparable from his person, his characteristic movements, touchedalso now with seemingly irreparable sorrow. For his part, drinking inhere the last sweets of the sensible world, it was as if he, the loverof roses, had never before been aware of them at all. The originalsoftness of his temperament, against which the sense of greater thingsthrust upon him had successfully reacted, asserted itself again now ashe lay at ease, the ease well merited by his deeds, his sorrows. Thathe was going to die moved those about him to humour this mood, tosoften all things to his touch; and looking back he might havepronounced those four last years of doom the happiest of his life. Thememory of the grave into which he had gazed so steadily on theexecution morning, into which, as he feels, one half of himself hadthen descended, does not lessen his shrinking from the fate before him,yet fortifies him to face it manfully, gives a sort of fraternalfamiliarity to death; in a few weeks' time this battle too is foughtout; it is as if the thing were ended. [241] The delightful summerheat, the freshness it enhances—he contrasts such things no longerwith the sort of place to which he is hastening. The possible durationof life for him was indeed uncertain, the future to some degreeindefinite; but as regarded any fairly distant date, anything like aterm of years, from the first there had been no doubt at all; he wouldbe no longer here. Meantime it was like a delightful few days'additional holiday from school, with which perforce one must be contentat last; or as though he had not been pardoned on that terriblemorning, but only reprieved for two or three years. Yet how large aproportion they would have seemed in the whole sum of his years. Hewould have liked to lie finally in the garden among departed pets, deardead dogs and horses; faintly proposes it one day; but after a whilecomprehends the churchyard, with its white spots in the distant floweryview, as filling harmoniously its own proper place there. The wearysoul seemed to be settling deeper into the body and the earth it cameof, into the condition of the flowers, the grass, proper creatures ofthe earth to which he is returning. The saintly vicar visits himconsiderately; is repelled with politeness; goes on his way ponderinginwardly what kind of place there might be, in any possible scheme ofanother world, for so absolutely unspiritual a subject. In fact, asthe breath of the infinite world came about him, he clung all [242] thefaster to the beloved finite things still in contact with him; he hadsuccessfully hidden from his eyes all beside.

His reprieve however lasted long enough, after all, for a certainchange of opinion of immense weight to him—a revision or reversal ofjudgment. It came about in this way. When peace was arranged, withquestion of rewards, pensions, and the like, certain battles orincidents therein were fought over again, sometimes in the highestplaces of debate. On such an occasion a certain speaker cites the caseof Lieutenant James Stokes and another, as being "pessimi exempli":whereupon a second speaker gets up, prepared with full detail, insists,brings that incidental matter to the front for an hour, tells hisunfortunate friend's story so effectively, pathetically, that, ashappens with our countrymen, they repent. The matter gets into thenewspapers, and, coming thus into sympathetic public view, somethinglike glory wins from Emerald Uthwart his last touch of animation. Justnot too late he received the offer of a commission; kept the letterthere open within sight. Aldy, who "never shed tears and was incapableof pain," in his great physical weakness, wept—shall we say for thesecond time in his life? A less excitement would have been morefavorable to any chance there might be of the patient's surviving. Infact the old gun-shot wound, wrongly thought to be cured, which hadcaused [243] the one illness of his life, is now drawing out whatremains of it, as he feels with a kind of odd satisfaction andpride—his old glorious wound! And then, as of old, an absolutesubmissiveness comes over him, as he gazes round at the place, therelics of his uniform, the letter lying there. It was as if there wasnothing more that could be said. Accounts thus settled, he stretchedhimself in the bed he had occupied as a boy, more completely at hisease than since the day when he had left home for the first time.Respited from death once, he was twice believed to be dead before thedate actually registered on his tomb. "What will it matter a hundredyears hence?" they used to ask by way of simple comfort in boyishtroubles at school, overwhelming at the moment. Was that in truth partof a certain revelation of the inmost truth of things to "babes," suchas we have heard of? What did it matter—the gifts, the good-fortune,its terrible withdrawal, the long agony? Emerald Uthwart would havebeen all but a centenarian to-day.

Postscript, from the Diary of a Surgeon, August —th, 18—.

I was summoned by letter into the country to perform an operation onthe dead body of a young man, formerly an officer in the army. Thecause of death is held to have been some [244] kind of distress ofmind, concurrent with the effects of an old gun-shot wound, the ballstill remaining somewhere in the body. My instructions were to removethis, at the express desire, as I understood, of the deceased, ratherthan to ascertain the precise cause of death. This however becameapparent in the course of my search for the ball, which had envelopeditself in the muscular substance in the region of the heart, and wasremoved with difficulty. I have known cases of this kind, whereanxiety has caused incurable cardiac derangement (the deceased seems tohave been actually sentenced to death for some military offence when onservice in Flanders), and such mental strain would of course have beenaggravated by the presence of a foreign object in that place. Onarriving at my destination, a small village in a remote part of Sussex,I proceeded through the little orderly churchyard, where however themonthly roses were blooming all their own way among the formal whitemarble monuments of the wealthier people of the neighbourhood. At oneof these the masons were at work, picking and chipping in the otherwiseabsolute stillness of the summer afternoon. They were in fact openingthe family burial-place of the people who summoned me hither; and theworkmen pointed out their abode, conspicuous on the slope beyond,towards which I bent my steps accordingly. I was conducted to a largeupper [245] room or attic, set freely open to sun and air, and foundthe body lying in a coffin, almost hidden under very rich-scented cutflowers, after a manner I have never seen in this country, except inthe case of one or two Catholics laid out for burial. The mother ofthe deceased was present, and actually assisted my operations, amidsuch tokens of distress, though perfectly self-controlled, as Ifervently hope I may never witness again.

Deceased was in his twenty-seventh year, but looked many years younger;had indeed scarcely yet reached the full condition of manhood. Theextreme purity of the outlines, both of the face and limbs, was such asis usually found only in quite early youth; the brow especially, underan abundance of fair hair, finely formed, not high, but arched andfull, as is said to be the way with those who have the imaginativetemper in excess. Sad to think that had he lived reason must havedeserted that so worthy abode of it! I was struck by the great beautyof the organic developments, in the strictly anatomic sense; those ofthe throat and diaphragm in particular might have been modelled for ateacher of normal physiology, or a professor of design. The flesh wasstill almost as firm as that of a living person; as happens when, as inthis case, death comes to all intents and purposes as gradually as inold age.

This expression of health and life, under my seemingly mercilessdoings, together with the mother's distress, touched me to a degreevery [246] unusual, I conceive, in persons of my years and profession.Though I believed myself to be acting by his express wish, I felt likea criminal. The ball, a small one, much corroded with blood, was atlength removed; and I was then directed to wrap it in a partly-printedletter, or other document, and place it in the breast-pocket of a fadedand much-worn scarlet soldier's coat, put over the shirt whichenveloped the body. The flowers were then hastily replaced, the handsand the peak of the handsome nose remaining visible among them; thewind ruffled the fair hair a little; the lips were still red. I shallnot forget it. The lid was then placed on the coffin and screwed downin my presence. There was no plate or other inscription upon it.

NOTES

197. *Published in the New Review, June and July 1892, and nowreprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.

210. +Transliteration: askêsis. Liddel and Scott definition:"exercise, training."

213. +Transliteration: Moirai. Liddel and Scott definition: "[singular=] one's portion in life, lot, destiny."

213. +Transliteration: Kêr. Brief Liddel and Scott definition: "doom,death, destruction."

214. +Translation: "in this church established for boys."

219. +Transliteration: hê pterou dynamis.

DIAPHANEITÉ

[247] THERE are some unworldly types of character which the world isable to estimate. It recognises certain moral types, or categories,and regards whatever falls within them as having a right to exist. Thesaint, the artist, even the speculative thinker, out of the world'sorder as they are, yet work, so far as they work at all, in and bymeans of the main current of the world's energy. Often it gives themlate, or scanty, or mistaken acknowledgment; still it has room for themin its scheme of life, a place made ready for them in its affections.It is also patient of doctrinaires of every degree of littleness. Asif dimly conscious of some great sickness and weariness of heart initself, it turns readily to those who theorise about its unsoundness.To constitute one of these categories, or types, a breadth andgenerality of character is required. There is another type ofcharacter, which is not broad and general, rare, precious above all tothe artist, a character which seems to have been the supreme moralcharm in the Beatrice of the [248] Commedia. It does not take the eyeby breadth of colour; rather it is that fine edge of light, where theelements of our moral nature refine themselves to the burning point.It crosses rather than follows the main current of the world's life.The world has no sense fine enough for those evanescent shades, whichfill up the blanks between contrasted types of character—delicateprovision in the organisation of the moral world for the transmissionto every part of it of the life quickened at single points! For thisnature there is no place ready in its affections. This colourless,unclassified purity of life it can neither use for its service, norcontemplate as an ideal.

"Sibi unitus et simplificatus esse," that is the long struggle of theImitatio Christi. The spirit which it forms is the very opposite ofthat which regards life as a game of skill, and values things andpersons as marks or counters of something to be gained, or achieved,beyond them. It seeks to value everything at its eternal worth, notadding to it, or taking from it, the amount of influence it may havefor or against its own special scheme of life. It is the spirit thatsees external circ*mstances as they are, its own power and tendenciesas they are, and realises the given conditions of its life, notdisquieted by the desire for change, or the preference of one part inlife rather than another, or passion, or opinion. The character wemean to indicate achieves this [249] perfect life by a happy gift ofnature, without any struggle at all. Not the saint only, the artistalso, and the speculative thinker, confused, jarred, disintegrated inthe world, as sometimes they inevitably are, aspire for this simplicityto the last. The struggle of this aspiration with a lower practicalaim in the mind of Savonarola has been subtly traced by the author ofRomola. As language, expression, is the function of intellect, as art,the supreme expression, is the highest product of intellect, so thisdesire for simplicity is a kind of indirect self-assertion of theintellectual part of such natures. Simplicity in purpose and act is akind of determinate expression in dexterous outline of one'spersonality. It is a kind of moral expressiveness; there is anintellectual triumph implied in it. Such a simplicity ischaracteristic of the repose of perfect intellectual culture. Theartist and he who has treated life in the spirit of art desires only tobe shown to the world as he really is; as he comes nearer and nearer toperfection, the veil of an outer life not simply expressive of theinward becomes thinner and thinner. This intellectual throne is rarelywon. Like the religious life, it is a paradox in the world, denyingthe first conditions of man's ordinary existence, cutting obliquely thespontaneous order of things. But the character we have before us is akind of prophecy of this repose and simplicity, coming as it were inthe order of grace, not of nature, by [250] some happy gift, oraccident of birth or constitution, showing that it is indeed within thelimits of man's destiny. Like all the higher forms of inward life thischaracter is a subtle blending and interpenetration of intellectual,moral and spiritual elements. But it is as a phase of intellect, ofculture, that it is most striking and forcible. It is a mind of tastelighted up by some spiritual ray within. What is meant by taste is animperfect intellectual state; it is but a sterile kind of culture. Itis the mental attitude, the intellectual manner of perfect culture,assumed by a happy instinct. Its beautiful way of handling everythingthat appeals to the senses and the intellect is really directed by thelaws of the higher intellectual life, but while culture is able totrace those laws, mere taste is unaware of them. In the characterbefore us, taste, without ceasing to be instructive, is far more than amental attitude or manner. A magnificent intellectual force is latentwithin it. It is like the reminiscence of a forgotten culture thatonce adorned the mind; as if the mind of one philosophêsas pote met'erôtos,+ fallen into a new cycle, were beginning its spiritual progressover again, but with a certain power of anticipating its stages. Ithas the freshness without the shallowness of taste, the range andseriousness of culture without its strain and over-consciousness. Sucha habit may be described as wistfulness of mind, the feeling that thereis "so much to [251] know," rather as a longing after what isunattainable, than as a hope to apprehend. Its ethical result is anintellectual guilelessness, or integrity, that instinctively preferswhat is direct and clear, lest one's own confusion and intransparencyshould hinder the transmission from without of light that is not yetinward. He who is ever looking for the breaking of a light he knowsnot whence about him, notes with a strange heedfulness the faintestpaleness in the sky. That truthfulness of temper, that receptivity,which professors often strive in vain to form, is engendered here lessby wisdom than by innocence. Such a character is like a relic from theclassical age, laid open by accident to our alien modern atmosphere.It has something of the clear ring, the eternal outline of the antique.Perhaps it is nearly always found with a corresponding outwardsemblance. The veil or mask of such a nature would be the veryopposite of the "dim blackguardism" of Danton, the type Carlyle hasmade too popular for the true interest of art. It is just this sort ofentire transparency of nature that lets through unconsciously all thatis really lifegiving in the established order of things; it detectswithout difficulty all sorts of affinities between its own elements,and the nobler elements in that order. But then its wistfulness and aconfidence in perfection it has makes it love the lords of change.What makes revolutionists is either self-pity, or indignation [252] forthe sake of others, or a sympathetic perception of the dominantundercurrent of progress in things. The nature before us isrevolutionist from the direct sense of personal worth, that chlidê,+that pride of life, which to the Greek was a heavenly grace. How canhe value what comes of accident, or usage, or convention, whoseindividual life nature itself has isolated and perfected? Revolutionis often impious. They who prosecute revolution have to violate againand again the instinct of reverence. That is inevitable, since afterall progress is a kind of violence. But in this nature revolutionism issoftened, harmonised, subdued as by distance. It is the revolutionismof one who has slept a hundred years. Most of us are neutralised bythe play of circ*mstances. To most of us only one chance is given inthe life of the spirit and the intellect, and circ*mstances prevent ourdexterously seizing that one chance. The one happy spot in our naturehas no room to burst into life. Our collective life, pressing equallyon every part of every one of us, reduces nearly all of us to the levelof a colourless uninteresting existence. Others are neutralised, notby suppression of gifts, but by just equipoise among them. In these nosingle gift, or virtue, or idea, has an unmusical predominance. Theworld easily confounds these two conditions. It sees in the characterbefore us only indifferentism. Doubtless the chief vein of the life ofhumanity [253] could hardly pass through it. Not by it could theprogress of the world be achieved. It is not the guise of Luther orSpinoza; rather it is that of Raphael, who in the midst of theReformation and the Renaissance, himself lighted up by them, yieldedhimself to neither, but stood still to live upon himself, even inoutward form a youth, almost an infant, yet surprising all the world.The beauty of the Greek statues was a sexless beauty; the statues ofthe gods had the least traces of sex. Here there is a moralsexlessness, a kind of impotence, an ineffectual wholeness of nature,yet with a divine beauty and significance of its own.

Over and over again the world has been surprised by the heroism, theinsight, the passion, of this clear crystal nature. Poetry andpoetical history have dreamed of a crisis, where it must needs be thatsome human victim be sent down into the grave. These are they whom inits profound emotion humanity might choose to send. "What," saysCarlyle, of Charlotte Corday, "What if she had emerged from hersecluded stillness, suddenly like a star; cruel-lovely, withhalf-angelic, half-daemonic splendour; to gleam for a moment, and in amoment be extinguished; to be held in memory, so bright complete wasshe, through long centuries!"

Often the presence of this nature is felt like a sweet aroma in earlymanhood. Afterwards, as the adulterated atmosphere of the worldassimilates [254] us to itself, the savour of it faints away. Perhapsthere are flushes of it in all of us; recurring moments of it in everyperiod of life. Certainly this is so with every man of genius. It isa thread of pure white light that one might disentwine from thetumultuary richness of Goethe's nature. It is a natural prophecy ofwhat the next generation will appear, renerved, modified by the ideasof this. There is a violence, an impossibility about men who haveideas, which makes one suspect that they could never be the type of anywidespread life. Society could not be conformed to their image but byan unlovely straining from its true order. Well, in this nature theidea appears softened, harmonised as by distance, with an engagingnaturalness, without the noise of axe or hammer.

People have often tried to find a type of life that might serve as abasem*nt type. The philosopher, the saint, the artist, neither of themcan be this type; the order of nature itself makes them exceptional.It cannot be the pedant, or the conservative, or anything rash andirreverent. Also the type must be one discontented with society as itis. The nature here indicated alone is worthy to be this type. Amajority of such would be the regeneration of the world.

July, 1864.

NOTES

250. +Transliteration: philosophêsas pote met' erôtos.

252. +Transliteration: chlidê.

THE END