More than a year has elapsed since the moment when, fancying that this series of studies must be well-nigh complete, I attempted to explain in an introductory chapter what the nature of this book of mine is, or would fain be. I had hoped that each of these studies would complete its companions; and that, without need for explicit explanation, my whole idea would have become more plain to others than it was at that time even to myself. But instead, it has become obvious that the more carefully I had sought to reduce each question to unity, the more that question-subdivided and connected itself with other questions; and that, with the solution of each separate problem, had arisen a new set of problems which infinitely complicated the main lessons to be deduced from a study of that many-sided civilization to which, remembering the brilliant and mysterious offspring of Faustus and Helena, I have given the name of Euphorion. Hence, as it seems, the necessity for a few further words of explanation.
In those introductory pages written some fifteen months ago, I tried to bring home to the reader a sense which has haunted me throughout the writing of this volume; namely, that instead of having deliberately made up my mind to study the Renaissance, as one makes up one's mind to visit Greece or Egypt or the Holy Land; I have, on the contrary, quite accidentally and unconsciously, found myself wandering about in spirit among the monuments of this particular historic region, even as I might wander about in the streets of Siena where I wrote last year, of Florence whence I write at present; wandering about among these things, and little by little feeling a particular interest in one, then in another, according as each happened to catch my fancy or to recall some already known thing. Now these, which for want of a better word I have just called monuments, and just now, less clearly, but also less foolishly, merelythings—these things were in reality not merely individual and really existing buildings, books, pictures, or statues, individual and really registered men, women, and events; they were the mental conceptions which I had extracted out of these realities; the intellectual types made up (as the mediaeval symbols of justice are made up of the visible paraphernalia, robe, scales and sword, for judging and weighing and punishing) of the impressions left on the mind by all those buildings, or books, or pictures, or statues, or men, women, and events. They were not the iniquities of this particular despot nor the scandalous sayings of that particular humanist, but the general moral chaos of the Italian fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; not the poem of Pulci, of Boiardo, of Ariosto in especial, but a vast imaginary poem made up of them all; not the mediaeval saints of Angelico and the pagan demi-gods of Michael Angelo, but the two tremendous abstractions: the spirit of Mediaevalism in art, and the spirit of Antiquity; the interest in the distressed soul, and the interest in the flourishing body. And, as my thoughts have gone back to Antiquity and onwards to our own times, their starting-point has nevertheless been the Tuscan art of the fifteenth century, their nucleus some notes on busts by Benedetto da Maiano and portraits by Raphael.
Mydramatis personahave been modes of feeling and forms of art. I have tried to explain the life and character, not of any man or woman, but of the moral scepticism of Italy, of the tragic spirit of our Elizabethan dramatists; I have tried to write the biography of the romance poetry of the Middle Ages, of the realism of the great portrait painters and sculptors of the Renaissance. But these, mydramatis persona,are, let me repeat it, abstractions: they exist only in my mind and in the minds of those who think like myself. Hence, like all abstractions, they represent the essence of a question, but not its completeness, its many-sidedness as we may see it in reality. Hence it is that I have frequently passed over exceptions to the rule which I was stating, because the explanation of these exceptions would have involved the formulating of a number of apparently irrelevant propositions; so that any one who please may accuse me of inexactness; and, to give an instance, cover the margins of my essay on Mediaeval Love with a whole list of virtuous love stories of the Middle Ages; or else ferret out of Raynouard and Von der Hagen a dozen pages of mediaeval poems in praise of rustic life. These objections will be perfectly correct, and (so far as my knowledge permitted me) I might have puzzled the reader with them myself; but it remains none the less certain that, in the main, mediaeval love was not virtuous, and mediaeval peasantry not admired by poets; and none the less certain, I think, also, that in describing the characteristics and origin of an abstract thing, such as mediaeval love, or mediaeval feeling towards the country and country folk, it was my business to state the rule and let alone the exceptions.
There is another matter which gives me far greater concern. In creating and dealing with an abstraction, one is frequently forced, if I may use the expression, to cut a subject in two, to bring one of its sides into full light and leave the other in darkness; nay, to speak harshly of one side of an art or of a man without being able to speak admiringly of another side.
This one-sidedness, this apparent injustice of judgment, has in some cases been remedied by the fact that I have treated in one study those things which I was forced to omit in another study; as, in two separate essays, I have pointed out first the extreme inferiority of Renaissance sculpture to the sculpture of Antiquity with regard to absolute beauty of form; and then the immeasurable superiority of Renaissance over antique sculpture in the matter of that beauty and interest dependent upon mere arrangement and handling, wherein lies the beauty-creating power of realistic schools. But most often I have shown one side, not merely of an artist or an art, but of my own feeling, without showing the other; and in one case this inevitable one-sidedness has weighed upon me almost like personal guilt, and has almost made me postpone the publication of this book to the Greek Kalends, in hopes of being able to explain and to atone. I am alluding to Fra Angelico. I spoke of him in a study of the progress of mere beautiful form, the naked human form moreover, in the art of the Renaissance; I looked at his work with my mind full of the unapproachable superiority of antique form; I judged and condemned the artist with reference to that superb movement towards nature and form and bodily beauty which was the universal movement of the fifteenth century; I lost patience with this saint because he would not turn pagan; I pushed aside, because he did not seek for a classic Olympus, his exquisite dreams of a mediaeval Paradise. I had taken part, as its chronicler, with the art which seeks mere plastic perfection, the art to which Angelico said, "Retro me Sathana." It was my intention to close even this volume with a study of the poetical conception of early Renaissance painting, of that strange kind of painting in which a thing but imperfect in itself, a mere symbol of lovely ideas, brings home to our mind, with a rush of associations, a sense of beauty and wonder greater perhaps than any which we receive from the sober reality of perfect form. Again, there are the German masters—the great engravers, Kranach, Altdorfer, Aldegrever, especially; of whom, for their absolute pleasure in ugly women, for their filthy delight in horrors, I have said an immense amount of ill; and of whom, for their wonderful intuition of dramatic situation, their instinct of the poetry of common things, and their magnificently imaginative rendering of landscape, I hope some day to say an equal amount of good.
I have spoken of the lesson which may be derived from studies even as humble as these studies of mine; since, in my opinion, we cannot treat history as a mere art—though history alone can gives us now-a-days tragedy which has ceased to exist on our stage, and wonder which has ceased to exist in our poetry—we cannot seek in it mere selfish enjoyment of imagination and emotion, without doing our soul the great injury of cheating it of some of those great indignations, some of those great lessons which make it stronger and more supple in the practical affairs of life. Each of these studies of mine brings its own lesson, artistic or ethical, important or unimportant; its lesson of seeking certainty in our moral opinions, beauty in all and whatever our forms of art, spirituality in our love. But besides these I seem to perceive another deduction, an historical fact with a practical application; to see it as the result not merely perhaps of the studies of which this book is the fruit, but of those further studies, of the subtler sides of Mediaeval and Renaissance life and art which at present occupy my mind and may some day add another series of essays to this: a lesson still vague to myself, but which, satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily, I shall nevertheless attempt to explain; if indeed it requires to be brought home to the reader.
Of the few forms of feeling and imagination which I have treated—things so different from one another as the feeling for nature and the chivalric poem, as modern art, with its idealism and realism, and modern love—of these forms, emotional and artistic, which Antiquity did not know, or knew but little, the reader may have observed that I have almost invariably traced the origin deep into that fruitful cosmopolitan chaos, due to the mingling of all that was still unused of the remains of Antiquity with all that was untouched of the intellectual and moral riches of the barbarous nations, to which we give the name of Middle Ages; and that I have, as invariably, followed the development of these precious forms, and their definitive efflorescence and fruit-bearing, into that particular country where certain mediaeval conditions had ceased to exist, namely Italy. In other words, it has seemed to me that the things which I have studied were originally produced during the Middle Ages, and consequently in the mediaeval countries, France, Germany, Provence; but did not attain maturity except in that portion of the Middle Ages which is mediaeval no longer, but already more than half modern, the Renaissance, which began in Italy not with the establishment of despotisms and the coming of Greek humanists, but with the independence of the free towns and with the revival of Roman tradition.
Why so? Because, it appears to me, after watching the lines of my thought converging to this point, because, with a few exceptions, the Middle Ages were rich in great beginnings (indeed a good half of all that makes up our present civilization seems to issue from them): but they were poor in complete achievements; full of the seeds of modern institutions, arts, thoughts, and feelings, they yet show us but rarely the complete growth of any one of them: a fruitful Nile flood, but which must cease to drown and to wash away, which must subside before the germs that it has brought can shoot forth and mature. The sense of this comes home to me most powerfully whenever I think of mediaeval poetry and mediaeval painting.
The songs of the troubadours and minnesingers, what are they to our feelings? They are pleasant, even occasionally beautiful, but they are empty, lamentably empty, charming arrangements of words; poetry which fills our mind or touches our heart comes only with the Tuscan lyrists of the thirteenth century. The same applies to mediaeval narrative-verse: it is, with one or two exceptions or half exceptions, such as "The Chanson de Roland" and Gottfried's "Tristan und Isolde," decidedly wearisome; a thing to study, but scarcely a thing to delight in. I do not mean to say that the old legends of Wales and Scandinavia, subsequently embodied by the French and German poets of the Middle Ages, are without imaginative or emotional interest; nothing can be further from my thoughts. The Nibelung story possesses, both in the Norse and in the Middle High German version, a tragic fascination; and a quaint fairy-tale interest, every now and then rising to the charm of a Decameroniannovella, is possessed by many of the Keltic tales, whether briefly told in the Mabinogion or lengthily detailed by Chrestien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach. But all this is the interest of the mere story, and you would enjoy it almost as much if that story were related not by a poet but by a peasant; it is the fascination of the mere theme, with the added fascination of our own unconscious filling up and colouring of details. And the poem itself, whence we extract this theme, remains, for the most part, uninteresting. The figures are vague, almost shapeless and colourless; they have no well-understood mental and moral anatomy, so that when they speak and act the writer seems to have no clear conception of the motives or tempers which make them do so; even as in a child's pictures, the horses gallop, the men run, the houses stand, but without any indication of the muscles which move the horse, of the muscles which hold up the man, of the solid ground upon which is built, nay rather, into which is planted, the house. Hatred of Hagen, devotion of Riidger, passionate piety of Parzival—all these are things of which we do not particularly see the how or why; we do not follow the reasons, in event or character, which make these men sacrifice themselves or others, weep, storm, and so forth; nay, even when these reasons are clear from the circumstances, we are not shown the action of the mechanism, we do not see how Brunhilt is wroth, how Chriemhilt is revengeful, how Herzeloid is devoted to Parzival. There is, in the vast majority of this mediaeval poetry, no clear conception of the construction and functions of people's character, and hence no conception either of those actions and reactions of various moral organs which, after all, are at the bottom of the events related. Herein lies the difference between the forms of the Middle Ages and those of Antiquity; for how perfectly felt, understood, is not every feeling and every action of the Homeric heroes, how perfectly indicated! We can see the manner and reason of the conflict of Achilles and Agamemnon, of the behaviour of the returned Odysseus, as clearly as we see the manner and reason of the movements of the fighting Centaurs and Lapithae, or the Amazons; nay, even the minute mood of comparatively unimportant figures, as Helen, Brisei's, and Nausicaa, is indicated in its moral anatomy and attitude as distinctly as is the manner in which the maidens of the Parthenon frieze slowly restrain their steps, the boys curb their steeds, or the old men balance their oil jars. Nothing of this in mediaeval literature, except perhaps in "Flamenca" and "Tristan," where the motive of action, mere imaginative desire, is all-permeating and explains everything. These people clearly had no interest, no perception, connected with character: a valorous woman, a chivalrous knight, an insolent steward, a jealous husband, a faithful retainer; things recognized only in outline, made to speak and act only according to a fixed tradition, without knowledge of the internal mechanism of motive; these sufficed. Hence it is that mediaeval poetry is always like mediaeval painting (for painting continued to be mediaeval with Giotto's pupils long after poetry had ceased to be mediaeval with Dante and his school), where the Virgin sits and holds the child without body wherewith to sit or arms wherewith to hold; where angels flutter forward and kneel in conventional greeting, with obviously no bended knees beneath their robes, nay, with knees, waist, armpits, all anywhere; where men ride upon horses without flat to their back; where processions of the blessed come forth, guided by fiddling seraphs, vague, faint faces, sweet or grand, heads which might wave like pieces of cut-out paper upon their necks, arms and legs here and there, not clearly belonging to any one; creatures marching, soaring, flying, singing, fiddling, without a bone or a muscle wherewith to do it all. And meanwhile, in this mediaeval poetry, as in this mediaeval painting, there are yards and yards of elaborate preciousness: all the embossed velvets, all the white-and-gold-shot brocades, all the silks and satins, and jewel-embroidered stuffs of the universe cast stiffly about these phantom men and women, these phantom horses and horsemen. It is not until we turn to Italy, and to the Northern man, Chaucer, entirely under Italian influence, that we obtain an approach to the antique clearness of perception and comprehension; that we obtain not only in Dante something akin to the muscularities of Signorelli and Michael Angelo; but in Boccaccio and Chaucer, in Cavalca and Petrarch, the equivalent of the well-understood movement, the well-indicated situation of the simple, realistic or poetic, sketches of Filippino and Botticelli.
This, you will say, is a mere impression; it is no explanation, still less such an explanation as may afford a lesson. Not so. This strange inconclusiveness in all mediaeval things, till the moment comes when they cease to be mediaeval; this richness in germs and poverty in mature fruit, cannot be without its reason. And this reason, to my mind, lies in one word, the most terrible word of any, since it means suffering and hopelessness; a word which has haunted my mind ever since I have looked into mediaeval things: the word Wastefulness. Wastefulness; the frightful characteristic of times at once so rich and so poor, the explanation of the long starvation and sickness that mankind, that all mankind's concerns—art, poetry, science, life—endured while the very things which would have fed and revived and nurtured, existed close at hand, and in profusion. Wastefulness, in this great period of confusion, of the most precious things that we possess: time, thought, and feeling refused to the realities of the world, and lavished on the figments of the imagination. Why this vagueness, this imperfection in all mediaeval representations of life? Because even as men's eyes were withdrawn, by the temporal institutions of those days, from the sight of the fields and meadows which were left to the blind and dumb thing called serf; so also the thoughts of mankind, its sympathy and intentions, were withdrawn from the mere earthly souls, the mere earthly wrongs and woes of men by the great self-organized institution of mediaeval religion. Pity of the body of Christ held in bondage by the Infidel; love of God; study of the unknowable things of Heaven: such are the noblest employments of the mediaeval soul; how much of pity, of love, may remain for man; how much of study for the knowable? To Wastefulness like this—to misapplication of mind ending almost in palsy—must we ascribe, I think, the strange sterility of such mediaeval art as deals not merely with pattern, but with the reality of man's body and soul. And we might be thankful, if, during our wanderings among mediaeval things, we had seen the starving of only art and artistic instincts; but the soul of man has lain starving also; starving for the knowledge which was sought only of Divine things, starving for the love which was given only to God.
The explanation, therefore, and its lesson, may thus be summed up in the one word Wastefulness. And the fruitfulness of the Renaissance, all that it has given to us of art, of thought, of feeling (for the "Vita Nuova" is its fruit), is due, as it seems to me, to the fact that the Renaissance is simply the condition of civilization when, thanks to the civil liberty and the spiritual liberty inherited from Rome and inherited from Greece, man's energies of thought and feeling were withdrawn from the unknowable to the knowable, from Heaven to Earth; and were devoted to the developing of those marvellous new things which Antiquity had not known, and which had lain neglected and wasted during the Middle Ages.
FLORENCE,January,1884.
I have seen the pictures and statues and towns which I have described, and I have read the books of which I attempt to give an impression; but here my original research, if such it may be called, comes to an end. I have trusted only to myself for my impressions; but I have taken from others everything that may be called historical fact, as distinguished from the history of this or that form of thought or of art which I have tried to elaborate. My references are therefore only to standard historical works, and to such editions of poets and prose writers as have come into my hands. How much I am endebted to the genius of Michelet; nay, rather, how much I am, however unimportant, the thing made by him, every one will see and judge. With regard to positive information I must express my great obligations to the works of Jacob Burckhardt, of Prof. Villari, and of Mr. J.A. Symonds in everything that concerns the political history and social condition of the Renaissance. Mr. Symonds' name I have placed last, although this is by no means the order of importance in which the three writers appear in my mind, because vanity compels me to state that I have deprived myself of the pleasure and profit of reading his volumes on Italian literature, from a fear that finding myself doubtless forestalled by him in various appreciations, I might deprive my essays of what I feel to be their principal merit, namely, the spontaneity and wholeness of personal impression. With regard to philological lore, I may refer, among a number of other works, to M. Gaston Paris' work on the Cycle of Charlemagne, M. de la Villemarqué's companion volume on Keltic romances, and Professor Rajna's "Fonti dell' Ariosto." My knowledge of troubadours, trouvères, and minnesingers is obtained mainly from the great collections of Raynouard, Wackernagel, Mätzner, Bartsch, and Von der Hagen, and from Bartsch's and Simrock's editions and versions of Gottfried von Strassburg, Hartmann von Aue, and Wolfram von Eschenbach. "Flamenca" I have read in Professor Paul Meyer's beautiful edition, text and translation; "Aucassin et Nicolette," in an edition published, if I remember rightly, by Janet; and also in a very happy translation contained in Delvau's huge collection of "Romans de Chevalerie," which contains, unfortunately sometimes garbled, as many of the prose stories of the Carolingian and Amadis cycle as I, at all events, could endure to read. For the early Italian poets, excepting Carducci's "Cino da Pistoia," my references are the same as those in Rossetti's "Dante and his Cycle," especially the "Rime Antiche" and the "Poeti del Primo Secolo." Professor d'Ancona's pleasant volume has greatly helped me in the history of the transformation of the courtly poetry of the early Middle Ages into the folk poetry of Tuscany. I owe a good deal also, with regard to this same essay "The Outdoor Poetry," to Roskoff's famous "Geschichte des Teufels," and to Signor Novati's recently published "Carmina MediiAevi." The Italiannovellieri,Bandello, Cinthio, and their set, I have used in the Florentine editions of 1820 or 1825; Masuccio edited by De Sanctis. For the essay on the Italian Renaissance on the Elizabethan Stage, I have had recourse, chiefly, to the fifteenth century chronicles in the "Archivio Storico Italiano," and to Dyce's Webster, Hartley Coleridge's Massinger and Ford, Churton Collins' Cyril Tourneur, and J.O. Halliwell's Marston.
The essays on art have naturally profited by the now inevitable Crowe and Cavalcaselle; but in this part of my work, while I have relied very little on books, I have received more than the equivalent of the information to be obtained from any writers in the suggestions and explanations of my friend Mr. T. Nelson MacLean, who has made it possible for a mere creature of pens and ink to follow the differences oftechniqueof the sculptors and medallists of the fifteenth century; a word of thanks also, for various such suggestions as can come only from a painter, to my old friend Mr. John S. Sargent, of Paris.
I must conclude these acknowledgments by thanking the Editors of theContemporary, British Quarterly, andNational Reviews, and of theCornhill Magazine, for permission to republish such of the essays or fragments of essays as have already appeared in those periodicals.
THE END.